Hungary’s Orban and government censorship of the academy

The New Neo Posted on by

Hungary’s Viktor Orban is continually referred to as “far right.” And perhaps he is. For example, I saw this article describing how Orban has decided to ban gender studies programs in the two universities in Hungary that have offered them in the first place. The headline is quite alarming (and I read similar ones elsewhere): “Viktor Orban moves to ban gender studies courses at university in ‘dangerous precedent’ for Hungary.”

What Prime Minister does such a thing, except one who is bent on stifling civil liberties and on a path to tyranny? Even the teaching of the often-useless and always-leftist topic of gender studies should be the school’s decision, not the government’s.

But a little bell went off in my head, sounding a note of doubt. Is this really what Orban had proposed? Or was it something milder than a ban?

So I turned to the body of the article. It did seem as though they were indeed talking about a ban [emphasis mine]:

A proposal by the Hungarian government to ban gender studies at universities in the country has been criticised as a “dangerous precedent” for state interference.

Hungary’s ministry for human capacities said the proposed ban, which would come into effect at the start of the 2019 academic year, had been introduced because employers showed no interest in graduates from the subject.

But critics say the ban is part of a campaign by Prime Minister Viktor Orban to attack NGOs or institutions that oppose his Fidesz party’s socially conservative narrative.

Andrea Peto, a gender studies professor at the Central European University, one of the two universities that could be affected, said the proposed ban violated the Hungarian constitution, which protects the freedom of scientific research and learning.

And the reason for the ban sure sounds odd, doesn’t it? If employers aren’t interested, why not stand back and let the market take care of it?

I read the entire article and it was quite consistent in describing the proposed action as a “ban.” But that little bell of doubt kept going off in my mind, and so I kept looking. And then I found this, which told a slightly different story [emphasis mine]:

Hungary’s government will stop financing gender studies university courses, Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s chief of staff said on Tuesday, marking one of the first concrete steps in a cultural shift signaled last month…

Gender studies courses are taught at the state-run university ELTE and Central European University, which are among the top universities in Hungary.

Gulyas said those already enrolled could finish their studies but Budapest would stop financing the courses from the next academic year.

Ah. So we learn two things from this article. The first is that it’s not a ban, it’s a defunding. The second is that one of the two universities in Hungary that even offer gender studies in the first place is run by the state. So why should the state pay for something it considers counterproductive and worthless?

I’m actually not the least bit in favor of governments banning areas of coursework. But withdrawing funds is a different thing, although if the state university is the only school that teaches a certain course, then withdrawing funds has the effect of eliminating it. However, if someone or some group wants to start a private college and offer it, providing their own funding, they are still free to do so.

Or so it would seem. After reading about six articles on this and trying to decipher what might actually be happening,I gave up because the truth was remarkably elusive.

It does indeed appear, however, as though a sort of reverse cultural revolution might be taking place in Hungary, a campaign by Orban’s party to restore the older ways and stamp out some of the leftist/progressive cultural agenda:

The most recent cultural target of the pro-Orban press is a Budapest exhibition of the work of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, which was denounced in an article headlined: “This is the way communism is promoted using state money.” Kahlo was a member of the Mexican Communist Party and had an affair with Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

In June, the Hungarian state opera scrapped several performances of the ballet musical Billy Elliot after the same right-wing newspaper called it “gay propaganda”.

Szilvester Okovacs, the opera’s general director, insisted that commercial rather than political pressures were behind the decision. This week, he announced that the theme for the opera’s 2019-2020 season would be “Christianity”.

Orban wants the Granscian march to go in the other direction for a change. And (as I wrote recently), Europe has a much weaker tradition of “liberal capitalism—the Enlightenment, Locke and the rest” than the US does. So it would be no surprise if Orban had instituted a ban, and started more heavy-handed direction of the country’s cultural life, although it’s not at all clear that those moves are occurring right now.

Why are so many intellectuals collectivists?

The New Neo Posted on by

Milton Friedman’s answer to the question, circa 1972:

I think it’s in their own self-interest, in a double way. First, in a collectivist society, intellectuals have more power than they do in a free enterprise system. In the 1930s, the New Deal created an enormous number of jobs that didn’t exist before for intellectuals. I had one myself, so I am speaking from personal experience. There has been a “drang nach Washington” since the New Deal which intellectuals everywhere recognize as having improved their personal status. Second, it is much easier to sell simple-minded, collectivist ideas than it is to sell sophisticated, free enterprise ideas.

Thomas Sowell wrote an entire book on the same basic topic approximately forty years later. I have only read a small portion of it, but I recommend just about everything Sowell ever wrote.

