Isegoria

Bryan Caplan considers Andre Schiffrin’s Dr. Seuss & Co. Go To War pro-Roosevelt, but it includes this forthright admission:

Roosevelt took it upon himself to negotiate privately with the Vichy governor of Morocco, Auguste Nogues, and then with General Giraud. FDR, who spoke fluent French, suggested to both that quotas for Jews in the professions be based on a quota of their proportion of the population (300,000 of more than 13 million), which would not have reopened many of the jobs that Vichy had closed. Little known as well is that he argued that “his plan would eliminate the understandable complaints which the Germans bore toward the Jews, namely that while they represented a small part of the population, over 50% of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc. in Germany were Jews.” This astonishing claim showed the degree to which FDR had accepted Nazi propaganda about the German Jews. As Freidel points out, while the Jews were between 1 and 2 percent of the German population before the war, they comprised no more than 2.3 percent of the professions. At most, 16.3 percent of the lawyers had been Jewish.
[..,]
But Roosevelt was no stranger to the question of quotas. Freidel, whose biography of FDR is overwhelmingly favorable, nonetheless points to his time as a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, its governing body. In 1927, deciding against quotas, the university agreed simply to accept the brightest applicants. To its shock, 42 percent of those accepted were Jews. Harvard, with Roosevelt’s approval, finally decided on a 15 percent quota for Jews (more generous than in other Ivy League schools). FDR always defended that decision and clearly he thought it an appropriate answer to Vichy’s dilemma.

The Assistant Village Idiot describes The Mating Circle, the large collection of teenagers congregating between the doors and the parking lot (at his church):

It is both appalling and charming, really. They can’t seem to help it. They just do this. Like cranes or marmots or Red Handed Howler Monkeys, as soon as they become sexual able, regardless of whether they are conscious of any sexual interest, human children start displaying their genetic fitness and access to resources by leaping around, exposing flesh, banging into each other, and trying to exclude others.

To those who immediately protest that there are other, less primitive qualities being displayed, I roll my eyes. Yes, of course this is an oversimplification, a cynical prism with which to view Princess and Junior. But as we spend our entire conversation about youth discussing them through the prism of encouraging responsibility, and planning for the future, and instilling values — as if they were reasonable creatures instead of those who we would make reasonable — can we just take a moment to drop the polite pretense that we use to try and instruct them and face what we are really up against? They just fall into this frightening behavior and they are completely unaware of it.

There was a South Park episode (Season 6: Episode 10) in which Bebe is the first girl to develop breasts, and suddenly all the boys in the neighborhood are playing outside her house, bashing each other, competing, acting like orangutans — and they have no idea why. They just do. The South Park creators are still politically correct enough to portray Bebe as having considerable insight into what is going on, but this is ludicrous. Anonymous, commenting on my Where Have All The Good Women Gone? post, described a young girl with half a skirt as if she knew what was up. Doubtful.

Think of her as a type of wren. She does this, and she doesn’t know why. This is why girls argue with their mothers — well, some mothers, anyway (I hold the mom in that comment more responsible). The mother looks and says “You are communicating to every male of our species “I want to mate.” The daughter responds in outrage that this is not so, she is just trying to be fashionable, so as not to be unpopular. To her, the general social minimum, set by the other young wrens in the flock, means that she absolutely cannot dress like her mother. She does not see her own mating display, she sees that it is far less than those Other Girls, who she disapproves of as much as you, Mother.

Also boys, crashing into trees for no apparent reason, BTW. Same thing. And it strikes long before actual puberty, when they still find girls icky. Nature prompts them to display pre-heroic behavior as a warmup for horrible societies in which 14 year old boys actually do have to be heroic.

I’m about to bring the water level up to the throat, boys and girls, so those of you young ‘uns who feel you have seen through this and are above it, beware.

