Mysterious:
For the Fourth: on liberty
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post from many many years ago. It was written in the springtime during a visit to New York City. Reading it now, it seems almost archaic in certain ways.]
I’ve been visiting New York City, the place where I grew up. I decide to take a walk to the Promenade in Brooklyn Heights, never having been there before.
When you approach the Promenade you can’t really see what’s in store. You walk down a normal-looking street, spot a bit of blue at the end of the block, make a right turn–and, then, suddenly, there is New York:
And so it is for me. I take a turn, and catch my breath: downtown Manhattan rises to my left, seemingly close enough to touch, across the narrow East River. I see skyscrapers, piers, the orange-gold Staten Island ferry. In front of me, there are the graceful gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge. To my right, the back of some brownstones, and a well-tended and charming garden that goes on for a third of a mile.
I walk down the promenade looking first left and then right, not knowing which vista I prefer, but liking them both, especially in combination, because they complement each other so well.
All around me are people, relaxing. Lovers walking hand in hand, mothers pushing babies in strollers, fathers pushing babies in strollers, nannies pushing babies in strollers. People walking their dogs (a preponderance of pugs, for some reason), pigeons strutting and courting, tourists taking photos of themselves with the skyline as background, every other person speaking a foreign language.
The garden is more advanced in time than gardens where I live, reminding me that New York is really a southern city compared to New England. Daffodils, the startling blue of grape hyacinths, tulips in a rainbow of soft colors, those light-purple azaleas that are always the first of their kind, flowering pink magnolia and airy white dogwood and other blooming trees whose names I don’t know.
In the view to my left, of course, there’s something missing. Something very large. Two things, actually: the World Trade Center towers. Just the day before, we had driven past that sprawling wound, with its mostly-unfilled acreage where the WTC had once stood, now surrounded by fencing. Driving by it is like passing a war memorial and graveyard combined; the urge is to bow one’s head.
As I look at the skyline from the Promenade, I know that those towers are missing, but I don’t really register the loss visually. I left New York in the Sixties, never to live there again, returning thereafter only as occasional visitor. The World Trade Center was built in the early Seventies, so I never managed to incorporate it into that personal New York skyline of memory that I hold in my mind’s eye, even though I saw the towers on subsequent visits. So what I now see resembles nothing more than the skyline of my youth restored, a fact which seems paradoxical to me. But I feel the loss, even though I don’t see it. Viewing the skyline always has a tinge of sadness now, which it never had before 9/11.
I come to the end of the walkway and turn myself around to set off on the return trip. And, suddenly, the view changes. Now, of course, the garden is to my left and the city to my right; and the Brooklyn Bridge, which was ahead of me, is now behind me and out of sight. But now I can see for the first time, ahead of me and to the right, something that was behind me before. In the middle of the harbor, the pale-green Statue of Liberty stands firmly on its concrete foundation, arm raised high, torch in hand.
The sight is intensely familiar to me – I used to see it frequently when I was growing up. But I’ve never seen it from this angle before. She seems both small and gigantic at the same time: dwarfed by the skyscrapers near me that threaten to overwhelm her, but towering over the water that surrounds her on all sides. The eye is drawn to her distant, heroic figure. She’s been holding that torch up for so long, she must be tired. But still she stands, resolute, her arm extended.
NOTE: I was going to add a photo of the Statue of Liberty here. But instead I was very taken with a video about how the statue was constructed. I’d never previously thought about the challenges involved and how they were surmounted, but I learned about them here. And the video also caused me to reflect, and not for the first time, on how the forces arrayed against the US right now are good at destroying but not at building. Destroying is so much easier:
Happy Fourth of July!
[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited repeat of a previous post.]
I saw that film on TV maybe 30 times when I was a child. Loved it, and in particular loved the idea that James Cagney—whom I already knew as a tough old gangster—could dance. His dancing fascinated me because it was so non-balletic and idiosyncratic—the strutting, graceful/ungraceful, artful/artless uniqueness of his movement. In particular I recall the wall-climbing part at the end, which delighted me then and still does now.
