Or shall we call it fire-breathing?
In trying to ascertain what would work best with North Korea, I come up with the answer “nothing.” They’re been on a very bad and very belligerent course for a long time.
That said, I don’t really think this helps at all, although I doubt it will matter much in the end. It really all depends on how sane or insane North Korea’s leader is.
But I’m curious what you think.
Thomas Sowell is a kind of hero of mine. I’ve written about him many times before, and I miss him since his (well-earned) retirement. He’s one of the clearest and most original thinkers as well as one of the most elegantly parsimonious in his writing style. In addition, the guy is fearless.
Here’s a quote from a tribute to Sowell that I found in a link at Powerline:
…[T]he ability to see things as they really are engenders hostility from countless factions in thrall to countless illusions. To persevere throughout a lifetime of opposition seemingly without the slightest perturbation or instability of judgment requires the rarest of temperaments and an extraordinary measure of courage.
If you’re not familiar with Sowell’s work, read him and/or watch some of the myriad YouTube videos of interviews with him over the years. He was a political changer, by the way.
Commenter Richard Aubrey makes a point that isn’t unusual, and seems quite logical:
To say men and women differ in their capability is gender essentialism, which I am told is a Very Bad Thing.
But you need to say it in order to justify exerting effort to get more women.
However—originally, at least—the push to accept more women in any given field rested on the idea of equal opportunity, not sheer equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity is an American ideal, and it justifies trying to get more of a certain group into a certain profession if in fact there is not equal opportunity for those people in that group who are qualified.
I realize that, under the leftist drive for equality of outcome, we may have lost the important distinction between the two, or at least it’s become blurred. In other words, for a lot of people today, particularly the Social Justice Warriors among us, equality of outcome is the only important metric. Their “logic” is that, since all groups are exactly equal in capability and talents, equality of outcome is prima facie evidence of inequality of opportunity. So we must have equality of outcome in order to guarantee equality of opportunity.
But they’re not the same, of course, if in fact groups differ on average in capability and talents in a particular field. And in that little phrase “on average” lies the heart of the matter. And even if groups differ on average in one capability or another, there could still be an inequality of opportunity that would be desirable to address. The question is how to measure it and how to address it.
One problem with this whole topic is that it’s extremely difficult to tease out the influence of nature and nurture, and so it’s very hard to know whether any observed or measured average differences between groups are due to nature or to nurture. That’s a biggee right there, and I’m not going to get into all the evidence either way except to say that I’ve read tons about it and don’t see an answer. But another large and important point is that we are only talking about average differences. There is a tremendous amount of overlap.
There are a few arenas in which there is no overlap. For example, if there was a job where, for some strange reason, the qualification included having given birth physically (I can’t think of such a job offhand, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility), it would of course be limited to women. For a job in which incredible upper-body strength was needed, it would be limited to strong men and the infinitesimal number of Amazonesque women who could meet that standard. But most jobs don’t have that kind of either/or set of qualifications. Most jobs have qualifications that some people of each sex can fill.
As a hypothetical, however, let’s say there’s a job for which the qualifications are more likely to be met, on average, by men. Let’s say, however, that there is a fair amount of overlap and that quite a few women are up to the task as well (the sexes could be reversed, depending on the job and its qualifications). Let’s also say that there are almost no women employed in that field. One could still say that the number of women in the field should be increased in the interests of fairness and non-discrimination.
The problem is that if we don’t use absolute parity of numbers as the way to measure non-discrimination, we’re in a gray area where we don’t know what the right numbers would be. Whether we’re talking about women or any other group against which there is a history of discrimination in jobs, how can we judge when enough redress is enough?
I think part of the ill will going around these days is that, particularly where hiring women is concerned, a lot of people feel that enough is enough, and that for many years now there’s been a preference for women, a preference that is not only unfair to men but has also resulted in the loosening and lessening of standards. This tends to be true of all preferences designed to combat previous discrimination.
I’m old-fashioned, and I believe that the way to end discrimination against a group is to end discrimination against that group, rather than to institute reverse preferences or to lower standards. The problem with that idea, though, is how to make it happen without instituting such preferences, and how to measure whether a disparity of outcome for groups in any given field is the result of actual discrimination or of natural differences on average in interests and aptitudes.
When I first saw this tweet, I thought it very clever:
Difference between Nazi and Communist is when you say how horrible Nazis have been, they don’t say “Well, real Nazism has never been tried.”
