The Principle of Explosion

 

Classic XKCD.

A weird little detail on BBC this morning from their Moscow correspondent doing what Moscow correspondents need to do a lot of nowadays, watching TV: In re the sinking of the Moskva, state television is denying, as you'd expect, that Ukraine had anything to do with it (yes, there was an explosion of ammunition on board that damaged the ship's hull but more or less no attempt to explain what could have caused the explosion, and the ship sank after "losing its balance" as they were towing it back into port), but in the middle of this discussion some talking-head military expert says that this is an act of war for which Ukraine will have to be severely punished—not if this is Ukraine's responsibility, but making the unspoken presupposition that it is, sitting inside a conversation in which everybody agrees it isn't.

Reinforced by the subsequent news of the Russian bombing of the Vizar plant near Kyiv where the Neptune missiles, which as we understand actually sunk the Moskva, are made, which we're clearly meant to read as a very precisely targeted response to the sinking, but the Defense Ministry issues a very precisely targeted assertion that it is something else:

Isms don't kill people. Or maybe they do.

 

It's so weird for writers like Bret Stephens to try to warn us that "antiracism divides the world into racial identities" when all its iconography looks like this. From "4 Lessons on Anti-Racism from Brené Brown and Ibram X. Kendi", Illustration by Angelina Bambina/Adobe Stock via Mindful.

The overall funniest thing about Mr. Bret Stephens ("Race and the Coming Liberal Crackup") trying to explain the "antiracism" concept to his readers is his serene confidence that he can do it without reading anything on the subject (spoiler: he can't), but I very much like the way he falls into this interesting rhetorical sandpit on his way:

Morally and philosophically, liberalism believes in individual autonomy, which entails a concept of personal responsibility. The current model of anti-racism scoffs at this: It divides the world into racial identities, which in turn are governed by systems of privilege and powerlessness. Liberalism believes in process: A trial or contest is fair if standards are consistent and rules are equitable, irrespective of outcome. Anti-racism is determined to make a process achieve a desired outcome. Liberalism finds appeals to racial favoritism inherently suspect, even offensive. Anti-racism welcomes such favoritism, provided it’s in the name of righting past wrongs.

He's interested in the concept of individual autonomy, but he can't talk about any individuals, only what isms do, believing, scoffing, dividing, being determined, finding things offensive, welcoming things.

If it doesn't have a groove, you must not remove

Drawing by W.S. Gilbert, from the 1864 "Bab Ballad" on which his and Arthur Sullivan's first opera was based. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Ladies and gentlemen, we will only take up of couple of hours of your time this morning sketching out the full and completely fact-based argument on behalf of my client that we will be presenting to you as soon as we've finished drafting it sometime Monday afternoon, because we don't plan to make you wait for us to start repeating ourselves the way the Democrats did, with their hysterical and deeply improper attempts to talk you into accepting witness testimony before you'd even been given a chance to hear the witness testimony summarized.

We intend, in contrast, to start the process of repeating ourselves immediately, with a kind of "coming attractions" reel of all the fine points we expect to be making next week, all of which will refer themselves exclusively to the evidentiary record that the Democrats laid out for us this week, and no reference at all to that time Trump asked somebody to "take out" Ambassador Yovanovitch at dinner in April 2018 before Rudolph Giuliani even got involved with the case*. We will not even bore you by acknowledging that Rudolph Giuliani exists, and this is a promise.

Trump Failing Another Turing Test

Exchange in the comments on yesterday's post:

Me: He doesn't think he can get out of it with a Sharpie, he thinks he can get out of it by denying it "very powerfully", like Putin or MBS. The Sharpie is pro forma, because it's the custom to offer evidence and because the problem is, for a change, so simple that he can do it himself. It's true he was surprised and annoyed that it wasn't good enough for people—that's because he doesn't understand the relationship between evidence and conclusion whereas your approach seems bent on insisting that he does.

Jordan: But at a certain point, he picked up the Sharpie and drew that curve onto the map. In that moment, what was he thinking? Are you saying he wasn't dealing with evidence and conclusion?

(I'm not picking a fight -- I'm genuinely interested and confused.)

I'm not very happy with the post, not just because I haven't succeeded in communicating my idea to the community but even more because I haven't succeeded in communicating it to myself. If we write to find out what our idea is, and that's a huge part of it for me, then I failed. I liked a part of the post nobody's interested in, the first paragraph, and Jordan's stuck on a point I think is obvious.

So I'm not picking a fight either, but I want to try coming at that point from a different direction, if I may, that I've written up a bit before on the Twitter, which is the subject of Trump "joking"—the pattern where he says some abominable thing

Puzzle

Racine County Logic Puzzle Museum.

