Toward a Kinder, Gentler Society

On this day:

27 BC
Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus is granted the title Augustus by the Roman Senate, marking the beginning of the Roman Empire.
550
Gothic War (535–554): The Ostrogoths, under King Totila, conquer Rome after a long siege, by bribing the Isaurian garrison.
1572
Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk is tried for treason for his part in the Ridolfi plot to restore Catholicism in England.
1581
The English Parliament outlaws Roman Catholicism.
1909
Ernest Shackleton’s expedition finds the magnetic South Pole.
1969
Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 perform the first-ever docking of manned spacecraft in orbit, the first-ever transfer of crew from one space vehicle to another, and the only time such a transfer was accomplished with a space walk.
1979
The Shah of Iran flees Iran with his family and relocates to Egypt.
2003
The Space Shuttle Columbia takes off for mission STS-107 which would be its final one. Columbia disintegrated 16 days later on re-entry.

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Trump has the terrible strength peculiar to people who are incapable of embarrassment and cannot fathom that they look ridiculous. --Will

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Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize medal to U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday during a White House meeting.

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The green dream is on life support in Sweden as politicians have grown skeptical and investors become wary of giant projects.

In the US, investors feel emboldened and are putting record funding into critical minerals and rare earths.--Bloomberg

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Political thinking tends to conceive of policies, institutions, or programs in terms of their hoped-for results – “drug prevention” programs, “gun control” laws, “environmental protection” policies, “public interest” law firms, “profit-making” businesses, and so forth. But for purposes of economic analysis, what matters is not what goals are being sought but what incentives and constraints are being created in pursuit of those goals.--Sowell

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Professors Deirdre McCloskey, Steven Pinker, Thomas Sowell, I, and others who decry today’s obsession with income differences blame much of this obsession on intellectual errors, including (but not limited to) treating modern economies as being zero-sum, ignoring the effects of taxes and transfers, and failing to account for the non-monetary values of different voluntary choices that people make – choices that inevitably lead to different monetary incomes.

Further, your argument rests largely on an appeal to the authority of past prominent thinkers such as Plato, St. Augustine, and Karl Marx.

Most of the past thinkers whom you mention lived before the modern market era. Pre-industrial economies were far closer to zero-sum institutions than today’s global market economy. --from a response to a letter

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Trump wants to fix prices on credit cards, just like Bernie Sanders and AOC.

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"There are many who say that Romanticism is dead. But the tensions between Romanticism and the soldiers of the original Enlightenment are rising up again. We are undergoing a cultural reawakening – a sort of Romantic revivalism – as scientific enquiry fails to fully construct a complete picture of nature, as theories of everything continue to fail, and as science is exploited into dystopian realities – such fraught areas as neo-eugenics through gene engineering and unequal access to drugs and medical care.

Precisely because scientific institutional authority has become a paradigm, it must have a counterculture."

This is from an essay by Jim Kozubek. So, a paradigm demands an alternative? Or is something like unequal access to drugs unrelated to the paradigm that created the drugs?

Paradigm

Noun:
1.a typical example or pattern of something; a model:"there is a new paradigm for public art in this country"
▪a worldview underlying the theories and methodology of a particular scientific subject:"the discovery of universal gravitation became the paradigm of successful science"
2.a set of linguistic items that form mutually exclusive choices in particular syntactic roles:"English determiners form a paradigm: we can say “a book” or “his book” but not “a his book.”"
3.(in the traditional grammar of Latin, Greek, and other inflected languages) a table of all the inflected forms of a particular verb, noun, or adjective, serving as a model for other words of the same conjugation or declension.

Word Origin:

late 15th century: via late Latin from Greek paradeigma, from paradeiknunai ‘show side by side’, from para- ‘beside’ + deiknunai ‘to show’.In science and philosophy, a paradigm is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitutes legitimate contributions to a field. The word "paradigm" is of Greek origin, meaning "pattern."