It brought forth a wry smile from me.
But then I started thinking about the distinction. Because of course, both have been tried, and in fact the trial of Communism was a whole lot longer in terms of time. And in terms of suffering and death, although the geographic distribution and victims was somewhat different, the Soviets probably won that sweepstakes from the Nazis in terms of sheer numbers killed.
So, why the difference in attitudes of people these days towards each system? Communism is a theory with a philosophy that is more likely to appeal to naive but well-meaning people who just want everyone to get along, no one to be poor, and for us to be just one big happy family with no one so much richer or poorer than anyone else. The clearly demonstrated fact that this particular vision works very poorly in real life, and that its leaders tend to be of a very different mindset, is the source of both its appeal and the claim that the ideas are good but it’s just that somehow the wrong leaders got control of the ship.
Some of the original Nazis may have considered themselves to be do-gooders in the sense that they would do good for Germany and rid the world of people they considered problematic. But that’s not exactly a vision that appeals world-round. No, on its face (and deep down as well), Nazism sounds pretty repellent, or perhaps very repellent, to the majority of people. Even its vision seems dystopian rather than utopian, and instead of appealing to the “can’t we all just get together” aspirations of people, it appeals to their “I’ll smash you and I’ll come out on top” desires.
So although Nazism still has its adherents, they are a more isolated and less numerous group. And yet, I bet somewhere, somewhere, there’s a neo-Nazi who says that the problem with German Nazism was that Hitler went too far, too fast, or some such thing, and that if a more attractive and patient leader took charge Nazism would rise again.
I don’t need to go into all the details, because if you follow this link you can get up to speed on them. But the gist of the story is that a senior engineer at Google wrote an internal memo questioning the idea that the reason women were not as numerous as men in tech jobs such as softwear engineering was due to discrimination rather than some more hard-wired differences between men and women.
Well, you can imagine what that sort of heresy unleashed—a firestorm of anger, hurt feelings, and demands (not just from women, by the way, but from a host of outraged SJWs) that he be fired.
And so it came to pass, with Google saying that although they love discussions of all sorts of issues, that particular one violated their dogma (otherwise known as the Code of Conduct).
Chilling, terrible, predictable.
Why did I use the word “Summersed” in the post’s title? It harks back to a topic I wrote about extensively early in my blogging career, the firing of Larry Summers as Harvard’s president. His offense was very similar, although slightly different. He dared to question the idea that female under-representation in the upper echelons of sciences—the pinnacle of achievement—might be due to something more than discrimination, and that the question was at least worthy of study.
For that, he was drummed out. Now, granted, Summers was already an unpopular president at the university for many reasons, so for a lot of people this was just the excuse to get rid of him. But for many others, it was what he said—what he dared to say—that threw them so.
It was a sad thing to realize that in an institution with Harvard’s reputation, such questions were so beyond the pale that they could not be mentioned and certainly not studied—even if true. Maybe especially if they turned out to be true. In the ensuing years the rot has spread to industry, particularly Silicon Valley tech firms such as Google.
Personally, I don’t care if women aren’t biologically as likely to enter tech fields in equal numbers to men. Why should I care, as long as the women who do want to enter, and who can do the work, don’t face discrimination in hiring? I’m sure there are professions for which men—on average, which are all we’re taking about, rather than individual men—aren’t as likely to have the aptitude or interest as women do. Who cares?
Lots of people, apparently.
[NOTE: You can find my Summers posts here and here as well as here.]
Nearly a third of territory reclaimed from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria since 2014 has been won in the past six months, due to new policies adopted by the Trump administration, a senior State Department official said Friday.
Brett McGurk, the State Department’s senior envoy to the anti-Islamic State coalition, said that steps President Trump has taken, including delegating decision-making authority down from the White House to commanders in the field, have “dramatically accelerated” gains against the militants.
It’s rather surprising that the WaPo is reporting on this.
A great deal of the good Trump might be able to do as president could come from non-interference with people doing their jobs. That’s also true of his policies on the border and illegal aliens and ICE, which includes the deterrence involved in perceptions of Trump’s position by those who would otherwise want to come here illegally:
“The number of illegal aliens apprehended in March 2017 was 30 percent lower than February apprehensions and 64 percent lower than the same time last year,” he said.
Vitiello said the combined efforts of the Trump administration have created a “perception” among illegal immigrants that it’s now much harder to stay in the United States, even if they make it across the border.
