Pun Salad

• Our Eye Candy du Jour… from the brilliant Mr. Bragg at Reason: Student Loan Forgiveness Explained. Pay attention to the background colors…

  Will ridicule work where rational argument has failed? Stay tuned.

  ---

• A sobering note. It's from Blake Flayton at Bari Weiss's Common Sense: My Post-Graduation Plan? I’m Immigrating to Israel..

  I had always felt at home in America. It was my home and my parents’ home and my grandparents’, and it never seemed like it could be any way else. But three weeks from now, I am leaving the place where I was born and making a new life in Israel. The story of why is the story of a growing cohort of Gen Z Jews who see what the older generations cannot yet see: That the future doesn’t feel like it’s here as much as there.

  When people ask me what the origin point is—when I knew I would leave—it’s not one particular moment, but a collection. Among them:

  • The drunk girl at my alma mater, George Washington, caught on video in November 2019, saying, “We’re going to bomb Israel, you Jewish pieces of shit.”

  • The Hillel that was spray-painted with “Free Palestine” in July 2020, at the University of Wisconsin.

  • The Chabad House set on fire in August 2020, at the University of Delaware.

  … and numerous other examples at the link.

  While others complain about "microagressions"… sheesh.

  I hope things work out for Mr. Flayton. I also hope things work out for an America that he couldn't comfortably accept as home.

  ---

• "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small." Megan McArdle covers another spat among the smart set: A fight among historians shows why truth-seeking and activism don’t mix.

  In a somewhat rambling essay published Aug. 17, James H. Sweet, president of the American Historical Association, argued that his profession is succumbing to “presentism,” the temptation to read all of history through a contemporary lens — in particular, through an emphasis on modern social justice issues. His assertion seems to be backed up by a quick perusal of the program for the AHA’s most recent conference, which is heavy on topics such as “Queering the Presidency” and “Decolonizing and Recentering Indigenous Specialists.”

  “The allure of political relevance, facilitated by social and other media, encourages a predictable sameness of the present in the past,” Sweet warned. The result, he said, is “ahistorical.”

  Historian Twitter exploded — there were rants and calls for resignation and, eventually, a groveling apology. Some of the critiques were substantive responses. But others rather proved Sweet’s point, rolling eyes at the old White guy who hasn’t gotten with the times.

  See the Quote Investigator for the provenance of this article's headline.

  ---

• Distorting biology and history! A Twofer! Biologist Jerry Coyne has made the modern "woke" Scientific American into a punching bag for a while now, and he takes aim at the magazine's latest: Once again, Scientific American distorts biology, and now history, to buttress its ideology.

  For the umpteenth time we find Scientific American distorting empirical data for the sake of buttressing a “progressive” ideology. In this case the magazine has produced a short article as well as a video on “the sex binary” (there’s also an earlier article and video on sex, but on a different topic: sex-specific variations in health).

  Both the video and the article below are devoted to debunking the idea that sex is a binary trait in humans. And they both reach the same conclusions:

  1. People with true intersex conditions are often subject to unnecessary and harmful genital and reproductive surgery when they are too young to consent.
  2. People with true intersex conditions are so common that one cannot say that sex is binary in humans. Rather, biological sex is characterized as a “continuum.”

  I agree with the first point, which is an ethical one. Of course children with ambiguous genitalia or other deviations from the strict “male” and “female” dichotomy should not be subject to drastic surgical intervention until they’re old enough to consent, particularly when those conditions won’t cause irreparable damage before the age of consent. What rational person could object to that? And who could argue that intersex individuals, or any individuals who can’t immediately be placed in the sex binary, should be treated as inferior to other people?

  No, my problem is with #2: the claim that sex in humans is not a binary.  This would be true if we had more than two sexes, and the other sex (or sexes) was quite common. But this is not the case.  We do not have more than two sexes: the “intersex” individuals, apparently considered by Scientific American (but not science itself) as “members of other sexes” are not. They are usually sterile, and do not constitute a “sex” in any meaningful sense. Rather, they are deviations, due to genetic or developmental anomalies, from the normal binary, just as many aspects of the development of other traits (limbs, brains, etc.) can seriously deviate from the “normal” condition.

  The SciAm article is here: How Medicine's Fixation on the Sex Binary Harms Intersex People. I'm pretty sure a lot of people are wondering: are you sure that "fixation" belongs to "medicine"?

  ---

• And it's not just SciAm. Jesse Singal's headline makes a point that shouldn't need to be made: It Is Bad To Alter Or Retract Published Research That Has No Factual Errors, Even If You Are Doing It “For Social Justice”.

  On August 18, the journal Nature Human Behavior published an editorial called “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.” The editorial is draped in reasonableness — who could be against dignity and rights for all humans? — and contains some unobjectionable arguments, like how it’s important to “[d]efine categories [of humans] in as much detail as the study protocol allows,” which, okay. But its primary goal, if you read it carefully, is to expand the number of reasons scientific articles can be rejected for publication or, most troublingly, edited or retracted post-publication.

