Larry Tribe’s Frankenstein/ien’s monster

The New Neo Posted on by

Larry Tribe, Harvard law professor, made a very weird (or is it wierd?) suggestion on Twitter:

Trump [had] tweeted:

Lawprof Laurence Tribe tweeted:

But let’s concentrate on the misspelling. Laurence Tribe is presumably serious when he says he thinks the “Frankenstien” spelling would convey anti-Semitism. What other reason is there to spell the word wrong? Well, first, there’s a simple mistake, perhaps influenced by the “i before e” rule.

Tribe ”” who must know about Occam’s Razor ”” tries to exclude the simple mistake by stating that “Trump had to override autocorrect,” but I opened a compose window in Twitter and typed “Frankenstien” and it did not autocorrect. I tried another “i before e” mistake and wrote “recieve” and it autocorrected, so I know how Twitter autocorrect works, and it doesn’t reject “Frankenstien.”

So Tribe just sounds ridiculously conspiracy-theory-oriented.

That’s what happens to leftists with Trump Derangement Syndrome. But since they tend to be surrounded by other leftists with the same affliction, they usually don’t notice.

Let me add that “stien” as a name suffix is not Jewish. Many names we think of as “Jewish” are also German and have German origins, although that’s not always the case. Sometimes the spellings are different from the German and sometimes the same. However, “-stein” is a much more typically “Jewish” (as well as German) spelling than “-stien,”which seems neither Jewish nor German. A mispelling of “stien” has no purpose whatsoever, except to drive the Larry Tribes of the world ever more crazy. A much more likely explanation is that it’s a simple misspelling and probably an inappropriate use of the “i before e” rule.

Trump probably meant to link Franken in our minds with accused serial offender Weinstein. Also, the pun with Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” would be irresistible even without the existence of the Weinstein reference; Franken’s name almost cries out for it.

In Shelley’s book, “Frankenstein” was the name of the monster’s creator, by the way, not the monster himself (as sometimes thought). But the monster does have a possible Jewish connection—a connection of which I am almost 100% sure Trump is unaware, as most people are unaware. That connection is with a figure in Jewish lore called the Golem:

The [Golem] is a legendary creature originating in European Jewish folklore with the most famous early legend being the Golem of Prague. There are numerous narratives as to the creation and outcome of the Golem.

The most famous narrative gives an account of Rabbi [Loew of Prague], and the creation of his Golem through magical rituals using clay. The Prague story describes the creation of the Golem as inspired by a need for protection of Jewish citizens from the disastrous affects of blood [libel.] Rabbi Loew is supposed to have constructed the Golem using clay or earth, and animated it using replication of the secret/esocteric knowlegde of biblical creation of Adam. One myth describes the golem being rejected in love and then going on a violent rampage, which is similar to Shelley’s plot.

…It is not clear whether Shelley intended to use this legend as a source, but there are many similarities between her monster and the Golem legend that indicate that it may have been some type of source for her work. The [wiki page on Golems] describes it as “a probable influence on Mary Shelley’s Novel Frankenstein.”

That has nothing to do with Trump, Tribe, or Franken. But it’s interesting—at least to me.

I also think that one of the very few positive effects of Twitter is that we get to see how extremely partisan and downright stupid famous people (some of whom are supposedly scholars) can be. And they seem proud enough of it to air their stupidity quite publicly.

Trump’s China deal

The New Neo Posted on by

Salena Zito notes that it hasn’t gotten much press:

Last weekend in Beijing, as part of his 12-day trip to Asia, President Trump announced that the US and China had signed an $83.7 billion memorandum of understanding to create a number of petrochemical projects in West Virginia over the next 20 years.

If the agreement holds tight, it is an economic game changer for the state.

And yet, speaking to the locals [in the state], you wouldn’t even know it had happened…

The BBC and CNN covered the news in their business sections, while The New York Times picked up a short story by The Associated Press on the deal. The stories’ headlines were muted; their placement low-key.

“One would have suspected that the prospect of an investment this large ”” nearly three times the total annual budget for the department of energy ”” would have been front-page news,” said Paul Sracic, political-science professor at nearby Youngstown State University.

Zito points out that Trump himself hasn’t really emphasized it in the medium he loves, Twitter. He’s been keener on insulting CNN and the like.

Jerald Stephens, a West Virginia native and union rep, was interviewed for the article and said, “I can guarantee you if anyone not named Trump had made this kind of deal for West Virginia, it would have at least been a panel discussion or two on a cable news channel.”

Or more.

For anyone who wants to talk about the death of the reprehensible Charles Manson…

The New Neo Posted on by

…here’s a thread for it.

