This statue is scaring the coeds at Wellesley College.

According to the WaPo:

The mostly-naked man appeared on the Wellesley College campus Monday, clad only in white underwear briefs, barefoot, standing with his eyes closed and his arms outstretched.

He looked like a problem for the campus police.

He turned out to be art.

The figure — which was set beside a road on the all-female college campus near Boston — is actually a very lifelike sculpture from artist Tony Matelli. The sculpture, called “Sleepwalker,” was intended to draw attention to a new exhibit by Matelli at the campus museum.

“There’s no way you can miss this thing,” said Lauren Walsh, 22, a senior from Danvers, Mass. She said the sculpture was placed in a busy area near both academic and residential quads. “I looked at it for a few minutes, and it didn’t move,” she said. Which meant it was art.

Some students dressed the statue up in winter clothing, apparently worried that the man would catch cold (the students returned to take their clothes back in the morning).

It is a good bet that most of the girls were amused by it. Maybe they took a selfie with it, but otherwise it was just another day on campus. It’s actually rather lame. If the “artist’ wanted to be edgy or controversial, he should have create a statue of a modern Priapus with a giant ornamental member. Maybe add some devil horns and a long tail with a spike at the end. That would have caused more of an uproar from the usual suspects than the frozen accountant. Imagine this on the girl’s campus.

Anyway, the girls did not like a naked man on campus.

Walsh worked on a petition to get rid of it. She thought that the appearance of an almost-nude male stranger — especially at night — would bring added stress for students, especially those who had suffered sexual assault in the past.

“The statue of the nearly naked man on the Wellesley College campus is an entirely inappropriate and potentially harmful addition to our community that we, as members of the student body, would like removed immediately,” Walsh wrote, in a petition posted at the Web site Change.org under the name of another student, Zoe Magid. There are now 300 signatures in favor of getting rid of it.

The thing about feminism is it is largely a lie. Sure, a small number of angry lesbians stick with it after college, but the whole thing is just an act. Most of the women indulging in this stuff are smart enough to land a decent husband and have a family. They end up living more like June Cleaver than the feminist ideal. The ones who do live the life after college end up miserable and crazy. The dumb ones tend to fall into that trap.

The American Conservative is a publication that seems like it should be better than it is and have a greater influence that it does. They have always struggled to keep it going, so that’s probably part of the problem, They tried to be a traditional paper journal, but that’s not something with a future. They have a website, but it is the antiquated “webzine” style that does not seem to work very well. The content has often been of the paleo variety, which is becoming a bit of an anachronism these days.

Anyway, this was posted the other day. It hits on why conservatism in general, but paleoconservatism in particular, never seem to work. There was always an effort to superimpose whatever they meant by conservatism onto the culture. That is, they often tried to take something that was obviously not Right and argue that it was actually conservative. often, the result was taking yesterday’s radicalism and making ti today’s right-wing orthodoxy. You see that in the Seeger piece.

Seeger was the authentic voice of the old American left and understood that conservatism, far from being inimical to socialism, was actually an essential component of it. In an interview with the New York Times in 1995 he declared, “I like to say I’m more conservative than [Barry] Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

Seeger’s vision of the ideal society was not some high-tech futuristic metropolis but was rooted firmly in the past. America’s past. “When I was a boy, I read every single book by naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton,” he said in a 1982 interview.

Seeger was an unrepentant communist, long after it was clear Stalin was a murderous psychopath. He actively conspired with foreigners to do harm to his fellow citizens for no other reason than ideological zeal. If mass murder is a conservative principle, the Right may want to have a meeting or something to figure out what went wrong. Just because someone has fond memories of the past, it does not make them Edmund Burke. There is more to being conservative than being a reactionary.

Seeger rejected the egotism of the modern elbow society which neoliberal capitalism has created. “There was no ‘I’ in Seeger’s music, only a big, broad encompassing ‘we’” writes Jody Rosen. Seeger never liked to talk in terms of his career. “I hate the word ‘career’ because it implies one is searching after fame and fortune—two of the silliest things to want,” he said. He abhorred commercialism. When he was given a microphone he used it to forward the causes he believed in—and not push a new album or CD.

