A note on the claim that Orwell's contradictory characterization of himself as a "Tory anarchist" illuminates the truth of the peril of too much government, say, for instance, socialism.
I don't see the truth being revealed by the contradiction.
The depredations of excessive statism, leaving aside statism itself, don't displace the vision of (say) Burkean Toryism, stable government changing incrementally, that slow bit by bit change to ward off the unforeseen consequences of too rapid and too much change at one time, and the related idea of maintaining an organic relation with custom and tradition, of keeping faith with the past and, so, making for an enduring, stable present and future.
Or, even if your conservatism has a big libertarian inflection, there is still the understanding of the decidedly non anarchist need for limited government, which squarely contradicts the premise of anarchism, that states by definition are coercive and evil as they are marked by their monopoly over force.
And in fact the monopoly over force is congenial with the night watchman role of the state, it providing security against violation from within and from without, those violations the condition of the state of nature, and security being the state's cardinal reason to be.
Finally anarchism is at bottom incoherent, a mode of nihilism, or, maybe better, of political nihilism. And recourse to its language or to famous intellectuals who've clothed themselves in its tropes offers no illumination of truth.
Is what I think.
Sent from my iPad
Sunday, August 27, 2017
White Privilege
A few thoughts on white privilege taken from a thread following the posting online of an article on it.
One misconception is that white privilege is reducible to not being totally or even sufficiently empathetic. It is rather, I think, being aware of the advantages that may presumptively accrue to something simply by being white. From that awareness, then, ought come compassion and understanding, a better understanding of one's self and of others. The misconception inverts the consequence and the premise.
There are of course tensions, paradoxes and nuances in the notion that sit with the reality it encapsulates. I couldn't begin here, or really anywhere, to give much of an account of them.
But, for one thing, since class is of such utter magnitude in our lives, that a black woman (say) growing up upper middle class and who had a top shelf university education, who asserts white privilege must realize her own class privilege and, taking it one step further, the privilege inhering in the innate gifts and talents she was born with and what they have enabled her to accomplish. So, a well employed, well paid, socially well ensconced, Ivy League graduate's assertion of white privilege based on a series of insensitive slights and dumb remarks to her sound precious and start to approach grievance mongering.
The white privileged asserter will as well acknowledge the truism that other groups, white ones too, have suffered, from outright depredations to daily mundane slights, simply by virtue of who they are, and, too, that the insistence on privilege entails the assertion of group victimization, not that that's a wrong assertion, but that it generates a kind of group formation in reaction, which at some point becomes divisively counterproductive. As Glenn Loury says and reported by George Packer:
....I recently spoke with the social scientist Glenn Loury, who teaches at Brown University. As he sees it, if race becomes an irreducible category in politics, rather than being incorporated into universal claims of justice, it’s a weapon that can be picked up and used by anyone. “Better watch out,” he said. “I don’t know how you live by the identity-politics sword and don’t die by it.” Its logic lumps everyone—including soon-to-be-minority whites—into an interest group. One person’s nationalism intensifies tribal feelings in others, in what feels like a zero-sum game. “I really don’t know how you ask white people not to be white in the world we’re creating,” Loury said. “How are there not white interests in a world where there are these other interests?” He continued, “My answer is that we not lose sight of the goal of racially transcendent humanism being the American bedrock. It’s the abandonment of this goal that I’m objecting to.”...
The asserter will need to have grappled with the limits on the utility of the notion of privilege--which while to some extent it is to be understood and internalized in dealing with things--is to be understood as well as ineradicable part of human nature as we all have and perforce react to all the differences among us, differences, inequalities, the randomness of life's lottery, our propensities and predispositions genetic and cultural, individual and group born.
Then, too, there is the potential freezing of social relations by the over insistent claim of privilege and its inherent drawing of racial divisions among us. I'm thinking of Mordecai Richler's black humor novel Cocksure, where the protagonist, Mortimer Griffin, in meeting a black woman, Rachel Coleman, is such at pains not to offend her in any conceivable way that he completely stultifies himself--their exchange described as frozen images staring at each other--and winds up offending her in any event, no little in part because in her view simply being white, "ofay," makes it impossible for him to understand her.