Cagney wasn’t just an actor and hoofer, although he certainly was both. He was also a political conservative and changer. Excerpts from his Wiki page:
He was sickly as a young child—so much so that his mother feared he would die before he could be baptized. He later attributed his sickness to the poverty his family had to endure…The red-haired, blue-eyed Cagney graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1918, and attended Columbia College of Columbia University where he intended to major in art…
Cagney believed in hard work, later stating, “It was good for me. I feel sorry for the kid who has too cushy a time of it. Suddenly he has to come face-to-face with the realities of life without any mama or papa to do his thinking for him.”
He started tap dancing as a boy (a skill that eventually contributed to his Academy Award) and was nicknamed “Cellar-Door Cagney” after his habit of dancing on slanted cellar doors. He was a good street fighter, defending his older brother Harry, a medical student, when necessary. He engaged in amateur boxing, and was a runner-up for the New York State lightweight title. His coaches encouraged him to turn professional, but his mother would not allow it…
In his autobiography, Cagney said that as a young man, he had no political views, since he was more concerned with where the next meal was coming from. However the emerging labor movement of the twenties and thirties soon forced him to take sides…He supported political activist and labor leader Thomas Mooney’s defense fund, but was repelled by the behavior of some of Mooney’s supporters at a rally. Around the same time, he gave money for a Spanish Republican Army ambulance during the Spanish Civil War, which he put down to being “a soft touch.”…He also became involved in a “liberal group…with a leftist slant,” along with Ronald Reagan. However, when he and Reagan saw the direction the group was heading in, they resigned on the same night…
Cagney was accused of being a communist sympathizer in 1934, and again in 1940. The accusation in 1934 stemmed from a letter police found from a local Communist official that alleged that Cagney would bring other Hollywood stars to meetings. Cagney denied this, and Lincoln Steffens, husband of the letter’s writer, backed up this denial, asserting that the accusation stemmed solely from Cagney’s donation to striking cotton workers in the San Joaquin Valley. William Cagney claimed this donation was the root of the charges in 1940. Cagney was cleared…
After [WWII], Cagney’s politics started to change. He had worked on Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidential campaigns…However, by the time of the 1948 election, he had become disillusioned with Harry S. Truman, and voted for Thomas E. Dewey, his first non-Democratic vote. By 1980, Cagney was contributing financially to the Republican Party, supporting his friend Ronald Reagan’s bid for the presidency…As he got older, he became more and more conservative, referring to himself in his autobiography as “arch-conservative.” He regarded his move away from liberal politics as “…a totally natural reaction once I began to see undisciplined elements in our country stimulating a breakdown of our system… Those functionless creatures, the hippies … just didn’t appear out of a vacuum.”
Cagney: hoofer, political changer. An original all the way.
Happy Fourth to you all!
Open thread 7/4/2022
You tell ’em, Joe
Our brilliant leader has a July 4th weekend message:
My message to the companies running gas stations and setting prices at the pump is simple: this is a time of war and global peril.
Bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product. And do it now.
— President Biden (@POTUS) July 2, 2022
Because oil prices are arbitrary. Because companies shouldn’t be able to charge more than what they’re paying for the product. Because the federal government should be able to tell companies how to set their prices.
Hey, I’ve got a better idea, Joe. Why don’t you nationalize the oil/gas industry? Then you can make it all better. It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, how ungreedy the oil and gas companies were during Trump’s time in office, and how their greed ramped up when you came to power?
By the way, it’s always a time of war somewhere on earth, but when last I looked the US was not at war – except maybe a cold civil war. And if the world is in global peril, you’ve certainly done your bit to add to the problem.