As Kathy Shaidle covered last week, Pete Seeger was a money grubbing thief who would screw his mother for a nickel.

He was a better socialist than the Trotskyite ideologues who accused him of being a Stalinist, and he was a better conservative than the McCarthyites who persecuted him. He understood, probably better than any other figure on the American Left, that in order for the human race to go forward we need to go back. Way, way, back.

That’s complete nonsense. Seeger was never “persecuted.” He was a proud Stalinist long after Khrushchev revealed the details of Stalin’s crimes.  In fact, he was dissembling about Uncle Joe right up until the end. As Mark Steyn pointed out, Seeger could never bring himself to condemn the man who murdered fifty million people just to prove a point. if being on the Right means anything it means opposing grand social experiments that slaughter tens of millions of people.

That gets back to the weirdness of American Conservative and that whole fringe right-wing world that operates around paleoconservatism. Maybe it is just the nature of fringe politics. As these people were pushed out of the main stream, many went looking for something else they can support. Inevitably, that mean embracing or accepting some crap pot stuff. Of course, everything outside the main looks like crack pottery when you’re standing inside the main. Crack pots are a matter of perspective.

I’m reading, as time permits, The Inequality of Man. This was written around when Haldane was converting to Marxism. You can tell he was deeply fascinated by the doings in the Soviet Union at the time. Haldane was convinced humanity was in decline, as he thought that was the natural evolution of all species. The only way to arrest that would be for man to alter his evolution. The only way to do that would be to alter his social arrangements.

I suppose it was only natural for him to be fascinated with what the Western intellectuals thought was the greatest social experiment in human relations since the French Revolution. According to his Wiki biography he became a full-throated Marxist in 1937, which was the start of the Yezhovshchina, the most intense of Stalin’s purges. A recurring theme of the time is the academic communists in the West became true believers just when the slaughter in the Soviet Union got going.

Two things keep popping into my head as I read through what is rather dry and painfully out of date genetic discussions in the book. One is that the most of the popular social theories of my grandparent’s age were mostly nonsense. Haldane talks about psychology as being the great savior of mankind because it will lead to the end of crime and mental illness. His fondness for eugenics is a bit chilling, even if what came next was wildly exaggerated.

The second thing is how belief and science are not incompatible. Haldane was an atheist, but he was a Marxist. There’s nothing rational or logical about Marxism. It starts with the assumption that heaven on earth is possible if things can be arranged just the right way. There’s no reason to believe it, but adherents do and they do so in order to be a part of the cause.

Catholics have no logical reason to have warm feelings toward the Pope, but they do because that’s what you do in that religion. Haldane was a rigorous and talented scientist, a brilliant scientist. Yet, he believed in some crazy religions like Marxism and eventually Hinduism. It is often assumed that belief and empiricism operate at polar opposites on the plane of human thought. It is simply not the case. True believers often make the best scientists.

I’m not sure if this is true today, I have no way of knowing, but science had a teleological thread to it well into the modern era. A guy like Haldane set aside God, but he still believed nature had a purpose and a design. Chance really did not figure into the science of his day. Discovering the truths about nature meant solving the purpose. “Why does a duck have a bill?” is a different starting point than “How did the bill win over the known alternatives?”

If I head off to Home Depot for a hammer and return with one, there’s agency involved throughout. If I head off to Home Depot and end up married to a Ukrainian in Florida, it is a series of choices that appear to be chance from a great enough distance.  It may not be chance in the strict sense of the word, but it is certainly not design. Teleology drove a good deal of early science and may be driving current science.

Here is an excellent essay from Kevin Williamson at National Review. I’ve commented before about how that publication has become a rudderless and supercilious operation since Rich Lowry took control. In a given week, there may be two or three things worth reading on that site, most of which will be by Kevin Williamson. If he were to leave or get fired I’d have no reason to visit the site. The guy is one of the better polemicists going these days. Even when you don’t agree, you take his argument seriously. That’s a rare quality, one I wish I possessed. Anyway, he bumps into a few subjects here that I have been noodling over of late.