“Individuals who might seek to enter the country through unlawful channels do not want to invest significant resources only to be turned around at the border or removed soon after they arrive in the United States,” he said. “We have shown that we are serious about border security and enforcing our immigration laws.”
Another sign of success at the border is that the cost of smuggling people into the U.S. has jumped.
Even the NY Times reported that story back in March, although they hedged by using iffy language, with a headline that read (emphasis mine): “Illegal Border Crossings Appear to Drop Under Trump,” and text like this:
The data is likely to please supporters of President Trump and could let him take credit for quickly making good on his promise to clamp down on illegal immigration.
So, is it not likely to please anyone but Trump supporters? And does it only “allow him to take credit”? What about the fact that it might even be true, and that his “taking credit” might be justified?
You may have noticed that I haven’t discussed the brouhaha around White House security advisor H.R. McMaster—you know, the allegations that he’s working against Israel and eager to undermine all of Trump’s foreign policy.
That would seem to be big news, right? So why haven’t I gotten into it?
Well, in addition to my general all-purpose handy-dandy claim that I’m only one person and can’t cover everything (or even most things), I’ll add the more basic reason that so far I consider this story to be on the level of gossip rather than truth.
That doesn’t mean it isn’t true, of course. It just means that from the start I smelled a rat, and the rat isn’t McMaster. I have come to distrust such “people in the know are saying” reportage that attempts to smear someone, whether the anonymous allegations come from the left to smear the right, from the right to smear the left, or from the right to smear the right—or even from the left to smear the left. At this point, I’m cynical about all such blahbity-blah-blah, until subsequent events make the case stronger.
Today I found this Weekly Standard article summarizing what’s been going on in the McMaster situation:
The Daily Caller published an article the night of August 3 quoting “two former NSC officials” extensively. “Everything the president wants to do, McMaster opposes,” one of the former NSC officials told the Caller. One of the officials said McMaster was “subverting” Trump’s foreign policy and that the “Trumpian view” of Afghanistan was “shut down” by McMaster and his supposed band of Obama-era holdovers.
Several articles at Breitbart, meanwhile, have published what reads like opposition research on McMaster, including an August 6 piece that reported the Army general advised a British national-security think tank that counted as one of its donors the pro-Iran-deal Ploughshares Fund. The front page of Breitbart has featured critical stories about McMaster for several days. Bannon was the chairman of Breitbart before joining the Trump presidential campaign last year.
And blogger Mike Cernovich spends much of his Twitter feed blasting McMaster and NSC aides for their transgressions. Cernovich references many of these aides, who have no public profile, by name. The website McMasterLeaks.com is a collection of links to speculative stories about McMaster’s disloyalty to Trump or undermining of Trump’s agenda. The site also encourages readers to “post your leaks” about McMaster in the comments. Cernovich constantly tweets out links to McMasterLeaks.com and did not respond when I asked him if he’s behind the site.
The onslaught was enough to prompt the White House to issue a statement of support for McMaster from Trump on Friday. “General McMaster and I are working very well together. He is a good man and very pro-Israel. I am grateful for the work he continues to do serving our country,” Trump said.
There is obviously a concerted effort to undermine McMaster. He’s the most recent Trump-appointed aide who’s been targeted this way, and it started rather suddenly. I don’t know what the impetus was for the attack to begin, and although Bannon is a likely suspect I don’t necessarily think he’s the originator, either. I do know that I’m tired of unsourced gossip posing as news, and that some of it is seemingly generated on the right with targets on the right.
The Netherlands euthanasia thread on Saturday generated a fascinating discussion in the comments section about the use of morphine at end of life, so I thought I’d highlight it here and expand on my remarks.
First, a personal note. In the last few years, I’ve seen a few people die who have had their way eased by morphine. Like many and maybe even most people, I’ve long assumed that morphine is given to reduce pain and make it less laborious to breathe, and that it may hasten death as a sort of side-effect but that a quicker demise is not the goal. But a few months ago, when I looked up what medical experts on the subject had to say, I was extremely surprised to learn that my assumption wasn’t true.
The discussion on the euthanasia thread begins around here, with a commenter who wrote about the death of several loved ones, “It was the morphine that suppressed her breathing reflex, not the liver failure that killed her”¦ in both cases, it was morphine that led to respiratory failure.”