His crimes were exceptionally vile. Just about anyone who was alive at that time—1969—remembers. I read the book Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi when it first came out, and it was horrific to even read what happened.

To me, the phenomenon of the Manson murders is a cautionary tale of its times. Young people adrift, awash in a sea of drugs and experimentation and amorality, meet a psycophathic con (as in “career criminal and convict” and “con man”), and the synergistic effect is the perpetration of evil, ruining many many lives.

Close encounters of the Bush I type

The New Neo Posted on by

…and by “the Bush I type” I mean the fanny-grope during the photo-op.

So now we have a new accusation against Al Franken by a woman named Lindsay Menz:

According to Menz, she attended the Minnesota State Fair with her husband and father in the summer of 2010, almost two years after Franken was elected to the Senate…

Then, as her husband held up her phone and got ready to snap a photo of the two of them, Franken “pulled me in really close, like awkward close, and as my husband took the picture, he put his hand full-fledged on my rear,” Menz said. “It was wrapped tightly around my butt cheek.”

Menz’s husband and several relatives say she told them shortly after the incident occurred, and there’s the following exchange on her Facebook page way back when:

Menz posted the photo with Franken on Facebook at the time, on August 27, 2010. Her sister, Cari Thunker, commented under the photo: “Sorry, but you two aren’t Bibles (sic) width apart” — a reference, Thunker explained to CNN, to how physically close Menz and Franken were in the photo.
Menz responded to her sister on Facebook: “Dude — Al Franken TOTALLY molested me! Creeper!” (The exchange is visible to Menz’s Facebook friends.)

That Facebook exchange could have merely been a joke referring to the closeness of the two in the photo (that’s what her sister had noticed), because the tone of Menz’s response seems rather light. However, if you take everything into consideration—the whole picture, as it were, including the Facebook post from 2010—I’d say this accusation has an excellent chance of being true, although we’ll never know with absolute certainty.

But for the sake of the rest of this post, let’s assume that it is true.

What on earth is this strange passivity on the part of groped women about? Seriously—this is a young women raised in the supposedly brave new world of female empowerment, and she didn’t do anything immediately (like, for example, let out a yelp and jump away from him)? Just the startle reaction alone might have caused such a thing, but apparently nothing of the sort happened. She says:

Lindsay Menz told CNN that she walked away as soon as the photo was taken, without saying anything to the then-first term senator. When she reconnected with her husband moments later, she told him…

And he said Franken was already gone.

Perhaps Lindsay Menz failed to react quickly because of the element of surprise and disbelief, but I still find it a bit odd that she didn’t seem to react at all in the photo. If more women raised a public stink if something like that happened to them when it happens, I bet it would have a chilling effect on the abusive behavior.

How many politicians have photos taken with random people? Just about every single one, practically every day they’re out in public. There are millions upon millions of photos of “me and the famous politician” out there, and every single woman (or perhaps the men, too) who possesses one now has a weapon in her hands to destroy whatever politician she might have it in for.

I don’t like that situation.

In the same article, Lindsay Menz describes a photo taken at the same venue with another politician, Minnesota Rep. John Kline:

As she was getting ready to take a picture with Kline, Menz said the congressman asked her whether they should “mutually put our arms around each other” — an interaction that struck her as being in stark contrast with what she had experienced moments ago with Franken…

[When later interviewed by CNN for this story, this exchange occurred] “If somebody wanted a picture, I would ask: should I put my arm on your back or your shoulder?” Kline said. He said that as a congressman, he was particularly inclined to do this when taking photos with women.

Now, there’s a smart—and very prescient—man.

So I went back and looked at a couple of photos I have of the “me and candidate X” variety. I was surprised to see that in each of them, the candidate in question had his hand very visibly on my shoulder. Now, if the photos had been very very close-cropped, I suppose their hands wouldn’t be seen. But they are very obvious in the photos as taken.

I suggest that every politician start adopting that approach immediately.

The Martyrdom of Man

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back we had a discussion of popular and/or highly-thought-of books of the past that we’ve never heard of, and that don’t seem all that great if we try to tackle them now.

Well, I recently came across The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade, which may just be the most influential book you never heard of. I had certainly never heard of it before. Nevertheless:

It is not an exaggeration to say that it provided a view of History as revolutionary as Darwin’s view of Science – an entirely new and non-religious way of looking at the subject. It was very popular and influential on publication in the 1870’s and long after – Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells and George Orwell were all heavily influenced.

Even Sherlock Holmes said “Let me recommend this book, — one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade’s ‘Martyrdom of Man.'”

