Well, I'm Impressed

 I was looking for something else but was mesmerised by this.

 

MAGA Fury

Do the WaPo and NYT describe everything that conservatives complain about as "fury?" This time it's MAGA furious at Bad Bunny being picked. Are they?  Football fans are pretty used to not liking the Super Bowl halftime show, because it tends to be someone who is supposed to attract the semi-fan, often female, who doesn't watch that often. They want those extra eyeballs for the commercials. I haven't seen it mentioned on conservative sites yet.  I suspect there will be some grousing. 

Fury. Well, I'm sure there are some people furious about Bad Bunny who are big Trump supporters, but I'll bet they get over it. Are their opponents trying to conjure it, trying to make people believe it, or projecting how they spend their mornings onto other people's screens? 

113

I put up 113 posts in September, well above my previous record.  I have exceeded 90 only twice, and only gone above 80 less than ten times.  I don't know why, because this was also a month with many links posts of about five each. Those total 74 more, so that is 187 for the month. In 2014 I only did 209 posts for the whole year!  I don't know why that was either.  One month had only five and another only six that year.  I am still reprising links from 2012 and should get to 2014 soon enough, and maybe I will figure it out then. I don't recall an especial busyness. 

Links

Grim did compile a list of likely effective gun control measures a few weeks ago, and ones that Second Amendment purists could sign off on.  But I still think this is funny from a decade ago. Yes Virginia, There Is Some Effective Gun Control. 

The baby bust and partisanship 

Strong female partisanship is an important part of the story. In the United States, women have stronger partisan identities than do men. Women are also more polarized than men in their partisan affect, liking their own party and disliking the other more strongly. This gender gap is wholly caused by white female Democrats, however; black women and men show no differences in polarization, and Republican women and men show none, either.

Communal Narcissism  Rotate the traditional definition of narcissism - I am the smartest, most popular, most dominant - ninety degrees and you get the communal narcissist - I am the most moral, the most helpful. But are they? Do they walk the walk?

When I was a boy, my social studies book would call them Laplanders, or Lapps, a remote exotic people that somehow lived off reindeer herding. Now my son knows a few Sami in Norway, where dried fish is as important as reindeer to their sustenance. Nomads to Natives tells their ancestry

From the Arthurian site I linked to about a week ago, The Northern Arthur. He dismisses the theory I had repeated about five years ago that "Arthur" was a title rather than a given name. Bernard Mees is coming at the historical record as a linguist, noticing differences in endings and spelling that are usually overlooked, and using these to place Arthur in region and time.

When I Was Twenty-One

I did not consciously choose this to go with the previous post.  I'm not sure there is any connection beyond both being about the early 1900s. 

"Put on you gingham gown, dear..."  I didn't think of gowns as being made of gingham that much. Maybe in 1911 that was more common - or maybe the meter just had to scan and the alliteration was nice. It comes from a Malay word for striped cloth.

I have noticed with the pre-1940 songs that they often have longer introductions than we are used to now.

A Time of Gifts

Book group is finishing A Time of Gifts and moving on. It is travel writing, and some consider it the peak of the form, of an older man recalling with the aid of his diaries his walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in 1933, when he was but 18.  I have found it difficult, and eventually decided this is because it highly descriptive, and I have little gift for visualisation. As I think I have mentioned, I even dream in dark sepia tones. Conversation I can recall. Ideas I can recall. I get outside references, though unevenly.  I can be remarkably unaware of the obvious. ("Oh, their names are George and Martha!  How did I miss that?") I have read enough in my time that I can recognise something that is supposed to be a telling detail, like a clue going by in a mystery novel, but the detail tells me nothing. I'll bet people point to this section as an example of good writing.  

One of the other members had read the book before, liking it the first time but growing irritated this time. He found the author to be unrelenting in showing off his vocabulary and knowledge of the arts. "Okay I get it!  You've read a lot." The first time around, the reader might be eager and even grateful to learn new stuff. The second time through one would be more concerned with what deep understandings this had led the author to,  and Fermor does not pay much direct attention to this.  The reader has to intuit this from subtler cues. I guess.  I didn't bother, myself. 

So I cannot recommend it myself, but I can say for those who like this sort of thing, they will like this. There are some remarkable incidents with the people he meets. 

The Location of Evil

A commenter at Cat Rotator's Quarterly reminded me of this passage from Alexandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. 

It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments.

And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

You will notice that it improved rather than hindered his ability to face down evil in others. 

Rowling and Emma Watson

 I am not an especial Rowling fan.  I read the first of the Harry Potter books and liked it well enough, but was not excited. The new magic was too dense.  People were doing magical things everywhere.  In the older fantasies the magic was often more of a poorly understood natural ability with actual magical events ancient and accumulated, brought forth for a purpose into essentially non-magical worlds. Still, she was clever, could write a good combo fantasy/school story and my family loved her.

I have become more of a fan in recent years when she has come under attack for cultural and political reasons. She has struck the balance between firmness, even harshness, and graciousness and sticking to reason rather than fashion.

Ann Althouse ran a post about her this morning which is among the best I have seen on the topic. Now that the Harry Potter stars have become adults and have taken to a very showy form of trashing the woman who made them famous, Rowling has subjected them to adult treatment. I doubt they will like it.

Time Travel

David Foster and I were trying to remember a joke today to tell to Jean, known to some of you as The New Neo. We kept screwing it up and couldn't get it right.  I finally figured it out.