At the risk of doing an injustice to Mr. Loy’s argument, the fullness of which cannot easily be communicated in this limited space, it must be understood that the thing that worries him here is not optional. “Manipulating the world in order to get what we want from it” is a pretty good definition of work, which is fundamental to our lives, so much so that in most of the ancient religions it is regulated in much the same way as sex and diet. Buddhism has a very developed philosophy of work — “right livelihood” being one of the requirements of the Eightfold Path — while the Christian story of the Fall is in the end an attempt to explain why we must labor: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” What happens in the meantime? “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” The message is the same elsewhere: The literal meaning of “karma” is “work.”

The problem of work, and the related problem of unemployment, is per Mr. Loy’s observation one in which the collective experience is recapitulated at the individual level. Unemployment at the individual level often is traumatic: Economic stress is difficult in and of itself, but it also can disturb family life, may lead to isolation from one’s friends and community, and may provide an occasion for shame, even when that shame is unjustified. Because we are the richest people that human civilization ever has seen, there is no reason for anyone to go wanting for the mere essentials of subsistence; because we are the richest people human civilization ever has seen, it is very difficult to be satisfied with the mere essentials of subsistence.

There are two things here. One is the belief that work is fundamental to the human animal. The need to work is the need for purpose, not a need to labor. People have believed this since the dawn of time. My grandfather used to say that if you don’t have a reason to wake up in the morning, you won’t. Similarly, we have the other side of the coin. Idle hands do the devil’s work. People with nothing good to do with their time will find something evil to do with it. These expressions did not spring from nothing. They are the product of generations so experience, trial and error in the laboratory of history. We are social animals and to be so means having a role, a purpose, in the tribe. Otherwise, the tribe has no use for you. Banishment is an ancient punishment for a reason.

But what happens when we cross the threshold into a post-scarcity world? Yeah, I know. The Congolese and Somalis are starving and dying of the runs. The Brazillian peasantry are starving and dying too. The reason is not scarcity. The reason is these people are violent, dimwitted savages. If they were otherwise, they would have all the food and medicine they could need. Even with some portion of our population in the violent savage category, we are able to provide more than enough for everyone in the West. The savages of West Baltimore and South Philly are not starving or dying of cholera. They shoot each other and overdose on drugs, but they have enough to eat and a roof over their head.

It goes beyond just feeding the animals in our zoos. We are running out of things for honest ambitious people to do with their time. Whole job categories are being eliminated every year. In Tyler Cowen’s bean-topia, robots will do all the labor and much of the thinking. A small elite will sit atop controlling the robots. They will also make sure the robots keep the rest of us in our camps and reservations. I have my doubts about that scenario, but we are going to have to come to terms with the fact whole categories of labor are going to become obsolete for the first time in human history. It is one thing to lose the buggy whip maker. It is another no longer need doctors or farmers. Go into a modern warehouse and you don’t see a lot of people.

Capitalism is not nearly as beady-eyed and green-eyeshaded as its critics would have you believe. Imagine transporting Mick Jagger and J. K. Rowling back in time even a few hundred years and presenting to the Sun King these two English subjects, richer than pharaohs and so celebrated that neither could go to a shop or stroll down the street without causing a sensation, and then explaining that they are, respectively, a singer of songs and a teller of children’s stories — not for Her Majesty, but for the common people. We are good to our poets. And we are very good to our plumbers and mechanics and builders. It is a testament not only to our wealth but to our spirit that people in Brooklyn can use the phrase “celebrity butcher” without falling down on the sidewalk laughing. I cannot imagine going back to the 1950s and trying to explain to my father, who worked in a butcher’s shop, that there would be such a thing as a celebrity butcher, and that people would pay $85 to take a two-hour class from one.

I don’t think you need go back much further than a the dawn of the First World War. In 1914, it was impossible to become a billionaire singing ditties or writing children’s books. You could become mildly famous, as it in famous amongst your peers, by writing books. I doubt that Booth Tarkington or Eleanor Porter were getting mobbed on the streets or even recognized, despite being best selling authors. My grandfather used to point out to me that in his youth, performers were considered the scum of the earth. They were the lowest rung. Even cleaning a stable was considered more honorable than joining the circus or the theater. He’d end his rant with a point about John Wilkes Booth being an actor.