I referred that commenter (and anyone else who’s curious about the subject) to this site, one of many that discuss the issue:
When a patient is receiving regular pain medication such as morphine in the final hours or days of life, there is always a “last dose”. To family at the bedside, it may seem like the drug caused or contributed to the death, especially if death occurs within a few minutes. However, this dose does not actually cause the person’s dying. It is simply the last medication given in the minutes or hours before the death naturally occurs…
…[R]esearch suggests that using opioids to treat pain or shortness of breath near the end of life may help a person live a bit longer. Pain and shortness of breath are exhausting, and people nearing the end of life have limited strength and energy…
If a person has never received morphine, the initial doses given are low. They are gradually increased to relieve the person’s level of pain or shortness of breath. After a few days of regular doses, the body adjusts to the morphine. The patient becomes less likely to be affected by morphine’s most serious side effect””the slowing of breathing. It would take a large dose increase over a short time to harm someone. Morphine doses are increased gradually and only as needed to maintain comfort.
The following is especially important to note:
When someone has received too much morphine,…the person’s breathing becomes very slow and regular. Sometimes only one or two breaths are taken in a minute…
In the last few hours of the natural dying process, a person’s breathing becomes shallower and faster than normal.
So, one way to distinguish between the two phenomena is the rate of breathing. When someone is dying of an overdose, the breathing rate slows, and this happens not just in the last few minutes or seconds but over a longer amount of time prior to death. The opposite is true for someone dying naturally. Even with the administration of morphine, breathing is typically shallow and fast, and then towards the very end will often switch to what’s called Cheyne-Stokes respiration that has a different and characteristic pattern (see also this).
It’s understandable that families and other observers often perceive that morphine hastens death in hospitals. But as far as we can tell it is not actually happening that way in the vast vast majority of cases, unless an error has been made in dosage. An even fuller discussion of the subject can be found here. It talks in particular about the myth of this “double effect” of morphine hastening death when administered at end of life. Of particular interest is how that perception relates to the euthanasia debate:
A troubling result of the mistaken belief in the double effect of pain medication is its effect on discussions of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Giving pain medications is even referred to as indirect euthanasia, “double effect euthanasia,” or “accidental euthanasia.” For example, in one article, the authors stated that “a common example of indirect euthanasia is the administration of large doses of narcotics to a terminally ill patient in unbearable pain” And although the AMA’s Council on Ethical and judicial Affairs, in its “Decisions Near the End of Life,” rejected euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide and endorsed palliative care, the Council stated that the “ethical distinction between palliative care that may have fatal side effects and providing euthanasia is subtle. . . .”
In the past, the underlying theme of most discussions of the double effect of pain medication, even when referred to as indirect euthanasia, was that the administration of pain medications was ethical. Recently there has been renewed interest in “double effect euthanasia,” equating it to, and using it to support, legalized physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia. The argument usually takes one of two forms or some combination of the two. First, because hastening death by drugs is already being done and is ethical, perhaps we should extend medical practice to allow physician-assisted suicide. The second argument is that because physicians are already hastening death, we should legalize it to provide safeguards.
It appears that even many of the doctors who don’t specialize in end of life issues believe—incorrectly—in the “double effect” as a given. This belief in the double effect is also used by people who advocate physician-assisted euthanasia, who bolster their arguments by saying doctor-assisted euthanasia is already happening regularly anyway, just in hidden form.
Much food for thought.
…and lit that fire.
Who’s the “he” who described himself as having put on his Bach hat? Ray Manzarek, who was the inspired and superlative keyboardist for The Doors, and co-founder of the group with Jim Morrison.
Recently it was the 50th anniversary of the monster Doors hit “Light My Fire,” a song made uniquely wonderful by Manzarek’s organ playing. John Hinderaker of Powerline offers up a post for the occasion that features an interview with Manzarek from 1998 that’s well worth listening to, particularly if you’re a fan. That’s where Manzarek talks about his Bach hat.
I can’t seem to embed the interview here, so please follow the Powerline link I just gave and listen to the audio there. In the interview, Manzarek explains how the song was made and then transformed into what we’ve heard for 50 years (Happy Anniversary!) as one of the greatest rock songs ever. It was originally popular in the “short” version, the one that gave short shrift to Manzarek’s solo (although the rest of his playing was still wonderful). A long time ago most people became familiar with the fabulous “long” version in all its crescendo-building glory.
I’ve long been a big Manzarek fan, but I had never heard that interview before. And I certainly never heard any Bach in “Light My Fire”—not that I was looking for it, although now that Manzarek mentions it, it’s pretty easy to spot.