I came across it in a biography of Churchill—I forget which one—that said Churchill thought it to be an important work.

If you want to have a go at it, you can find it online here.

We have seen that Reade’s longing to achieve something which should cause him to be remembered after his death was an abiding passion, and how all the efforts that he consciously made towards this end failed, in his own judgment, to achieve it. Yet a book that he wrote in great measure to ease his conscience was destined, in spite of the most violent opposition, to make its way where his other endeavours failed, and is still read with pleasure by a large and apparently increasing public among the generation which sprang up after his death. Such a phenomenon is almost without parallel in the history of literature, and cannot, I think, be attributed merely to the subject-matter of the book. Perhaps Reade’s style had benefited, as sometimes happens, by the long period of literary idleness that it underwent at Falaba, when, as he tells us, he found it impossible to write anything intended for the public; or perhaps it was purified by the abandonment of the conscious striving after effect noticeable in his earlier works;””the fact remains that the Martyrdom of Man shows just that touch of genius which is lacking in its author’s romances and travel-books, and merits in full measure the eulogies which such different critics as Sir Henry Rawlinson, Charles Reade, and Sir Harry Johnston have bestowed upon its literary style.

It’s interesting that I’m unfamiliar with those three guys mentioned in that last sentence, too.

I just couldn’t get through the first few pages of the book; you can read about it here. Sounds fairly leftist and anti-religion in nature, but that Churchill endorsement gives me pause on that. Here’s an even more thorough description, one that doesn’t incline me to read the book, either.

The ex-classics website where the book can be found has an interesting concept:

The Ex-Classics project was founded in 2000 to fill an unmet need. When reading the blurb etc. to a book by Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte, say, we would often come across sentences like “Favourite reading included . . .” If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us. So off we go to the library or bookshop, to be met first with blank stares and then with the information that the book has been out of print for decades. Our first two books were Gil Blas and Hudibras, which are prime examples of this. This web site is dedicated to rescuing these works from obscurity and making them available online, both for reading directly, and for downloading.

It takes a lot to stand the test of time. Homer, The Bible, Plato, Shakespeare—how many others are there, really?

Evaluating sexual offenses: Part I

The New Neo Posted on by

Like just about everyone else, I’ve been mulling over the allegations (some ancient, some quite new) against Bill Clinton, Clarence Thomas, Roman Polanski, Harvey Weinstein, Anthony Weiner, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, Roy Moore, Al Franken, et alia. It would take a book to analyze the charges against each and their truth or falsehood and the degree of heinousness of the acts of which each is accused. But that’s a book I’m certainly not planning to write. In my mulling, I’ve been reading a bunch of opinions on the subject from the left and right sides of the web, and everything in-between, and I’ve come to the conclusion that I have a rather idiosyncratic and unusual take on this.

Some people are inconsistent—and nakedly political or self-serving—in who they think is guilty and who innocent, and the relative seriousness of their acts. Some are consistent, and I try to be able to count myself among that crew. But the consistent ones often are consistent in saying something like “always believe the women.” I’m consistent in always being skeptical.

My basic position is skepticism, which means that I am aware that people sometimes lie (accusers and accused). It means that I think it’s absurd to say that any class or group of people always tells the truth or always lies, whether that group be women or men or members of some race or class or ethnicity or profession. To me it’s not just wrong to say “group A always tells the truth,” it’s an absurdity and an abomination and against our devotion to judging people as individuals and judging them on actions and evidence.

And by “judging,” I don’t just mean in the legal sense. I don’t mean as though we are a jury needing proof beyond a reasonable doubt. But I think we do need evidence—not “evidence” in the purely legal sense, either, but evidence in the sense of something that backs up a person’s naked unadorned word for it, or something that tells us that there’s a reason to trust the person telling the story. I’ve heard too many false stories told by people who seem for all the world to be sincere and telling the truth.

It used to be that women were automatically distrusted when they told stories about abuse by powerful men. It’s wrong to do that, and it needed to be corrected. But the idea that women are always to be trusted on this is an over-correction. I would think that fact would be obvious, but it’s not obvious to a host of people.

It also used to be that women who told such a story ran a great risk of being blamed for it, or being called liars. That still sometimes happens, of course, but nowadays it is more likely that they will automatically be believed and called heroines. That represents something relatively new, an incentive to make charges of this sort, a phenomenon that could lead to a greater incidence of false charges.