The Mating Circle is also a Social Circle, of course, which is what makes it complicated. The social circle aspect pushes you to fit in with your age cohort, which in historical terms is as important as fitting in with your family and the larger society — maybe more. When your life expectancy is 40 and no one has enough to leave an inheritance, the people who you will go into battle with, or work with, or bear your children in the company of, or will still be alive when you take sick at age 25 and your kids are still under 10, are a more precious resource than the parents who are telling you that your skirt is too short or the swimming hole is dangerous. Fit in, but stand out. It’s hard to be young, and parents who see that your biological imperatives have to be modified for a society that requires you to pass algebra don’t simplify it. We battle against mighty forces.

Two girls at a birthday party in Arizona were playing in a bounce house, when a “microburst” of wind picked up the bounce house, dumping one girl in the yard but carrying the other two houses away and dropping her onto a roof:

The incident in the town of Marana left a 10-year-old with serious head lacerations and other injuries. She was taken to a trauma center in Tucson after firefighters got her off the roof.
[...]
The 10-year-old was carried more than 100 feet before falling out onto the house. Her 7-year-old friend had minor injuries.

About two dozen roof tiles were shattered by the impact.

(Hat tip à mon père.)

John Derbyshire ponders his loyalty to the tribe:

It’s been over six years since I last attended a church service. I maintain a proper humility toward large questions about the universe and human self-awareness, but I am a functional atheist. It seems highly improbable that my personality, known to undergo striking changes after four or five glasses of Old Crow, will pass intact through my physical annihilation’s more demanding rigors. So here I am: no gods, no afterlife.

The matter can be argued, but it’s been a decade or two since I heard an argument I hadn’t heard before, so I am not much interested in disputation. I am settled in my opinions and expect to make it through my dwindling supply of days without further changes.

I suppose people convert into faith or lapse out of it, but neither thing ever happened to me. Setting aside the usual experience and, one hopes, wisdom that come with a few decades of stumbling around in the world, I am as I was at twenty: skeptical, empirical, and self-sufficient.

My occasional churchgoing was esthetic, sentimental, and tribal. I loved my Anglican church’s liturgy and splendid old hymns. I got satisfaction contemplating the continuity, both personal and historical, I was plugged into at a service. These are the hymns I sang as a child. These are the verses my ancestors heard parsons read on frosty Jacobean mornings in the country churches of Lancashire and Staffordshire. This is the Creed that saw my civilization through the Dark Ages.

I never had any interest in theology. How many people do? Nor have I ever felt the least warmth toward Jesus of Nazareth. I identify with George Orwell’s remark that “I like the Church of England better than Our Lord.”

I don’t know anyone who actually received a lump of coal for Christmas. I imagine it would be quite traumatizing — for an American child. Naughty children in Austria and Hungary have something more to fear — the Krampus:

These demonic Christmas cryptids, along with a wide variety of other nefarious aides and companions, have accompanied Saint Nicholas on his gift-giving journeys in the Central and Eastern European Alps for hundreds of years. Cloven feet aside, these monstrous figures (really local youths with a love for tradition, with some casual sadism thrown in) are quite frightening to see, brandishing chains, whips, and switches at the townsfolk.

According to Der Spiegel, “On December 5, the day before St. Nicholas arrives with his sack of gifts, local men dress up in goat and sheep skins, wearing elaborate hand-carved masks. They make the rounds of village houses with children. When the kids open the door, they’re frightened by Krampus-clad men waving switches at them and ringing loud cowbells. In some towns, kids are made to run a Krampus-gauntlet, dodging swats from tree branches.”

Great Chinese State Circus performs Swan Lake — it sounds like a political satire, but it is instead a jaw-dropping combination of Chinese acrobatics and western ballet:

(Hat tip to David Foster.)

Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, the 42-year old Chief Executive of Danish toymaker Lego, has a Lego mini-fig of himself, complete with beard and glasses, for a business card.

When you read that a young woman picked up her own head after falling off a horse, you may wonder about the gruesome particulars:

Thea Maxfield, who runs a stud farm in Oxfordshire, England, suffered a “hangman’s break” a clean break of the upper cervical vertebra when she fell from her dressage horse.

