Tuesday: Hili dialogue

June 11, 2024 • 6:45 am

Welcome to the Cruelest Day: Tuesday, June 11, 2024, and National Corn on the Cob Day.  I used to have a picture of Matthew Cobb with a can of corn on his lap, which I called “Corn on the Cobb”, but I can’t find it.  This photo of elote, the tasty Mexican version, will have to do:

SimpleFoodie, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also Call Your Doctor Day, National German Chocolate Cake Day (not cultural appropriation!), Pizza Margherita Day, World Pet Memorial Day, and, in Hawaii, King Kamehameha Day,

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*On Sunday French President Emmanuel Macron experienced a humiliating defeat when, after the elections for the EU parliament, his own Renaissance party’s representatives were roundly defeated (31.4% to 14.6%) by Marine Le Pen’s right-wing National Rally Party (it seems that all of Europe is moving sharply rightward). In respond, Macron made a gamble: he summarily dissolved one of the two houses of the French Parliament and called for new elections. From the NYT:

On the face of it, there is little logic in calling an election from a position of great weakness. But that is what President Emmanuel Macron has done by calling a snap parliamentary election in France on the back of a humiliation by the far right.

After the National Rally of Marine Le Pen and her popular protégé Jordan Bardella handed him a crushing defeat on Sunday in elections for the European Parliament, Mr. Macron might have done nothing. He might also have reshuffled his government, or simply altered course through stricter controls on immigration and by renouncing contested plans to tighten rules on unemployment benefits.

Instead, Mr. Macron, who became president at 39 in 2017 by being a risk taker, chose to gamble that France, having voted one way on Sunday, will vote another in a few weeks.

“I am astonished, like almost everyone else,” said Alain Duhamel, the prominent author of “Emmanuel the Bold,” a book about Mr. Macron. “It’s not madness, it’s not despair, but it is a huge risk from an impetuous man who prefers taking the initiative to being subjected to events.”

Shock coursed through France on Monday. The stock market plunged. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, a city that will host the Olympic Games in just over six weeks, said she was “stunned” by an “unsettling” decision. “A thunderbolt,” thundered Le Parisien, a daily newspaper, across its front page

The risk, of course, and it’s substantial, is that the National Rally Party would win the elections, national ones this time. From an earlier NYT article:

If the National Rally repeats its performance in national elections, the country could become nearly ungovernable, with Mr. Macron confronting a Parliament hostile to everything he believes in.

“It’s a serious, weighty decision,” he acknowledged. “But above all, it’s an act of trust” in French voters, he said.

French parliamentary elections take place in two rounds. The second round will be held on July 7, less than a month from now.

Given France’s important place at the heart of the European Union, the European election result was a significant sign of a strong rightward drift in Europe, driven mainly by concerns over uncontrolled immigration. The nationalist right has also been far more ambivalent than Mr. Macron and other Western leaders about supporting Ukraine.

. . . A National Rally triumph in the legislative elections that Mr. Macron just called would not topple him from office. But depending on the results, it could force him to appoint a prime minister from his political opposition — perhaps even from the National Rally.

And France would be in chaos. Why is Macron doing this? He didn’t have to dissolve Parliament; he decided to.  I don’t know enough about French politics to give an answer, and the NYT says just this:

“France is a country of the discontented, but Mr. Macron has provoked an acute form of personal resentment,” Mr. Duhamel said. “He has given many French people the feeling of being inferior, and they detest that.”

Such is the animus that Mr. Macron may have encountered, he might well have been forced to dissolve a Parliament where he does not have an absolute majority in the fall anyway.