But never fear, China approves:
My comment on Biden’s tweet last year, when he didn’t believe that greedy capitalism is all about exploitation. pic.twitter.com/ibgf9dSHyF
— Chen Weihua ????? (@chenweihua) July 2, 2022
Roundup
(1) Roger L. Simon on the SCOTUS decision that limits the power of the EPA.
(2) A Texas court says that the state’s 1925 abortion law can go into effect. The 1925 law criminalized abortion in that practitioners could be jailed, but the court blocked that aspect of the old law. Now it just opens practitioners to civil suits. This really has to do with the timing that applies to a new “trigger law” in Texas banning abortion from conception, to take effect 30 days after a SCOTUS decision. This is about what law is controlling in the meantime.
That Texas trigger law does allow exceptions “save the life of a pregnant patient or prevent ‘substantial impairment of major bodily function.'” I’m not sure how that will be interpreted, but it seems to me that its intent is to prevent psychological reasons from becoming an excuse to perpetuate abortion on demand. Neighboring New Mexico will almost certainly become a haven for Texas residents who want an abortion, and there will be agencies and charities that will be planning to help poorer women travel to New Mexico or other states for that purpose.
(3) Is it really the case that most people’s natural hand color is the same as their natural face color? See this for a discussion that seems to assume that this is generally so. My face and hands are not the same color, except in a very general sense. By the way, I don’t use foundation and never have except for the stage. I can’t stand the feel and the look of it.
(4) Here’s a very disturbing case of a mother convicted of first degree murder for allowing her child to starve on a mostly vegan diet (the father will be tried as well):
The O’Learys told police after Ezra’s death that the family followed a strict vegan diet, eating only raw fruits and vegetables, but that the toddler was also fed breast milk.
Closing arguments in Sheila O’Leary’s case began early Tuesday with jurors beginning deliberations shortly after noon.
“This child did not eat. He was starved to death over 18 months,” said Francine Donnorummo, Special Victims Unit chief at the State Attorney’s Office.
Earlier, the mother had been enrolled (with a previous husband) in parenting classes because her older children had failure to thrive.
[The prosecutor] added that O’Leary told detectives Ezra hadn’t eaten for a week and that he was having trouble sleeping the night prior to his death.
“She made choices that killed her child,” Donnorummo said.
She repeated that this took place over a prolonged period of time.
This is a very strange case, and I’d need more information to really understand what happened here. But it seems to me that the facts really support a criminal negligence and/or neglect verdict, perhaps some lesser manslaughter charge, but not murder. O’Leary said the child had been fed raw fruits and vegetables and also breast milk. Breast milk can sustain an 18-month-old in good health without supplemental feeding, if the child can get enough milk in the normal way. This definitely did not occur here.
(5) Talks with Iran are going swimmingly. Not.
Doctors, trans surgery, and language
First, a bit of language clarification. When Jordan Peterson called the doctor who removed Ellen/Elliot Page’s breasts a “criminal doctor,” he wasn’t necessarily saying that the doctor was violating a law and should be tried and jailed. If a person wanted to say that, the word “criminal” would be used as a noun as in: this doctor is a criminal. Or, if it is used as an adjective, it would have to be something like: this doctor has violated the following criminal statute. Used the way Peterson used it, it could easily be interpreted as having the meaning deplorable or disgraceful. You can see that usage in definition number four here for the use of “criminal” as an adjective.
I believe that Peterson was calling this act of removing healthy breasts disgraceful and deplorable because it is an exception to the general rule of a doctor not removing a healthy organ or body part. Doctors remove diseased body parts all the time. But it’s not usually done for psychological reasons, except for things like sex change (or, as Twitter would prefer, sex affirmation) operations. Removing a bump in the nose, or sculpting a chin, or even breast reduction surgery (where a portion of healthy tissue is removed), is not the same as removing the thing in its entirety.