Enjoy.
[NOTE: Here’s my previous post on Manzarek, written on the occasion of his death in 2013.]
Euthanasia has been legal in the Netherlands since 2002, and since then the incidence of such deaths has risen to become 4.5 percent of all deaths. What’s more, the number of people availing themselves of this form of death who are not otherwise terminal has increased, as well.
Unsurprising. Disturbing.
The vast majority – 92 percent – had serious illness and the rest had health problems from old age, early-stage dementia or psychiatric problems or a combination. More than a third of those who died were over 80.
Requests from those who aren’t terminally ill still represent a small share, but have been increasing, Van der Heide said.
“When assisted dying is becoming the more normal option at the end of life, there is a risk people will feel more inclined to ask for it,” she said.
About 8 percent of the people who died in 2015 asked for help dying, the review showed. Van der Heide said about half of all requests are approved now, compared with about a third in previous years.
Not only is it a slippery slope, but it’s an exceptionally difficult issue involving liberty. Should people be allowed to choose to die, and to have medical assistance in carrying out their wishes? A strict libertarian would probably say “yes.” Most religious people and most religions would probably say “no.”
It troubles me that many of the people doing this in the Netherlands seem to merely be depressed (although depression can be so bad that “merely” really doesn’t seem to be the correct word). We have a situation in which some depressed people are committing suicide with the help of doctors. This seems so clearly wrong to me that I would think it beyond argument, and yet it’s been going on in that country for quite some time.
[NOTE: I know a number of elderly people who had said for years that if they ever came to the point of being very compromised, either in body or mind or both, they would kill themselves. Several owned the book Final Exit and praised it highly (I believe that one even belonged to the Hemlock Society), and at least two had access to enough medication to perform the act without assistance. And yet, when both of them failed (in body more than mind, although there was a moderate amount of memory loss for both) at very advanced ages, neither did a thing to end their lives. Their everyday existence was very diminished, and there was even a fair amount of pain, but both of them elected to let fate determine the hour of their deaths.]
Ann Althouse performed a task that very few people have taken on: she actually read the WaPo transcript of Trump’s call with Peé±a Nieto and closely analyzed it. What she found may surprise you, but it dovetails with my own impression from my own admittedly not-so-close reading.
The original reaction to the transcripts in the MSM and by Democrats and other Trump-opponents was generally that they revealed him to be stupid and/or clumsy and/or hypocritical. That’s what those readers were looking for, so of course they found it—mainly by fastening on isolated statements of Trump’s such as New Hampshire being a “drug-infested den” (I wrote yesterday about how that statement of Trump’s was true, if not literally, then basically).
Take a look for yourself at Althouse’s close reading of the talk between the two presidents. Here are her final remarks on the subject:
Now, what if anything is there in all of that to use against Trump? Really, the only thing is that he cares about his personal political success and doesn’t mind referring to it directly, even when the other guy insists that it’s all only about the public good. There’s nothing in there about Trump perhaps not really wanting to build a physical wall. He seems dedicated to that. You can’t see him conceding that Mexico won’t pay for the wall. What you see is some complicated, political structuring of a way to get the wall paid for that will probably satisfy the people who heard that promise and wanted it kept. But what can his antagonists grab onto? They can’t very well oppose crushing the drug gangs or better trade deals. So it’s no wonder they went big with Oh! He insulted New Hampshire! And that’s it for the transcripts. Don’t encourage people to actually read them. They might think Trump did just fine.
Indeed, that was my impression, too. Hey, let’s natter on about the nasty thing Trump said about New Hampshire—even though prior to this lots of us were talking about New Hampshire’s enormous opiate problem! Hey, stupidhead Trump doesn’t even know he lost New Hampshire (even though—shhhh!!—what he may have meant or even probably meant was that he won the New Hampshire primary, which he did)!
That’s the way the MSM operates, that’s what most people read, and that’s what many of them remember.
This time, however, I’m not so sure. As I also wrote yesterday, there’s been a lot of criticism of the MSM for publishing the transcripts, even from some normally anti-Trump sources. It’s fairly clear that the WaPo did it solely in an attempt to hurt Trump. There was absolutely no overriding reason the American people needed to know anything revealed in there. There was no smoking gun and really nothing much of note. So the WaPo’s Trump-destructive motives seem unusually transparent. Is it the old “give them enough rope” principle in action?