The status of entertainer was unchanged from the time of Ur through about 1930, give or take. Suddenly, mass media turned this relationship on its head. Telling jokes, singing songs, playing sports, fornicating in public and debasing yourself for the entertainment of others are now the way to riches. Even people who are bad at it get rich. Kwame Brown is a very bad basketball player. He has made $63 million dollars in the NBA. Sitcom actors who make one program end up earning tens of millions over their lifetime. This talent show culture has infected how we manage our affairs. President Obama won two elections because he belongs to a cult and reminds people of a young Morgan Freeman, an actor who often plays a president. I may be wrong, but I suspect this does not end well.

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[subscribe2]I admit to being a fan of Jay Leno. By fan I mean I have been recording his program for years and watching when I feel like watching some television. I don’t watch much TV, other than sports. While eating dinner, I like to watch something for an hour that will not piss me off or make me crazy. Leno is the perfect choice. His brand of humor is broad based and well within the bounds of common decency and middle-class respectability. Leno’s jokes are PG-13, his political humor sticks to the obvious from the headlines and it is not particularly ideological. He makes fun of whoever is in the news, regardless of party or status. His bits after his monologue are similarly tame, mostly letting regular people do silly things for the camera. The first 30 minutes make for a good dinner time show. I rarely watch his guests as I don’t follow pop culture.

All that said, I therefore took note of the fact he was being forced out by his employers in favor of a person named Jimmy Fallon. A quick search tells me Leno was dominating his counterparts, including the man-boy favorite, Jimmy Kimmel. The old Marxist David Letterman stagers on in third place. As Leno’s forced exit grew closer, his rating soared to the point where he was becoming a cultural phenomenon. His final show scored huge numbers. According to the people who care about these things, his final show was one of the most watched in decades. As an empirically minded person, 14 million viewers in a nation of 300 million looks tiny to me, but people who make millions to know about this stuff say otherwise. It is just a reminder that culture is not rational in the linear sense of the term.

If a major company decided to retire its top selling and most profitable product, for a new product that is obviously inferior, it could be excusable. Even the best and brightest get wild ideas in their ahead about what lies around the corner. Front running, or attempts at it, is what gets investors in the most trouble. The best investment for the typical American is an index fund based on the broad market or one of the major indices. Millions every day, however, try to guess the market and lose money doing it. If you keep doing it after seeing it fail, then it is not longer folly. There’s something else. NBC tried this a few years back and it was a costly and embarrassing disaster. To do it again when Leno is riding even higher than the last time raises the question. Why does NBC hate him?

I first bumped into the totalitarian mind when I was a kid working in DC. I worked for a Congressman doing nonsense work. Back in the old days, this was common. I’m sure it is a rigid process these days, but three decades ago it was not, so you got a fun mix of personalities. The law student in charge of the young staff was a nice girl, but a hard thumping liberal feminist. Inevitably she set her sights on me as someone who had to be run out of the office as a trouble maker. Her reason, which she told me when I confronted her, was that I was not “very liberal.” That’s all that mattered to her. So much so she did not note that I was the favorite of the congressman’s wife, driving her around town. The lunatic was cut loose and I stayed.

It was my first experience with a fanatic. The second experience was talking with an Iranian exile. He was a student when the Shah fell, but he was not a fanatic. Like me, he was a skeptic and thought his contemporaries were nuts. He told me a story to illustrate his point. In the Iraq war, the Iranian commander asked for volunteers to clear a minefield. About two dozen Revolutionary Guards volunteered. After some prayer, they ran across the minefield, blowing up the mines with their feet. A second wave of volunteers followed showing that the mines had been cleared. I then understood that the fanatics are the same the world around. The object of their fanaticism changes, but everything else is the same. The true believer gives up his identity for that of the group so sacrifice is the ultimate expression of faith.

The point of this diversion is that NBC is run by fanatics. A night watching MSNBC, for example, is a descent into madness. Within living memory, liberal members of the press would have mocked these people as the aluminum foil hat crowd. Today they run the news division of NBC. A good example of just how crazy things are at that asylum, is the Mike Huckabee flap. Despite video evidence showing Huckabee said the opposite of what NBC claims, they still have the fake story on their website. I suspect they really believe he said it. So much so that no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise. These people are no different than those Iranian guards running across the minefield. Reality is now a distant land across the sea.