Saturday, August 26, 2017
Michael Connelly's The Burning Room
8/267/17
Michael Connelly's The Burning Room
Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch book The Burning Room has razor sharp talk, is deeply, maybe primarily, procedural yet never dry or boring. It moves quickly and is fascinating in the way it has Bosch working thorough each step of his investigation, no step taken too small to not merit some weighing of alternatives.
Lightly folded into Bosch as top flight investigator are touches from his life: his teen age daughter, his nearing retirement, his indifference to conventional proprieties and to being political, his love of jazz, his love life or, better, his recent lack of one. From all these blended touches, from his exchanges with those around him, his colleagues, those he answers to, others who answer to him, and from the relentless way he investigates, driven by an underlying moral passion to see justice done, emerges a whole and concretely vivid picture of a particular man
The storytelling starts with a just dead mariachi guitarist who dies from the lingering effects of being shot being shot 10 years prior. On extracting a bullet from the corpse, the chief pathologist determines the 10 year old shooting a murder.
From this premise spins out a story with many tentacles touching on a horrible barrio fire in which children died and that happening coincident with a cheque cashing store robbery over 20 years ago netting the robbers then big money--over $200,000.00, touching a nun with a bad past, touching a right wing extremist, touching high stakes California politicians including a most wealthy backer, touching Bosch's inevitable confrontations with politically infected police brass, touching his young female partner's back story and touching investigative trips around Southern California and to other states. From this welter of detail and of minor and major characters come complication and complexity as messy and as intriguing as life itself.
And in all of it, Bosch is unquestionably one of the good guys, questing for justice, utterly professional in his zealous yet controlled police work, thinking moves ahead in a chess like way. He likens interviewing suspects to entering a burning room. Tread carefully there, he advises his young partner: ...Because it’s a hot door, and we have to be careful. You never open a door on a burning room... Bosch scorns lazy detectives who won't expend investigative energy unless the science, the forensics, lays a a foundation for a workable theory. He's clearly old school, a variant, likely unintended, on Gerald Green's The Last Angry Man. In his controlled zeal, in his moral passion for just deserts, for setting wrong right, in his hard code of right and wrong, all the procedural and investigative detail work perfectly in allowing the complete and particular figure of Bosch emerge:
....The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever...
I recommend this book highly. It's a wonderful read and Connelly is a superb craftsman.
Michael Connelly's The Burning Room
Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch book The Burning Room has razor sharp talk, is deeply, maybe primarily, procedural yet never dry or boring. It moves quickly and is fascinating in the way it has Bosch working thorough each step of his investigation, no step taken too small to not merit some weighing of alternatives.
Lightly folded into Bosch as top flight investigator are touches from his life: his teen age daughter, his nearing retirement, his indifference to conventional proprieties and to being political, his love of jazz, his love life or, better, his recent lack of one. From all these blended touches, from his exchanges with those around him, his colleagues, those he answers to, others who answer to him, and from the relentless way he investigates, driven by an underlying moral passion to see justice done, emerges a whole and concretely vivid picture of a particular man
The storytelling starts with a just dead mariachi guitarist who dies from the lingering effects of being shot being shot 10 years prior. On extracting a bullet from the corpse, the chief pathologist determines the 10 year old shooting a murder.
From this premise spins out a story with many tentacles touching on a horrible barrio fire in which children died and that happening coincident with a cheque cashing store robbery over 20 years ago netting the robbers then big money--over $200,000.00, touching a nun with a bad past, touching a right wing extremist, touching high stakes California politicians including a most wealthy backer, touching Bosch's inevitable confrontations with politically infected police brass, touching his young female partner's back story and touching investigative trips around Southern California and to other states. From this welter of detail and of minor and major characters come complication and complexity as messy and as intriguing as life itself.
And in all of it, Bosch is unquestionably one of the good guys, questing for justice, utterly professional in his zealous yet controlled police work, thinking moves ahead in a chess like way. He likens interviewing suspects to entering a burning room. Tread carefully there, he advises his young partner: ...Because it’s a hot door, and we have to be careful. You never open a door on a burning room... Bosch scorns lazy detectives who won't expend investigative energy unless the science, the forensics, lays a a foundation for a workable theory. He's clearly old school, a variant, likely unintended, on Gerald Green's The Last Angry Man. In his controlled zeal, in his moral passion for just deserts, for setting wrong right, in his hard code of right and wrong, all the procedural and investigative detail work perfectly in allowing the complete and particular figure of Bosch emerge:
....The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever...