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Toward a Kinder, Gentler Society

On Dec. 15, the European Union added Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss army colonel and former intelligence analyst living in Brussels, to its sanctions list. His offense: appearing on media outlets Brussels dislikes and promoting what the EU calls “pro-Russian propaganda.” The official listing cites his (implausible) claim that Ukraine orchestrated its own invasion to accelerate North Atlantic Treaty Organization membership, which the EU labels a “conspiracy theory.” Others call it "nuts".

Free-speech advocates have long warned Americans about the dangers of adopting “hate speech” codes. The result wouldn’t be the kinder society intended by such censorship; it would be an intimidated, even frightened one. Either you engage in mass arrests, or you enforce the rules selectively, which means targeting some viewpoints above others (by only the most objective, unbiased judges).

For an indication of where this censorious impulse can lead even in a democratic society, look no further than European Union nations and Britain, where the experiment in speech control is running not on university campuses but on national scales, backed by the state’s monopoly on force. The results are so extreme that Americans might assume they’re exaggerated. They aren’t.

Start with Britain, where “grossly offensive” communications can be a police matter. In 2023, British police made more than 12,000 arrests under two communications statutes. For comparison, during America’s first Red Scare, from 1919 to 1920, oneeathrow for  of the worst crackdowns on speech in the nation’s history, the United States averaged about 2,000 arrests per year, when the U.S. population was more than 50 percent bigger than Britain’s today, and there were a lot of commies.

Behind the numbers are stories like that of the Irish guy from Arizona who was arrested when he arrived in Heathrow. for something he had written about transgenderism on the internet, a dutiful official uncovered after a heroic investigation. Or Elizabeth Kinney, a mother of four who was arrested for having called a man who assaulted her a homophobic slur — not to his face, but in a private message to a friend. After the two fell out, the now former friend sent the messages to law enforcement. Kinney’s attacker wasn’t punished, but she was, under the Malicious Communications Act. Told she potentially faced 10 years in prison, Kinney pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to the British equivalent of probation and community service, and fined the equivalent of nearly $500.--mostly Lukianoff.

So, the government has a social 'paradigm'. Better watch your mouth--or pen--and pick your friends judiciously.

Tick Tock

On this day:
1536
Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, stands trial in London on charges of treason, adultery and incest. She is condemned to death by a specially-selected jury.
1567
Mary, Queen of Scots, marries James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell, her third husband.
1648
The Treaty of Westphalia signed.
1776
American Revolution: the Virginia Convention instructs its Continental Congress delegation to propose a resolution of independence from Great Britain, paving the way for the United States Declaration of Independence.
1864
American Civil War: Battle of New Market, Virginia – students from the Virginia Military Institute fight alongside the Confederate Army to force Union General Franz Sigel out of the Shenandoah Valley.
1891
Pope Leo XIII defends workers’ rights and property rights in the encyclical Rerum Novarum, the beginning of modern Catholic social teaching.
1963
Project Mercury: The launch of the final Mercury mission, Mercury-Atlas 9 with astronaut L. Gordon Cooper on board. He becomes the first American to spend more than a day in space.

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Camp Century, a U.S. military base built under Greenland’s ice during the Cold War, was part of an ambitious and clandestine Pentagon plan for a network of nuclear-missile launch sites beneath the Arctic ice. It was partially constructed in 1959, abandoned in 1967, and is now buried under at least 100 feet of ice.

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Pete Rose was posthumously removed from the Major League’s banned list yesterday. An Index for people.


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A series of studies published in Science in February 2025 provides the best evidence yet that birds and mammals did not inherit the neural pathways that generate intelligence from a common ancestor, but rather evolved them independently. This suggests that vertebrate intelligence arose not once, but multiple times. Still, their neural complexity didn’t evolve in wildly different directions: Avian and mammalian brains display surprisingly similar circuits, the studies found.