In such an asylum, a non-believer like Leno would be suspect.All of the bees in the hive work to show their ideological purity. The leadership invests a lot in filtering out the apostates and spies. They are always worried about spies. Anyone that sticks out from the rest of the hive is assumed to be a deviationist. Leno’s willingness to take shots at their cult leaders certainly would alarm lunatics like Maddow. His success and value to the network would not matter much to these people. Their singular focus would be the removal of this bad person. Just as the first disastrous attempt to destroy middle-class health care did not change any minds on the Left, the first disastrous attempt to rid themselves of Leno did not dissuade the lunatics at NBC.

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I saw this post from the former Half Sigma and thought about spewing some venom toward the author. There’s something about the ridiculous little twerp that bugs me. Phoniness has always had that effect on me for some reason. I remember hearing the phrase “pseudo-intellectual poser” for the first time in prep school and thinking it was the greatest combination of words ever. Of course, we tend to hate the things in others we hate about ourselves so maybe I’m a pseudo-intellectual poser. You never know about these things. No matter how clearly you see the world, you always have a big blind spot that is called a mirror.

Anyway, this is what I thought deserved the boot to the face:

Most rich businesspeople can’t vote Republican because they are disgusted by the prole values that Republicans stand for. Anti-abortion? Anti-birth control? Anti-gay? Climate change deniers? No way are rich businesspeople who want to be part of polite society going to vote for that stuff. The Democrats are the only viable party to vote for. But why do the Democrats have to be so anti-business?

Obtuse does not begin to describe that bit. The weird cultural fusion of 1950’s Greenwich Village, the 1960’s Harvard and 1980’s Manhattan  that is Silicon Valley is a temporary and tiny phenomenon. They may not like the crude, unsophisticated ways of those rubes back in DC, but they will adapt. The reason they will adapt, instead of DC adapting to them,  is simple. The folks working for the technocratic class carry tablets and smart phones. The folks working for the political class carry guns. An iPad can be a weapon, but an MP5 is a better weapon. Add into that the fact we crowd source public policy. Those prols in DC are really good at working the crowd. Silicon Valley can bankroll as many Hindus as they can find, but they will still be paying tribute to their rulers in DC until they are out of money.

Anyway, I see Steve Sailer picked up on the same story. His take is a bit more grounded in reality:

But the real future of politics is to have the best of both worlds: You’re doing it for the diverse and the poor and it’s going right into your bank account. Thus, for example, Mark Zuckerberg’s class war on his employees is framed as being waged out of concern for the Dreamers living in the shadows etc etc. The real political genius will be the guy who figures out how to tie tax-free repatriation of tech profits in Puerto Rico into World War G/T.

That sounds a lot like the past. I’m fond of saying that there’s a lot of money to be made off the poor. If you doubt that, I can take you for a ghetto tour of Baltimore and DC. There you will find Korean retail stores operating in places that would cause Half Sigma to rush to his fainting couch. I’m talking about the hard thumping ghettos. The Koreans open cash business like liquor stores, laundromats and convenience stores. Then you have the check cashing joints and the paycheck loan guys. Of course, there’s an army of social services parasites making fat salaries off the tax payer to run the welfare industrial complex. The best business in America is ghetto business. There’s never been a recession.

The truly amazing accomplishment of that cult, which grew up on Rue Saint-Jacques so long ago, is  they loath and despise the people, yet rally them to their banner. Those culturally sensitive types bankrolling the Hindu lawyer are carefully chasing the brown people out of their city. It takes skill and ideological fervor to preach about tolerance from you monochromatic compound and actually get the support of the people you expressly prohibit from entering. It makes me think stuff like this is probably not an accident. The Sino-Semitic push to ethnically cleanse the city comes with a rainbow flag and promises to fight those right-wing bible thumpers who fled the city a century ago.