I recommend this book highly. It's a wonderful read and Connelly is a superb craftsman.
Monday, August 14, 2017
A Great Insight Into Overly Racialized Politics And Culture
8/14/17
Great point by Glenn Loury: actually it's an amazing point, something I cop to never having thought through as he has.
I wrote this to a friend after sending him the statement:
....What Loury says, embedded in a basic truth about our common humanity, that bedrock notion underlying an essential premise and promise of liberal democracy and underlying such notions as equality, justice, equal protection and the rule of law, is the best concise account I've ever come across on the terrible reductive logic of extreme identity/racial politics and race as a cultural imperative as they show themselves these days. Content of character not color or skin idea. It's not that there ought be no identity politics. Politics will always be interest groups vying for their interests. But when the balance between that and some notion of the common good rooted in our common humanity is so disjointed as it now is, Loury's statement is a big, incisive point of wise light...
The statement itself:
I recently spoke with the social scientist Glenn Loury, who teaches at Brown University. As he sees it, if race becomes an irreducible category in politics, rather than being incorporated into universal claims of justice, it’s a weapon that can be picked up and used by anyone. “Better watch out,” he said. “I don’t know how you live by the identity-politics sword and don’t die by it.” Its logic lumps everyone—including soon-to-be-minority whites—into an interest group. One person’s nationalism intensifies tribal feelings in others, in what feels like a zero-sum game. “I really don’t know how you ask white people not to be white in the world we’re creating,” Loury said. “How are there not white interests in a world where there are these other interests?” He continued, “My answer is that we not lose sight of the goal of racially transcendent humanism being the American bedrock. It’s the abandonment of this goal that I’m objecting to.”
Sent from my iPad
Great point by Glenn Loury: actually it's an amazing point, something I cop to never having thought through as he has.
I wrote this to a friend after sending him the statement:
....What Loury says, embedded in a basic truth about our common humanity, that bedrock notion underlying an essential premise and promise of liberal democracy and underlying such notions as equality, justice, equal protection and the rule of law, is the best concise account I've ever come across on the terrible reductive logic of extreme identity/racial politics and race as a cultural imperative as they show themselves these days. Content of character not color or skin idea. It's not that there ought be no identity politics. Politics will always be interest groups vying for their interests. But when the balance between that and some notion of the common good rooted in our common humanity is so disjointed as it now is, Loury's statement is a big, incisive point of wise light...
The statement itself:
I recently spoke with the social scientist Glenn Loury, who teaches at Brown University. As he sees it, if race becomes an irreducible category in politics, rather than being incorporated into universal claims of justice, it’s a weapon that can be picked up and used by anyone. “Better watch out,” he said. “I don’t know how you live by the identity-politics sword and don’t die by it.” Its logic lumps everyone—including soon-to-be-minority whites—into an interest group. One person’s nationalism intensifies tribal feelings in others, in what feels like a zero-sum game. “I really don’t know how you ask white people not to be white in the world we’re creating,” Loury said. “How are there not white interests in a world where there are these other interests?” He continued, “My answer is that we not lose sight of the goal of racially transcendent humanism being the American bedrock. It’s the abandonment of this goal that I’m objecting to.”
Sent from my iPad
Saturday, August 5, 2017
Romney vs Obama Revisited: Dan Balz's Collision 2012
8/5/17
I just finished Dan Balz's Collision 2012 on the nomination lead up to and the presidential campaign itself.
It's like seeing the whole shmeer reflected in a mirror, a selective mirror to be sure--there's no way to reflect it all, but fair, neutral and disinterested in its selection. The book is crisply written and incisive and shows off well the good shoe leather reporting behind it. "Reporting," that's one good encapsulation of the book.