She tried to get out of the animal’s way as it galloped around after the fall, but when she tried to pick herself up, the horrified 26-year-old found her head stayed where it was.

Realising she had to move to avoid being stomped on, Ms Maxfield cupped her hands around her own head and lifted it into place to avoid damaging her spinal cord.
[...]
Doctors initially warned she may be permanently paralysed.

But incredibly after using a revolutionary fixed brace connected to a computer by tiny sensors for three months to help fuse the bones back together, she is now back riding seven months after the accident.

Do they save up “news” stories like this for seven months, until Halloween?

This graphic guide to Facebook portraits really gets going when you reach the first possibly:

The data-miners at OkTrends share the real “Stuff White People Like”, based on white people’s own descriptions of their interests. Here’s what white guys like:

The OkTrends analyst summarizes what white guys like:

If you’re trying to figure out if white dudes like something, put fucking in the middle, and say it out loud. If it sounds totally badass, white dudes probably love it. Let’s see this principle in practice:

The dashboard camera of a Sugarcreek Township police cruiser caught this insane 100-mph crash in which a 1995 Pontiac Firebird hits the guardrail, goes airborne, and slams into an overpass:

The 19-year-old driver lived, by the way. Wow.

OkTrends is the official blog of OkCupid, where they analyze the data from their dating service to discover things like exactly what to say in a first message — which might apply beyond the dating scene:

After the Civil War, the North decided not to create an American Bantustan, Joseph Fouché explains:

In The Soul of Battle, agricultural expert Victor David Hanson presents three great interventions of liberation: Epaminondas’s liberation of Messenia and Arcadia from Sparta during his first invasion of the Peloponnese, Sherman’s March to the Sea, and the march of Patton’s Third Army into Germany. The contrast between Hanson’s portrayal of Epaminondas’s intervention and Sherman’s intervention is telling. Epaminondas built fortresses for the Messenians and Arcadians, arranged them into potent and territorially contiguous confederacies, and armed them. Both confederacies outlasted Sparta, their former master, and, in the case of Arcadia, even absorbed Sparta’s weakened remnant.

In contrast to Epaminondas, William Tecumseh Sherman liberated the slaves but left them dispersed among their former oppressors, indifferently armed, indifferently protected, and vulnerable. In Freakonomics, Steve Levitt analyzed the pattern of lynching in the South. The number of lynchings were high in the initial decades after the Civil War but then dropped off.

Why?

Levitt makes a plausible case that, as time went by, lynching did its work. Those African-Americans who were most resistant to white rule had been killed. The community had been decapitated. Resistance to white rule had become muted and directionless for almost another century. The educational function of lynching, except for the occasional remedial lesson, was completed.

The best solution to protecting African-American civil rights would have been to relocate them to a single contiguous block of territory where they were a majority that could govern themselves, armed them, and ensured they had an adequate economic base. While the idea of a bantustan is abhorrent to contemporary sensibilities that favor racial integration, a bantustan was more feasible in the late nineteenth century than the racial integration pursued by the Radical Republicans. It would also correspond to the dominant ideological idea that emerged from the twentieth century: people would rather be oppressed by someone who looks like them and talks like them and acts like them than be ruled well by someone who does not look like them and does not talk like them and does not act like them.

In the early nineteenth century, many white Americans from Henry Clay to Abraham Lincoln already realized this. However, their preferred solution, the emigration of freed slaves to Africa, was unworkable because of the costs of shipping that many people back to Africa and, the major stumbling block, most African-Americans had no desire to emigrate. Ulysses S. Grant’s proposal to annex Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) and use it as a refuge for African-Americans was at least in the same hemisphere but foundered for the same reasons African colonization failed. Though the politics of the time didn’t favor it, a better solution would have been to set aside a substantial piece of American territory specifically for African-Americans. In the name of justice, this piece of territory should have been South Carolina, with its white, secessionist population expelled. Florida would be even better but even the territory that later became North Dakota or Arizona would have been preferable to decapitation through mob attrition.

