We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Kay Hymowitz reviews Mansfield's much talked-about new book in Commentary. A few paragraphs from the review:
Harvey Mansfield sets off into America’s treacherous sexual wilderness with a clear destination in mind: to rescue manliness from the bear-like clutches of its enemies, in particular feminists and advocates of a gender-neutral society. As he notes, the opponents of manliness have tried to depose the term altogether, in favor of “masculinity.” They want to expose manliness as a mere social invention, a rationale for male power.
But this, Mansfield observes, begs the question of why men have always had the power in the first place. He finds the answer in manliness, which he defines as “confidence in the face of risk,” an “easy assumption of authority” that leads to an abundance of corollary qualities stereotypically associated with the male of the species. If the womanly tendency is to seek intimacy and personal warmth, the manly tendency is to dominate.
Mansfield concedes that the manly man is not always appealing. He can be willful and boastful, and patronizing toward women. But these annoyances are part of a package that makes the average Joe capable of greater heroism and command than the average Josephine. More open to facing risk, he is more likely to gain and wield power and to make his mark in the world. There can be manly women—Elizabeth I and Margaret Thatcher come to mind—but they are rare.
Male power is not a social artifact, Mansfield argues, but a reflection of our nature, as much a part of biological reality as testosterone itself. This explains the failure of the androgynous utopia promised by the 1960’s. Even after decades of re-educating the young, the line between male and female activities has been “blurred” but not erased. Men, he points out, still drive trucks, fly planes, fix cars, and mow lawns. Women still teach kindergarten, empty hospital bedpans, and clean the kitchen.
Truth is, I do none of those particular male or female things, except sometimes clean the kitchen when it gets really bad. But if Mansfield were President of Harvard, instead of a Yale Prof, he'd be fired for writing this book. Entire review here.
Grant Wood's American Gothic, a portrait of his sister and his dentist, is considered America's most famous painting, with perhaps Whistler's Mother a close runner-up.
Is this picture a satire? Is it a condescending portrayal of a stern and severe midwestern attitude? I doubt it. And why the pitchfork? Sandall has written a piece on the painting, with attention to Paris Hilton.
I took this picture of a duck a few days ago. I have been told it is pretty good as wildlife pictures go... so I'm sending it to you knowing that many of you are sportsmen and will appreciate her it. Perhaps you would be so kind as to help me identify this healthybabe duck, fellas?
In 1950 Alan Turing, the famous WWll code-breaker and computer pioneer, proposed his test of whether computers can think: It you can't tell the difference between a computer responding to you and a person, the computer can think. The "Chinese Room" experiment is a variant of the Turing Test.
I've always thought that the question "Can people think?" is a more relevant one. And what is thinking anyway? Much of what passes for human thought is emotion, application of old mental templates, and intuition.
As if to prove this point, there are now Artificial Intelligence gurus who take positions on AI based on ideology. A quote from a piece by Halpern:
In discussing the “system” argument against his Chinese Room thought experiment, Searle once said, “It is not easy for me to imagine how someone who was not in the grip of an ideology would find the idea at all plausible.” The AI champions, in their desperate struggle to salvage the idea that computers can or will think, are indeed in the grip of an ideology: they are, as they see it, defending rationality itself. If it is denied that computers can, even in principle, think, then a claim is being tacitly made that humans have some special property that science will never understand—a “soul” or some similarly mystical entity. This is of course unacceptable to many scientists.
In the deepest sense, the AI champions see their critics as trying to reverse the triumph of the Enlightenment, with its promise that man’s mind can understand everything, and as retreating to an obscurantist, religious outlook on the world. They see humanity as having to choose, right now, between accepting the possibility, if not the actual existence, of thinking machines and sinking back into the Dark Ages.
Read the entire lengthy but solid update on AI, in The New Atlantis.
For those with freezers full of game, now that this hunting season winds to a close, try thisGame Cookery site.� How many hunting seasons does a person have? Each one�is precious; each one could be our last one;�and each critter is a precious thing which deserves to be cooked with the utmost care.
