Pay Attention to the Details

 Over to The New Yorker there is long and well done evisceration of evolutionary psychology. It has in it, however a howler of an interpretive error. Gottlieb offers a little anecdote from Darwin's reception:

The idea of natural selection itself began as a just-so story, more than two millennia before Darwin. Darwin belatedly learned this when, a few years after the publication of “On the Origin of Species,” in 1859, a town clerk in Surrey sent him some lines of Aristotle, reporting an apparently crazy tale from Empedocles. According to Empedocles, most of the parts of animals had originally been thrown together at random: “Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders . . . and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads.” Yet whenever a set of parts turned out to be useful the creatures that were lucky enough to have them “survived, being organised spontaneously in a fitting way, whereas those which grew otherwise perished.” In later editions of “Origin,” Darwin added a footnote about the tale, remarking, “We here see the principle of natural selection shadowed forth.”

The problem here is obvious. Natural selection and Empedocles' just so story have nothing whatsoever to do with one another. Darwin hadn't heard or read and was not working in that intellectual tradition. He was, rather, engaged in a  modern scientific endeavor in which the facts mattered. Take, as an example, the peacocks tail or sexual selection. As Gotlieb points out Darwin, like all of us, was a prisoner of his culture. Nonetheless, he recognized that females had enormous influence on evolution even though it violated his cultural assumptions about women's inferiority.

In addition, Lamarcks' theory of acquired characteristics, which is a nearly perfect example of just soing, was one of Darwin's targets as were all the then current just so stories about speciation.  Darwin, for all his faults and warts, was most emphatically not just soing and, indeed, one reason why the Darwinian solution to evolution, natural selection plus descent with modification, was and is so important is that it provides both a wealth of evidence against just so but also a nearly-perfect example of how the application of scientific method to a knotty problem can resolve the problem and limit the distortion of cultural assumptions.

Missing The Point

Here is a E. Waugh's response to a publicist's enthusiastic call  for blurbs for Catch-22:

6 September 1961

Dear Miss Bourne,

Thank you for sending me Catch 22. I am sorry that the book fascinates you so much. It has many passages quite unsuitable to a lady's reading. It suffers not only from indelicacy but from prolixity. It should be cut by about a half. In particular the activities of "Milo" should be eliminated or greatly reduced.

You are mistaken in calling it a novel. It is a collection of sketches—often repetitious—totally without structure.

Much of the dialogue is funny.

You may quote me as saying: "This exposure of corruption, cowardice and incivility of American officers will outrage all friends of your country (such as myself) and greatly comfort your enemies."

Evelyn Waugh 

The times they were a changin'.

Can't Explain

Do you think Romney sees this as a stirring call to action?




Because it is a rambling and disconnected diatribe aimed squarely retire the petite bourgeoisie and the empty-headed fools who believe Rush Limbaugh's lies.

Inside Baseball

Josh Marshall goes all inside basebally to explain Perry's drop in the polls:

But stepping back from all the particulars, it seems to me that a key reason for Perry's burn up on reentry into the atmosphere after his rapid ascent in August is that his key political handlers -- and presumably Perry himself -- simply didn't grasp that the dynamics of national politics are just very different from those of Texas.

Ah brave new media with such people in it. How about this: Rick Perry is a moron and his policy positions are idiotic and moronic. The percentage of American voters willing to risk  their future to another moron with idiotic policies from Texas is vanishingly small. When Perry's policies weren't idiotic they were centrist Democratic policies and the percentage of Republicans willing to vote for centrist Democratic, which is to say workable if insufficient, policies is vanishingly small. As a consequence Perry's popularity dissipated. QED.

Why is it that pundits, new media or old, think that the key to explaining things is to pretend that there is some kind of a circle of seriousness and knowledge that they inhabit while others don't. It'd be one thing if Marshall or any of them were right more than they were wrong but the fact is they mostly don't know what they are talking about. Except Krugman and his political judgements are reliably utopian.  Perry and his advisers thought that the time was right for another Texas moron with idiotic policies; they where wrong.

Not Really a Contradiction

In today's NYT book review:

Gabrielle Chanel — better known as Coco — was a wretched human being. Anti-Semitic, homophobic, social climbing, opportunistic, ridiculously snobbish and given to sins of phrase-making like “If blonde, use blue perfume,” she was addicted to morphine and actively collaborated with the Germans during the Nazi occupation of Paris. And yet, her clean, modern, kinetic designs, which brought a high-society look to low-regarded fabrics, revolutionized women’s fashion, and to this day have kept her name synonymous with the most glorious notions of French taste and élan.

This is the kind of silliness that drives me nuts. To give a headline: Evil Wretches Still Capable of Artistry. The idea seems to be that if an individual can create something of lasting aesthetic value the fact that he or she was a horrific person ought surprise us despite the fact that the history of the world is filled with precisely those kinds of people.

In a similar fashion, and no doubt equally as surprising, louts with mongoose's aesthetic appreciation of fashion struggled against the evils with which Chanel collaborated. They might, of course, have appreciated something else and yet left nothing of "lasting" value behind but a well bred pig or neatly written ledger, or whathaveyou. Why, it's almost like the objects aesthetic appreciation and ethical actions have nothing whatsoever  to do with one another. 