One thing restruck me. I've always thought that a big turning point in the Romney Obama race was the second debate when Ben Ghazi came up. Romney backed off pressing on with the debate criticisms on Ben Gahzi that he began to thrust with, after his own and general pre debate scathing criticism of Obama for it even happening and the (non)response to it, criticisms coming from any number of angles.
Balz recounts Ben Rhodes "going back" and noting that Obama initially used the word "terror" describing the attack. Rhodes urged stressing that in the debate against the criticism that the Administration played politics with Ben Ghazi by (infamously) claiming an anti Muslim video spontaneously caused the attack rather than it being a concerted terrorist one. Obama did that. And it led to the famous Candy Crowley-the moderator-affirmation that Obama had indeed said "terror" while a perplexed and taken aback Romney kept denying Obama had said it and demanded proof.
Romney, in my view, internally fell apart by the clear image of the deflation of his criticism. Team Obama outpointed Team Romney in debate prep by coming up with that answer. And Romney in that instance didn't have the agility or wherewithal to parry Obama's combo of parry and thrust.
Romney's consternation showed.
Not discussed by Balz, but I remember that Romney then began a ridiculously formulated criticism of an alleged Administration stand down order to the U.S. military, it allegedly being a politically motivated decision, a reverse Wag The Dog. Romney was awkward in beginning that line of criticism and Obama acted like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. Rearing up some, he looked sternly at Romney and said, I paraphrase, "Are you saying I, as Commander in Chief, ordered a stand-down for political purposes?"
Romney backed off, tail tucked.
My thought watching the debate was that the whole Ben Ghazi thing was an opportunity lost by Romney. His team, as I note, should have anticipated Obama's answer using the word "terror." Even if unanticipated, Romney shouldn't have been so flummoxed and needn't have lost the gist of the "video critique," which the one early use of "terror" didn't really displace.
Moreover, there were many ways of getting in the stand-down order point without directly accusing Obama of it. The rationalized use of the video for political purposes could have evoked the theme of Obama's generally raising politics over meritorious action. Obama's delegation of command and control of the response to a couple of people and then virtually taking himself out that c and c loop save for the odd check in and briefing could have been a criticism in itself; and it might have been surmised to have been layering in a buffer between him and any such order, let alone any debacle in the response to the attack.
The issue could have been framed as "There are questions we don't know the answers to such as....and here are concerns that raise the questions..." The anchor of these approaches would have been the fact that there was no military response. Maybe framed too as res ipsa loquitur/the act speaks for itself, as lawyers say.
My sense is that the first debate Romney won had the makings of transforming the race. To continue those winning ways in the second debate would have rolled transformation right along. But with the debate collapse over Ben Ghazi, which done right could have been politically maiming if not lethal, Romney floundered, then and there support of resistant Rs who were starting to come around cooled off and the framing idea of the race's ongoing transformation into Romney winning and Obama losing ruptured.
I was put in mind of examinations I have done, especially cross examinations, when carefully thought through questions leading to specific mini coups de grace of sorts paid sizable rewards and, too, sad to say, just as many, when an unexpected answer or something missing in my analysis sent me internally reeling and set me back. I can't think of a case, mind you, that ultimately turned on opportunity lost, but then again of course every win and loss within a trial either helps or hurts.
In my way of seeing it, flubbing Ben Ghazi in the second debate hurt Romney a lot and can credibly be seen as an election costing opportunity lost.
Balz's book brought all those thoughts flooding back to me.
If anyone likes this kind of thing, retrospective looks at campaigns, I recommend this book to them.
I just finished Dan Balz's Collision 2012 on the nomination lead up to and the presidential campaign itself.
It's like seeing the whole shmeer reflected in a mirror, a selective mirror to be sure--there's no way to reflect it all, but fair, neutral and disinterested in its selection. The book is crisply written and incisive and shows off well the good shoe leather reporting behind it. "Reporting," that's one good encapsulation of the book.
One thing restruck me. I've always thought that a big turning point in the Romney Obama race was the second debate when Ben Ghazi came up. Romney backed off pressing on with the debate criticisms on Ben Gahzi that he began to thrust with, after his own and general pre debate scathing criticism of Obama for it even happening and the (non)response to it, criticisms coming from any number of angles.