Eisenhower was the last Republican president not to be subject to rage unto paranoia, press hostility, and continual assault, disrespect, and contempt from the political opposition. (However, it is a fact that the leader of the war that saved the "free world" from fascism was widely viewed as a dunce by the Adlai Stevenson supporters.)
If you are old enough to recall, Nixon was subject to what we would now call a "Nixon Derangement Syndrome" which finally brought him down. So were Ford and Reagan and Bush 41. All were demonized, called "stupid," and intensely hated by the opposition.
Having learned this unfortunate lesson, the Republicans finally decided to try that same game with Clinton, who they managed to handcuff politically via relentless ankle-biting, but were never able to rally intense hatred against him - probably partly because of press sympathy but also because the foundations of hatred were not present.
Where does this hatred come from? I think the Left believes that they are the "good smart guys," and any Repub a "bad dumb guy." I do not think that Conservatives tend to use such a black-and-white view of politics. Most Conservatives I know do not see themselves as the good guys, but as having better ideas. Thus, amongst Liberals, you rarely see the kind of social stresses that people like neo-neocon go through in being a neocon in a Left-liberal community.
(Take me, for an example. I do not believe that I am "smarter" or "better" than Leftys and Liberals. I do believe that the ideas I hold about the relationship of the individual to the State are better ideas, that offer to bring out the best in people, but "some of my best friends are liberals," and it doesn't bother me at all. Friendship and shared interests should trump politics. When my Liberal pals are willing to discuss issues rationally, and not emotionally, I think it can be fun to debate and that it can add something to a friendship.)
Along with the good guy/bad guy syndrome comes a sense of entitlement, I believe. If we are the good guys, then we deserve to be in charge. If we aren't, then something has gone terribly wrong, or something nefarious has occurred, or Americans are idiots. Feeling powerless when you "know" you are right makes some people nuts. (Never forget, though, that if American voters are idiots - it's the same idiots that vote when you win an election.)
I find the hatred that is generated by this disappointed sense of entitlement to be very destructive. Debating ideas and world views is great, but hatred, lying, tantrums, and attribution of malevolence to other public servants is not the civil society I want to live in.
(I also believe that not everything about this subject is psychological, per se. Liberals care more intensely about politics, because they are more invested in the role and power of the state. As a rule of thumb, except in the case of war, Conservatives tend to want to lessen the power of the State over the individual, Liberals to increase it. And yes, I think Bush is a conservative at heart, but a politician in practice....and I mean in "practice".)
My message to the Bush-Deranged: there is no good vs. bad here. There are simply differing ideas and differing views of human nature - all deserving of rational debate. Let's debate - not hate.
Cool book. Gwynnie made me read it because I had forgotten the Danish Viking kings of England - the Canutes etc.
My favorite - George lll. A good fellow, for sure. We demonized him here in the US during the Revolution, but he was just trying to pay his bills, like all of us. "Farmer George" they called him. Sadly, a victim of porphyria later in his life. Always interesting to see that the loss of the American colonies is just a footnote in Brit history.
There are as many different thinking "styles" as there are personality types. But we obviously cannot be aware of our unconscious reflections - by definition.
Every student of chemistry remembers Kekule, to whom the structure of the benzene ring came in a dream. Apparently for many people, not thinking about something can be a way for the mind to think about it.
Snap judgments about people and places can be remarkably accurate, and there is no substitute for simple logic and reflection in determining questions like which alarm clock or cellphone is the best value.
But many more important decisions — choosing the right apartment, the optimal house, the best vacation — turn on such a bewildering swarm of facts that people often throw up their hands and put the whole thing temporarily out of mind. And new research suggests that this may be a rewarding strategy.
In a series of experiments reported last week in the journal Science, a team of Dutch psychologists found that people struggling to make complex decisions did best when they were distracted and were not able to think consciously about the choice at all.
Lanchester in The New Yorker reviews two books on the subject of happiness. Interesting stuff. A Quote:
He (McMahon) points out that the Founding Fathers, who queried, crossed out, and haggled over every line of the Declaration, let the “pursuit of Happiness” stand unedited and unamended. But he also points out that the eighteenth-century understanding of “pursuit” was rather darker than it might seem now. Dr. Johnson’s dictionary defined it as “the act of following with hostile intention,” and McMahon adds that “if one thinks of pursuing happiness as one pursues a fugitive . . . the ‘pursuit of happiness’ takes on a somewhat different cast.”