How Soon He Forgets

Remember when Andrew Sullivan was all a twitter about the "Arab 1848" that his misunderstanding of the past and the use of historical analogy was on a nearly hourly display? Despite the continuation of the tumult his interest, if judged by posting, has dropped to zero. I have no real idea why this is but I would suggest that it is that fact that what is there going on is so complicated and the triumph of the masses, if that's what happen in Tunisia and Egypt and might yet happen elsewhere, so long in coming that he just plain lost interest or, more precisely, he wasn't much interested in the events on the ground as he pretended to be.

In the same way, outside of TPM or TPM-like outlets, despite information concerning the continuing and increasing foolishness and counterproductive nature of the anti-human policies of Scott Walker and his fellow travelers is difficult to find in the national news. Indeed, in TPM and its fellows, we mostly read of popularity versus unpopularity. Why? Again, I have no real idea but would suggest that the groundswell of support for traditional American remedies for the excesses of capitalism embarrasses  excess's most recent defenders: the Neoliberals left right and center wings.

In other words, once the reality underlying some phenomenon or another becomes complicated or runs counter to interests into the memory hole it goes.

Ross Douthat: Boy Theologian

Recently Ross Douthat weighs in on the issue of hell. Not surprisingly, he's for it. I'll leave it to others to debunk the biblical warrant for hell. Instead, there is this:

Atheists have license to scoff at damnation, but to believe in God and not in hell is ultimately to disbelieve in the reality of human choices. If there’s no possibility of saying no to paradise then none of our no’s have any real meaning either. They’re like home runs or strikeouts in a children’s game where nobody’s keeping score.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

This is sadistic and sadism is a sign of imperfection. If God assures that salvation is within the grasp of anyone who does as Christ wanted, caring for the least among us, etc, regardless of doctrinal orientation, it does not follow that everyone obtains salvation because some, like Conservatives, are actively violating these principles. The punishment is death everlasting while life everlasting is the reward. Beyond this God needn't go unless, of course, you think God is a sadistic bastard, in which case I'd say buy a nice coffin you'll be there a while.

Megan McArdle Doesn't Understand Choices

 Megan McArdle quotes Julian Assange argument that

in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems, by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, mass leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance.

And then mocks it:

This must be why Wikileaks has been getting so much material from the governments of China, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, and why internal documents from Cargill are currently dominating their traffic.  Ooops!  That was a flash from an alternative universe where what Assange is saying isn't nonsense.

This is called missing the point.  Assange makes a theoretical argument about how a decentralized internet or other communication method eases the lot of dissidents in unjust societies.  Its easier to distribute information on Facebook than via Samizdats. Consider the recent case of Iran.

She also argues that

I mean, it's certainly true that closed, secretive networks become less effective--but that doesn't mean they become less effective at the things we dislike them doing.  Stalin remained exceptionally good at purges and liquidations all through World War II, and that didn't stop him from helping to win the war, and dominating half of Europe.  It's just that it took more dead Russian boys to do it, because being secretive and purge-oriented kind of hampered the efficiency of the economy, leaving them a little short of key items like guns.  But since Stalin was running a super-secretive, centrally controlled regime, that insight didn't really matter.  

Except for being wrong about Stalin during the war, when the purges had to stop because they were inefficient and the fact that crash industrialization combined with lend lease led to more guns during the war, as opposed to before and after, she's absolutely right; which is to say her historical analogy proves the opposite of what she wants it to.

And she makes the claim that

 forcing the US military and the state department to become more secretive might well hamper their effectiveness.  But it seems most likely to hamper their effectiveness at things like nation-building and community outreach, where you need a broad, decentralized effort.  I don't see why they'd be much less effective at launching drone attacks.  To be sure, the drone attacks might kill a lot more innocent civilians.  But no doubt Assange thinks this is all to the good because it heightens the contradictions or something.

Why? Killing civilians via drones needs necessarily to be secret, saving people's lives is supposed to be open and above board. DoD and DoS can speak openly about providing food and clean water to civilians but they can't about the wedding party they killed under the mistaken impression that it was the Terrorists Annual Ball.  Similarly, the less openly they can speak about the odious things they do the harder those things are to accomplish, ayna?

She asserts that

[i]t's also worth noting that the assumption that secretive organizations will necessarily be undermined by leaks is only even arguably true in a world where they can't expand their sphere of influence to control the propagation of those leaks.  It will be clear to anyone who has ever visited China that we do not live in that universe.  And of course, the US government has plenty of room to expand its power.  And what truly worries me about Wikileaks is not the immediate damage that has been done by the release of this sort of information, but the fact that the latest drop has created an enormous, nearly unanimous backlash in the United States.  

Her point, I take it, is that Wikileaks will lead to a police state here in the good old US of A, long may her purpled mountains majesty.  Let's call the last but here the Franz Ferdinand Falsehood. People often say, when asked, that Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination sparked WWI and overly literal people think that the statement is meant to be literally true. It is actually a kind of short hand for a longer argument having to do with preexisting conditions, rising international tensions, short-sighted military and political leadership, and reactions to the assassination. If we avoid over reactions like McArdle's and others and insist on more transparency because, after all, everybody knew what was in Wikileaks, we can all live happily ever after, with tax increases for the wealthy and a pony for everybody else.

My larger point is and remains how we, as opposed to the state, respond to Wikileaks is our choice and, after living through the stupidity of 9/11 responses, I chose to applaud in the hopes of more transparency and less odiousness.