The Dangers of Free Speech

Education is a self-organizing system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.--Sugata Mitr 

Mom spent yesterday in Ohio with oil and gas wild men.
Chris has been playing tennis again.
I went to a writing meeting and it was worthwhile. Panara has very small sandwiches, though. Arby's wins.

Michigan State University has announced a $2.4 million retirement deal for former MSU president Lou Anna Simon, who was forced out of office last year after MSU’s crippling sexual assault scandal. Simon stands charged with two felonies and is accused of lying to law enforcement officials about what she knew regarding the abuse of more than 150 women over nearly three decades. In addition to its three-year pay-out to Simon, the university will provide a generous benefits package, including medical and dental coverage, the title of “president emeritus,” continued access to football and basketball tickets and a commissioned portrait that will be displayed at the university (so long as she is not convicted).
Preemptive rehab? What's next? Jerry Sundusky gets tenure?


A new candidate has come out of nowhere to surge in the polls in the Democratic primary, and she’s only six years old. Susie Peters of Minneapolis, Minnesota, was on a local news segment where children gave their opinions on world problems, and she asked, “Why can’t we just give everyone everything they want for free?” The message quickly went viral and really resonated with Democratic voters, propelling Susie from unknown to third in most polls, ahead of Bernie Sanders and just behind Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden.--Babylon Bee



One of the casualties of the Democrat debate was Obama. His center-left policies were pilloried as old world and incomplete by the far Left majority. A legacy slipping away so soon.

Germany’s economy shrank in the second quarter and China reported a raft of weak data, sharpening fears over how far the spillover from the global trade dispute is damaging the prospects for growth.(wsj)

• The statists at the OECD put together a ranking asserting that poverty is a bigger problem in the United States than in Greece, Portugal, or Turkey.

The U.S. is now exporting crude oil to a record number of 31 countries, according to newly released data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. U.S. oil exports are going all over the world, ranging from oil-rich United Arab Emirates to Australia, reaching 2.9 million barrels a day from essentially 0 in 2015 before Congress lifted a 40-year-old ban on exporting crude oil.

There is a fondness for the pre-technology days. We were so much human then, right? But one of the best things that ever happened to African-Americans was the mechanization of agriculture that destroyed many of their jobs. 

Is it possible to have unlimited access to limited products and services? 

As health care costs continue to rise, practitioners in India are working to lower prices -- and bring their innovations closer to American shores. Health City Cayman Islands is a new frontier for India’s largest for-profit hospital chain. Focused on efficient health care delivery, its services are now drawing Americans to the Cayman Islands.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed  the Social Security Act into law on August 14, 1935.

                   The Dangers of Free Speech

Most infringements of liberty have some good intention. People are not capable to make good decisions, people don't understand the science, the species is inherently malicious and we must be protected from each other. Even slavery has an upside; at least you weren't executed.

Free speech has recently become one of our dispensable freedoms. Faculty leaders of the University of California consider these statements racist microagressions: “America is a melting pot”; “America is the land of opportunity”; “Everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough”; and “There is only one race, the human race.” The latter statement is seen as denying the individual as a racial/cultural being. Then there’s “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” That’s “racist” speech because it gives the impression that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.” Other seemingly innocuous statements deemed unacceptable are: “When I look at you, I don’t see color,” or “Affirmative action is racist.” Perhaps worst of all is, “Where are you from, or where were you born?”

Princeton University professor Carolyn Rouse, who is chairperson of the department of Anthropology, called free speech a political illusion, a baseless ruse to enable people to “say whatever they want, in any context, with no social, economic, legal or political repercussions.” As an example, she says that a climate change skeptic has no right to make “claims about climate change, as if all the science discovered over the last X-number of centuries were irrelevant.”

There are simply too many opinions out there and a lot of them are either wrong or malicious. Why should we tolerate error and malice? Elites just know better. They know more and they see deeper. And they are better motivated. No less a revolutionary luminary than President John Adams wrote and signed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.
We clearly must escape our liberty obsession.

Socrates/ de Tocqueville

Exceptionalism and it Discontents


There is an interesting and surprising article in The Atlantic that compares the problems of ancient Greece to contemporary America from an unusual--if modern--view.

Socrates is presented as less an inquiry into the nature of man and virtue and more a challenge of Athenian "exceptionalism." It seems that the inquiry into The Good has anti-nationalistic overtones.  Virtue is an individual, not a national, trait. But, paradoxically, guilt might be collective. It seems that cultures must rise above their uniqueness and fight the trend that their specialness might separate them from the whole of mankind. Apparently the Athenians could not stand the lesson and killed the teacher. (In fairness, the solipsistic Socrates described here did shun the loss of community through exile and mixed his own poison; contrary to this view, his was an extremely socially conscious life.) Nonetheless, apparently the Greeks required a purging by the Spartans before they could right themselves from their success.