I asked Matthew’s opinion, as he knows a lot about France, and here’s his answer:

[Macron] is trying to regain the initiative. His party has a fragile majority in parliament, and has been ruling by decree for the last year. This way he hopes he can oblige the right to unite around him, and the left to vote for his party in the second rpund of the elections where they face an RN candidate. That’s how he got elected President, twice, with the voters of the Left gritting their teeth and voting for him against the Le Pen. He has never had a majority of French people *for* him. But he has created such havoc and compromised with the politics of the RN (except on Europe and Ukraine) over the last 6 years that he may have used up that political capital. We will see….
He added this, too:

“Perhaps more significant in Macron’s eyes, and it seems to have worked: he has destroyed what remains of the old right wing party, which claims to be the inheritor of de Gaulle. They have just said they will stand in the election with the RN (the inheritors of Petain…) They will be shattered forever. (They are now called Les Républicains. Used to be called the RPR [Chirac’s party]. Macron’s project has always been to get rid of the old parties of right and left. )

*NBC News reports that the U.S. is contemplating cutting a side deal with Hamas (without the presence of Israeli representatives) to free the American hostages. (h/t: Bill)

Biden administration officials have discussed potentially negotiating a unilateral deal with Hamas to secure the release of five Americans being held hostage in Gaza if current cease-fire talks involving Israel fail, according to two current senior U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials.

Such negotiations would not include Israel and would be conducted through Qatari interlocutors, as current talks have been, said the officials, all of whom have been briefed on the discussions.

White House officials declined to comment.

The Biden administration has said it believes Hamas is holding five American hostages who were abducted during the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel. U.S. officials are also hoping to recover the remains of three additional U.S. citizens who are believed to have been killed on that day by Hamas, which then took their bodies into Gaza.

The officials did not know what the United States might give Hamas in exchange for the release of American hostages. But, the officials said, Hamas could have an incentive to cut a unilateral deal with Washington because doing so would likely further strain relations between the U.S. and Israel and put additional domestic political pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

One of the former officials said the internal discussions have also taken place in the context of whether the possibility of the U.S. cutting a unilateral deal with Hamas might pressure Netanyahu to agree to a version of the current cease-fire proposal.

I haven’t thought at length about this, but it sounds to me like a bad idea. We are allies with Israel and should be solving this problem together, nor should the U.S. be helping Hamas (note: this isn’t Palestine they’re bargaining with) in any way. What could the U.S. give Hamas that wouldn’t help them?  On the other hand, I can see that it’s a way to give five human beings their freedom, and Biden’s real brief is to help Americans if he can.  On the other hand, it seems like an election-year stunt, and ideally the U.S. would be working with Israel to get ALL the hostages freed. (But we’re not in agreement on the negotiations.) On the third hand, Thailand did cut a side deal to get its hostages back by releasing Palestinian prisoners. (I am not sure how many Hamas members are in U.S. prisons, and whether Hamas would want them back badly enough.) This is a diplomatic and moral dilemma, and I can see both sides.  I just don’t think Biden should be helping Hamas, though if they’ll let Americans go in return for a handful of Arab terrorists being released from prison, perhaps it’s worth considering. Readers should weigh in.

*In light of the recuse of four Israeli hostages by the IDF, Hamas has now issued orders to any of its “operatives” to kill any hostages if the IDF shows up.

Hamas terrorist leaders have given standing orders to operatives who are holding hostages saying “that if they think Israeli forces are coming, the first thing they should do is shoot the captives,” according to Israeli officials quoted by The New York Times on Monday.

Two days after the Israel Defense Forces’ rescue of four hostages from Nuseirat in central Gaza, the newspaper reported that if other hostages were killed on Saturday, as Hamas has claimed, “it might have been at the hand of the [terrorists], not because of an Israeli airstrike.”

The IDF has directly rejected a Hamas claim that three hostages were killed by Israeli airstrikes, the report noted.

The two buildings where the four hostages were kept were about 200 meters apart, and a decision by security forces to go for both simultaneously on Saturday was due to the concern that Hamas may murder the hostages after identifying the rescue operation at the other location.