Mueller's statement is a logic puzzle; as a matter of fact, so is the whole 450-page Report, but this morning's presentation was more succinct, and it went, in proper puzzle form, pretty much like this:

Based on the following statements,

1. If I thought Trump was not guilty, I would say so
2. If I thought Trump was guilty, it would be improper for me to say so (since he's president), so I wouldn't
3. If I had a case I couldn't prove, I might say so (as I did in the conspiracy case, but without directly naming the suspects)
4. I'm not going to say what I think

what does Mueller think?

It's not very difficult, but the answer isn't simple either.

The Oppressions of David Brooks

17th-century English print via May Morning Oxford.

So it looks like David Brooks ("The Retreat to Tribalism") went to this lecture Jonathan Haidt gave, "The Age of Outrage", at the Manhattan Institute last November. It was a big deal, Haidt was wearing a tux, and said that society is like a maypole, or kids dancing around a maypole, but in an especially odd way:

Imagine three kids running around a maypole, forming a chain with their arms. The innermost kid is holding the pole with one hand. The faster they run, the more centrifugal force there is tearing the chain apart. The tighter they grip, the more centripetal force there is holding the chain together. Eventually centrifugal force exceeds centripetal force and the chain breaks.

No, that's Brooks; Haidt just has an ordinary pole. Brooks's mistake is funny, too, because Haidt unlike Brooks knows exactly what a maypole is and uses the image more than once to make what I think is a kind of Straussian argument about the value of religion: gods are maypoles, the ribboned ones where at the end of the dance the maidens have twisted a colorful pattern around the pole as a byproduct, and in the same [?] way the worship of the gods "weaves" or "binds" the members of the community together, into a social coherence that's just as valuable as a newly decorated pole, though that seems a little confused: are the community members the ribbons, which are indeed bound together, or the maidens, who aren't, but move to some other activity when the dance is over?

Anyway with this pole it's the three kids who constitute the community, and the centripetal force that makes them hold tighter on to each others' hands is typically the wartime threat of external enemies, and what makes them keep running faster is the media, immigration and diversity, and the deadly dialectic of the "more radical Republican party" and the "new identity politics of the Left", which is different from the old identity politics of the Left, operated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which brought people together, because of the "high social trust" that existed in the Jim Crow era—

For the record: Arguing with Tomi Lahren

The young woman who denounces the Affordable Care Act while enjoying the fact that it gets her free coverage on her parents' policy was weighing in on the topic of transgender troops.

SMBC-Comics, via Language Log.

Do you have an argument why Italian-American men should be allowed to serve? People over 6'5"? Natve speakers of Chinese?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 30, 2017

The American way is everyone who passes the physical can serve. Burden of proof for making an exception is on you.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 30, 2017

And the military already studied all the arguments you can come up with, and they're worthless. https://t.co/2bJUuwVdPn

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 30, 2017

That's why, sweetcakes. There's no good reason to create this category of persons who must not serve.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 30, 2017

Trumpier than Thou

Hunan Daily, via Sinosphere.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, makes a startling observation ("A Trumpism of the Left"):

Donald Trump’s post-debate ranting about Alicia Machado, the former Miss Universe elevated by Hillary Clinton as proof of Trump’s misogyny, has been similar to his other meltdowns but distinctive in one particular way: It’s the first time in this election that Trump has clashed with someone who actually resembles him.

Oh? In what respect? Is she a billionaire? Was her father a real estate magnate? Does she devote all her conversation to explaining how successful she is? Does she have a really unusual hair style?

The Golden Chain

Barbara Stanwyck in Alfred E. Green's Baby Face (1933), via An Honest Ghost.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Fragmented Society", New York Times, May 20 2016:

I'm so clued in that Yuval Levin name-checks me in his new book, and yet there are things in that sucker even I didn't know, on virtually every page, although all the examples I can think of seem to be things I say myself all the time, like political polarization in Congress seems to be on the rise since its period of decline in 1910-40 and income inequality, diminishing from 1925 to 1970, has also begun to rise, and immigration, slowing from 1910 to 1975, has been going up. These factors, as opposed to the Internet, which arrived later, have caused us to become a fragmented society. Levin argues that our politics are based upon nostalgia for a less fragmented time. Conservatives lament the new lack of social cohesion and liberals complain about the inequality. Both are wrong, in Levin's view, because that's just the way things are nowadays and we can't do anything about it. These phenomena are the downsides of choices we have made for perfectly good reasons, like the desire to enjoy more flexibility, creativity, and individual choice, as when we buy cheap products around the world, and so there's nothing to be done. Therefore what we do will have to be the opposite of what we have done in the past. Unlike the policies of the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush administrations when all this unfortunate fragmentation took place, we will have to adopt subsidiarity, devolving more power and choice from the federal government to local authorities. This is all quite true, but I'd like to say that I disagree with it in part. I think it is important, as we are taking away power from the federal government, that we should also give more power to the federal government, for example by instituting radical new ideas like national service and OMG look at the time and I've run out of space.