This was not the solution selected. Instead, the solution selected was repeated Federal intervention. Certainly consistent Federal intervention could have protected the freed slaves from local Southern revanchists and, until 1877 and even into the 1890s, it did. However, the same discretion granted by the Fourteenth Amendment that allowed the Grant Administration to intervene in the South to protect African-Americans allowed the Hayes Administration to withdraw that protection.

Live by Federal discretion. Die by Federal discretion.

Alain do Botton looks at French sociologist Auguste Comte’s attempt to reconcile suspicion of religion with sympathy for its ritual:

One of the most fruitless questions that can be asked of religions is whether or not they are “true”. For the sake of argument and the flow of this article, let us simply assume from the start that they aren’t true in the supernatural sense. For a certain kind of atheist, this is the end of the story; but for those of a more ethnographic bent, it is clearly only a beginning. If we made up our gods to serve psychological needs, a study of these deities will tell us a crucial amount about what we require to preserve our sanity and balance, and will raise intriguing questions about how we are fulfilling the needs to which religions once catered.

Although we tend to think of atheists as not only unbelieving but also hostile to religion, there is a minor tradition of atheistic thinkers who have attempted to reconcile suspicion of religion with a sympathy for its ritualistic aspects. The most important and inspirational of these investigations was by the visionary, eccentric and only intermittently sane French 19th-century sociologist Auguste Comte.

Comte’s thinking on religion had as its starting point a characteristically blunt observation that, in the modern world, thanks to the discoveries of science, it would no longer be possible for anyone intelligent or robust to believe in God. Faith would henceforth be limited to the uneducated, the fanatical, women, children and those in the final months of incurable diseases. At the same time Comte recognised, as many of his more rational contemporaries did not, that a secular society devoted solely to financial accumulation and romantic love and devoid of any sources of consolation, transcendent awe or solidarity would be prey to untenable social and emotional ills.

Comte’s solution was neither to cling blindly to sacred traditions, nor to cast them collectively and belligerently aside, but rather to pick out their more relevant and secular aspects and fuse them with certain insights drawn from philosophy, art and science. The result, the outcome of decades of thought and the summit of Comte’s intellectual achievement, was a new religion: a religion for atheists, or, as he termed it, a religion of humanity.

Comte presented his new religion in two volumes, The Catechism of Positivism: Summary Exposition of the Universal Religion (1852) and the Theory of the Future of Man (1854). He observed that conventional faiths usually cemented their authority by providing people with daily (and even hourly) schedules of who or what to think about — rotas typically pegged to the commemoration of a holy individual or supernatural incident. So he announced a calendar of his own, animated by a pantheon of secular heroes and ideas. In the religion of humanity, every month would be devoted to the honouring of an important field of endeavour — for example, marriage, parenthood, art, science or agriculture — and every day to an individual who had made a valuable contribution within these categories.

Comte was impressed by the way in which established religions had disseminated moral guidance — dictating principles for how to conduct oneself in marriage, say, or fulfil one’s duties to the community — and he lamented that modern liberal governments, in their desire to prove inoffensive to all constituencies, had settled on merely offering factual instruction before letting people out into the world to destroy themselves and others through their egotism and self-ignorance. Therefore, in Comte’s religion of humanity, there were classes and sermons to help inspire one to be kind to spouses, patient with one’s colleagues and compassionate towards the unfortunate.

Because Comte appreciated the role that architecture had once played in bolstering the claims of old religion, he proposed the construction of a network of secular churches or, as he called them, temples of humanity. He suggested that each could be paid for by a banker, whose bust would appear above the door in recognition of his generosity. Inside the temples, there would be lectures, singing, celebrations and public discussions. Around the walls, sumptuous works of art would commemorate the greatest moments and finest men and women of history. Finally, above the west-facing stage, there would be an aphorism, written in large golden letters, invoking the congregation to adopt the essence of Comte’s philosophical-religious world-view: Connais-toi pour t’améliorer (“Know yourself to improve yourself”).

(Hat tip to Michael Nielsen.)