The Times also reported on Washington’s contributions to hostage-rescue efforts since almost immediately after Hamas’s October 7 massacre in southern Israel, quoting US officials as saying that “the sheer numbers of American aircraft” gathering intelligence over Gaza have been able to surface information that Israeli drones missed.

“At least six MQ-9 Reapers controlled by Special Operations forces have been involved in flying missions to monitor for signs of life,” the officials were quoted as saying.

Well, I’m delighted that the U.S. is sticking with Israel and helping it gather intelligence. My question is what Hamas has to gain by shooting hostages if the IDF shows up.  It loses bargaining chips, for one thing.  Their response might be that there’s no surviving an encounter with the IDF, and why give up hostages that Israel wants if you’re going to die. Another thought I had was, “Just surrender if the IDF shows up. You may have to give up your hostages, but you don’t die.” Then I remembered that true Muslims want to die, as you get eternal benefits in heaven from martyrdom.   I asked Malgozata earlier, and she, like me, didn’t have a cut-and-dried answer. A half hour later she sent me this:

The answer to your question of why Hamas they kill hostages when the IDF shows up came to me after we finished talking. They keep hostages alive only as long as they need them to extract some benefits from Israel. Otherwise, why let those infidels live? Killing infidels is pleasing to Allah. Then we went for a walk and I told Andrzej about your question. He reminded me about the Nazis in the last weeks of the war. They needed men and fuel for fighting but they still used a substantial portion of both to kill Jews. Their aim was to kill all Jews on Earth and they tried to kill as many as possible even when they could see Russian tanks on the horizon. And this was pure, earthly ideology, no heavenly rewards were promised. So pure hate can achieve such an outcome.

Readers are of course invited to weigh in on this issue.

*The Washington Post has an op-ed called “A scientific controversy at the Supreme Court“, which of course got my antennae waving. It turns out that while nearly all studies show that the abortion drug mifepristone is safe, a couple of studied highlighted problems. Recently those papers showing problems were retracted by the publisher.  Remember, the whole basis for banning the drug in Texas came from those who say the FDA ignored problems with the drug!

In March, the Supreme Court heard a case about access to mifepristone, one of two pills used for a medication abortion. Just weeks before that, though, a scientific controversy roiled the debate: Some of the scientific studies underlying the legal challenge to the abortion pill were retracted by Sage, the academic publishing company, over methodological and ethical concerns. The Supreme Court is expected to rule in a matter of days or weeks.

This is a big deal. Removing a published article from a scientific journal doesn’t happen because of some small error. It’s unusual for a paper to be retracted (about 1 in 500), but the rate is increasing — and misconduct accounts for the majority of such instances. A retraction can be decided by the authors (after realizing a huge error) or by the publisher (over fraud, plagiarism, ethics, etc.).

The legal challenge was set off by a group of antiabortion doctors who argued that the Food and Drug Administration ignored safety concerns when it eased restrictions on mifepristone’s availability. They relied on scientific studies claiming the medication is dangerous, citing the number of emergency room visits after mifepristone use. After publication, though, other scientists voiced major concerns about the statistical methods and thus questioned the conclusions.

The article mentions some of the other errors in the papers, and I assume the review was conducted objectively. There is more:

The experts identified major ethical issues and scientific errors, including: A peer reviewer knew at least one of the authors of all three studies, and several are members of the same pro-life advocacy organizations, despite declaring no conflicts of interest in the study. The Sage review also concluded there were “unjustified or incorrect factual assumptions,” “material errors” and “misleading presentations” of data that “demonstrate a lack of scientific rigor and invalidate the authors’ conclusions in whole or in part.”

Then there’s this:

Clinical guidance and policy are (ideally) built on decades of research and consideration of the totality of evidence. In the case of mifepristone, more than 100 studies show it’s safe — in fact, safer than Tylenol — with only a few discordant studies. However, big mistakes can make it past the peer-review process, and, in some rare cases, “mistakes” are intentional and egregious. Even if studies are retracted, they can do a lot of harm. (Just look at the Wakefield study on autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine.)