The legacy of that ambiguity is with us still. We are pursuing happiness to this day, and it is by no means clear that it is a happy process. The self-help section in any bookshop is easy to mock—indeed, it sometimes seems that the titles of self-help books are almost mocking themselves—but there is nothing to mock about the people standing in front of the shelves looking for guidance. In fact, the advice in self-help books is, by and large, pretty good. The trouble is that it is very difficult to take.
Just got one of these cases for my 16 ga side-by-side, and these are fine. Galazan.
And if you take your shotgun out of the case to go bird hunting, over time there is over a 50% chance you'll be peppered by bird shot. Powerline has that story, but erroneously uses the term "BBs." BBs are much larger than "bird shot," and generally are only used for cartridges designed for geese. It seems far less likely in European driven hunting, where the shooter shoots from a "peg" without moving, while the birds come from one direction - and usually high. In the US, we actually hunt, and therefore tend to get scattered around at times. The only perfectly safe bird hunting is one man (or gal) and one dog.
But this subject does bring to mind the great movie, The Shooting Party, (1985) with James Mason and John Gielgud. If you haven't seen it, you must. It's a meditation on pre-WW1 England, and the end of an era, and it prefigures the horrors and the cultural changes that the Great War will bring.
"Dane-geld" was the money you paid the Vikings to leave you alone, a bit like "protection" money in Brooklyn, or the way companies give money to Jesse Jackson. It's called "legal extortion". Horsefeathers remembered these lines of Kipling:
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say:— “Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we’ve proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.
Indeed. And ultimately, after hundreds of years of raiding and pillage and rape and murder and destruction, the Danish Vikings, from Sven Forkbeard, to various Canutes, etc, ruled England for many years before the Norman Invasion in 1066.
My free-association to these thoughts about appeasing an enemy leads to an excellent and, for me, very influential book: Hannah Arendt's Eichman in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.I will not try to summarize all of the wisdom in this book, but one of her many points is that Eichman did not have horns - he was a bureaucrat who wanted to get ahead and please his superiors. An average schlemiel, you might say.
Part of the book refers to how the trusting and possibly overly-civilized, or innocent, Jews cooperated with German authorities. From an Amazon review by Egolf:
One of the most disturbing sections of the book begins on page 117 in which Miss Arendt gives a horrifying example that mass murders in German occupied Europe were done with the sanction of the victims. She explains that leaders of Jewish councils cooperated with German authorties in a triage effort in herding victims to the concentration camps. This section reveals what happens when "decent" people exert serious efforts to prove that they can obey the law even if the law means their own destruction. These comments are followed by similiar remarks on page 137 whereby Miss Arendt remarks, ...the odd notion, indeed very common in Germany, that to be law-abiding means not merely to obey the laws but to act as thought one were the legislator of the laws that one obeys. Hence the conviction that nothing less than going beyond the call of duty will do." These remarks partailly explain the subtitle of the book, A REPORT ON THE BANALITY OF EVIL.
Yet, as depressing as this book is, Miss Arendt cites examples of rare courage in German occupied Europe during World War II. Miss Arendt cites the Danes who in effect said that they would no longer comply with German law, and a few Danes openly resisted efforts to arrest and convey Jews to concentration camps. This is an important part of the book in that it explains what can occur when petty minded bureaucrats meet with open defiance based on principle. Miss Arendt reveals what many thought was "toughness" was merely,... "a ruthless desire to comform at any price..."
Thinking about Arendt leads me to the famous 1974 Milgram Experiment, which demonstrated how ordinary people can be quickly led to depravity by following the rules and adhering to authority and civilization conformity pressures. Read the link, if you need a reminder. Nowadays, Political Correctness and Leftist Surrender are the main source of Peer Pressure.
That's enough for now. This isn't a lecture. You connect the dots. Or let us show you modern-day civilized, humanitarian, humble, sensitive submission - let Gateway do it for you, - in Denmark!!! - with pictures... These are not the Danes who rescued the Jews: these are the Danes who submit, by reflex, to aggression. We all have people like that.