Balz recounts Ben Rhodes "going back" and noting that Obama initially used the word "terror" describing the attack. Rhodes urged stressing that in the debate against the criticism that the Administration played politics with Ben Ghazi by (infamously) claiming an anti Muslim video spontaneously caused the attack rather than it being a concerted terrorist one. Obama did that. And it led to the famous Candy Crowley-the moderator-affirmation that Obama had indeed said "terror" while a perplexed and taken aback Romney kept denying Obama had said it and demanded proof.
Romney, in my view, internally fell apart by the clear image of the deflation of his criticism. Team Obama outpointed Team Romney in debate prep by coming up with that answer. And Romney in that instance didn't have the agility or wherewithal to parry Obama's combo of parry and thrust.
Romney's consternation showed.
Not discussed by Balz, but I remember that Romney then began a ridiculously formulated criticism of an alleged Administration stand down order to the U.S. military, it allegedly being a politically motivated decision, a reverse Wag The Dog. Romney was awkward in beginning that line of criticism and Obama acted like he couldn't believe what he was hearing. Rearing up some, he looked sternly at Romney and said, I paraphrase, "Are you saying I, as Commander in Chief, ordered a stand-down for political purposes?"
Romney backed off, tail tucked.
My thought watching the debate was that the whole Ben Ghazi thing was an opportunity lost by Romney. His team, as I note, should have anticipated Obama's answer using the word "terror." Even if unanticipated, Romney shouldn't have been so flummoxed and needn't have lost the gist of the "video critique," which the one early use of "terror" didn't really displace.
Moreover, there were many ways of getting in the stand-down order point without directly accusing Obama of it. The rationalized use of the video for political purposes could have evoked the theme of Obama's generally raising politics over meritorious action. Obama's delegation of command and control of the response to a couple of people and then virtually taking himself out that c and c loop save for the odd check in and briefing could have been a criticism in itself; and it might have been surmised to have been layering in a buffer between him and any such order, let alone any debacle in the response to the attack.
The issue could have been framed as "There are questions we don't know the answers to such as....and here are concerns that raise the questions..." The anchor of these approaches would have been the fact that there was no military response. Maybe framed too as res ipsa loquitur/the act speaks for itself, as lawyers say.
My sense is that the first debate Romney won had the makings of transforming the race. To continue those winning ways in the second debate would have rolled transformation right along. But with the debate collapse over Ben Ghazi, which done right could have been politically maiming if not lethal, Romney floundered, then and there support of resistant Rs who were starting to come around cooled off and the framing idea of the race's ongoing transformation into Romney winning and Obama losing ruptured.
I was put in mind of examinations I have done, especially cross examinations, when carefully thought through questions leading to specific mini coups de grace of sorts paid sizable rewards and, too, sad to say, just as many, when an unexpected answer or something missing in my analysis sent me internally reeling and set me back. I can't think of a case, mind you, that ultimately turned on opportunity lost, but then again of course every win and loss within a trial either helps or hurts.
In my way of seeing it, flubbing Ben Ghazi in the second debate hurt Romney a lot and can credibly be seen as an election costing opportunity lost.
Balz's book brought all those thoughts flooding back to me.
If anyone likes this kind of thing, retrospective looks at campaigns, I recommend this book to them.
Friday, August 4, 2017
An Argument For Beauty As Truth I Made To A Guy
So let's try it this way:
Truth: a transcendent fundamental or spirituality reality; fidelity to an original or a standard.
Beauty: the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit; an excellent quality; a brilliant instance.
We commonly speak of a "true" any number of things, a true shot, a true gentleman, a true lady, a true friend, as in real, genuine or authentic or as in of the right kind, such as it should be, proper. We can derive from these uses of true one idea of true as the exemplification of the ideal or of a standard. So what exemplifies an ideal or a standard is a form of one meaning of what is true.
Beauty has on the above definitions, among other meanings, the idea of exalted excellence, of the high instance of an ideal or a standard. For example, it would be odd to deny that a perfect rose, a perfect body, a gracefully executed athletic move and other exemplifications of an ideal or standard and that exalt us in mind or spirit are beautiful.
Therefore on the above definitions, all from standard dictionaries, beauty is a form of truth....
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