What the heat wave in Britain has revealed

The New Neo Posted on by

When I first read the headline of this article—“‘Millennia of human activity’: heatwave reveals lost UK archaeological sites”—I imagined something like a fantasy movie in which some hulking ancient ruin comes heaving out of the ground, astounding the watching crowd.

But that’s not what’s actually happening, which is this sort of thing:

Those are what’s called scorch marks:

Lost sites have been turning up all over Britain and Ireland, ploughed flat at ground level but showing up as parch marks from the air, in areas where grass and crops grow at different heights, or show in different colours, over buried foundations and ditches. A treasure trove of discoveries, including ancient field boundaries, lost villages, burial mounds and military structures, was revealed on Wednesday, recorded during the summer by aerial archaeologists flying over the landscape for Historic England…

Among dozens of sites revealed in Cornwall were an unusual prehistoric settlement surrounded by concentric ditches at Lansallos, and an iron age settlement surrounded by a circular ditch with marks of other circular and rectangular structures within one field at St Ive – evidence of continuity of settlement over at least 4,000 years.

What is believed to be a Roman farm, with buildings, fields and paddocks, has showed up at Bicton in Devon, and at Stogumber in Somerset four bronze and iron age farms have been spotted, one with signs of having been abandoned and a new settlement built on top.

It’s as though these structures and settlements had been written in invisible ink, and the drought was the catalyst for revealing the messages they hold. Excavation will further reveal them.

It’s interesting, too, that in a slight parallel, some invisible inks are revealed by the process of being heated, which usually turns them brown.

Another study on low-carb diets…

The New Neo Posted on by

…comes up with some interesting results that might disturb advocates of low-carb diets:

In a large cohort of adults living in four diverse US communities, with more than two decades of follow-up, mid-life dietary patterns marked by both low carbohydrate (<40% of energy from carbohydrate) and high carbohydrate (>70% of energy from carbohydrate) consumption were associated with increased mortality risk and shorter residual lifespan, with minimum risk observed with 50–55% of energy from carbohydrate. These findings reflect a U-shaped relationship between carbohydrate intake and mortality, and were corroborated by data from other North American, European, Asian and multinational cohorts, combined as part of a meta-analysis. However, low carbohydrate dietary patterns that replaced energy from carbohydrate with energy from animal-derived protein or fat were associated with greater risk. However, this association was reversed when energy from carbohydrate was replaced with plant-derived protein or fat.

I’ve written many times about my own experiences with low-carb diets, as regular readers here probably know, but the summary version is that I hate them for many reasons, including a very important one: I don’t lose weight on them. I also don’t like eating a lot of meat or cheese of any kind, and it makes me feel lousy. Really lousy. Among other things, my digestive system shuts down. It’s just a miserable, unproductive experience for me.

But I know a lot of people love and swear by them, and that they say that their bloodwork improves immensely and they feel and look better. More power to you, folks.

I believe that low-carb advocates will shrug off the findings mentioned in that quote about the study, for the following reasons and probably more:

—they’ll say the low-carb diets studied don’t reflect the type of diet they advocate.

—they’ll say that studies of diet and health that rely on self-report of food intake have inherent flaws

—they’ll say that other studies don’t find the same results, so this one is an outlier (I’m not sure, though, that the other studies measured all-cause mortality, which this one appears to do, so it may be apples and oranges).

One thing I have noticed, here and on other sites, is that some low-carb advocates treat it almost as a religion, and they proselytize. I cannot tell you how often, when I write any sort of post on the topic of these diets, people come here and ignore what I’ve written about how low-carb diets have worked (or not worked) on me in the past. There’s also a tendency among advocates to become hyper-rigid about diet.

What’s more, some of the historic arguments about paleo don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Humans have been eating grains and fruits and vegetables and cereals for many thousands of years—different forms of the foodstuffs, to different extents, in different societies—and I think it stands to reason that there has been quite a bit of evolution and natural selection to deal with that since the earlier time when paleo diets supposedly were dominant.

But I’m not trying to talk anyone out of something that seems to work for that person. I think we still know very little about optimal diets, and I also think that each individual reacts very differently to diets and we especially don’t know how to tailor dietary instructions to the individual.

Aretha Franklin has died

The New Neo Posted on by

She had a troubled life in certain ways, but boy could that woman ever sing.

Most people think of “Respect” as Aretha Franklin’s anthem, and I suppose it was. I liked a great many of her songs very much—including that one—but this one had a special place in my heart:

RIP, Aretha Franklin.

What I saw today in Tuscany

The New Neo Posted on by

San Gimignano is a lovely place, but not quite as lovely when all the parking lots are full and you must circle around and around the town loop looking for a space to open up in one of the lots, along a lot of other circling cars. And it’s really really hot climbing up those hills. On the other hand, if you can climb in a patch of shade, it feels much better.