Should people be allowed to make the more extreme decision of removing an entire body part that is not ailing, and have a doctor acquiesce and perform such a surgery? At present, they certainly have that right, but it didn’t used to be that way. When I was a kid I first learned about Christine Jorgenson, who had gone to Copenhagen in 1952 to get sex-change surgery because it wasn’t available in the US. And even when it became available in the US, for many years it was rare and only approved after a long period of time living as the opposite sex and all sorts of psychological screening. Those days are gone, gone, gone.
The analogy some people make is to those suffering from body integrity identity disorder. At present, physicians do not fulfill the desires of such people, and it might even be considered criminal of them to do so:
The term body integrity identity disorder (BIID) describes the extremely rare phenomenon of persons who desire the amputation of one or more healthy limbs or who desire a paralysis. Some of these persons mutilate themselves; others ask surgeons for an amputation or for the transection of their spinal cord. Psychologists and physicians explain this phenomenon in quite different ways; but a successful psychotherapeutic or pharmaceutical therapy is not known. Lobbies of persons suffering from BIID explain the desire for amputation in analogy to the desire of transsexuals for surgical sex reassignment. Medical ethicists discuss the controversy about elective amputations of healthy limbs: on the one hand the principle of autonomy is used to deduce the right for body modifications; on the other hand the autonomy of BIID patients is doubted. Neurological results suggest that BIID is a brain disorder producing a disruption of the body image, for which parallels for stroke patients are known. If BIID were a neuropsychological disturbance, which includes missing insight into the illness and a specific lack of autonomy, then amputations would be contraindicated and must be evaluated as bodily injuries of mentally disordered patients. Instead of only curing the symptom, a causal therapy should be developed to integrate the alien limb into the body image.
As far as I know, this term and illness has not been politicized, and so the prohibition against amputation is still in place.
I believe that the justification for removing healthy organs for doctors operating on trans people is that psychological health is involved, and in some cases refusal to remove would precipitate a suicide on the part of the person seeking such surgery. What of suicides afterwards, which also happen? Or is this merely a question of personal autonomy? Should people and doctors be allowed to do anything the person might want?
This might be as good a place as any to deal with the use of the term sex assigned at birth, used by trans activists and their supporters to mean the sex of the baby at birth. What is this word “assigned” about? It seems to indicate something arbitrary and perhaps temporary, which for the vast vast vast majority of human beings it is not.
I don’t know the history of the term as far as the activists go, but I suspect it comes from a different phenomenon in which it actually was quite appropriate. It used to be reserved for the rare situation in which a child was born with ambiguous genitals or hermaphroditic genitals. Sometimes the “assignment” was somewhat arbitrary and it emerged later on that the assignment had been the wrong one. There are a number of medical conditions that can cause such problems, and for some of them what seems to be the case at birth ends up being reversed at puberty when certain hormones kick in. One example of the latter phenomenon is Reductase 2 deficiency. There are others. In such cases, the word “assigned at birth” is appropriate. But as I said, they are rare.
The “genius” of the activists is the transfer of the concept to all births, or their attempt to do so. It is the classic leftist move of which Orwell was so acutely aware, the idea that changing language can help change thought.
Doing anything fun for the Fourth…
…this long weekend?
Open thread 7/2/22
Twitter suspends Jordan Peterson: why?
Here’s what Peterson tweeted that got him suspended:
In the tweet prompting Twitter’s suspension, Peterson wrote, “Remember when pride was a sin? And Ellen Page just had her breasts removed by a criminal physician.”
Twitter wrote that Peterson had violated its rules for “hateful conduct,” apparently because used Page’s given name; Page now goes by Elliott. He also referred to Page as “her,” thus implying Page is a woman.
One of Peterson’s aims has long been to resist compelled speech. That’s why he was bound to run into Twitter censorship sooner or later. I’m not sure it’s his first time, either, but I can’t imagine him retracting or changing what he wrote. I think one reason he wrote it may have been to purposely mount such a challenge to Twitter and see what would happen. If Twitter compels him to call the former Ellen Page “Elliott,” and to also refer to Page with the pronoun “he,” I would imagine Peterson would object for the obvious reasons. If he wanted to do it of his own free will, fine, but he does not want to be forced to say something he does not believe.