Levin's book is The Fractured Republic: Renewing America's Social Contract in the Age of Individualism (Basic Books, 2016), and I don't know if it's as much of a mess as the way Brooks portrays it, although it's inevitable that it should suffer from that cognitive dissonance between the fatalistic declinism of the conservative narrative (nostalgia aside, you can never have it as nice as it used to be) and the need to claim that your prescriptions are going to do the patient some good (you'll be as good as old!)

Brooks's basic argument, that he has thought of a way to disagree with Levin's argument even though Levin mentions him by name, is contained in paragraphs 14-16 of his column:

It's just logic. Feminists are the real sexists.

Parisian resistance fighter Simone Segouin, who killed an unknown number of Germans and captured 25 with her submachine gun, via Crafty Kryptonite Alpaca. Ann Althouse feels she is practically the same person because she's pretty rebellious too.

Hillary Clinton, asked by Lena Dunham whether she considers herself a feminist:

Yes... Absolutely. I’m always a little bit puzzled when any woman of whatever age, but particularly a young woman, says something like, ‘well, I believe in equal rights but I’m not a feminist.’ Well, a feminist is by definition someone who believes in equal rights.

Ann Althouse's comment:

Who writes the definition? We're still saying what X is "by definition" after all these years of scoffing at the anti-same-sex-marriage people who kept saying, tediously, marriage is by definition between a man and a woman?

Lectiones

Julian Bond (1940-2015) organizing sometime in the early 1960s, via Georgia Encylopedia.

R.I.P. Julian Bond. NPR had a beautiful interview on the civil rights titan with his dear friend and sometime political opponent Congressman John Lewis.

Syria

Also important on NPR this morning, two pieces on the European refugee crisis, one heartbreaking interview with a Médecins Sans Frontières emergency rescue coordinator, one breakdown of the numbers and what they mean. The latter was drier, but more shocking as you consider what they represent, the extraordinary callousness of the international community: in Calais, there are 3000 refugees mostly from Syria trying to make their way into the UK, to howls of aggrieved protest from Prime Minister Cameron and the nativist British right, but the rest of Europe is holding 250,000 refugees—Britain really can't help out with approximately 1% of the total? And then Europe moans over its 250,000, but comparatively impoverished Turkey is taking care of two million all by itself, or four times the total for the world's richest continent.

Then again, in Syria itself there are now, according to the latest USAID report, 7.6 million internally displaced persons, almost a third of the population (of course the population would be larger if not for the four million refugees outside the country). The US is the largest single donor of cash assistance, having spent $4,110,566,565 since the conflict began in March 2011, but had actually taken in fewer than 1000 refugees by last May (compared to 6000 in Brazil), because why? Because we're too scared, as explained by

Exchange: Eggs and owls

Also if you don't care about these guys there is something very wrong with you. Via National Wildlife Federation.

This one is the fault of the folks at LGM and specifically Erik Loomis, who was mocking a somewhat confused conservative a couple of days ago:

Because of new findings deemphasizing the connection between cholesterol and eggs, all science is really politically motivated liberals undermining our freedom and therefore we should log all old-growth forests and send the spotted owl into extinction. Or something.

So I went and looked at the stupid thing and left a comment and one thing led to another. You don't have to read it, except if you've been wondering how the old spotted owls are doing and want to follow up the links. I'm depositing it here (with all the Disqus formatting removed because I don't think I can make it work right) for the record, and because the blogmaster has already deleted some of it with more, perhaps, to follow (no, he didn't).

Yastreblyansky (1 upvote): What are your sources on the Northern Spotted Owl population? The only estimate I can find for California is 1200 nesting pairs (several 2014 sources such as herehttp://naturalresourcesmgmt.ne... ), and all sources agree the population continues to be in decline. A petition went out in December to relist it as threatened or endangered. FWS seems to think NSO are not harmed by logging burned areas, and others disagree, but no source says they thrive more on private land, what does that even mean?

"You're always using tu quoque arguments, Jonah!" "No, YOU are!"

Update:Thanks for the shout-out, Blogenfreude, and welcome Mike's readers!

Image via Buzzfeed.

Jonah doesn't know what old Steve Scalise was up to in 2002:

As I write this, GOP House whip Steve Scalise is in hot water over reports that he spoke to a group of racist poltroons in Louisiana twelve years ago. Whether it was an honest mistake, as Scalise plausibly claims, or a sign of something more nefarious, as his detractors hope, remains to be seen.

But one thing he knows for sure, whatever it was, some Democrat has done exactly the same thing and gotten away with it scot-free. Or at least that's what he hears on the Twitter: