Or: The problem with white belly dancing women.

From Salon, and where else? Well, in any case, we shouldn’t be too surprised:

Google the term “belly dance” and the first images the search engine offers are of white women in flowing, diaphanous skirts, playing at brownness. How did this become acceptable?
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One of the most awkward occurrences for me when I go out to an Arabic restaurant is the portion of the evening when the white belly dancer comes out. This usually happens on weekends, and I’ve learned to avoid those spaces then, but sometimes I forget. The last time I forgot, a white woman came out in Arab drag — because that’s what that is, when a person who’s not Arab wears genie pants and a bra and heavy eye makeup and Arabic jewelry, or jewelry that is meant to read as “Arabic” because it’s metallic and shiny and has squiggles of some kind — and began to belly-dance. She was not a terrible belly dancer. But she was incredibly thin…
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These women are more interested in their investment in belly dancing than in questioning and examining how their appropriation of the art causes others harm. To them, I can only say, I’m sure there are people who have been unwittingly racist for 15 years. It’s not too late. Find another form of self-expression. Make sure you’re not appropriating someone else’s.

Wah.

Robert Tracisnki commented just a little while later:

Now that is an interesting principle if we were to apply it consistently. The mind reels. Enormous parts of our culture have been influenced by and therefore “appropriated” from someone else. Much of contemporary American popular music was “appropriated” in one way or another from Southern blacks, as are whole styles of dance. Tap dance was appropriated by whites from blacks, who appropriated it from the Irish. Or maybe the other way around, or both. Parts of the American Arts and Crafts style were “appropriated” from traditional Japanese homebuilding. Franz Liszt encouraged his contemporaries to “appropriate” melodies from the Hungarians like all get-out. Classical architecture was “appropriated” from the Romans by the descendants of the very barbarians who sacked the empire. And so on.

What Jarrar condemns as “appropriation” is actually “learning”…

This thing we today call “liberalism” isn’t anything of the kind. As this little dust-up vividly illustrates, it is a fascination with categorizing people: You go there, you go there, you other people go there. White women shouldn’t belly-dance, and such.

Whatever “liberalism” and “conservatism” might have meant in years past, this is a distinction that works reasonably well today: The idea that people of certain races & classes belong in certain places, is exclusively scare-quote “liberal.”

“How did this become acceptable?” That should be a slogan, emblazoned on the coat-of-arms of scare-quote “liberal”-ism. These-people shouldn’t be doing this. Those-people shouldn’t be doing that.

I try to see similarities between myself and Margot Magowan; we’re both parents who are very concerned about the messages being presented to our children by a modern apparatus of commercialization and “news” and political agendas, which is not responsible for the impressions it leaves behind after it tires of one hot “new” craze and moves on to the next one. But, I haven’t commented on her pages for awhile by now, I’ve come to understand my opinions are just not welcome. I’ve found she’s willing to acknowledge that boys are being damaged too, but then again, she’s just not interested in that side of it.

We also don’t see eye-to-eye on victimhood in general. When George Will made the salient point that appears in the title of this post, she flipped out.

These particular words of his appeared in the Washington Post where he’s a regular columnist. That’s right, in 2014, an educated and “brilliant” man is informing the public that women covet rape.
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I am so disgusted. It seems to me like George Will is getting nervous that women are going to start talking and that people might finally be listening.

Women covet rape? Well hey, some do. If there’s a rape hoax, how can you conclude differently? And there have been some; so, that settles that.

But it isn’t a fair characterization, anyway, is it? Will wasn’t singling out any particular woman or group of women. He was describing human nature, if I’m reading it correctly, and I’m pretty sure I am.

Will goes on to say:

Meanwhile, the newest campus idea for preventing victimizations — an idea certain to multiply claims of them — is “trigger warnings.” They would be placed on assigned readings or announced before lectures. Otherwise, traumas could be triggered in students whose tender sensibilities would be lacerated by unexpected encounters with racism, sexism, violence (dammit, Hamlet, put down that sword!) or any other facet of reality that might violate a student’s entitlement to serenity. This entitlement has already bred campus speech codes that punish unpopular speech. Now the codes are begetting the soft censorship of trigger warnings to swaddle students in a “safe,” “supportive,” “unthreatening” environment, intellectual comfort for the intellectually dormant.

It is salutary that academia, with its adversarial stance toward limited government and cultural common sense, is making itself ludicrous. Academia is learning that its attempts to create victim-free campuses — by making everyone hypersensitive, even delusional, about victimizations — brings increasing supervision by the regulatory state that progressivism celebrates.

And see, I think this gets to the heart of it. The honest way to debate this issue is not: “Women covet rape” versus “no they don’t.” But rather: “What we need is more victims” versus “no we don’t.”

Changing definitions over time can serve beneficial ends. One example might be, oh, let’s say, the scene early on in Patton where the General informs the cook that the mess hall will no longer be open after 6 a.m., and any soldier in this unit not wearing proper uniform is going to be skinned. Obviously, the intent was not just to make the men wake up earlier and dress sharper; it was all about discipline. This would lead to other disciplines, which would culminate in the ultimate objective of creating a superior fighting force. It is a vision not uniquely Patton’s. It is what the D.I. does for a living, year after year. The standards change, the goal of the moment changes, these things all change as the progress changes, just like in any teacher-student relationship.

With progressivism, though, the “progress” is downward, as definition of “victim” changes, loosens up, includes things it previously would not have included. They keep wanting to cast a wider net. But the effect is not to make a better, faster, stronger, brighter student. Nor is that the intent. The “progress” of progressives is toward chaos. Dysfunction, disorder, temptation, weakness, trouble. Victimology.

Margot, incidentally, went on to say this:

When will we learn to honor rape survivors as the heroes that they are instead of shaming them into silence?

Heroes?

I’m sure there is a legitimate purpose to saying such a thing. Probably has to do with saying something, effecting change, so that a serial abuser is not free to inflict suffering on more people. I can certainly grasp that. The problem is, just a few paragraphs earlier she ridiculed George Will for daring to insinuate there might be some desirable cachet involved in being a victim. And here she is providing it, not even indirectly.

So George Will was right, when you make victimhood a coveted status you will see more victims. According to human nature…and by design. There certainly is a political agenda behind all this, there’s been one for a very long time, and if it somehow isn’t fair for us to discuss it while it’s happening right under our noses then this is going to lead to problems.

Sill liberals. They think the quick and easy way to a non-judgmental color-blind society, is to judge white people by their color and then “guilt” them into shutting up, that’s an accurate summary is it not? If it is — just repeat it a few times, what’s wrong with it becomes undeniable and obvious. But they won’t make the effort. Of course, if it isn’t an accurate summary, then they need to learn to communicate a bit better, which means embiggenning the discussion to something more complicated than three words.

From here.

At least, that’s what he says, and there’s some interesting commentary that goes with that:

It’s true that for a long time, an inexcusably long time, I was a registered Democrat. But even then, I never called myself a liberal. Because I came of age in the 1960s, I associated liberals with the punks I knew who called cops “pigs,” called soldiers “baby killers” and used any and all means to dodge the draft, and then had the hypocrisy to announce they did so because they were avowed pacifists.

Being in my 20s myself, I knew these people and I knew it was fear of battle or being bossed around by top sergeants, typically tough guys from the South, that motivated them to head off either to Canada or to one of the many left-wing shrinks who were willing to lie about their mental disorders and or verify they were homosexuals.

Fifty years later, they’re still hypocrites, but instead of being college students, they’re running colleges, TV networks, movie studios, solar panel companies and the New York Times. And, what’s more, they continue to lie. Most recently, a sample of journalists lied to a pollster about their political affiliation, a mere 28% admitting to being Democrats and 50% claiming to be registered Independents.

Inasmuch as we already know that at least 90% of those in the news game always vote for liberals and that their campaign contributions are even more lopsided than that, you have to wonder why they even bother lying about something as transparent as their political bias. All you really have to do is turn on the network news or pick up a daily newspaper, Time magazine, the New Yorker, Vanity Fair or any of the slick glossies devoted to fashion and cosmetics, to realize that they should, by all rights, be paid directly by the DNC for their propaganda efforts.

He’s talking about this, I think (via Hot Air):

In 2013, about half of all journalists (50.2 percent) said they were political independents, up about 18 percentage points from 2002.

I think Burt’s on to something here. Whatever change has taken place since 2002 isn’t about forsaking the democrat party to turn independent; it’s about lying and getting away with it. Also, we have a somewhat more subtle problem with the liberals of yesteryear no longer being twenty-somethings. Youngsters are still relatively powerless. We expect big areas of responsibility to be run by someone in their fifties or sixties. What is changed in the here-and-now is that yesteryear’s hippies are in that bracket, running things. And they’re not too keen on cause-and-effect, they don’t necessarily “feel” that one thing results from another thing.

As a consequence of that, you see all sorts of laws that don’t really count for anything because they aren’t enforced. And, you see other scare-quote “laws” that nobody has taken the time to legislate, or even to write down, laws that would violate disputably sacrosanct rights if they did exist in writing; nevertheless, being enforced.

The Mrs. and I were looking at more potential new home-sites last night, and once again I was allowed to witness the same indefinite and indeterminate round of speculation, in response to “can we barbeque here?” Here in the Golden State, the answer to any & all such questions is really one of “nobody-knows.” I wish people would start replying with it, when it is the correct answer and nothing else is. It is, after all, what we expect to hear now when we ask the question. Not just about barbeques, but about anything.

What’s really happening? I’m reminded of a third-of-a-century-old movie.

MARCUS: This concludes our proposal. Thank you for your attention.
SPOCK: It literally is Genesis.
KIRK: The power of creation.
SPOCK: Have they proceeded with their experiment?
KIRK: Well, the tape was made about a year ago. I can only assume they’ve reached Stage Two by now.
McCOY: But, dear Lord, do you think we’re intelligent enough to… Suppose, what if this thing were used where life already exists?
SPOCK: It would destroy such life in favor of its new matrix.
McCOY: It’s new matrix? …Do you have you any idea what you’re saying?
SPOCK: I was not attempting to evaluate its moral implications, Doctor. As a matter of cosmic history, it has always been easier to destroy than to create.
McCOY: Not anymore! Now we can do both at the same time! According to myth, the Earth was created in six days. Now, watch out! Here comes Genesis, we’ll do it for you in six minutes.
SPOCK: Really, Doctor McCoy, you must learn to govern your passions. They will be your undoing.

“It would destroy such life in favor of its new matrix.” Prelutsky’s pals from the sixties were intent on creating something new. “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.” Key to this vision of creating something new, was demolishing the old.
Me, in the comments:

The proprietor should be able to control what goes on in his business. It’s like being Captain of the ship. The authority goes with the responsibility; the restaurant-owner has a responsibility, for which he will be held to account, to ensure that his patrons do not have to endure an unpleasant dining experience. I agree, to throw someone out because of what he is, as opposed to because of what he does, is wrong. Most conservatives would agree with that; it’s part of what conservatism is, people should prosper and suffer according to their behavior and not according to their class membership. Who is the final arbiter over whether business is being turned away because of actions, or because of what a person is? The proprietor, the Captain of the ship. It simply isn’t effective for the decision to be made by anyone else.

It’s part of what makes society go. So it is to be expected that liberals want to destroy it.

Look at anything liberals are trying to build, and you’ll invariably find — whether they want to discuss it or not — there’s something else being destroyed. Identify any social custom that has leveraged some responsibility for preserving our society and allowing it to continue functioning, and you’ll invariably find — whether liberals want to discuss it or not — there is an effort of theirs to destroy whatever that thing is.

Their movement is a “Genesis” device destroying whatever existed before, “in favor of its new matrix.”

Victor Davis Hanson, putting into words what has long been writhing around out there, waiting for someone to come along and say (via The News Junkie at Maggies’s Farm):

Supporters of “comprehensive immigration reform” never really divulge the details of their various amnesty plans: How many DUIs or felonies get one deported? Exactly how long do you have to reside in the U.S. to be eligible for a pathway to citizenship? Can you receive amnesty if your history of residency in the U.S. is largely one of dependency on public assistance? How exactly is the border to be declared secured before amnesties are offered, to prevent the sort of rush to the border we see now? Is Mexico really a “partner” or a cynical manipulator that wants a safety-valve for its own failures, many of them driven by racist policies toward indigenous peoples, a continuance of billions of dollars in remittances, and a soapbox for lambasting the U.S. that deflects attention from its own nativist and restrictionist immigration policies.

As for new legal immigration reform, was it really going to be largely ethnically blind and based on meritocratic criteria, in which, say, a Nigerian with an electrical-engineering degree who has been waiting five years to enter the U.S. legally would be given preference over someone from Latin America without a high-school diploma but with a long history of crossing the border illegally? Voters doubt that.
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Voters in Virginia finally had enough with the big lie of illegal immigration: Those who want open borders are largely either ethnic activists and chauvinists who wish open borders on the south, but would never extend such laxity to other ethnic groups (e.g., La Raza activists would oppose 1 million Chinese, Nigerians, or Ukrainian nationals trying to cross illegally into the American Southwest), or want access to cheap labor, with employers pocketing the profits while the state and thus the taxpayer pick up the inevitable social costs of their exploitation of labor.

Yesterday, we saw that voters don’t like being called names by those who are both hypocrites and nakedly self-interested in putting their own selfish agendas over the concerns of the less well-off.

It’s natural for a produce buyer to start a new regimen of picking up & feeling the fruit more carefully before the purchase, after a long streak of hauling home rotten goods. I’ve long been hoping the word “reform” becomes a dirty word in politics, in immigration, welfare, health care, torts — everything. If you’re a politician running for re-election and your idea for “reform” is so great, it should be in your interests to go skipping straight past the glittering-generality R-word and go straight to the heart of the matter, of what your reform would actually do. I’ve become deeply suspicious of this word, after years and years of hauling home rotten cabbages. I doubt like the dickens that I’m the only one.

Maybe the word has lost enough luster over this upset, that its fall from grace is final and complete. I doubt that very much, but hope springs eternal. Either way, Virginia is showing us how it’s done; their voters are essentially saying, “begone with the mile-wide inch-deep boring bromides, instead give us information so we can decide.” Agree or disagree with the ultimate outcome, that’s a healthy sentiment for any constituency.

Goddard. Can’t think of anything to add.

I was listening to NPR the other morning, and they had a former Obama transportation secretary blaming poor transportation infrastructure on Republicans refusal to increase gasoline taxes. So why don’t they use the existing gasoline taxes? Obama’s smallest budget is 30% larger than Bush’s largest budget. Where is that money going?

Democrats see the solution to all problems as raising taxes, because their constituency depends on them stealing money from other people, and giving it away to Democratic voters. They use a small portion of it for something useful, so they have an excuse to raise taxes even further.

Well — there is this. There are two motivations going on here, which must be the case with any ideology that relies on deceit: That which motivates the deceivers and that which motivates the deceived. “I want to get hold of that money so I can give it away to my constituents and get re-elected” is deceptive, but not deceived; “I want that guy to win his election so I can get money” does not, in & of itself, involve deception. Some proggies are very up-front about this. Of course, they may be victims of deception. But their problem isn’t quite so much with not-knowing, as with not-caring. They tend to live for today, maybe for tomorrow if they’re feeling extra diligent about planning ahead, but usually just for today. They want money. How can society continue to function? It isn’t even on their radar; no really, go talk to them sometime, you’ll see my point…

To these two subclasses of proggie, we can add a third, since there are many among them who do not rely on social services, yet aren’t independently wealthy and are not running for public office. They just want more liberalism, for a variety of reasons that have to do with unproductive base human impulses. From inspecting these reasons, we can divide this third subclass down further. A lot of them think of politics as a football game: Root for the home team, and that’s all that matters. Others, I suspect, know deep down that conservatives are correct in pointing out that society cannot continue to function this way — you can tell by the way they get unhinged when they lose arguments. They’re not just repeating hype about the beneficial effects of liberal programs, or Hillary has worked so hard, or you-didn’t-build-that.

They have genuine passion, and it isn’t about helping the less fortunate, it is in the last of those. You didn’t build that. An individual, or group of investors and other contributors, separated from everything else outside by a wall, gave up these huge pantloads of time, money, blood, sweat and tears that were not contributed by anyone outside that wall. They made something happen that improved life for many others, perhaps for everyone, and got filthy stinking rich. Or, at least, deserved to. The you-didn’t-build-that proggies have a burning, white-hot, visceral phobia against this thought. Can’t hold it in their heads. There’s something about it that makes them uncomfortable.

Others want to help the less fortunate, but they’re not sufficiently interested in doing that to donate their own time or money to charity. Perhaps it is fair to intermingle them with the ones described in the paragraph above; if something good must be done, we individuals are not capable of doing it and shouldn’t even think of such a thing, it all has to go through government. Perhaps they suffer from the common phobia. Like they think people, taking the initiative, and acting without forcibly collected tax dollars or appointed oversight authority, are not capable of doing good. We can only break things and hurt each other. “It is the not-idle hands that are the devil’s workshop,” you might say. They seem, to me, to be laboring long and hard to tear down one status system in order to replace it with another: You shouldn’t enjoy any special abilities or privileges from working hard to build something and making a profit off it, status instead should come from working for the government. They talk a lot about making everything equal for everyone; but, I think, if they lived in a society of their own making, in which everyone was equal all of the time, they’d never successfully adapt to it, ever. It might eventually kill them. They’ve got to find a way to be better than the average, and they’re frustrated because it is they and their peers who are constantly working against anyone having any way to establish or maintain such distinction.

Other than the foregoing, I really don’t have much of an opinion about it.

From here, via A Voice For Men.

What a fascinating clip. I was surprised that the womyns-studies-babe was surprisingly reasonable, in demeanor if not in her rhetoric. The anchorette in the short skirt, on the other hand, was something else. Maybe she was planted there, to show what institutional anti-male bias looks like?

Dean Esmay has much better self-control than I do.

The New American:

A Colorado baker found guilty of discrimination for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple must go through sensitivity training as part of his penance and rehabilitation. In December of last year, Administrative Law Judge Robert Spencer found Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cake Shop in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, guilty of discriminating against same-sex couple Dave Mullin and Charlie Craig when he told them in July 2012 that he couldn’t bake them a wedding cake because homosexual behavior conflicted with his Christian beliefs.

Phillips appealed the verdict to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which stood by Spencer’s decision and ordered May 30 that Phillips be required to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples in conflict with his moral Christian convictions. Additionally, Phillips and his staff will have to submit to a regimen of state-sanctioned sensitivity training to make sure they are in line with Colorado’s non-discrimination statute.

Liberals are supposed to be all about liberty, but they have a fondness for bureaucracies that encroach upon it, restrict it, diminish it, remove it entirely if left to their own devices.

Over the next two years Phillips will also be required to submit quarterly reports to Colorado’s Civil Rights Commission concerning his business practices, informing the commission whether he has turned any business away, most importantly homosexual customers. “So if his shop is closed or he’s out of flour, he needs to report to the commission,” explained Nicolle Martin of Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the conservative Christian legal advocacy group that represented Phillips in the case, to Fox News on June 5.

As far as the sensitivity schooling, Phillips will have to “prove that he has sufficiently trained his employees and staff to comply with the Colorado anti-discrimination act,” added Martin.

The plaintiff-side said something about this that I found interesting:

Attorney Amanda Goad of the ACLU’s Colorado franchise, which filed the discrimination complaint against Phillips on behalf of the same-sex couple, said that while “religious freedom is undoubtedly an important American value … so is the right to be treated equally under the law free from discrimination.”

That’s the endlessly-repeating litany of those who have sought to take our freedoms away, for quite a few years now: “While such-and-such a right is very important, freedom from discrimination is MORE important.” This is why liberals shouldn’t be allowed to make rules, at all: They simply do not comprehend making a dent in something, they have to do-away-with it. Everything is a smallpox virus. End war, end hunger, end illiteracy, end bigotry, end ignorance, end sensible skepticism against the global-warming bromides, end end end end end. Their “end-“ing methods fail to work, every time they target something that, evidently unknown to them, happens to be the default state.

People discriminate. If we have to keep losing more and more of our ability to manage our own lives as long as discrimination exists, we will never stop losing it until this ability is all-the-way gone, nevermind whether discrimination is present or absent by that time. And you know, maybe that’s the whole point.

Would a liberal support a global ban on these forced sensitivity-training regimens, in the public sector as well as private? That would be a good test-case question to put to a new recruit to the liberal movement; if liberty really is the inspiring motive, the subject shouldn’t hesitate to answer in the affirmative, since nobody who truly champions the cause of liberty would be interested in forcing strangers to think a certain way.

Fascinating column in (the pay section of) the Wall Street Journal, by comic book industry insiders Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche:

In the 1950s, the great publishers, including DC and what later become Marvel, created the Comics Code Authority, a guild regulator that issued rules such as: “Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal.” The idea behind the CCA, which had a stamp of approval on the cover of all comics, was to protect the industry’s main audience—kids—from story lines that might glorify violent crime, drug use or other illicit behavior.

In the 1970s, our first years in the trade, nobody really altered the superhero formula. The CCA did change its code to allow for “sympathetic depiction of criminal behavior . . . [and] corruption among public officials” but only “as long as it is portrayed as exceptional and the culprit is punished.” In other words, there were still good guys and bad guys. Nobody cared what an artist’s politics were if you could draw or write and hand work in on schedule. Comics were a brotherhood beyond politics.

The 1990s brought a change. The industry weakened and eventually threw out the CCA, and editors began to resist hiring conservative artists. One of us, Chuck, expressed the opinion that a frank story line about AIDS was not right for comics marketed to children. His editors rejected the idea and asked him to apologize to colleagues for even expressing it. Soon enough, Chuck got less work.

The superheroes also changed. Batman became dark and ambiguous, a kind of brooding monster. Superman became less patriotic, culminating in his decision to renounce his citizenship so he wouldn’t be seen as an extension of U.S. foreign policy. A new code, less explicit but far stronger, replaced the old: a code of political correctness and moral ambiguity. If you disagreed with mostly left-leaning editors, you stayed silent.

In the post immediately previous I recall making reference to the First Conquest Rule, that people are conservative about what they know best (or whatever is closest to them). This thing may have to do with the Second: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” It is the way of large, entrenched, layered bureaucracies, because it is the way of image over substance. Everyone wants to look enlightened, everyone wants to appear forward-thinking, everyone wants to get something for nothing. So once people pool up into large organizations and start to worry about reputation more than mission, they just love to put out an image of their group that attracts maximum attention but involves minimal commitment to the stated ideals.

The gay-friendly thing doesn’t bother me so much, other than the introduction of adult themes into a medium that is supposed to be for children. That, the way I see it, is a rating-problem: Comic books are much more popular with older kids than they used to be. This introduces challenges with mixing up the age groups that the industry has not adequately addressed, which in turn causes some social commentary to be put in that doesn’t really belong there. But what worries me far more is this thing about moral ambiguity. Superman doesn’t want to “be seen as an extension of U.S. foreign policy.” Excuse me, but doesn’t this get to the very core of word “hero”? Doesn’t it at least interfere with the ideals? How is this supposed to work — Superman defends the defenseless but only up until such point as it starts to cramp his style?

What we saw in the 1990’s, in comic books and elsewhere — and it has yet to lose momentum, even this late — is a cultural phobia against true heroism. This could always use more & better inspection, even if the inspection results in unflattering things being noticed about the phobia, which I think for the most part is the case. Let’s see, what are the reasons heroism might be a pain in the ass. There are some: 1) A hero who rights wrongs, might come after you if you’re the guy doing something wrong; 2) Heroes raise the standard, since it isn’t really the physical capability to do what’s right that makes the hero, it’s the resolve. So they pose a threat to the active evil-doer, and the passive bystander alike. May I suggest that our two-decades-old or so beef with yesteryear’s simpler and cleaner brand of heroism, is advocacy for the benefit of the passive and not so much for the active. It is a shadowy crusade for sake of the lazy.

It is, I think, a fulfillment of success by way of defining success downward to meet status quo. Here’s an evil thing being done, and here’s a rationale for not doing anything about it: If true heroism is nothing more than recognizing that we shouldn’t do anything about it, then we can all be heroes by continuing to sit on our asses, playing Angry Birds on our phones. And therein lies a complete inversion that didn’t take too many years to come about; since when Superman got started it wasn’t his superpowers that made him a hero, it was his recognition that something was amiss and something had to be done about it. “This looks like a job for,” remember that?

The Kryptonite that poisoned Superman, here, is the nihilistic aspect of modern liberalism. The perpetual search for reasons not to do things, not to give a damn, not to see anything as worth doing. To leave a tinier “footprint,” or something. The more environmentally-conscious Superman wouldn’t dash off to stop a bank robbery or save a woman from being mugged, since such actions might actually change the outcome of a situation, which is the one single ignition point of this phobia. Ideally, such a modernized Superman would do what any other adherent to modern nihilistic liberalism would do: Make a hole, as tiny as possible, jump into it and pull it in after himself. It’s all about not having an impact on anything. Don’t, don’t, don’t: Don’t do anything about Iraq, don’t do anything that creates carbon, don’t even get up to wash dishes or take out the trash.

As a child of the “Star Wars” generation, I am truly perplexed by this because I understand the enormous revenue-generating potential of restoring “good guy versus bad guy” western heroism. It stirs passions in the soul, and it should. In my lifetime, as this good-versus-evil clarity has been proven out as the high octane story-telling fuel that it is & should be, our modern society has shown this resistance against it as we seek to placate the hero-phobes. These are people living among us who have been somehow warped, I don’t completely understand how, but probably in childhood. They somehow have been “educated” that there is no evil in the world, other than a higher standard. Apart from whatever passes as “bigotry” in the moment, nothing should be resisted, ever — except the calling, to do what plainly ought to be done, and get up off your ass. There’s nothing for any of us to do, except resist bigotry, play up our sense of group-victim-hood now & then, and keep playing games on our phones.

We’re living in their time, the time of the nihilist. I’m not entirely sure why that is. Perhaps boredom?

They’re all really supposed to be just one. Put it on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, probably should’ve put it here, it’s a bit heavy…

We concern ourselves with the best possible outcome of an effort — AND — with a bunch of what I have come to think of as “dryer lint.” Usually, it’s got something to do with a process, this is that “process versus outcome” conflict upon which I have waxed lyrically before. But if we’re honest about it, we acknowledge most of these processes have to do with something more primal: Blame management. Making sure that, when & if it all hits the fan, you can’t be blamed. That is why people follow processes, and it is rational. What is irrational is castigating others for not following the same process, after it has become abundantly clear that if there is any possibility remaining at all for producing the desirable outcome, the process will have to be abandoned.

So there is: Making sure I’m not blamed; making sure nobody in my peer group is blamed; making sure that if anything goes wrong, all the blame falls on the head of that guy over there; making sure that if anything goes wrong, the blame goes to a group. That’s blame management. Then, there is credit management, by which of course I don’t mean “get my score up to 770,” but the preceding four concerns about blame, countered in credit: I get the credit if we meet the goal, my peer group gets the credit, that guy doesn’t get any credit, that group doesn’t get credit. That’s eight things, eight reasons for following a process that have absolutely zilch to do with accomplishing the stated objective.

To the eight, we add a ninth: A lot of people follow processes just because they find it comforting. Some of them, I notice, have received a lot of accolades for a very long time — like, back to fifth grade or something — for their “excellent leadership skills.” Even though if you watch them, you see they never actually make any decisions, other than to echo what someone else has decided and buttress it with their own soothing but piercing voice inflection. Or perhaps a polished and effective writing style. They place these behind ideas that are not theirs, and receive all sorts of flattery for their leadership and their decisions, even though they never ponder benefits or liabilities of anything, outside of social escalation. Ever.

What’s missing from all this swimming-pool-filter-trap-crap is autonomous, effective, confident decision-making. The stuff that actually gets things done. The making of good plans, strong plans, plans likely to yield the desired result. You know — the stuff we all say we want, all of the time?

What is happening here is not that we’re changing our minds about what it is we want to do; rather, we’re shrinking the diameter of our circle of concerns. This happens when the broader effort continues onward, not yet complete, but our own contribution to it has been played all the way out and there’s nothing left for us to do but sit and watch someone else carry the ball. Sit, wait, worry…and self-assess.

The temptation is to go all-or-nothing: “All of my decisions have been the correct ones,” or “I really bolluxed this thing, and I let everybody down.” If someone doesn’t have what it takes to admit to having let everybody down, and they don’t have what it takes to see themselves as a whole book as opposed to one page, the only alternative left is to take the “I made all the right decisions” approach and look for someone else to blame. In a large organization, a lot of this has to do with political capital. It keeps coming back to calculations, how much of it will be spent on admitting to a mistake, whether that much still exists in the account or whether this would result in a deficit.

And this comes back to the First Conquest Rule: “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.” Everyone looks for that First Concern, achieving the desired outcome that was defined at the inception, in something. It’s a matter of where is that thing. Does it expand to cover the effort in which everybody else is engaged, looking out for the interests of all contributors by looking out for the interests of this overall effort? Or does it shrink down to the size of that one contributor’s political interests, and social elevation within the organization?

As has been noticed by anyone who’s had misgivings about how a large bureaucracy functions, either from within or from outside of it: People tend to be very easily swerved from that productive line of thinking, “If we do it that way the organization’s goal will not be achieved, but if we do it this other way then maybe we all have a better shot.” Everybody likes to think they’re thinking that way, all of the time. Well hey, I like to think I look like a lifeguard on Baywatch whenever I’m in swim trunks.

But that doesn’t make it true. And 9:10 is a hefty ratio. That’s why when you look at the people who actually do manage to get things done, you’ll find one quality they all share most consistently is not that they’re necessarily bright, or pushy, or eloquent, or even that they’re inspiring. It’s that they cast a wide net in collecting the information that goes into their decisions, but after just a little bit of time they do make decisions — and they don’t lose focus.

And yeah, I know, “reading to well” is not correct. But I can really relate to the part about the algebra teacher, and the complex math in fourth grade, these were my experiences as well.

Tickld, via Young Conservatives, via The Federalist Papers.

Just a creative writing exercise that touched a lot of people. Calvin’s last goodbye.

Francis came over to his grandfather’s side, “What is it Gramps?”

Calvin reached over to the stuffed tiger on his bedside and and held him out shakily to his grandson, who looked exactly as he did so many years ago. “This is Hobbes. He was my best friend when I was your age. I want you to have him.”

“He’s just a stuffed tiger.” Francis said, eyebrows raised.

Calvin laughed, “Well, let me tell you a secret…”

My son, that is. I’ll be picking him up from the train station in a few hours; turned 17 Wednesday.

Happy birthday, kid! Here’s a picture of your Dad.

Update: Got ‘im, and whoa. Looks like we’re finally at the “kid taller than his Dad” stage.

I considered calling this something like “Chess: The Perfect Blend Between Process and Outcome,” since that drives more to the heart of the matter, but it’s too long and it takes too much reading-between-the-lines to get there. Anyhow, the point made is brilliant, as is the chess analogy:

Picture the situation: you know that putting your knight on e4, for example, leads to a counterattack that ruins your position. You move your bishop there instead. A normal opponent would think about what you were conceding to do that instead of the knight move and react accordingly. The Cuttlers, however, would go ahead with the sequence of moves, even though with a bishop there it will ruin their own position instead. And then they will insist that, because they made all the correct moves, that in reality the game is theirs, even as their queen and both rooks decorate the side of the board where you keep the captured pieces. The game WOULD have been won if the knight had been there, therefore your bishop doesn’t belong there, the move was invalid and the game is won, QED. Or do you deny that their moves were not perfectly in accordance with the rules?

Misses the point by a bit, don’t you think?
:
…[A]n expert can be reasonably expected to know about a specialized topic. Wouldn’t you ask an expert about it? But the point isn’t in merely asking, because a question is a tool designed to get a good answer. If the answer is wrong, then it misses the point of having asked someone skilled in the field – I can give you bad tax advice a lot more cheaply than your expert accountant.

Here we can see again the difference between condescension and humane behavior. If you question the bad advice, how does the expert react? Does he explain the reason for his advice? Does he accept if the reason doesn’t apply here? If you share something you’ve learned, does he take the time to show why that knowledge is irrelevant, or better, does he say he’ll read about it and then get back to you? That’s humane – it recognizes that what one has learned may be learned by others, that to be an expert is not to be flawless even in that realm of practice, and it shows a willigness to grow.

Or, you know, the expert could be insulted that someone else did a little research, discount the new information because of its unworthy source, openly question why you’re questioning their opinion in the first place, and then go right ahead and be stubbornly wrong about it, because experts say so. The bishop never belonged on that square. The reply moves were all well within the rules. Just tip your damned king, you peon.

That’s the funny thing about something like chess – the pieces are the same for each player, from a grandmaster to a patzer like me. One side’s bishops don’t suddenly start scooting sideways; the grandmaster’s rooks don’t level up to move twice per turn; my queen can’t shoot lasers just to make it fair.

Life is rather chesslike in this regard…

It’s easy for non-experts to interpret expert opinion way beyond the boundaries of what it really is. It’s obvious to anybody who’s ever been an expert about anything. And even if you’ve never been an expert about anything, you can ask an expert about something within their expertise and practically see it in their eyes: What’s the premise of the question, is it a valid one, who’s my audience, how are they going to misunderstand this. And, do I really know what I think I know.

Of course, now we live in a time in which a lot of experts make their expert-living off of doubting any uncertainty. And that’s perhaps worth a whole post in & of itself.

Historian takes on Cornelius Ryan, author of The Longest Day.

In his well-documented biography of Ranger commander Earl Rudder — “Rudder: From Leader to Legend” — historian Thomas M. Hatfield excoriated Ryan for repeatedly sacrificing “facts for dramatic effect.”

Scaling sea cliffs under fire is incomparably dramatic. However, the German guns were not in the casemates. “Sacrifice for nothing” became Ryan’s ironic storyline.

It is historically inaccurate, to the point of falsehood.

In Hatfield’s view, Ryan was not a professional historian but a man grinding out a book to meet a publication deadline. Ryan admitted he relied on one Ranger veteran for his entire D-Day account, a sergeant who manned an observation point over a mile from the most critical combat on Pointe du Hoc. Professional military historians seek multiple sources, to include after-action group interviews.

Earl Rudder, who later became president of Texas A&M University, was a superb special operations commander, but a man not given to grandiose language.

Ryan’s interview of Rudder didn’t produce the sizzle Ryan sought. Ryan asked Rudder where and when he arrived in Normandy. Rudder: “Omaha Beach, H-Hour.” Ryan asked if Rudder had lost friends in the battle. Rudder: “Yes, many.” Was Rudder wounded? “Yes, twice.” Ryan appealed for a dramatic moment. Did any single incident stand out in Rudder’s mind? “No.”

One moment? The battle for and on and over Pointe du Hoc was two-and-a-half days of endless suffering, death, violence and chaotic hell, yet Rudder and his Rangers had succeeded in achieving their critical mission.

Hatfield noted that a man with solid Hollywood connections helped correct the record. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan held a ceremony at Pointe du Hoc. With Rudder’s widow and 2nd Ranger vets at his side, Reagan said: “Their mission was one of the most difficult and daring of the invasion, to climb these sheer and desolate cliffs and take out the enemy guns. … These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the men who helped free a continent.”

Via Instapundit.

I’m not in any position to criticize Mr. Ryan, but it’s always worrisome how quickly you can find disagreement among the presumably knowledgeable, during these times in which we live when all sorts of different disciplines of scholarly work drive so hard toward something called “overwhelming consensus.” I recall some since-deceased relatives who helped me back in school researching my own family history, and as their generation died off my thoughts turned to the questions I probably should have asked them about little details, that I no longer could. Questions that would remain unanswered forever.

It must be a blissful brand of ignorance that permits the amateur and the historian alike, to believe it is only the answers that endure, and the questions that are temporary. That’s not actually how it works.

And there’s a reason for this. While most anyone with any experience at all will understand the frustration involved in dividing bad ideas from good ideas, the bad ones often looking so much like good ones, this is a difficulty that tends to exist only in advance. Good ideas, as distinguished from bad ones, have a way of looking like good ideas in the aftermath, as well as in the currency of their execution. That’s why people say things like “this is / is not working out.” This is a rather durable trend with few exceptions, although there are exceptions to just about everything.

He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else, as the saying goes. This is to be expected. When you biff it, and you aren’t willing to admit you’ve biffed it but you want people to keep listening to you, of course it becomes politically necessary to come up with an excuse, be it good or bad. And if this is something that tends to happen over and over again to the same person, after awhile this person will naturally acquire some talent for coming up with excuses. It is also an inevitability that this person, or group, or ideology, will become very stubborn about always getting the last word in. There’s no other alternative for them, since controlling the narrative is important when you’re selling a bad idea.

Good ideas tend to speak for themselves. Yes, here and there you have to wait around a bit to find out if the good idea really was a good idea. That’s rare enough to be an exceptional case, and usually there is some defined test that can be run after this interval to prove the idea was good. And, yes, there are some exceptions to that as well.

Priorities in these things, though, are determined by the trends and not by the exceptions. And so we see these purveyors of bad ideas consistently lunging for, grasping for, insisting upon, control over the same things. Control over the definitions, of phrases, words, motives of their opposition. Control over the definition of the goal, and then the re-definition of the goal, and then the re-re-definition of the goal. If the idea being sold is a good one, of course none of this is necessary. The idea speaks for itself. The aftermath of its implementation says all that needs to be said, about what a good idea it was.

Jordan Ellenberg, writing in the Wall Street Journal.

…today, I don’t think we’re paying too little attention to our young geniuses. I think we’re paying too much.
:
Talent isn’t a number. We would never presume to identify the great novelists of the future by counting the number of vocabulary words they knew at age 10. To think we can do the same for math and science—as if proving the Riemann hypothesis were something like getting 100,000 on the math SAT—is to adopt a depressingly impoverished view of science and its demands on its practitioners. The cult of genius tends to undervalue hard work and the productive persistence that psychologists nowadays like to call “grit”—not to mention creativity, perspective and taste, without which all those other virtues may be wasted on pointless projects.

Those of us who managed sky-high SAT scores at 13 were 20 times as likely as the average American to get a doctorate; let’s say, being charitable, that we’re 100 times as likely to make a significant scientific advance. Since we’re only 1 in 10,000 of the U.S. population, that still leaves 99% of scientific advances to be made by all those other kids who didn’t get an early ticket to the genius club. We geniuses aren’t going to solve all the riddles. Most child prodigies are highly successful — but most highly successful people weren’t child prodigies.

Hat tip to Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm.

Not sure if I fit into what he’s discussing; probably not. I was one of the “bored” prodigies. Didn’t hand things in, didn’t hand things in, didn’t hand things in, and then came the threats of holding me back a year. It’s not an isolated case by any means, and seems to be happening more and more often now: Kid doesn’t do his work, so the adults start fighting with other adults. Then, as an experiment, I was put in the advanced group, stopped being bored, and started doing work.

It didn’t last into high school. Maybe I went back to being stupid. Or, more likely, the being-bored-with-class thing was just a symptom of something much larger. Public school has always been friendly to those who think inside the box, which is a kind way of saying it’s always been hostile to those who think outside. It’s a bureaucrat-friendly zone, and I have the impression from being a parent & former student that it is crystallizing, becoming a more strident and uncompromising version of its past self.

I didn’t mix well with the (other?) prodigies. I recall a certain need for a grasp of conceptual command of something, when I asked a teacher I was directed to ask one of the prodigies. I did, and what I got back was a sequence of steps I could execute so that I would be solving the problem as expected. I repeated the question about the concept, and got back the same sequence of steps. It emerged that the prodigy didn’t have the answer to the question I was asking, hadn’t developed it, didn’t need it. There is no one particular episode to which I’m pointing here, this is a generalization that applied to several events from that year or two.

I suppose by high school I maybe “matured” to the point of understanding and accepting that school is a crushing bore, and you have to just do the best you can and limp through to graduation day. I was too slow to grasp what we’re forced to learn in adulthood: Most of life is boring. Plodding through is not the answer, what you need to do is shrug off the boredom, think about the outcome, link it to your identity and take pride in what you do.

My gripe with K-12 is that it seems to be grading kids on their ability to fully come to terms with that. Which isn’t something that is too likely to happen, and if it does, it’s certainly not likely to happen early. If the kid’s going to be a success, it’s much more likely to happen because the crushing boredom somehow never becomes a factor.

Which makes the argument for more-attention-to-prodigies, up top, 2nd paragraph, a little distressing:

Some educators rebrand child prodigies as “exceptional human capital” and hold us to be the drivers of global economic competitiveness. “These are the people who are going to figure out all the riddles,” the Vanderbilt University psychologist David Lubinski said in a recent interview. “Schizophrenia, cancer — they’re going to fight terrorism, they’re going to create patents and the scientific innovations that drive our economy. But they are not given a lot of opportunities in schools that are designed for typically developing kids.”

It’s fascinating to me that with all this zeal we have for separating people and putting them in organized boxes, we’re so sluggish to form the separation that truly matters: Those who plan according to process and those who plan according to outcome. The surface-thinkers vs. the vertical-thinkers.

The latter of whom, time after time, we see are getting in trouble at school for thinking too pragmatically. They can’t see the point to handing in the assignments, so they don’t hand them in, and this is pegged as a “who cares” sort of an issue — kid lacks discipline, kid’s pig-iron stupid, poorly organized, who cares what it is? We’ll just treat him like he’s stupid and threaten to flunk him. Nowadays it’s “treat him like he has a DSM-V learning disability, and medicate him.” Back when it was happening to me, I couldn’t see why there was so little analytical thought being put into it, even as the grown-ups were getting in these arguments with each other over the work I wasn’t doing. As a grown-up, I can see the passion was really not so much about what it took for me to succeed, but more like about their differing approaches to life. They were having arguments about definitions, with the outcome-thinkers requiring strong and crisp definitions in order to even begin to assess what was going on, and the bureaucrat process-thinkers who fight so hard to keep things from being defined. And it was all my fault, really, for getting them into these fights with each other, by not doing my work. These two sides shouldn’t be coming into contact with each other, ever. Or, very rarely anyway, only under very tightly controlled conditions.

Back to the school thing, though. We talk so much of kids learning to think creatively, solve problems, think outside the box. Had that energy managed to find its way into the public school apparatus, the apparatus, I think, would have been taking a very different evolutionary path from what it has been taking, and would look very different from the way we find it today.

Kurt Schlicter writes about why you shouldn’t argue with liberals:

The truth is that conservatism is an ideology that is in accord with natural law and basic human decency, while liberalism is merely the summit of a slippery slope leading down to the hellish depths of collectivist misery.

Liberals aren’t going to like to hear this manifest and demonstrable truth. So you’re going to get called “racist,” “sexist” and “homophobic,” even if you’re a conservative black lesbian.

What you are not going to get is an argument. An argument is a collected series of statements designed to establish a definite proposition. Arguments involve the presentation of facts and evidence from which one draws a conclusion. Implied within the concept of an argument is the potential that one might change his conclusion. But liberals start with the conclusion.

They don’t change their conclusions based on the facts and evidence; they change the facts and evidence based on the conclusion they want. This is why a 105 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming, while a 60 degree day is irrefutable proof of global warming. As is a -20 degree day.

That, in & of itself, is a better argument than anything you’ll ever get out of a liberal.

He goes on to recommend what amounts to lowering oneself to the liberal’s level. I think that part is a joke…

I had to make some arrangements with someone. I’ll leave it unmentioned who, but it’s a person with whom I am entangled in a financial way for the time being, which is awkward since she doesn’t look at money the way I do. Also, I had to add her to my bank account as a payee, from one bank to a different bank, which I figured out was a matter of business I should resolve by going into the branch and speaking with a human, the old-fashioned way. There is a history of these things getting FUBAR’d, it used to be mildly aggravating, then it got humorous, then it got tedious — THEN, it happened a few more times and I’m just tired of it.

Well, yeah, of course the cashier can’t help with something like that, so I was sent off to wait for a banker. And wait I did; not exactly brimming with exuberant optimism or high spirits at the beginning of it, I was left to pickle for awhile, long enough for my weekend errand schedule to get rearranged a bit, which is frustrating in itself on a Saturday. I picked the wrong branch, and maybe I picked the wrong forum as well. Two bankers, tied up with two customers. On and on it went, sit and sit I did. Sit, and listen to the endlessly repeating dialogue with the young couple-with-baby trying to explore their options now that they’d found they couldn’t open a checking account. Ugh. This was aggravation on steroids, because you had to feel for the baby and the parents, plus the banker was handling it completely the wrong way. The old “Let’s make this a compassionate conversation by making it forty-five minutes long, and about two or three minutes of useful stuff.” What were the takeaways. Well, there’s the possibility that the outstanding matter might be cleared up, and you’re legally entitled to get a free credit report by doing blah blah blah.

It turned out I wasn’t waiting for the end of this, because another banker eventually freed up. And then didn’t help very much. But, sitting there, mulling over how people think about money, and how they are encouraged to think about it when they’re at what we might call the “scratching and clawing” phase of life, I had time to think about something: We really do not do much to encourage the insolvent to become solvent. You hear a fair amount about people of all ages being encouraged to “go back to school,” that’s about as close as the advice ever comes to what would seem to me to be most needed: Find ways to improve your value.

What is it that you’re doing, if anything at all, to make this economy go? Is there a gap between whatever that is, and your true potential? How do you translate that gap into action? That’s the bulls-eye; “maybe you should think about going back to school” approaches it, but doesn’t hit very close to the mark at all. And that’s about as close as we ever seem to come.

“You’re legally entitled to get a copy of your credit report as long as it’s just once a year” doesn’t hit the hay bale. It doesn’t even land inside the same archery range.

And here’s my gripe: What’s the opposite? “Oh well, there’s more to life than making money!” That one…THAT one…we hear all the freakin’ flippin’ time. And I’m entirely unsure about why that is. Who says this? Who listens to it? Who believes it? Oh sure, it’s true in the strictest, most technical sense. But my point is, so what? There’s a lot more to life than picking your nose, which isn’t easy, but people manage to get that done don’t they? There’s more to life than saving a baby trapped in a burning house, but if someone is put in the position of having to try for it, you’d want them to succeed wouldn’t you? Well, wouldn’t you?

I hate this phrase with the passion and radiant heat of a thousand suns. It’s just stupid. It envisions conflict within the act of simply generating an income or making a profit. As far as crass generalizations go, it would be much more correct to envision service to one’s fellow man within such things.

“More to life than making money” is the polar opposite of what young people need to hear. It’s just a turnkey solution phrase we say, not because it works, but because that’s what old people have always said to young people. It’s like “clean your plate”; common sense should immediately tell you this is a recipe for getting fat and staying fat, and maybe the advice should be “lock it up in clean Tupperware when you aren’t hungry anymore.” We read and listen to stories every single day, about so-and-so in these dire straits because the IRS ruled on such-and-such a matter in such-and-such a way…or, his wife has such-and-such a health drama going on and it isn’t covered. Alright then, we live in an age in which fortune is fickle. And the fickle fortune, is the fortune of basic survival. This has always been the case; in fact, looking at it from a long view, we happen to be the generation that has it the easiest, and we still haven’t reached the point where there are any guarantees.

The conclusion to all this is: If you’re in that thing that I described up above as “what we might call the ‘scratching and clawing’ phase of life” — SCRATCH. And CLAW. Maybe, if all it takes to wipe out our illusory solvency is a routine physical that finds a malignant lump or a brain cloud, we should act like it. Go to school if that’s how you can maximize your income. Learn a new trade. Get this job, quit that job, job-hop like a little jitterbug if you have to, whatever it takes.

This is all just an extension of that other thing it seems like young people aren’t being told anymore: If you’re going to play, play to win. And, you have to play. Have kids, but be married and able to support the kids before you have the kids. And be able to support the marriage before you have the marriage. Have good ideas, implement all of the very best ones, and make sure you get your cut whenever you implement a good idea. If you lose, find a way to make your ideas better, and better, and better still, until you win. Then keep winning until you’re obscenely rich, teach those kids of yours how to do the same, feel no guilt and sleep well.

That is the advice we should be hearing more often. The truth is, though, we’re not hearing that, we’re hearing the “more to life than making money” nonsense. And we’re hearing it because we’re embroiled in a culture war, between those who accept that we live in a universe of cause-and-effect, and those who reject this. And those who reject it, are winning. These are the “you didn’t build that” people, the people who think all good things and all disasters are spontaneous, and there’s nothing for us to do about any of it, in prospect or in retrospect. You’ve heard Patton’s quote “I wouldn’t give a hoot and hell for a man who lost and laughed”; these are the losers-and-laughers who are winning. The paradox is obvious, don’t ask me to explain it, it’s their way — they lose at everything except arguments about whether it’s good to lose. They will always win, culturally. Their way is so much easier. That’s why it is so important that every person who desires success, learns to think with autonomy, as an individual.

It truly is a conspiracy to keep the masses poor, discouraged, malnourished, dispirited, apathetic and stupid.

We’ve discussed this before, but the numbers are broken down lately more meaningfully.

Those who can, do; those who can’t, make up a bunch of new rules to force others to do.

Wisdom from my Hello Kitty of Blogging account:

Practical thinking, broadly, is divided into two phases. You figure out what’s going on based on the evidence you manage to collect or that finds its way to you; then, you figure out what to do (or avoid doing) about it.

Maturity means you noodle these things out based on the expected outcome. Soon after we’re born, we have what it takes to recognize we need to get those questions answered, and a little while after that we develop the methods for answering them. The obstacle to maturity is that, in childhood, “outcome” is indistinguishable from “gratification of self.”

It is only in the later years that a conflict arises: Should I win more privileges for myself, or my peer group, or elevate the social stature of myself & my peer group; or, should I pursue an agenda (and evaluate the success and failures of previous efforts) based on concern about the eventual outcome? See, a baby bawling for a tit in his mouth doesn’t have to worry about that conflict. In his world it’s all the same.

The Isla Vista shooter never had to cross that barrier into maturity, that rite-of-passage wherein one has to consciously decide to accept criticism, admit to mistakes, revise strategies, in order to achieve a defined beneficial outcome. And as we see from the VA mess, which our current President inherited unfairly but about which He nevertheless learned for the first time from watching the news — neither has Barack Obama.

Not exactly a fresh or brilliant insight, and it could be criticized for being overly obvious as far as observations go. But recent events make it clear that it’s not nearly obvious enough; pointing it out has become a necessity.

Mulling it over a bit more, I see what we’re looking at is really a triangle of primal forces, and those who fail to achieve this rite of passage aren’t quite so much failing to surmount an obstacle, as taking an errant path. The baby who has the luxury of ignoring these meaningful distinctions due to living in a simple world not yet complex enough to require them, yammering for his momma’s tit in his mouth, is acting on 1) self-gratification, 2) a defined (instinctive) process and 3) fulfillment of an objective. When he enters school, the teachers will educate him in processes he’ll only follow because he’s being told to follow them, and there will be a gap between #1 and #2. When he is expected to solve problems, there will be a division between #2 and #3, and when he begins to work to serve others there will be a gap between #1 and #3.

It takes a certain level of maturity to say “Hey wait, that isn’t going to achieve the defined goal” and then come up with an effective and viable alternative sequence of steps likely to yield success. Our society still values it; we still want our leaders to have this ability. What we are losing is the ability to encourage it. Our education system lately doesn’t seem to be doing much to challenge it and develop it.

There emerges the question about whether it can. Certainly, it’s possible, but there has to be an effort to shape the curricula. In a job, especially a job that produces material wealth, it will be a natural and unavoidable development in any successful employee.

Further thoughts on the post previous, in which I conjured up yet one more tortured metaphor…

That’s really where it started. With the idea that all of our problems can be solved if we just load up everything that is masculine and rough-n-tumble into a great big rocket ship, and fire it into the sun.

Context is key. The people I’m targeting are not women. Not exclusively women, anyway. They’re not even all feminists. In fact, I would go on to say they’re not even true-believers, investing any genuine faith in the idea described.

The problem is broader than that, in fact, it’s broader even than the destructive urge against “everything that is masculine and rough-n-tumble.” The problem is the urge itself. Back in the day, we weren’t supposed to discuss religion, sports or politics in divided company; we’ve busted the taboo wide open as far as politics are concerned now. The consequence of that has been enlightening overall, if not productive or successful. Some would say it’s been a complete fustercluck, a living parable that illustrates why the taboo existed in the first place. Perhaps, perhaps not, but either way it has emerged that most people are not very good at discussing politics, or for that matter forming solid opinions about politics.

They/we may write, or monologue, some sort of manifesto — which all too often, boiled down to its essentials, amounts to nothing more than “What we really need to do is load up a big rocket ship with all the [blank] and fire it into the sun.” Some say that about Republicans, some say it about lawyers, men, women, LGBT, “corporate fat cats,” illegal aliens…oh, the politicians, yes the politicians. Pro-lifers, pro-aborts, hippies, hipsters, yuppies, yumpies, boomers, X-ers, millennials…

Some will say I am the target of my own criticism with regard to liberals. I’m sure it looks that way to many, but, one: 1 Cor 4:3-4. Two: Here we come to the heart of the matter. The problem comes with the lack of foresight, lack of vision for how things are going after the sunspot dissipates — where does that leave us. I entertain no delusions that all our problems would go away if the liberals burned up in the sun. It would fix nothing. Although, it might make an environment in which the fixes could take place.

Our various problems with society and with foreign relations, are like a busted or missing cog in a fine, delicate, tiny and expensive timepiece, disassembled and waiting for the skilled repairman to go to work. Spread out on a big bed. Liberals are like a spoiled and sugared-up five-year-old jumping on the bed. How’s that for a metaphor. Point is, their presence is not the problem. Their influence is the problem. They meddle where their whole way of thinking, their whole Weltanschauung, does not belong.

As for the rest of us: We need to learn to perceive this important distinction, and to act on it. The difference between removing something from a situation that prolongs or exacerbates a problem, and actually fixing the problem. Those two are two different things.

Joe Getty of Armstrong and Getty engaged in a delicious rant Friday morning, or Thursday, or something. You remember that late-night fight that Mr. and Mrs. Incredible had about their kid “graduating” from the fourth grade; it was inspired by that. There’s a certain silliness about this time of year, which we did not so reliably encounter in the recent past, and that silliness is in these graduation ceremonies for kids who haven’t graduated yet. They are moving from the [blank] grade to the [blank] grade, and for that we are to have “graduation ceremonies.”

When the subject moved on to baseball games for six-year-olds, well…it became unavoidable to finally, finally, target with laser precision the true cause of the problem. And Mr. Getty was forced to issue the proper disclaimers. I was driving, so I couldn’t take notes. Wish I could. It was a perfect disclaimer, in the sense that it didn’t diminish the core message. The gist of it: Joe Getty is pro-woman, AND pro-man, but the object of their scorn is evidence that we’ve been doing too much the ladies’ way. The graduation ceremony that was not a graduation ceremony, after all, couldn’t even live up to being a phony-graduation-ceremony. It was a fashion show.

If we were culturally allowed, more often, to challenge the beneficial effects of such a spectacle, the challenges would be plenty and the defenses against them would be weak, perhaps entirely ineffectual. Is it good for kids to make them feel like they’ve accomplished something? Doubtful. This thing the experts call “self-esteem” does not seem to be in short supply now; if there are problems with it, the problems could be more credibly observed to be with its abundance, than with its scarcity. And the public has become aware. “Participation trophy” has become a well-known phrase now, and not a flattering one.

This era is past its zenith now, that’s a good thing. But a decline can last a good long time. And we can’t fault the women for keeping it going. Gender-neutrality is the norm now, and the truth is that out of all the most zealous-feminist people I’ve seen who have some everyday effect on us, acting out their mission to destroy masculinity wherever they find it, very few of them are women.

I was noticing in the post previous that in our entertainment media, the “western” is not what it used to be. Over on the Hello Kitty of Blogging I’ve seen, participated in, and occasionally started some discussions about why the Star Wars prequel movies suck so much compared to the originals. My position is that out of all that’s different, the most hurtful thing is the conference-room-scene. Hours and hours of actors with rubber masks on standing around in circles, talking about things. A big table, twelve or twenty bodies in the room, only two or three with any speaking lines at all, and someone intoning “Good, then it’s settled!” at the end of it. Gag. Quick, name a plot-point in the prequel movies, that was not defined this way. Anakin got fried in the third one, that’s about it. Everything else got decided in a conference room. That’s excruciating to an audience. And — it isn’t a western. Someone was pointing out, CylarZ I think it was, that part of what made the original movies so much fun was that they were westerns, battles between pure good and pure evil, decided out of necessity by way of force.

That’s essentially what a western is. Evil makes the problem, Good comes up with the solution. Good settles the injustice by way of superior force, but only because of absolute necessity; Evil creates the necessity. That’s not womanly enough for us, nowadays. We have to have these conference room scenes, with a dozen people in a big round room, ten of them completely silent. If it is necessary to create a more profound sense of drama and suspense, the formulation has come to be to have more than a dozen. A thousand is better than a hundred, of course, and once you get into the thousands you rely on the magic of CGI. Great. Now you have actors, in rubber masks, gathered around enormous fancy tables in round rooms, delivering lines in front of CGI dopplegangers who are far more quiet and deferential than anyone you’ll ever see in real life. It’s all very bland and boring. On top of that, we’ve lost this contrast between good and evil. We’ve become overly enamored of these stories with good guys who are really bad (they spend too much time at work and place too much importance on making money), and bad guys who are really good (they have to rob this bank because a mysterious, shadowy syndicate has kidnapped their daughter…or, they have to steal the Declaration of Independence in order to save it).

Women, by and large, don’t want this. That’s the irony. Women like manly men, who eat steak and drink beer, and know how to kill spiders, fix cars, build furniture, and who appreciate the soft skin and supple curves of a womanly-woman. A man who knows and recognizes the difference between good and evil, and will take the initiative to act in the cause of good. A man who can and will defend them against danger if need be. They want what’s been cleared away, for decades now, in a risible marketing-effort to pander to their tastes.

It has not gone well, because the effort was not guided by women-at-large, only by the advocates who bothered to do some advocating. The loudest ones. The pinheads who don’t want to see anything, anywhere, that isn’t part of their tiny world. That’s really where it started. With the idea that all of our problems can be solved if we just load up everything that is masculine and rough-n-tumble into a great big rocket ship, and fire it into the sun. The results we have seen, in hindsight, are the results we should have expected to have seen. They are the consequences of getting rid of something without stopping to ask why it was put there in the first place. Kids learning en masse at age six that baseball is a boring game and a fashion show, will ultimately make those problems worse and not better.

Planning my bike route last night, I noticed there was a “New Google Maps” which looks more like Bing. And so Mrs. Freeberg had to put up with yet one more rant.

Nobody took the time to ask me. They never do. This suggests a lack of importance on my part, which would actually be my preference; but let me ask this one thing. If I am so unimportant, then why is it that every time this-thing is made to look more like that-thing, it is a constant and consistent observation of mine that the thing being changed was so much higher on my unimportant list of personal preferences, than the that-other-thing? The thing to which it is being changed?

What could explain that, other than some sadistic power-broker huddled in a back room somewhere saying to a room full of other power-brokers — Morgan likes this thing and he doesn’t like that other thing, so let’s get moving.

Make James Bond more like Jason Bourne. Make Star Wars movies more like C-SPAN. Make *all* of the police-procedural dramas on the teevee, look like Law And Order. Make all the talk shows look like The View. Make not-Apple products look more like Apple products.

I guess they’re all just little reminders that the universe is not my personal property. We can all use such a reminder now & then; some of us, more than others. But there is more to it than that. As Scott Adams pointed out three years ago, it’s likely to have an effect on us when we never have to be bored. It’s the bunny-trails in life, the paths not tread, the avenues without asphalt. Not too many people are looking at those anymore. There’s no reason to.

Entertainment merely sheds the best light on what is happening to us, making this effect upon our behavior most pronounced. Entertainment is most expensive. And, risky. The producers of the entertainment want a built-in audience.

And we seem to be living in an age in which the largest and most lucrative audiences, have no objections to offer if everything they’re seeing is something they’ve seen before. Recently. Repeatedly.

None of this is cause for concern, I suppose, except one thing: The reaction we have lately when we make make the increasingly rare acquaintance of something, or someone, outside of this narrow confine of our Apple-Starbucks-The-View urban cocoon. It was not so long ago that people would generally find such a thing refreshing. Perhaps, in the outlying areas, they still do. But the urban, modern living is becoming more sharply and crisply defined, the “footprint” of such living shrinking into a pencil-sized dot of expectations, enforced daily and dogmatically.

The expected consumer of such goods is, therefore, also becoming more crisply defined; this is both a cause and an effect. S/He is not me. This is more like an anti-Morgan. Someone who likes movie westerns only if the gunfighter looks like a hipster douchebag, and when s/he turns on the teevee s/he completely loses it if the forum is not always the same big table with four or five women clustered around it, clutching big gaudy coffee cups in their manicured claws, talking over each other.