The New Cabela's Limited Edition Spring Catalog. Email them, and get your own. Hard-cover, for your bedside table, next to your Bible and your current history book.
Jake was dying. His wife sat at the bedside. He looked up and said weakly: "I have something I must confess." "There's no need to, " his wife replied."No," he insisted, "I want to die in peace. I slept with your sister, your best friend, her best friend, and your mother!" "I know," she replied, " now just rest and let the poison work."
A mortician was working late one night. He examined the body of Mr. Schwartz, about to be cremated, and made a startling discovery. Schwartz had the largest private part he had ever seen! "I'm sorry Mr. Schwartz," the mortician commented, "I can't allow you to be cremated with such an impressive private part. It must be saved for posterity." So, he removed it, stuffed it into his briefcase, and took it home "I have something to show you won't believe," he said to his wife, opening his briefcase. "My God!" the wife exclaimed, "Schwartz is dead!"
A married man was having an affair with his secretary. One day they went to her place and made love all afternoon. Exhausted, they fell asleep and woke up at 8 PM. The man hurriedly dressed and told his lover to take his shoes outside and rub them in the grass and dirt. He put on his shoes and drove home. "Where have you been?" his wife demanded. "I can't lie to you," he replied, "I'm having an affair with my secretary. We had sex all afternoon." She looked down at his shoes and said: "You lying bastard! You've been playing golf!"
Few like to admit that hate and anger are enjoyable for human beings. From a psychiatric standpoint, hate and anger are "pleasurable" emotions, and righteous anger and hate are among the most satisfying of human emotions.
I had planned to write Part 2 on Depression this week, but this is more pressing. Our News Junkie put his finger on it yesterday when he referred to the "Hate Party" going on in the Middle East. Indeed it is a party. What we are not permitted to report, in this modern-day New Puritanism world, is how much fun they are having.
Those Moslem haters of the Western World are having a great time. Adrenaline flowing. Peer-sanctioned excuses for disinhibition of emotion, leading to destruction. Mobs led by instigators getting everyone high on regressive group-think. Riots, fights, and mayhem run deep in human nature. Don't we enjoy watching it on the news, and in movies?
This is not unique to extremist Moslems, by any means. The NJ referred to the KKK's fire-lit Parties of Hate, but I can simply point to yesterday's Coretta King funeral for the most recent American Hate Fest, or the Kos website. People, sad to say, do enjoy opportunities for free expression of hate and anger. It is common, in Psychiatry, to find patients who refuse to let go of it, it is so satisfying and enjoyable. (I know, this truth is not supposed to be stated. People are just so nice at heart, aren't they, Jimmy Carter?)
It is not necessary to be a paranoid to be looking for a fight. All humans are energized by a battle, but generally the guard-rails of culture and civilization contain the expression of these impulses. But humans welcome socially-sanctioned opportunities for it. Paranoid individuals, and those from paranoid-tinged cultures, have an easier time finding those opportunities, especially when led by clever manipulators. Europe, and the Middle East, now are filled with such folks who are like the half-in-the-bag guy at the bar saying "What you lookin' at?"
Spoiling for an exciting fight. And dangerous, because they haven't signed the Social Contract. It's one of the reasons we need civilization: not to repress such emotions, but to contain our base human nature so we can pursue more worthy goals and more benign relationships.
In this New Age of psychology run amuck, we all give too much validity and credibility to emotion. Since when are we expected to "understand people's feelings"? That is pop psychobabble, for the most part. It's very odd that a revolution of Reason, The Enlightenment, has led to this idealization of emotion. Can we blame it all on Rousseau? As irrational biological instincts which really cannot be controlled (although behavior in response to them can be, by normal sober adults), emotions deserve no particular respect, and they are meaningful data only in a shrink's office (or, if the emotion is passionate love, to your beloved). How come on this blog we constantly feel the need to repeat the AA Mantra: "Feelings aren't Facts."?