Anyway, the future of politics. I’ve come to the conclusion we are headed into uncharted turf. The nation has been governed for a long time by two, non-ideological parties. Loosely speaking, the ideological differences between the parties were window dressing. In order to get votes they had to claim to be different, but they agreed on just about everything. That changed in the 1990’s. The Democrat party became an ideological party. The New Left finally got control of the senior offices and purged the ranks of non-believers. The people representative of the party today were considered political arsonists two decades ago.

This change in the landscape has sent cracks through the Republican party. The normal course of business had been for the deal makers and trimmers to run things and deal with the Democrats. The various strands of conservatism provided the organizational muscle and the money. The model no longer works and the factions are now at war with one another as the deal makers try to hold it together. To make matters worse, the leadership is trying to cut deals with the Democrats, who seek to exacerbate the fissures in the GOP. The CML wants the GOP and all its factions to die. As any Israeli will tell you, it is tough to cut deals with people who want you dead. The result is a staggering and confused leadership, frozen in terror at what’s happening around them.

There’s two endings possible. One is this drags on and candidate rises up in 2016 that can appeal to all sides. I have no idea who, but it would have to be a candidate from the grass roots, but trusted by the establishment. The party then wins the White House and slowly unwinds some of the mischief done by Obama. The other possibility is the leadership tries to purge the ranks of radicals and the party blows apart. They ram through amnesty after the mid-term and the GOP primary is a bloodbath similar to 1992. This time the base stays home and begins looking at building a third party.

The latter seems most likely to me. Late Empire America has a Rhodesia feel to it. The last defenders of Western civilization are surrounded by the barbarians and the fanatics. The former just wants revenge the latter is planning to live at a great distance from the mayhem they are creating. The new Robber Baron class looks around the world and thinks Brazil, India, China and even the Russians have the right idea. Fifty years from now places like San Francisco will be walled cities. All around them will be a vast ghetto.

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The food supply in the West is surprisingly safe, given the deregulated and decentralized nature of the system of producing food and getting it to your table. This reality, however, comes with frequent food scares. These cares are usually based in superstitious nonsense. Every day we see stories about how some staple of our diet is dangerous or a story debunking the previous scary story. Then there are the new snake oil salesman, pitching the latest food fads and miracle diets.

This story about Subway is a good example. The chemical in this case is Azodicarbonamide, a food stabilizer. There’s no science linking it to any negative health issues. We know this because it is in all of the food in North America and people are not falling over dead from it. Granted, there has not been a longitudinal study on the widespread use of it, but the lack of people dying from it is called a clue. That does not stop grifters from claiming otherwise. In this case, it is someone named Vani Hari.

Vani started FoodBabe.com in April 2011 to spread information about what is really in the American food supply. She teaches people how to make the right purchasing decisions at the grocery store, how to live an organic lifestyle, and how to travel healthfully around the world. The success in her writing and investigative work can be seen in the way food companies react to her uncanny ability to find and expose the truth.

Where she got the knowledge she spreads is a mystery. A search for a more detailed biography comes up empty. It appears she was a marketing or sales person out of college and then got into the fake nutrition rackets. That’s not surprising. People in sales are good at finding the pressure points of people and exploiting them. So are con-artists, which is the entire population of the health food racket. Everyone wants to be healthy and will set aside rationality in the quest for good health. It is a very old story.

A feature of the female grifter these days is the weird aspirational way they describe themselves. Maybe is the way women have always talked, but men never had a reason to notice it. In this highly feminized culture, women are turning up everywhere in female lead roles, which are exaggerated versions of women. That means they talk about themselves in weird ways and seem to care about everything a bit too much.

My name Vani, means Voice in my native language, and I have always had things to “Voice” throughout my life whether it be about politics, the environment or whatever is making headlines. After suffering some serious health issues, I became incredibly passionate about understanding what is in food – how it is grown, what chemicals are used in its production, and what eating food does or doesn’t do for the body.

Hitler became passionate about killing Jews and Slavs. Mao, after coming to power, became passionate about killing off millions of his people. Pol Pot was very passionate about his work. Serial killers are passionate about their work. When the West was run by sensible men, taming one’s passions was a virtue. Now that it is run by women, the more passion the better, even if the person is a raving lunatic and con artist. Perhaps that’s the other feature of girl power. Everyone becomes a con artist.