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Tick Tock

In the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, TikTok will challenge the law banning it from U.S. app stores. TikTok argues in its brief that the law demands a divestiture (from Chinese ownership) that is technologically and commercially impossible — and unprecedented: “Never before has Congress expressly singled out and shut down a specific speech forum. Never before has Congress silenced so much speech in a single act.” In 2023, TikTok says, U.S. users uploaded more than 5.5 billion videos were viewed worldwide more than 13 trillion times. TikTok argues that the ban violates the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee and the guarantee of equal protection under the laws.

Granted, any company beholden to China’s Leninist party-state will do what the Communist Party dictates. But labeling speech (often accurately, regarding TikTok) as foreign propaganda does not license government interference with it. In 1965, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned a law that burdened citizens’ “right to receive” communist propaganda mailed from a foreign adversary.

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The TikTok law asks us to trust the government that evidently thinks we cannot be trusted to cope with propaganda. Trust the government that tried to suppress as misinformation true criticisms of the government’s pandemic policies? The government, which in 12 months extending into this election year, overstated by 818,000 the number of jobs created during the Biden administration?--from wsj

The great problem with democracy is that it burdens the citizen with decisions. And those decisions will be influenced by their education and common sense. Free societies will always be faced with such problems that are not just homicidal, they are suicidal. The choice is obvious. 

The American Revolution changed the world. But it came very late to the human social table, so it must not be a no-brainer. It is through education that the government should arm its citizenry. If it must protect them through control of its intellectual atmosphere, it is too late.

Speech and Ideas

It appears that the border wall between The Dominican Republic and Haiti works.

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The number of couples in China choosing to marry has gone up for the first time in nine years.

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Speech and Ideas

There is a big case coming before the Supreme Court on Freedom of Speech. The substance involves the efforts by the federal government to control the information coming out of social media that opposed the government's position on COVID-19, how people got it, how they spread it, and how vaccines influenced it.

There is a peculiar picture here of acres of computer farms with technicians combing through postings from a housewife in Peoria looking for her subversive questions about the value of immunizing infants.

But what about speech the other way? What about speech originating not from the small computer on the kitchen table but from the center of opinion-making? Like Washington.

Here's an example.

A typical university policy statement (such as this one from California State University, Fullerton) reads, “Faculty members from traditionally underrepresented groups may experience additional demands on their time, a phenomenon termed ‘cultural taxation.’ Cultural taxation involves the obligation to demonstrate good citizenship towards the institution by serving its needs for ethnic representation and cultural understanding, often without commensurate institutional rewards.”

An example of "Cultural taxation" might be a black professor who is burdened with the supposed need to spend more time with black students than a white professor would be and therefore deserves some extra compensation. There isn’t any evidence that this is true, there is no reason to assume these Black students require more help, there is no reason why the helpful professor would necessarily be Black ....on and on. 

The point is that we now are dealing with a new concept--"cultural taxation"--with its own structure, theories, costs, and--most importantly--its own mythology. What is essentially a coffeehouse notion has become policy and will result in its own bureaucracy, rules, administration, and justice system. Without any proof.

Does such an idea deserve support or should the veracity of this idea be questioned? If the idea is imaginary and without foundation, should it be suppressed or should it be allowed to advance in deference to "Free Speech?"

Another way of putting it is, Why is the citizen always the offender?

 

SatStats

 

                                              SatStats

A college survey.

The survey does not define the word "offensive," so it's impossible to know what kind of speech the respondents had in mind. That said, there is clearly a belief in the value of censorship and the willingness to assign that power to some apparently arbitrary power. This, among the educated.

Gillette/Tucker Carlson

Re the recent ad campaign by Gillette using the #MeToo theme: Generalizing from small numbers in science is called "bad science." In social analysis it is called "bigotry." Any company asking its customers to identify with Harvey Weinstein is called "stupid."