  Early on, the article contains the ominous sentence “Although academic freedom is fundamental, it is not unbounded.” Whenever someone feels the need to express opposition to a belief held by just about no one, it’s a sign of potentially choppy intellectual waters ahead. To be fair, I don’t know how seriously this policy will be taken or if researchers will really try to use it as a cudgel to force retractions. But boy, is it half-baked. It nicely demonstrates the extent to which the careless injection of political values (guised as reasonableness) into science can cause trouble.

  Singal points out some obvious problems: the article posts criteria for prospective publications, and they are "incredibly vague". And worse (as implied by the headline): "research that is perfectly valid and well-executed could run afoul of these guidelines."

  There's no reason to "trust the science" when progressive ideologues control what acceptable results are.

I came late to the party here. I was stunned by Amor Towles' previous book, A Gentleman in Moscow. So I resolved to read this as soon as it became available at the Portsmouth Public Library.

Reader, the book was published in October of last year. The library owns ten copies (three large print). And only now was I able to snag a copy off the shelf.

Unsurprising. Because it's a wonderful book. (See the Amazon page for all the well-deserved praise.)

The book starts with teenaged Emmett being brought back home to Morgen, Nebraska after a 15-month stint at a work farm in Salina, Kansas. He was there for involuntary manslaughter: an unfortunate mostly-accident when a hot-tempered punch caused a bully to hit his head on a tent spike.

Emmett has been released early on compassionate grounds: his father, a failed farmer, has died. And he's left Emmett and his young brother Billy with a foreclosed-upon farm, their only remaining asset being a Studebaker gathering dust in the barn, and a tidy sum in cash hidden from the bankers. Emmett and Billy resolve to make a fresh start in California, following the titular highway, as their mother did years back when she abandoned them.

But things are complicated when two of Emmett's acquaintances from the work farm show up, having sneaked into the trunk bringing Emmett back to Nebraska. There's Wooley, a tender but error-prone soul who got dumped into the work farm by his well-to-do New York family. And Duchess, a smart, funny, charismatic kid, burdened by a desire for score-settling and an advanced notion of situational ethics. (Mainly expressed by his answers to the questions: "How do I work this situation to my advantage?" and "How am I going to get out of this situation?" That works out for him, until it doesn't.)

It takes about a hundred pages for any of them to get out of Nebraska. And a surprisingly small amount of time is spent on the Lincoln Highway. The foursome's escapade develops in completely unexpected ways. There's a large supporting cast of expertly-drawn characters. Their situations are full of humor and (alas) pathos.

Enough said. If you need my recommendation: just read it; you won't be sorry.

Portsmouth is somewhat of a bastion of progressivism in New Hampshire, and that's reflected in its library. The staff took the liberty of producing an "Anti-Racism Zine" last year, enthusiastically weighing in on the Robin DiAngelo/Ibram X. Kendi/Angela Y. Davis side of a contentious public issue.

Fortunately, however, they do a decent job of keeping their shelves ideologically neutral. And when I submitted a suggestion for the purchase of this Noah Rothman book, they agreed, and even put it on hold for me when it came in. Now, I'm under no illusion that casual browsers in months hence will pick up the book, read it out of curiosity, and, bingo, Portsmouth Bernie Sanders voters en masse turn into National Review conservatives. I'm just happy to have it there, in case.

The author is the Associate Editor of Commentary, and I've mentioned him favorably over the years (here, here, here, here) I thought his 2019 book, Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, was flawed but basically OK. This one is very good.

Of course, Mencken's famous definition of Puritanism is deployed early on: "The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Zing!

But, somewhat surprisingly, Rothman does not use "Puritan" as a simple epithet. (Something I didn't know: the term was originally conceived as an epithet.) That would have been pretty easy to do: simply pick and choose from the hundreds of tales of censorship, deplatformings, deinvitations, cancellations, firings; arrange them into themes, and voilà, you got a book. Instead, he looks back at the historical heyday of Puritanism, mostly in America, and if you (like me) were only paying fleeting attention during your history classes, you'll learn a lot.

Rothman shows how the "new" Puritans unconsciously echo the attitudes and actions of those bygone figures, and how that plays out in many areas, with tactics we've all noticed: theological-style indoctrination, denunciation and persecution of apostates, censorship of literature and art, humorlessness, and (above all) earnestness. (As P. J. O'Rourke observed: "Earnestness is stupidity sent to college". The Puritans, it should be noted, founded Harvard.)

Rothman laces his trenchant narrative with a dry wit: he notes that, in decline, the Massachusetts Puritans referred to the increase in civil litigation to resolve disputes as "creeping 'Rhode Islandism'". And comments: "Even today, the very concept is enough to strike fear into the hearts of anyone who doesn't live in Rhode Island."

And, it should be noted, Rothman goes out of his way to demonstrate that, in both historical and modern versions, Puritanism isn't an unalloyed bad. Historically, for example, they were famed for the "Puritan work ethic". Hey, I'm a fan. And in the current age, the new Puritans really did, for example, improve things in the workplace for women and minorities. (Not without going overboard in many cases, of course, but still.)

What about "fighting back", as promised in Rothman's subtitle? To a certain extent, the old Puritans carried the seeds of their own eventual irrelevance. (One of their last gasps, however: the witch trials.) Rothman recommends mockery; and clarifying "where culture ends and politics begins".