Without having read this article, I assumed it was the first step in the Left’s jettisoning of blacks from the coalition. The Left has been uncomfortable with their alliance with black America for years, probably going back to the Civil Rights Movement. Political expediency has kept blacks in the boat, but that may be changing. Hispanics look like a far more promising partner. I figured this post would be about what I think will be the next big deal in American politics and culture. A little hint of it can be found in the exchange I had with Steve Sailer in this post. But, that’s not where this is heading after all. What got my attention right out of the shoot is this:

Five years ago, while fervently supporting the candidacy of the man who would become America’s first black president, I came to the realization that I didn’t actually know any black people. Most of the people I did know (i.e., other white people) didn’t know many black people either. One, maybe two, was the norm. I asked one white guy I knew if he had any black friends, and he replied, “You mean ones that aren’t on television?”

My first thought was, “I bet the kid writing this is from the northeast.” I thought he was a kid because it contains that juvenile amazement at the realization there are a lot of things new to you that are not all that new. Young, smug climbers of the meritocratic age suffer from this more than anyone. They have been told since the cradle that they are the brightest little stars in the world. When they suddenly find out they have been walking around with incorrect ideas in their head they naturally assume they have discovered something new to the world.  The northeast assumption is the fact that whites in the northeast (there are no black people named Tanner) put a lot of distance between themselves and black people. They love MLK, but only at a great distance.

I went looking for his bio and found this:

Tanner Colby was born in Houston, Texas, in 1975. He grew up in Louisiana and Alabama and graduated from Tulane University in 1997. After graduating from college, he served as head writer for the National Lampoon Radio Hour for two years, then co-wrote a biography of “Animal House” and “Saturday Night Live” star, John Belushi. Following “Belushi,” he co-wrote the New York Times bestselling “The Chris Farley Show,” a similar oral history of the star of “Tommy Boy.”

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tanner Colby

I may be wrong, but I’m thinking you are an extremely self-absorbed person if you are providing websites with your biography. Regardless, this guy grew up in the deep south and has had no black friends. That tells me he is a son of privilege. He hit school long after integration and surely spent a lot of his life around black people. At the ripe old age of 39 he suddenly realizes he knows no black people, his friends have no black friends and he looks at black people like the rest of us see furniture. Maybe Tanner is just a sociopath, but I’m thinking this guy has spent the bulk of his life gazing at his image in the mirror.

Anyway, low expectations are not a bad thing. I think this is a good start:

The pernicious effects of Republican attitude on race are plain to see. But one of the more subtle consequences of the right’s willful incompetence is that there is rarely any thoughtful critique of the left when it comes to race. Affirmative action is unfair to white people and the Democratic Party is a plantation—that’s about as incisive as the rhetoric usually gets. Even when Republicans have a legitimate point to make about the shortcomings of some government program, it’s almost as if they can’t help blowing their own argument. They’ll start off talking sensibly enough about educational outcome disparities and within seconds they’re rambling incoherently about how black men don’t take care of their babies. It’s really astonishing to watch.

But the fact is that a lot of liberals hold on to some really bad ideas about race too. Some of the arguments they keep trotting out amount to little more than unexamined platitudes, riddled with holes. Fifty years after the March on Washington, America’s high school cafeterias are as racially divided as ever, income inequality is growing, and mass incarceration has hobbled an entire generation of young black men. Do we really think this is entirely due to Republican obstruction? Or is it also possible that the party charged with taking black Americans to the Promised Land has been running around in circles?

This is an interesting post. Atheism is one of those things that is ridiculous when you seriously consider it. The atheist claims to be certain about the existence of god, but that is impossible. By definition, God is unknowable, so you either believe he exists or you don’t believe he exists. The key word there is belief. This is a human trait that is rooted in our biology. We know it is heritable and we have some sense of why this is a useful human trait. To argue against it is to argue against biological reality.

