Tolkien left enough holes and contradictions in what he said about Tom to make room for speculation like this, I think. But I don’t think Tolkien ever intended any such thing.
The boys try a new format: 5 for 5. Five topics in 25 minutes.
1. To Kill a Mockingbird and Judge Kavanaugh. Isn’t the message of the book that you shouldn’t “believe all women”? How is it that most people in the country have read the book and don’t understand the simple message that an accusation does not prove guilt.
2. What’s with the hysteria about building the wall? We already have hundreds of miles of fence. It’s not like “the wall” is going to do anything but fill in the places we’re not already protecting. Would “extend the fence” have resulted in the same panic?
3. Perverts in the priesthood. Does the fact that the Roman Catholic Church only accepts men to the priesthood who are willing to forsake marriage and sexuality skew the population of people who apply to be priests? Isn’t it necessarily going to attract the wrong people, to some extent?
4. Sound fasting™. How much time in your day are you getting some sort of auditory input? We’re assaulted with sound all the time. Even when we’re pumping gasoline at the station. Can’t we have two minutes without somebody else’s voice in our ear? Can we take a break from the cacophany? Or are we afraid of silence?
5. Ozark / Breaking Bad and the Hero Arc. These popular shows have a common theme of the regular guy who gets caught up with some bad people. It’s very relatable, and you can see how you might get caught up in a similar situation. Pigweed hopes it’s going to be like the hero myth: he starts at home, he gets caught up in some catastrophe, he restores order, then he goes back home. 24 seems to follow that arc, but these shows seem to have lost that last part about restoring order.
Kevin Williamson has an interesting article about the Khashoggi mess, which is worth your time if you care about such things. What Do We Really Know about Saudi Arabia?
I don’t particularly care, although I’m sorry the guy got killed, of course.
But this caught my attention.
Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer insists that MBS (as Mohammad bin Salman is known) “would have had to give the order for any such murder.” But do we really know that? How has Trudy Rubin come into possession of information unknown to people who have worked closely with the Saudi government and the royal family for years?
Short answer: she almost certainly hasn’t. The most likely scenario is that she’s winging it to make some larger (partisan) point. E.g., MBS had to know, therefore the Saudi regime is evil, therefore I can get mad at Trump because he’s, once again, coddling a dictator. Or something.
That’s my assumption without having even read Rubin because that’s how things go these days.
But why might a Saudi leader assume he could carry out such a brazen move without tarnishing the Saudi image? Perhaps because he was a close friend of first son-in-law Jared Kushner, or because he had been adulated by President Trump, who considers the Saudis to be his closest Arab Mideast ally.
And perhaps because Trump is so cozy with other leaders who are hostile to journalists and is himself a fierce critic of mainstream media. Gone is the time when the United States stood in defense of press freedoms. Trump’s relentless attack on U.S. news outlets that critique him, as “fake news” or “enemies of the people,” has had a negative impact worldwide.
Oh, shut up and go hire a fact checker! And while you’re doing that, meditate on this.
Trump tries out various attacks and snubs and insults and whatnot at his rallies. If they resonate, he uses them. And “fake news” resonates really, really well because … big surprise here … most of it is fake!
The purpose of any news story these days is to defend or attack Trump. Trump has invaded everybody’s mind, like some sort of mental virus. Everything is about him, 24-7, and never mind if you can prove your opinion or not, whether you’re making it all up, or whether you pretend to have knowledge you can’t possibly have. That doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you’re pushing the agenda.
The left-wing media does this stuff constantly (which is why Trump’s criticisms of the media resonate), but so does the right-wing media (which is why left-wing criticism of Fox News resonates).
E.g., when Fox News pretends to know what’s behind the secret testimony that hasn’t been released yet, or what really happened in the FISA court, or what the deep state is up to, etc. They don’t know these things. They’re just playing off the audience’s desire to believe in the conspiracy.
So many of the stories — from left and right — are based on innuendo and speculation. And by the time we learn what’s actually going on, and the conspiracy theory has lost some of its mojo, we’re on to the next made-up fact to support the conspiracy theory.
#Instapundit likes to say “if you think of them as Democratic operatives with bylines, it all makes sense.” And he’s completely right, so far as the legacy media is concerned. And the reverse is true of right-wing media.
There’s a really funny joke at the top of this story — Keeping it Casual — and then the article goes on to discuss stuff you should already know, and which was cataloged in depth in Eggs are Expensive, Sperm is Cheap.
A few years ago, after reading some book about all the weird things we do without knowing why we do them, I spent a little more time observing my own actions, and I noticed one strange thing that I do.
When I would get on an elevator with another person, and that person got off before I did, I would move over and take the space of the person who had left.
What a horribly weird thing to do! I figure it’s some territorial instinct from deep in my brain. (And now that I’m aware of it, I don’t do it any more.)
Humans do lots of things like that. We’re incredibly complicated creatures who don’t understand most of our own behavior, but we have a thin veneer of sentience spread on the top of a churning cauldron of mess.
Sometimes we fool ourselves into imagining that we do everything intentionally and rationally, but that’s a serious delusion. It only takes a little bit of self reflection to realize this. For example, we don’t always know why we get angry, or why we’re horny, or why we’re having a good or a bad day.
Atheists …. But now I’m going to have to stop and clarify what I mean, because atheists come in varieties just like everybody else.
Just as there are believers who know what they believe and why, and other believers who simply believe (out of habit or something), there are aware and unaware, intelligent and unintelligent atheists.