And on to the famous Pericles Funeral Oration where Athens's enemies can be consoled by the qualities of the victors: "Cataloging Athenian achievements, from the uniqueness of the city-state’s democracy to its magnanimity, Pericles suggested that its vanquished enemies should take pride in having been bettered by such unparalleled specimens of humanity. “Only in the case of Athens can enemies never be upset over the quality of those who defeat them when they invade; only in our empire can subject states never complain that their rulers are unworthy.”"
Arrogant, yes. But fatal? Is the dialectic to be replaced by hubris? After all, what was an Athenian--or a Persian, for that matter--to think when he encountered a naked Celt painted blue? That it was only force of arms that made the difference?

It continues: "Here, in the attitude underlying Pericles’s Funeral Oration, lies the meaning of Socrates’s life, as well as the meaning of his death—and of Plato’s response, which was not, in the end, a retreat. Even, or especially, a democratic society with an exceptionalist heritage—as Plato and his fellow Athenians were hardly the last to discover—may prove unprepared to respond wisely when arrogance takes over and expectations go awry. Neither Socrates nor Plato ever challenged the Greek conviction that achieving a life that matters requires extraordinary effort and results in an extraordinary state. But Socrates was determined to interrogate what being exceptional means. Personal fame, he contended, counts for nothing if your life isn’t, in itself, a life of virtue. Only that kind of extraordinary accomplishment matters—and the same could be said for city-states. Power and the glory it brings are no measure of their stature. The virtuous citizen, indeed, is inseparable from the virtuous polis, his claim to significance rooted in his commitment to the common good. What counts, Socrates taught, is the quest for a better understanding of what virtue is, what justice and wisdom are. The goal is a moral vision so compelling that every citizen, no matter his position, will feel its force and be guided by it. A democratic state that fosters the continuous self-scrutiny demanded by such a vision can hope for greatness." 


So the success of the culture is only within the culture; it is personal. So a people, politically or culturally, has little meaning. So American "exceptionalism" is actually dry rot. Perhaps the Russians should vote in our elections.

As most know, the uniqueness of American "exceptionalism" was not "prideful," it was "unusual."

The phrase was de Tocqueville's, from Democracy in America, 1835: "The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe, which allows them to neglect these pursuits without relapsing into barbarism, a thousand special causes, of which I have only been able to point out the most important, have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects. His passions, his wants, his education, and everything about him seem to unite in drawing the native of the United States earthward; his religion alone bids him turn, from time to time, a transient and distracted glance to heaven. Let us cease, then, to view all democratic nations under the example of the American people."

So one could not look at America as a typical or prototypic democracy.

The phrase has been hijacked since by those--often Americans--who saw America as a point of reference in man's search for freedom and liberty, a nation purposely constructed on principles, not accidentally inherited through history. (It was also used by Stalin as a slur, decrying America's self-held belief that it was somehow excluded from the Marxian class warfare generality.) But the phrase has a dangerous and very un-modern connotation: Quality. Quality implies a hierarchy and that kind of vision, be it ancient Greek or modern Yankee, can not--will not--be tolerated. And its fall is to be fervently desired.

Fortunately, the author gives us hope. When the Spartans destroyed Athens, they were merciful. And, after all, Plato did return from his self-imposed exile.

A Bad Lesson from Sports

I heard an interview recently with a serious and successful business man who talked about the economy, unemployment and the business world in general. One thing he said stuck, especially to my medically sensitized brain. He was speaking about hiring and firing people and said he never hired a bad or incompetent guy. The employees he picked were always up to the job. He fired only in two instances; first, in a business downturn as his business was growing and was sometimes stressed to make payroll and , second, in the instance of an employee under performing. He said that when an employee underperformed it was never because he could not do the job. His failure was always due to the same problem: The employee always had a poor ability to assess himself and always, always, overestimated his performance.

Humility. Caution. Critical self assessment.

We live in a very sports obsessed world. The athlete trains himself in many ways; one focus is to win. How to win is taught. He never learns that a task is too big, too complex. He never learns he is outgunned because, if he does, he is beat before he starts. Blind optimism is a particularly athletic trait; confidence is paramount and sometimes tips the balance. And lack of confidence can kill. The great competitors take advantage of this and make the competition more than just the sport; it becomes a complex battle with history and personality and texture and, if his opponent accepts the new ground rules, he is beat. Muhammad Ali was a genius it this; Patterson the perfect victim of it.

But this does not work in the real world. The real world is indeed complex with history and personality and texture that all must be considered and managed. Confidence and brashness might beat the cornerback but it does not solve problems. Self assessment is hard and may be a success trait. The highest scoring students in self esteem testing are the lowest scoring students in grades.

It is significant that the first--and sometimes the only--Greek word the student learns is hubris.