Here’s a relevant passage:

If reasoning is so easily swayed by passions, then what kind of reasoning should we expect from people who hate religion and love reason? Open-minded, scientific thinking that tries to weigh the evidence on all sides? Or standard lawyerly reasoning that strives to reach a pre-ordained conclusion? When I was doing the research for The Righteous Mind, I read the New Atheist books carefully, and I noticed that several of them sounded angry. I also noticed that they used rhetorical structures suggesting certainty far more often than I was used to in scientific writing – words such as “always” and “never,” as well as phrases such as “there is no doubt that…” and “clearly we must…”

To check my hunch, I took the full text of the three most important New Atheist books—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and I ran the files through a widely used text analysis program that counts words that have been shown to indicate certainty, including “always,” “never,” “certainly,” “every,” and “undeniable.” To provide a close standard of comparison, I also analyzed three recent books by other scientists who write about religion but are not considered New Atheists: Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods, and my own book The Righteous Mind.

I’m a bit skeptical of this method. It assumes things that are not in evidence, as they say in court. people who are confident in their beliefs probably use language loaded with certainty, but we live in a passive age, so maybe not. Language is as much a part of the culture as ritual and ceremony. Given that we live in a feminine age, it may be that atheists have changed their language to use the passive-aggressive technique popular with women. In other words, it’s not as simple as the author assumes.

To provide an additional standard of comparison, I also analyzed books by three right wing radio and television stars whose reasoning style is not generally regarded as scientific. I analyzed Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us from Evil, and Anne Coulter’s Treason. (I chose the book for each author that had received the most comments on Amazon.) As you can see in the graph, the New Atheists win the “certainty” competition. Of the 75,000 words in The End of Faith, 2.24% of them connote or are associated with certainty. (I also analyzed The Moral Landscape—it came out at 2.34%.)

One of the under discussed aspects of atheism is that the adherents are the biggest proselytizers. generally, we assume proselytizing is a sign of doubt. The person trying to bring you over to his side wants confirmation. if he were sure about what he thought on a subject, he would just add it to the stock of truths he carries with him. He would assume most people have the same truth. The proselytizer, in contrast, is never really sure, so he hopes to convince others so he  can be sure.

Reason is indeed crucial for good public policy and a good society. But isn’t the most reasonable approach one that takes seriously the known flaws of human reasoning and tries to work around them? Individuals can’t be trusted to reason well when passions come into play, yet good reasoning can sometimes emerge from groups. This is why science works so well. Scientists suffer from the confirmation bias like everybody else, but the genius of science as an institution is that it incentivizes scientists to disconfirm each others’ ideas, and it creates a community within which a reasoned consensus eventually emerges.

This is where the skeptic shows his worth. Science is just as prone to nonsensical beliefs as any other human endeavor. The endless feuding over climate science is a great example. Even the most empirically minded can become zealots, losing all perspective in their crusade. The skeptic is far less likely to fall into this trap as he is much more willing to accept that we simply don’t know the right answer. The skeptic, unlike the atheist, is only sure of his won fallibility.

Driving around Boston, some things caught my attention. One is the use of difficult to see speed bumps to reduce speeds in residential neighborhoods. Everywhere on earth, warning drivers of speed bumps is the civilized thing to do. In fact, civilization is measured by traffic. Well maintained roads, clear signage and sensible layouts are what you see in the first world. Outside of civilization, the roads are a mess, the drivers are crazy and you have no idea what’s around the next turn. Here’s a good example.

Anyway, driving around Boston, I come upon these massive speed bumps that look like slabs of side walk on in the street. My buddy warned me so I saw it, but it was not easy. If you were unfamiliar with the area, you could easily rip the wheels off your car. There’s little doubt that the people who installed them did this on purpose. The speed bump is supposed to be punishment. It’s another reminder that social justice is just thinly veiled social vengeance on the rest of us by people who hate us.

Another thing I noticed was a new type of street light. This one would be red for stop and flashing yellow for go. I’m sitting there, trying to figure out what that meant when my buddy tells me it is the new green. The point is to encourage caution, he thinks. There may be a better way to regulate an intersection than the traditional American scheme, but that’s certainly not it. That’s stupid. It feels like you’re being warned by your mother to look both ways or brush your teeth. It’s a traffic light that nags the drivers.