 A man is given the gift of time travel for one event.  He decides to go back to 1918 and kill Adolph Hitler.  He comes back discouraged and his friend asks him "Didn't it work?" 

 "No," said the time traveler "I couldn't find Adolph Hitler anywhere.  I had to settle for killing Woodrow Wilson."

 

His friend looked puzzled. "Who's Adolph Hitler?"

Deep River

 

I wouldn't have thought I would like this version

Sunday Links

I'll be having lunch with David Foster of Chicago Boyz and Jean of The New Neo in Epping today at The Holy Grail. If I recall, they have Old Speckled Hen there.

Science Fictions has Insectageddon, trying to figure out whether we really are in danger of losing bees and other insects. 

Tune in to hear how, in exactly the same way as they affect our episodes on psychology and psychiatry and medicine, really difficult issues of measurement are at the bottom of the entire debate.

Google Admits to Censoring YouTube content, and that the Biden administration pressured it to, but maintains that the two are unrelated. Snopes accepts its reasoning. I wouldn't. Snopes is better than it was a few years ago, but still not on my completely reliable list. This follows Zuckerberg admitting approximately the same thing in August.

Also at the Chicago Tribune, some letters about dogs in restaurants. I am opposed, but it probably based on a professional bias of hating the ridiculous claims about some unapproved "emotional support animals." 

AI Isn't Replacing Radiologists,  with dramatic graphs

I was a paid subscriber to Rob Henderson but no longer am.  This one with Louise Perry looks intriguing enough that I might try again. A lot about intra-elite competition.

Comey Mistake

According to Powerline, this was not the indictment of Comey that we wanted, and it might not fly.  Thanks to Maggie's Farm for the link. 

YouTube

It keeps giving me feeds of punks getting beat up because they deserve it.  I must like that more than I thought.

The Sword of Freedom

Yossi Cohen, the former head of Mossad, has a book out, The Sword of Freedom. I have only read a few excerpts. I used to read a lot of spy stuff, both fiction and nonfiction. I would have been a terrible spy myself, but in the pre-computer days I would have been a good cryptographer. I don't know what use any intelligence agency would ever have had for me.  Maybe I should have gone and knocked on the gate at Camp Peary when I lived down there and see what they had. 

Update:  Also new from Free Press Born Lucky by a son with High-Functioning Autism whose dad shepherded him into adulthood.  Excerpt here 

 But my dad knew that there wasn’t a teacher or therapist who could step in and suddenly make me fit in. The world wasn’t going to adapt to me, and he wasn’t going to try to make it. There would be no therapists or accommodations. If I was going to succeed, he would have to adapt me to the world.

Skeletons

Seen on FB: We shouldn't use plastic skeletons for Hallowe'en, they are bad for the environment. We should use all-natural locally sourced skeletons instead. 

Try a Little Tenderness

I had not known it was an older song before Otis Redding sang it.

Isaac Punts

This guy is obsessed with the kicking game and special teams, and this is a good time for it. There were 8 field goals over 50 yards this week and one for 64. There are also new strategies for blocking kicks. A few punters are able to reliably back the return game way up and average 50 more yards/game in field position. But it's kickoffs where you are going to see new strategies for a while until it gets sorted out which one is best.  This knuckleball style kick looks promising. It looks like a nightmare to field when you know large people are running at you quickly.

I am not allow to embed, so I will just link to his channel.  It's great fun to pay close attention to a part of the game that most of us miss. 

We Want Them Punished

Punishment is often just, and good for the maintenance of society. We have had the discussion before about the Christian understanding that mercy is superior, though I always provide the qualifier that mercy does not exist except upon a foundation of justice. We should not try to be more merciful than God.

But that is not today's subject. I want to contrast justice not with mercy, but with practicality and usefulness. When I worked with sexual offenders (or supposed sexual offenders) one of the difficulties was getting the staff to keep focus. Staff would want to punish them, or as the prisons do, allow them to be punished by the conditions and other inmates, because they were horrifying people who deserved no better. One difficulty of this is that when one staff member moves to punish, another will move to rescue. That will in turn set off balance/counterbalance effects, especially with personality disorders. From this comes shift wars, department competition, challenges to authority and other ills.

A speaker at a conference described the more important problem succinctly. Your first job is to protect the public. He went on to point out that if we punish offenders until we are bored or spent, and some rescuer intervenes to give them added freedom or even discharge and they reoffend, then we have failed in our primary task. I have heard nurses mutter about castration for child molesters.  But even the castrated can still molest. The desire to punish may be just, but it may not be the best choice.

I am seeing a lot of this on the right in politics and culture these days. I understand it, and it is often just. People who deceived us, got rich off us corruptly, or insulted us deserve punishment. But the more important task is to get those agencies functioning correctly, so they do not do further damage.  If we punish all the bad guys at the DOJ, the CDC, the ATF, and EPA but they just just lay low and start again - or their replacements capsize the boat on the other side, we will feel deeply satisfied for a while, but we are not better off. Sometimes punishment is the best choice.  Sometimes not.

Keep focus.  This is a Keep Your Eye on the Prize era now. 

True Crime Replication Crisis

Just to get you in the habit, Graph Paper Diaries has the second entry in its True Crime series The True Crime Replication Crisis.  I did not see that fusion of topics coming.