If that’s the case, then the Supremes should say the drug is safe. We don’t want judges deciding what sound science is; we want them to defer to the scientific consensus, as they do when ruling against creationism as a subject in public schools.  If the Supreme Court starts judging the safety of drugs, we’re in trouble.

*Finally, Hunter Biden’s case has gone to the jury:

Jurors in Hunter Biden’s gun trial began deliberating Monday to decide whether the president’s son is guilty of federal firearms charges over a revolver he bought when prosecutors say he was addicted to crack cocaine.

He is charged with three felonies in the case that has laid bare some of the darkest moments of his drug-fueled past. Prosecutors have used testimony from former romantic partners, personal text messages and photos of Hunter Biden with drug paraphernalia or partially clothed to make the case that he broke the law.

“No one is above the law,” prosecutor Leo Wise told jurors in his closing argument as first lady Jill Biden watched from the front row of the Wilmington, Delaware, courtroom.

Jurors deliberated for less than an hour before leaving the courthouse for the day. Deliberations were to resume Tuesday morning.

. . .Before the case went to the jury, the prosecutor urged jurors to focus on the “overwhelming” evidence against Hunter Biden and pay no mind to members of the president’s family sitting in the courtroom.

“All of this is not evidence,” Wise said, extending his hand and directing the jury to look at the gallery. “People sitting in the gallery are not evidence.”

I’m guessing that the verdict will be “guilty”.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, the bad news has put Andrzej in a bad mood:

Hili: You have been reading the news again.
A: Is it visible?
Hili: Yes, You look as if you wanted to say something unpleasant to somebody.
In Polish:
Hili: Znowu czytałeś wiadomości.
Ja: A to widać?
Hili: Tak, wyglądasz jakbyś chciał komuś powiedzieć coś przykrego.

And a photo of Baby Kulka cavorting outdoors:

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From Unique Birds and Animals and Instagram:

 

From Science Humor:

A good question from a reader:

From Masih, kudos from another famous dissident:

Some hypocrisy sent by Malgorzata:

Albanese is an odious person. Look at the language she uses:

Is this really a great commercial? It’s certainly an unusual one!

GUESS!

From Malcolm: two angles on a volcano, both photographed from space:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/817401286906592

From the Auschwitz Memorial; one that I reposted:

 

Two tweets from Dr. Cornonthe Cobb. How do people SKI like this!

Matthew simply says “Outrageous!” in response to this product. I agree with him!

Bill Maher on America’s screwed-up prison system

June 10, 2024 • 12:00 pm

Here’s Bill Maher’s monologue from his latest episode of Real Time. It’s a serious (but humorous) look at America’s deeply dysfunctional prison system, but beginning with speculation about Trump getting raped in prison.

As I’ve written ad nauseam, America deliberately creates prisons to be horrible, demoralizing, and—in the extreme form of SuperMax prisons—liable to drive their inmates insane. All of this comes from the belief that prisoners had free will when they did their crime, and thus must undergo severe retribution.  Yes, incarceration can be useful for keeping bad people out of society, helpin reform them, and even detering others from criminality, but retribution? If you’re a determinist, it doesn’t make sense.  That’s why enlightened countries like Norway treat their prisoners like human beings. That may explain why Norway’s recidivism rate is about a quarter of America’s (rates mentioned in the video below).

The whole justice system—not just in America but nearly everywhere—is based on the assumption that criminals could have avoided doing their crimes—that they have libertarian free will. Thus they must be punished for making the wrong “choice.” Both Robert Sapolsky and I, diehard determinists, think that one of the biggest implications of determinism is the pressing need for judicial reform.  And this attitude als0 pervades Maher’s monologue.