This is the beautiful setting:

And one of the entrances to the town taken from in-town:

Brennan’s security clearance revoked

The New Neo Posted on by

Good. The only bad part about the news is that it gives Brennan the golden opportunity to be in the limelight again, and to fume against Trump—his favorite position and his favorite occupation.

I really don’t question this decision of Trump’s, which is one of those overdetermined moves:

“Erratic” properly describes [Brenna’s] shrill and often mindless attacks on Trump. Moreover, his hatred of the president is so palpable that one can easily imagine him using access to secret information to harm the administration.

To be sure words like “erratic,” “shrill,” “mindless,” and “hatred” are not objective terms…

However, in Brennan’s case, objective factors also support Trump’s decision. Brennan was caught lying about breaking into the computers of Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s staff. And, reportedly, he’s in jeopardy with the House Intelligence Committee for lying to Congress about the anti-Trump dossier that collection of falsehoods gathered by partisans for partisan purposes. Indeed, Brennan appears to have played a significant role in promoting the dossier as a weapon to be used against Donald Trump.

A guy like that really ought not have a security clearance…

Brennan, of course, is talking about how his freedom of speech is being curtailed as he gives interviews about the subject of how intimidating this could be. Well, he doesn’t seem at all intimidated and it probably wouldn’t intimidate most people who are no longer in jobs that require such clearance. It also might serve notice to subsequent heads of the CIA or ex-heads of the CIA not to leak or to lie, or to demonstrate extreme partisanship and animus against a president, and still expect to get access to sensitive and confidential information (after retiring) that they will then try to use to destroy that president. Works for me, no matter who the president might be. No president owes such people anything at that point. And they remain perfectly free to talk.

But there’s another factor regarding Brennan and his clearance, one I discussed at some length in this previous post, which can be summarized as the fact that I think Brennan should never have gotten a security clearance from the CIA in the first place, much less become head of that organization.

I also believe—as I wrote in this post—that former officials should not automatically retain their security clearances after leaving office.

Why socialism is okay now (and, did you even actually listen to some of the claptrap that emanates from Bernie Sanders’ mouth?)

The New Neo Posted on by

Seems that socialism is no longer a dirty word these days in the US as long as you call it “democratic socialism.” How did socialism get rehabilitated?

I suppose that enough kids have finally matured who got little at school to counter the idea of socialism (or who actually heard it touted), and who don’t personally remember Communism and the Cold War. They think there’s something very nice about socialism; can’t we all just be more equal?

And then in 2016 the candidacy of Bernie Sanders legitimized it. Grandpa the socialist was surprisingly attractive to a lot of young people. He also made the Democratic primaries far more interesting than they otherwise would have been.

I believe that initially Sanders was mostly there to give Hillary Clinton enough competition to stop the Democratic race from being such a big snoozefest that no one paid attention. He wasn’t expected to be competitive–old white Jewish socialist guy–but when he appeared to be developing into a serious challenge to Clinton, it was probably panic time for the Democratic party establishment, who set about making sure he didn’t actually get the nomination. They had no intention of letting him do that, and it didn’t happen (superdelegates, anyone?).

But Bernie’s candidacy was the gift that kept on giving to the growing leftist wing of the party, because his popularity let the Democratic Party know what they hadn’t known up till that point and probably didn’t see coming, either: that it was now possible for them to claim the mantle of socialism and give it voice. No need to hide any more—although they may be a bit premature on that.

If you take a trip back in time, Bernie Sanders used to be quite cagey and secretive about the socialist that he undoubtedly was and is. I find these quotes pretty extraordinary in their open admission of deception:

Sanders, 73, has been preaching socialism for nearly half a century, and he cites Eugene Debs, the five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party of America, as his hero. But he hasn’t always embraced the label.

“I myself don’t use the word socialism,” he said in 1976 in the Vermont Cynic, a student publication at the University of Vermont, “because people have been brainwashed into thinking socialism automatically means slave-labor camps, dictatorship and lack of freedom of speech.”

Brainwashed, eh?

Here’s one of my favorites:

“I’ve stayed away from calling myself a socialist,” Sanders said in the Boston Globe in the aftermath of his win in ‘81, “because I did not want to spend half my life explaining that I did not believe in the Soviet Union or in concentration camps.”

Wouldn’t want to actually have to answer any questions about where leftism has so often led, would we?

And here’s Bernie’s definition of socialism. You can see where that “democratic” label came from in the recent move to call it “democratic socialism”:

All that socialism means to me, to be very frank with you, is democracy with a small ‘d.’ I believe in democracy, and by democracy I mean that, to as great an extent as possible, human beings have the right to control their own lives. And that means that you cannot separate the political structure from the economic structure. One has to be an idiot to believe that the average working person who’s making $10,000 or $12,000 a year is equal in political power to somebody who is the head of a large bank or corporation. So if you believe in political democracy, if you believe in equality, you have to believe in economic democracy as well.”

You see? Socialism is just economic democracy, my friends. Nothing to fear.

In case the Congo didn’t have enough troubles already…

The New Neo Posted on by

…now there’s a new ebola epidemic. So far this one seems to involve a higher percentage of health care workers than previous epidemics.

But now there are more tools to deal with ebola than ever before. There seems to be a vaccination that helps, for example:

…[T]he WHO is continuing its strategy of contact tracing for vaccination, with more than 600 potential contacts already identified. Ghebreyesus said that 260 have already been vaccinated, including some from cities, but that vaccinators are being moved from Guinea and hope to be on the ground today in Bene and Mangina. Healthcare workers have also started to be vaccinated, he added.

Ghebreyesus noted that in addition to vaccines, five people were treated with a monoclonal antibody, and he characterized those who received the treatment as doing “well.”

Good.

Tuscany impressions

The New Neo Posted on by

They seem to love the roundabout concept here in Tuscany. I think roundabouts are abominations, but I’ll forgive the Italians their rondaboutphilia because this is nevertheless a great place to visit.

Many people in yesterday’s thread mentioned the Italian expertise at industrial design. Agreed, except for one thing—the toilet in my hotel. Anyone other than a giant is insecurely perched up so high that their feet don’t come near touching the ground. And instead of being relatively flat, the seat itself sticks up in a kind of ridge, which has the effect of heavily digging into any body parts making contact with it.

I was at a neighborhood pot luck dinner here on Wednesday evening that involved the neighborhood of the enormous rented villa at which some of my relatives are staying (a residence to which I’m slated to transfer myself this Saturday, with a view that reminds me very much of Napa, California). It turns out that Italian potluck has much the same menu as potlucks in my New England experience: heavy on the couscous salads, the pasta salads, and the green salads.

But I’m well aware that Italians know how to cook and they know how to eat. I’m looking forward to visiting a few restaurants for a lot more than pasta salad.

Tomorrow I do my first sightseeing. The plan is to visit this place, then back to the family villa for a little dinner for about 25.

Tales of the traveling Neo

The New Neo Posted on by

Here I am in—Italy!

Why Italy? Well, why not.

But August is not the time to visit Italy I hear you say. It’s awfully hot, and besides the whole country is on vacation.

True, but here I am. I didn’t choose the date. It’s a family event and a reunion of sorts, in Tuscany. I’m not the greatest of travelers, especially long distances, and I’m still recovering from what turned out to be about a 24-hour trip and jet lag. Not to mention the fact that the hotel I’ll be in till Saturday keeps throwing me offline and not letting me get back on. I’d planned a lot of already-prepared posts for you as well as some new stuff. But the best laid schemes o’ mice and men…and bloggers…

I assume this will all get straightened out soon, and I’ll be posting and vacationing at the same time. But for the moment please bear with me and keep checking back.

One or two observations about Italy—

I landed in Rome in a thunder and lightning storm. Fun! But the enormous airport there was a model of efficiency, at least in my experience. The international arrivals building was loaded with people from all over the world, pulling their wheeled luggage and hurrying wherever they were hurrying, and the helpful signs at the airport were numerous, keyed with lots of graphics and arrows that actually turned out to point to the destination they said they were pointing to, amazingly enough. The signs were in Italian and English for the most part, but as I said the graphics would help even people who don’t speak either language (fortunately for me, I’m adequate in one).

The luggage came immediately, and contrary to rumor and fear, it was all there. But it was the bathroom sinks in the airport that I loved the best. Each one was large and had three operations for the weary traveler. The first was a faucet that turned on automatically, something most airport faucets do these days except ordinarily more than half of them are malfunctioning. These functioned perfectly. Likewise, each sink had its own automatic soap dispenser to the right of the faucet, working perfectly as well. But the piece de resistance (how do you say that in Italian?) was the individual hand drier to the faucet’s left that sent forth a small but intense blast of hot air that was focused and effective, drying the hands in about three seconds flat.

Beautiful.

More anon! It’s better than endless chatter about the most pressing issue of the day, Trump and Omarosa, isn’t it? But that’s a low bar.

Oh, and Italy? Beautiful, too.

Let’s have a little traveling music

The New Neo Posted on by

Surprise! I’ve been traveling for close to 24 hours. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow or later tonight (well, not all about it, but something about it).

I still plan to post regularly during my trip, on the usual eclectic mix. But every now and then I may throw in a bit about where I am and what I’m doing. I’m not turning into a travel blogger, though.

Till later…