We have a stereotype of the well read, strident, argumentative atheist, who may be an ass, but at least he generally knows what he’s talking about, and most people would (reluctantly) regard him as intelligent. But there’s another class of atheist — the low-life “no religion” version — who also doesn’t believe in God. They outnumber the smart ones.
Anyway, the intelligent, well-read atheists tend to know about these weird things that humans do. Many atheists like to read articles about evolutionary biology — presumably so they can find a scientific origin for our moral intuitions — and they can probably tell you why men prefer women with long hair, etc.
They know (or they suspect they know) that the “real” reasons for our choices are often deeply complicated and confusing, and that our conscious explanations for our choices are often post-hoc justifications.
Which all reminds me a little of a quote attributed to Jordan Peterson (I think he got it from Jung) that says “everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is.”
The mythology of the intelligent atheists is that if we were more rational, and did away with all this weird religion stuff, we’d be much happier, more moral, etc. The agenda is to refashion our moral instincts and cultural norms on science and reason!
Please, please no. This all stems from a very dangerous delusion, and the program won’t end well. For one very simple reason.
We don’t understand ourselves very well at all. We don’t understand our own motives, because many of our decisions are made — for lack of a better term — by our bodies. Like that weird thing I did in the elevator.
There is no way anybody is going to be able to “reason” into all the weird stuff that we do. We’ve developed our moral instincts and rules over a very, very long period of time. Not because some genius sat down and reasoned them out, but because we stumbled and bumbled our way into rules that worked.
Art and literature and culture and religion and music are a kind of common reflection on human experience. We read a good novel or listen to a good song and get an insight into human behavior because creative people are reflecting on humanity in a way most people don’t understand. The artist himself might not understand. (I’ve had that experience myself, where people have shown me things in my own books that I didn’t consciously intend.)
Weird things that we do — like pray, or gather together to pray, or give thanks, or offer a sacrifice, or sing, or dance — have survived throughout time and across cultures because they reflect some deep reality about who and what we are. We have only the slightest glimmer of why these things are important, or why they work.
Asking humans to reason their way into moral and cultural rules is almost as bad as asking a chimpanzee why he likes bananas.
Why is sacrificing an animal going to help a guilty conscience? It makes no “rational” sense — in that thin veneer of rationality that might account for 1/10th of what we actually do in our lives — but it clearly has a deeply human significance.
Tearing all this stuff away because the angry atheist doesn’t understand it is a very foolish thing to do.
Pigweed has women on his mind, and decides he might be a feminist.
To lubricate their brains for such a dangerous topic, the boys drink and review Pigweed’s Well Digger Robust Porter, which is a delightfully dark, malty, slightly chocolate-flavored porter.
Is feminism about equality? Crowhill says it’s not. Only men register for the draft, but you don’t see feminists complaining about that. Men get harsher sentences for the same crimes, but you don’t see feminists complaining about that. So the idea that feminism is about equality is plain BS.
On the good side of feminism, Pigweed and Crowhill believe in women’s rights. Women shouldn’t be excluded from any opportunity. There shouldn’t be artificial barriers to women, and we shouldn’t say that some things are “men’s work” or “women’s work.” People should be treated as individuals.
In general, we shouldn’t have barriers to people based on group characteristics. People should be treated according to their individual achievements and talents.
What about equality vs. equity. There’s an important distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome. Crowhill wonders what the heck equality actually means. Female gorillas aren’t the same as male gorillas. Female chimpanzees are the same as male chimpanzees. What makes us think female humans are the same as male humans?
The truth is that males and females are different, and one of the main differences is that men are more represented on the extremes of the distributions. (The bell curve.) There are more male geniuses, but there are more male dunces. There are more very successful men, and more men in the gutter. And diversity training isn’t going to change that.
There is no evil patriarchy oppressing women. Women have every opportunity to do whatever they want to do, and that’s a good thing.
In summary, neither our model projections for the 21st century nor our analyses of trends in Atlantic hurricane and tropical storm counts over the past 120+ yr support the notion that greenhouse gas-induced warming leads to large increases in either tropical storm or overall hurricane numbers in the Atlantic. … [I]t is premature to conclude that human activity–and particularly greenhouse warming–has already caused a detectable change in Atlantic hurricane activity.
Also, even if the United States had done everything Al Gore wanted, from the first time he latched on to his Chicken Little views of the climate, it would have had almost no effect. China puts almost twice as much CO2 in the atmosphere as we do.
I’m in meetings this week, and so is my boss. So when this email came this morning, it didn’t seem that odd.
Subject: Urgent request
Are you available at your desk. Reply my email.
I am in a meeting.
Most people with a pulse know not to click on suspicious links in emails, but … replying doesn’t seem all that dangerous, so I was a little off my guard and replied to the effect that I was at my desk. (Yes, I did notice the typo, but typos are common in emails, especially when people dictate them.)
When the reply came back about the need to buy some gift cards, I started to get suspicious. Not that we never buy gift cards, but … my boss is a capable person and would have done that herself. When I looked at the original email a little more carefully, it was obvious the email was not from my boss. (E.g., it said “Sent from my iPad” and she doesn’t have an iPad.)
I replied, …
Thanks for your email. I didn’t buy the gift cards, but I did hire some Romanian hackers to track down your system and infect it with ransomware. Good luck.
The spooky thing about this attempted scam is that the scammer knew multiple names in our organization, and may have known who reported to whom.
A few months ago, somebody tried to trick our CFO into sending money to some address in Virginia. It was an elaborate effort, where they not only knew our org chart, but what banks we use, and other sensitive information.
You already know this, but … be warned. It’s not just Nigerian princes trying to scam you these days.