I feel more pity than envy toward such a creature. What’s it like to live in a society that panders to your most tangential preferences minute by minute, year after year? Doesn’t the day ever come where they find themselves wanting something that everybody else doesn’t necessarily want? This, I infer, would be a jarring experience to someone unaccustomed to it. What happens then? That would be a personal-decision-point, I guess. It couldn’t be anything else. They’d learn to push past the pain and start thinking for themselves, or else they’d succumb and get reined back in, back into the world of chocolate mocha frothy drinks at McDonald’s. Much more often the latter than the former. A gilded cage.

Meanwhile, my “center map here” command has gone missing, and zoom seems to be broken. I’m glad they’re continuing to get and see only what they expect to get and see, nothing more, nothing less. Just yet another research project for the rest of us that we didn’t want.

I wish maximum embarrassment on everyone involved in this sordid mess, except the wife maybe. Who, I think, won’t be embarrassed too much if it becomes much bigger mess. And so I hope it does.

I was glad, therefore, to see this.

Schadenfreude.

Reason:

To my mind, if we are going to say that any kind of “culture” was responsible for Rodger’s rampage…then we might want to examine the impact of mainstream therapy culture rather than obsessing over the fringe misogyny culture he might have dabbled with.

We know a handful of things about Rodger. One is that he visited therapists. Another is that he was full of self-regard, was incredibly self-obsessed, and was utterly outraged when people, especially women, didn’t treat him with the love and respect he felt he deserved.

It is possible that these two things are connected, maybe even intimately connected. For one of the main, and most terrifying, achievements of the modern cult of therapy has been to churn out a generation of people completely focused on the self and in constant need of validation from others; a generation that thinks nothing of spending hours examining and talking about their inner lives and who regard their own self-esteem as sacrosanct, something which it is unacceptable for anyone ever to dent or disrespect.

Could Rodger’s fury at the world for failing to flatter his self-image as a good, civilized guy be a product of the therapy industry, of the therapy world’s cultivation of a new tyrannical form of narcissism where individuals demand constant genuflection at the altar of their self-esteem?

Hat tip to blogger friend Rick.

Forbes:

A new study by Forbes contributor Dan Schawbel, who runs Millennial Branding, a one-man research and consulting firm in Boston that’s focused on millennials, released a study today that comes to some conclusions I find startling. The most unsettling: If you are in the millennial generation and your goal is to find a job, it may be wiser to get no college degree at all than to spend four years and hundreds of thousands of dollars earning a humanities B.A. In a survey of nearly 3,000 job seekers and HR professionals, Schawbel, together with career website Beyond.com, found that a striking 64% of hiring managers said they would consider a candidate who hadn’t gone to a day of college. At the same time, fewer than 2% of hiring managers said they were actively recruiting liberal arts grads.

From Captain Capitalism.

Making a perfect world.

From Dejah Thoris at Victory Girls, who adds:

Basically, in the age of Obama and this Counter Enlightenment; his bumbling, stumbling, rambling leadership that is marked by his administration’s continued wanderings in search of a coherent and understandable policy on anything of importance, I have noticed that liberals have a pattern. You may have seen this.

To wit, the liberal philosphy in a nutshell:

If you are black/white/hispanic/asian/LGBT and we agree on anything in politics or values = good person

If you are black/white/hispanic/asian/LGBT and we disagree on anything in politics or values = evil racist bigoted hate speaking Oreo Uncle Tom hatemonger who must be destroyed.

The fact that the Dinosaur Legacy Media act as if we don’t see it makes me LMAO even harder.
:
The people whose freedom liberals say they love the most are in grave danger. Gays are being killed in Iran. Women are being oppressed in every nation where Islam is a majority. Minorities of all kinds are being slaughtered around the world. Liberals and Progressives have chosen to defend that longing for freedom that those people crave by the aggressive use of speeches and the high minded proposition that everyone must first be safe from uncomfortable ideas, followed by complaining about states asking for photo ID to vote being a racist idea and about how we need to pay even more attention to race in order to be equal in a country that elected a bi-racial man from a single parent household raised by his white mother to the highest office in the land…. Twice.

Newsflash Liberals: The world is a dangerous place, and kind words and loving gestures mean nothing to enemies who don’t care if your way of life lives or dies.

The size of the Amygdala is “positively correlated to aggressive behavior across species.”

The Isla Vista shooting has sparked a firestorm of protest over this problem of young men driving around running over & shooting & stabbing people, to get even with all the good-looking women who wouldn’t put out. It’s became a rather sad spectacle, since the protesters (article-writers, really) are demanding some kind of change to address the problem, and murdering people is already illegal. So with any sort of legal reform redundant, the cultural protocol they’d like to put in place is that women shouldn’t have to sleep with men if they don’t want to. We’ve had that, too, for several centuries now, so what do they want? They don’t seem to know, but they’re extra upset about whatever it is.

Their real conflict is with the entitlement mentality. And that’s a problem since they themselves are operating according to it. A problem and a pity; imagine what new possibilities could be opened if they were to aim that nozzle of incandescent cultural rage toward this bulky and ancient buildup of immediate-gratification plaque. I’d be happy to join the protest. If only it could happen.

As Nightfly said:

It’s not just a failure to cope with a lack of purpose…it’s a failure to be given anything to cope with. The squishy marshmallow left has largely succeeded in crafting a world in which young people have grown to physical adulthood without ever having their will crossed in any small matter, much less a large one. Nobody is permitted to keep score, grade correctly, scold general misbehavior, or look askance at anything. Nobody is told “no.” Nobody hears that their opinions are bunk, and that their arguments are lacking, and that their attitude is piss-poor.

To quote that lovely pillar of the legal profession, Judge Judy: “The questions get harder.” As adults we can say “It hurts that you lost the big game, but it will be better soon” – but only if we ourselves learned from losing the big game once upon a time. We learn that the sun will rise again, there will be other big games, and we most importantly learn that real life doesn’t have a reset button to mash on until we get our predetermined result. The next game awaits – the last game is gone forever, and will always be a loss. That’s how to figure out how to handle results with actual consequences beyond one’s hurt feelings.

Our loonier squishes imagined that their own inability to cope and become successful were the fault of the failures of early life, thus proving that they learned little…and they decided to spare the next generation that learning opportunity, with the not unsurprising result that we have an alarming number of raging narcissists who can’t possibly imagine why anyone could ever disagree with them. They can’t hold jobs because the boss expects things like actual work done the boss’ way, not the worker’s. They can’t form relationships because others expect some give and take and actual respect, and they only want mirrors to reflect their own imagined greatness. They can’t deal with other people’s actual needs, much less reasonable requests that have nothing to do with them personally.

Well, a lot of them are rage-quitting life, and taking innocent people with them, and it’s not going to get better unless what adults remain start teaching hard lessons to young people.

The truly frightening thing about Elliot Rodger is that he left this world — we don’t know this as an absolute fact, but it seems a safe presumption — twisted, insane, in a far less stable or useful mental condition than what he had when he entered it. Also, that what knocked him off his nut came from within and not from the outside. And that this primal force from within was a nothing, and not a something. “Nobody is told ‘no.’ Nobody hears that their opinions are bunk, and that their arguments are lacking, and that their attitude is piss-poor.” He essentially missed something that everyone should be getting, and is not getting; so, how many more of us are there who happen to be like him?

Perhaps he is unique in the distance to which he carried things. I hope so. How common is the root problem? On the Internet, you see it everywhere. Especially if you start arguing with liberals: “This conversation isn’t over until it’s over the way I want it to be over.” People who just can’t get jiggy with the plain and simple fact, “I seem to have met up with someone who isn’t buying it.” They get told no, and their answer is to keep selling the same thing again and again, and they’ll do it forever, like a drill press stuck in the on position. Can’t cope with disagreement.

Sippican, by way of Bird Dog at Maggie’s Farm: “…some people’s desire to find the ignoble in everyone but themselves trumps everything.” You should read Sippican’s obit for Wallace Kaufman from top to bottom, for contrast if nothing else. What if we had to rely on an entitlement-mentality generation to fight World War II? I’m not the first to ask.

On the one side of the spectrum we have stories like that one; on the other, we have Elliot Rodger, and those who share some of his behaviors. In between the two extremes are various degrees, in the ability to adapt to the unexpected and the not-preferred. The ability to cope. Different ways of coping, some having to do with adjusting expectations, some having to do with changing or de-selecting whatever has failed to satisfy; some having to do with simply lashing out. Blaming the National Rifle Association, and “Let’s lower a beatdown on the male gender one more time,” would be examples of lashing out. Planning a murder rampage because women won’t sleep with you, would belong under the same category of coping by not-coping.

Only one was made, says IMGUR.

Via Linkiest.

Wikipedia entry:

It was built to celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary. Only one Egoista will be made, and it is a fully functioning model based on the Gallardo. It features a 5.2 L V10 engine producing 600 hp.