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"Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They're what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared."
These are the sensitive and heartfelt words of Tucker Carlson, a guy I had to Google, who is the FOX replacement for O'Reilly at the 8:00 pm weekday slot. They are worth reading again. Carlson, a self--declared conservative, seems to believe that the government is responsible for citizen integrity and the betterment of interpersonal relationships. These are family, social and religious qualities, not political. Fortunately, Gillette wants to help too.

Expanding the congregation is one thing, expanding access to the pulpit is quite another.

Colllusion

An American Spectator magazine story, “Russian funding of U.S. environmental groups shows how collusion is done,” points to the kind of Russian collusion and domestic meddling that some approve.

A 2014 U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee report identified that the San Francisco-based Sea Change Foundation receives funding from a Bermuda-based shell company known as Klein Ltd. The company was created by attorneys from Wakefield Quin, a law firm that has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The IRS requires nonprofit organizations to file 990 forms that report their activities. Those 990s show that Klein Ltd. contributed $23 million to the Sea Change Foundation in 2010 and again in 2011. The forms show that the foundation distributed more than $20 million in grants in 2010 and 2011 to environmental organizations, including the leftist Natural Resources Defense Council, The Sierra Club Foundation, the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, the Tides Foundation, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the World Wildlife Fund.

In return for the grant money, those leftist environmentalists were “to promote awareness of climate change,” “reduce reliance on high carbon energy,” “educate the public about climate and clean energy” and “promote climate and clean energy communications.” A U.S. House Science, Space and Technology Committee report, titled “Russian Attempts to Influence U.S. Domestic Energy Markets by Exploiting Social Media,” details that the environmental groups used the Russian money to protest the process of fracking and fight the building of the Keystone XL pipeline. If environmentalists can thwart U.S. oil production, Russia stands to gain greater economic and political power.

It is gratifying to see Russia's concern for our environment--and interesting how influence abuts free speech. And how complex the job of monitoring is, even for the most vigilant.

Diversity and Not

There are limits to our drive for diversity.

Four recent studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who are Rube-publicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences between 7 and 9 percent.

Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Rube-publicans (although a large share are independents).

In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. Marxist!

Rube-publicans may just be dumber but discrimination may actually be involved. One peer-reviewed study found that one-third of social psychologists admitted that if choosing between two equally qualified job candidates, they would be inclined to discriminate against the more conservative candidate.

A test preparation company for the Law School Admission Test offers test-takers a tip: Reading comprehension questions will typically have a liberal slant and a liberal answer.

The discrimination becomes worse if the applicant is an evangelical Christian. According to Yancey’s study, 59 percent of anthropologists and 53 percent of English professors would be less likely to hire someone they found out was an evangelical.

George Yancey is a sociologist who is black and evangelical. “Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he said. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”

“Of course there are biases against evangelicals on campuses,” notes Jonathan L. Walton, the Plummer Professor of Christian Morals at Harvard. Walton, a black evangelical, adds that the condescension toward evangelicals echoes the patronizing attitude toward racial minorities: “The same arguments I hear people make about evangelicals sound so familiar to the ways people often describe folk of color, i.e. politically unsophisticated, lacking education, angry, bitter, emotional, poor.”

Jonathan Haidt, a centrist social psychologist at New York University, cites data suggesting that the share of conservatives in academia has plunged, and he has started a website, Heterodox Academy, to champion ideological diversity on campuses.

“Universities are unlike other institutions in that they absolutely require that people challenge each other so that the truth can emerge from limited, biased, flawed individuals,” he says. “If they lose intellectual diversity, or if they develop norms of ‘safety’ that trump challenge, they die. And this is what has been happening since the 1990s.”

From an article by Kristof in the NYT

“Mein Kampf”

The book "Archangel" has an observation that is inherent to its story line: The real villain in the last Century was Stalin, not Hitler. Hitler was a single individual at a single historical moment, Stalin was a refined evil in a long history of evil. Hitler was an event, Stalin a process. One point was that "Mein Kampf" was on humanity's Index where Stalin's political party regularly publishes its literature and gets 20 to 30 percent of the vote.