Something similar (although different in its details) used to be true of accusations by children that someone sexually abused them. Long ago, children were uniformly disbelieved when they came out with an accusation like that. But later, it was often thought that children were sexually innocent and oblivious about sexual matters unless they had been abused, so a sexual abuse accusation coming from a child was thought to represent sexual awareness on the part of that child that could only have come from having actually been abused. So the more common belief came to be: “children always tell the truth about sexual allegations.” Sound familiar? Well, that idea was later somewhat corrected when it was acknowledged that children these days are much more sexually aware than they used to be, and that sometimes they have their own reasons for lying and/or are manipulated or forced into lying by some of the adults in their lives.

So I don’t automatically believe or disbelieve anyone. When I hear charges of abuse, I try to evaluate the truth or falsehood of those allegations in a systematic way. I consciously try to apply the same standards to all, and to be consistent.

Here are just some of the elements I think people ought to take into consideration in terms of seriousness and/or truthfulness (most of these relate more to adult victims than to children):

Was the coercion overt? What was the age of the victim? Was “no” communicated by the victim (for adult victims only; for a child it’s irrelevant)? Was it just a verbal proposition by the accused with no behavioral follow-up? Was the offender a therapist or teacher or priest or parent? When did the victim report it—was there an enormous time lag? Does the victim have a separate grudge against the accused that might have motivated a false accusation? Is there any other evidence to back up the victim’s report? If so, how persuasive is that evidence? Was there any violence involved? Is the accused a politician who is currently running for office—and has the revelation come out right before the vote, with very little time to evaluate its truth or falsehood? Does the accuser have a history that indicates she/he is a habitual liar? Does the accused have such a history? Are there other alleged victims, and (this next part is very important and not often taken into account) did all the other victims tell their stories only after the initial accusations got a lot of publicity, or had their stories been told earlier? If the latter, was the story told to the police or other authorities, or to some friend or relative whose word we have to take for it? If we have one or more very credible accusations and then a new accusation comes out, is the new one in the mold of the old ones or does it up the ante dramatically? Has each accuser’s story remained consistent, or has it morphed?

There’s much more, but I think you get the idea. Since we don’t usually have a smoking gun (Anthony Weiner’s emailed photos, for example), we have to rely on this sort of thing.

I hate to see abusers go undetected and unpunished, free to continue their abuse with others. But I also hate to see people empowered to make false accusations that are insufficiently scrutinized and could ruin the life of a possibly innocent person. I’ve described the best way I know to try to figure out how to minimize both of these occurrences. Despite its flaws, I can’t think of a better way.

[NOTE: In Part II, I plan to discuss certain specific cases in light of Part I.]

Through a lens, murkily

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have noticed that posting is a bit light today. That’s because I spent a while at the eye doctor’s, learning what I already knew—that my cataracts (particularly in my left eye) are progressing nicely—if you like cataracts, which I don’t. But I don’t need to have surgery yet.

Maybe next year.

I’ve never been keen on going to the doctor, any doctor. I find as I get older, the anxiety about possible bad news becomes more justified, at least in the statistical (hopefully not the personal) sense. Cataracts? A mere nothing, very fixable. Everybody’s got em, if they live long enough. Be grateful I live now and not back then, when cataracts paved the way to almost certain blindness.

And I am grateful, although I know that any eye surgery is not “nothing,” and that my own mother had problems after her cataract surgery. I also have had my own history of a weird complication after a very minor eye surgery for narrow angles.

Nevertheless, it went well today, and for that I’m happy.

What’s going on in Zimbabwe?

The New Neo Posted on by

Nobody seems too sure. But as best I can piece together (from articles such as this and this, for example), here’s the story.

Mugabe’s previous supporters have turned on him, and that’s what turned the tide. Those in charge of the coup don’t want it to be perceived as an actual coup. They prefer to follow parliamentary procedure and impeach him, which looks as though it could happen.

Mugabe is 93 years old and has been in power either as Prime Minister or President for nearly 40 years—40 years that have mostly been very destructive of civil rights, human rights, and the economy. Perhaps his opponents saw light at the end of the tunnel—how long can the guy live?—but the propect of Mugabe’s wife taking over after his death may have sharpened their motivation to get rid of them both. I hadn’t yet read this article when I wrote that previous sentence, but here’s the lede, which certainly is in agreement:

Grace Mugabe, the 52-year-old wife of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, is a national hate figure in the embattled African state, so much so that many believe the military coup launched yesterday against his regime was less about deposing the president and more about getting rid of her.

No one seems to know where she is right now.

My guess is that Mugabe will be removed in the next couple of weeks, and that Grace will go with him. But my guess is also that their replacements will not be a whole lot better, although I wish for Zimbabwe’s sake that I’m wrong about that part.