How to deal with out of control anger, tantrum, and mayhem? In my profession, with firm limits. In the big world, with the firm limits of force. Such things wake people up to an anti-regressive reality. Nothing else will. Reason does not work with the regressed, with the paranoid, or with those intoxicated with the barbarian, yet human, joys of rage and destruction. Fight for free speech? With great pleasure!
Jackson and Perkins is an old stand-by for roses of all sorts, but there are many growers of antique roses these days - Google antique roses. Vintage roses are tougher than modern ones, and they smell like roses. Here's one source.
This should keep my study cozy after work, for the next couple of months. Love the splitting, but hate the stacking.
This what you might call a Connecticut logpile, not a Vermont pile (which would be 100 times larger). I am only on my second cord for this mild winter.
That's my spring-loaded splitting maul. A cool tool.
It has been twenty years since Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death was published. Postman's son Andrew has written the introduction to the 20th Anniversary Edition of the still-fresh book, which might be more applicable in 2006 than it was in 1985. Some quotes from the Intro:
Substantive as this book is, it was predicated on a “hook”: that one British writer (George Orwell) with a frightening vision of the future, a vision that many feared would come true, was mostly off-base, while another British writer (Aldous Huxley) with a frightening vision of the future, a vision less well-known and feared, was scarily on target. My father argued his point, persuasively, but it was a point for another time – the Age of Television. New technologies and media are in the ascendancy.
Fortunately – and this, more than anything, is what I think makes Amusing Ourselves to Death so emphatically relevant – my father asked such good questions that they can be asked of non-television things, of all sorts of transforming developments and events that have happened since 1985, and since his death, and of things still unformed, for generations to come (though “generations to come” may someday mean a span of three years). His questions can be asked about all technologies and media.
What happens to us when we become infatuated with and then seduced by them? Do they free us or imprison us? Do they improve or degrade democracy? Do they make our leaders more accountable or less so? Our system more transparent or less so? Do they make us better citizens or better consumers? Are the trade-offs worth it? If they’re not worth it, yet we still can’t stop ourselves from embracing the next new thing because that’s just how we’re wired, then what strategies can we devise to maintain control? Dignity? Meaning?
How would this work on those large flocks of Bluebills? Naw, that's an evil thought. How about on a safe-house full of Jihadist head-cutters? A good idea to be on the right end of this little toy.
Heard Peter Noone (Herman of Herman's Hermits) interviewed on Mark Simone on WABC, Sat. nite. What a charming, unpretentious, and smart fellow. Among other things, he said that "Henry the Eighth" was a pub song that his grandfather was known for singing. He is a third-generation musician. And Peter is still on tour.
I have never thought that it made much sense to talk about "happiness."
For one, I do not know how to define it. For another, I suspect that joie de vivre is probably more of an inborn talent than something which can be sought. For another, I think people were made for work and responsibility and to find God - not for happiness. Self-respect is a tall enough order, in itself. And "self-esteem" is psychobabble: I have yet to meet the person who deserved it.
I still blame Jefferson for being a weeny and giving in by replacing the words "pursuit of property" with the vague and new-agey "pursuit of happiness." (Yes, that did happen.) I think that set a crazy standard for a life which is in many ways a vale of tears, confusing, mysterious, and an endless challenge.
It is much easier to talk about what doesn't make us happy, or makes us unhappy, or upset, angry, disappointed, fearful, or pained.
As our readers know, I rarely refer to pop, or especially "lite pop" psychology pieces, but this one on "Happiness Traps" by Baker in Prevention Magazine has been brought up by a couple of my patients in Boston. It is simple, clear, and practical.
That was the "intellectual impresario" Brockman's highly-stimulating Question of the Year for 2005. Answers from a number of scientists and thinkers via The Edge website were compiled as a book. The Edge 2006 Annual Question is "What is your dangerous idea?"
My dangerous idea, or one of them, is "What if life is real?" Another is "What's for dinner?"
The catalogs are springing up like crocuses. 
Watch this 
Heard Peter Noone (Herman of Herman's Hermits) interviewed on Mark Simone on WABC, Sat. nite. What a charming, unpretentious, and smart fellow. Among other things, he said that "Henry the Eighth" was a pub song that his grandfather was known for singing. He is a third-generation musician. And 