Peterson is a big fan of Solzhenitsyn, who wrote: “Live not by lies.” Here’s an excerpt from a book called The Solzhenitsyn Reader:
On the day Solzhenitsyn was arrested, February, 12, 1974, he released the text of “Live Not by Lies.” The next day, he was exiled to the West, where he received a hero’s welcome. This moment marks the peak of his fame. Solzhenitsyn equates “lies” with ideology, the illusion that human nature and society can be reshaped to predetermined specifications. And his last word before leaving his homeland urges Soviet citizens as individuals to refrain from cooperating with the regime’s lies. Even the most timid can take this least demanding step toward spiritual independence. If many march together on this path of passive resistance, the whole inhuman system will totter and collapse.
For Peterson – if I understand him correctly, having watched a fair number of his videos – the important thing here is not what he calls Page. It’s why. We all are being required to acquiesce in what Peterson considers the fiction that Page is a man and always was. Certainly the latter – that Page was born a man and has always been a man – is something manifestly untrue except in woke circles and I suppose in Page’s mind. But everyone is now required to agree with the narrative, and Peterson thinks there’s a big cost in agreeing.
There is a cost, indeed.
When I was in graduate school in the 1990s I noticed this new (to me, anyway) tendency to insist that subjective beliefs should hold sway over objective ones, and that in fact there was no such thing as objective truth. Sorry, I don’t buy that. Maybe there isn’t absolute and definitive truth, but some things are a lot truthier than others and someone like Peterson should be allowed to say so without being thrown off Twitter.
Would it have been better for him to have written a sentence that went this way, “Elliott Page just had his breasts removed by a criminal physician”? Peterson doesn’t want to write seeming nonsense (that Peterson does not believe) in order to please the left and Page, but that’s exactly what the left wants him to do.
When did the transgender movement lose a lot of people who were pretty okay with it prior to that? When advocates began moving the medical treatment ages further and further downward, and when they began insisting that a change of sexual identity (including surgery to remove sexual organs) was a change to affirm a sexual identity that had always been the case – that bodies and chromosomes have no reality, even as patients go to great surgical length to change their bodies in an attempt to fit a standard of sexual identity.
Orwell understood:
The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
No, you can’t alter the past. You can only pretend, and try to force other people to pretend with you.
By my profile I should be the most liberal of liberals
In a Jordan Peterson video I saw something about this personality test, and I decided to spring for it to the tune of ten dollars. Taking it is kind of fun, and it gives you your assessment immediately. The scores are percentiles on five dimensions, and each of those are broken down into two parts as well:
The Understand Myself assessment and report is based on the Big Five Aspects Scale, the scientific model that describes your personality through the (Big Five) factors and each of their two aspects.
Individual Report
The assessment only takes 15-20 minutes. Your resulting report will give you a comprehensive description of the factors and aspects of your own personality.You will, for example, learn how agreeable you are relative to others, and how your Agreeableness breaks down into the aspects of Compassion and Politeness (deference to authority and social norms). You will also learn how these aspects of your personality influence how you act towards and react against the various people and situations you find yourself dealing with every day.
As an example of some of my results, I’m apparently way more compassionate than most people but way less polite. That’s no surprise. In person I’m actually quite polite in the conventional sense – I say “please” and “thank you” and “nice to have met you” and all that, but that’s not really what the test measures.
But on certain other dimensions – such as a subcategory called “orderliness,” I score in the basement. “Orderliness” on this test isn’t about being a hoarder or not – in my case it actually has to do with a deficit in planning skills and a dislike of predictable routine. And it also says this:
Those who are who are very low in orderliness are remarkably much less likely to be political conservatives.