Old copies of the “Mein Kampf” are kept in a secure cabinet, called the “poison cabinet,” in the dark recesses of the vast Bavarian State Library. A team of experts vets every request to see one. “This book is too dangerous for the general public,” library historian Florian Sepp warns. 
Nevertheless, the book that once served as a kind of Nazi bible, banned from domestic reprints since the end of World War II, will soon be returning to German bookstores.
The prohibition on reissuing the book has been upheld by the state of Bavaria, which owns the German copyright. But those rights expire in December, and the first new print run since Hitler’s death is due out early next year. The new edition is a heavily annotated volume in its original German that is stirring an impassioned debate over history, anti-Semitism and the latent power of the written word.

Assassination Two

According to the media, savage and violent behavior towards seemingly peripheral individuals can be stimulated by nasty and erroneous public opinions. So an isolated idiot or a completely disconnected maniac can be focused into action by the written or spoken word. This is in contradistinction to our opinion on education which shuns any kind of moral or civics teaching. So people can be stimulated to do negative things but not to do positive things. And we apparently know what these dangerous stimuli are. This comes as good news to those who remember the interview with the attempted assassin of George Wallace who revealed that he experienced great anger and hostility while watching The Donna Reed Show, certainly a vipers' nest of chaos and social disruption.

Of course we need to identify these high risk dangerous information areas and stop them. The problem seems to be what is causing what. It appears that violent rap music does not cause violence in inner city youth. Mark Twain, however, can cause prejudice. Muslim terrorists point to the Koran as their inspiration but apparently they are wrong. Does Homer and books about whale hunting cause aggressive behavior in the West? And what censorship could have saved Senor Carlos Castro from his unfortunate recent demise?

There is no reason to denigrate these insightful people who know the causes of these terrible things. But it would be more reassuring if they had something that looked like evidence to bolster their belief. Otherwise the merely plausible might become law. Perhaps it is a simple matter of reading further in the book. The notion is the hypothesis; it is only a starting point. Once the hypothesis is made, long and difficult evaluations have to be made as the hypothesis is stressed. Only after good challenge does the hypothesis get any credibility and, even then, may fail.

But the first day of any study is always exciting and fun. And easy.

Westboro Baptist Church and Retirement Plan

The Westboro Baptist Church is in front of the Supreme Court this session. The Church is small, eighteen members or so, and inbred, all of its members are members of the Phelps family, and unaffiliated with any known church, Baptist or otherwise, in the world. Their credo, such as it is, is the United States is being punished for its tolerance of homosexuals and national tragedies are generally attributed to God's judgment of the country's moral laxity. The Church focuses on military deaths and tragedies of national importance to demonstrate and raise awareness of their point. (They also hate most other creeds but that is beside the point here.) The Court is now hearing a case in which the father of a soldier killed by a roadside bomb in the Middle East sued the Westboro Church for their disrupting the dead son's funeral. The Church, defended by the Church lawyer, a daughter of the Church's pastor, argues the Church is protected by the Free Speech and Freedom of Religion clauses in the Bill of Rights. The Church is defended by The Phelps Chartered Law Firm, the family law firm.

It is easy to look at this as a necessary irritation a free society suffers where the edge of a long bell-shaped curve is protected. But there is another aspect here, Section 1988, 42USC Section 1988 "The Civil Rights Attorney Fee Act". This is a law created to pay attorneys who represent deprived clients. Think ACLU. This is a law that forces the people , usually the government, to pay for the lawyer of their opposition. Every time the government sues one of these peripheral shard groups, or are sued by them, the taxpayer pays both sides.

This looks like a fertile field for the entrepreneurial mind. Take some sacred core beliefs--religion and speech--mix with some tender societal events--soldier funeral or mining disaster--and shake well. Bill $350 an hour.

Fortunately lawyers and ministers are above such behavior.