I’m about as low on the “orderliness” scale as a person can get, and yet I’m a political conservative. Go figure.
One trait in which I score in the 98% percentile is “openness to experience.” For that trait it says: “Those who are liberal, politically, are very much more likely to be high in openness to experience than conservatives.” There we go again; I’m the opposite politically of what my personality scores would indicate.
Here’s an excerpt from the description of “openness to experience” [my emphasis]:
People with exceptionally high levels of openness to experience are almost always characterized by others as extremely smart, creative, exploratory, intelligent and visionary. They are extremely interested in learning, and are constantly acquiring new abilities and skills. They are extremely curious and exploratory. They are exceptionally interested in abstract thinking, philosophy, and the meaning of belief systems and ideologies. They live for cultural events such as movies, concerts, dance recitals, plays, poetry readings, gallery openings and art shows. They are very likely to enjoy writing (or even to be driven to write). They enjoy complex, abstract ideas and deeply love to confront and solve complex, abstract and multi-dimensional problems.
One intriguing thing the site offers is that if two people each take the test, you can ask it to analyze the type of relationship or marriage you will tend to have if you get romantically involved with each other.
Another white arbiter of Blackness is heard from
Apparently, the proper metric of Blackness is attendance at NBA games. Who knew?
And Clarence Thomas has been tested and found wanting on that dimension by Rex Chapman, who also writes: “Clarence Thomas would last 20-30 seconds in an NBA locker room.” What is Chapman suggesting would happen in that locker room? Would Thomas be beaten up? Ridiculed? Flee in fear at his lack of authentic Blackness? What?
In other breaking news, “wise latina” Sotomayor has never been photographed eating a tortilla, at least as far as I can tell. Therefore her bona fides must be suspect.
However, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s cultural Jewish identity is safe:
The visits included a stop at the New York deli Russ & Daughters at 179 East Houston St. Apart from appreciating the pickled herring, bagels, and lox, young Ruth could see something she’d never seen anywhere else—a business that proudly proclaimed in its name and its signage that it would be passed on to daughters and not sons. The notion, which might not seem revolutionary today, was novel for a girl growing up in the 1930s and ’40s. Before she ever heard the word “feminist,” Russ & Daughters helped shape Ginsburg’s idea of what’s possible for women.
That’s actually rather interesting. However, “Russ & Daughters” was indicating a present reality, not an intention to pass a business on to daughters in the future. And it turns out that Russ was not making a feminist statement:
n 1920, Russ opened his store at the current location of 179 East Houston Street. In 1933, he renamed the business “Russ and Daughters” after making his three daughters, Hattie, Anne, and Ida, partners in the store. Historically, businesses typically took on the name “and sons”, but since Russ and his wife Bella had only daughters, his business became Russ & Daughters. However, Russ was not a feminist ahead of his time. For him, getting his daughters into the business was not a matter of women’s rights, but a matter of parnosa, or surviving to make a business. As he put it, he was concerned with Vi nempt men parnosa, meaning ‘From where do we take our living.’ According to Hattie, she and the other daughters had all worked in the store “since they were 8 years old” on weekends, fishing out the herring fillets from the pickle barrels. Once each one of them finished high school, they all worked full-time. Moreover, Russ kept the store open seven days a week…
In 2008 The Jews of New York documentary premiered on PBS, featuring three generations of the Russ & Daughters family (Anne Russ Federman and Hattie Russ Gold, the two surviving Russ daughters; Mark Russ Federman, then the proprietor; Niki Russ Federman; and Josh Russ Tupper). The documentary tells, among other things, the story of Russ & Daughters from the early 1900s to the (then) present. The third daughter, Ida, had died.
Russ & Daughters: Reflections and Recipes from the House That Herring Built, by Mark Russ Federman (grandson of Joel Russ), with an introduction by Calvin Trillin, was published in 2013.
[ADDENDUM: See this for more on Clarence Thomas and blackness.]