This is really a video op-ed, and I can’t help but believe that, at least for the video generation, it’s more effective than a serious piece in the New York Times.

h/t: Leo

Taboo conclusions in human biology

June 10, 2024 • 10:00 am

Reader Suzi pointed me to a RealClear Science article about subjects that cause controversy in psychology—but also in biology and among people in general. Click the top headline to see their short summary of a longer paper in Perspectives in Psychological Science, a paper you can access by clicking the second title.

While you can click the title below to get to the article, you can also find the pdf here.

The purpose of this study was severalfold, and I’m not going to go into all the questions and conclusions. What I found most interesting was the authors’ list of ten taboo conclusions about psychology and society, the degree of confidence that psychologists had in these conclusions, the degree to which psychologists would self-censor their opinions on these topics (and the correlation with their agreement between censorship and belief), and, finally, the consensus on academic freedom—the assent of psychologists that people should be able to study whatever they wanted.

First, the authors asked 41 psychologists to give a list of what they saw as “controversial” conclusions. From this they distilled the ten most controversial ones, often using their own phrasing to state the conclusions clearly.

Then, the authors gave these conclusions to a bigger sample of psychologists: 470 who agreed to answer the questions (4,603 were asked).  Among other things, they were asked to state their degree of confidence in the answers and then their reluctance to share their views, whatever they were. They were also asked whether “scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment.”

 

I’ve put below the list of ten c0ntroversial conclusions derived from the preliminary survey, along with the average degree of agreement for each conclusion among the scholars who gave answers (not all 470 answered every question). First, how the scholars were asked to agree/disagree and how they judged their degree of risk that would make them self-censor (this is all from the paper itself):

Participants were told they would be responding to 10 taboo conclusions in the social sciences that were nominated by their peers in earlier interviews. First, participants responded to three questions regarding each conclusion on 101-point sliding scales (ranging from 0 to 100): “How confident are you in the truth or falsity of this statement?” (responses ranged from 100% confident it is false to 100% confident it is true), x

Participants then reported how at risk they would feel of various consequences if they shared their views on these topics openly on a sliding scale ranging from no risk at all to very high risk. (All sliding scales used in our study had a range of 0–100.)

After each question, I’ve put in bold the average degree of confidence among the respondents about whether they consider the conclusion to be true.  Notice that the first question is about whether men were naturally selective to be sexually coercive, a conclusion I attacked strongly when younger (I’d have a more nuanced answer now, I think).  Note that two of the questions, #4, #7, are taken up by Luana and me in our paper in Skeptical Inquirer, and we have high confidence in them (I just asked Luana, and we agreed that we both have 100% confidence in those two conclusions).

So here are the top ten hot potatoes in human psychology along with the average degree of agreement.

1. “The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.” (53.47)

2. “Gender biases are not the most important drivers of the under-representation of women in STEM fields.”  (45.26)

3. “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).” (59.29)

4. “Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people.” (66.10)

5. “The social sciences (in the United States) discriminate against conservatives (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”(52.06)

6. “Racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to White Americans.” (46.93)

7. “Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.” (65.50)

8. “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.” (29.10)

9. “Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.” (54.11)

10. “Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.” (21.44)

Note that for most topics psychologists had split opinions, but not for racial differences in IQ being somewhat based on genetic differences (question 8) or diversity leading to worse performance (question 10). In both cases a big majority of people disagreed  The highest agreement, though, came for the questions that Luana and I discussed (sex being binary for the vast majority of people and men and women had different psychological traits because of evolution.  It is surprising that questions whose answers are dead obvious, like the two I just mentioned, don’t have close to 100% agreement, which means that psychologists don’t know much about the binary nature of biological sex or about evolutionary psychology (note that question 7 doesn’t say that ALL psychological differences between men and women are evolved; it implies only that some of them are, which to me seems palpably true, e.g.,  differences in attentiveness to their offspring or the degree of choosiness in mating).

What I found almost as interesting to me is that there was, with one exception, a positive correlation between the degree of belief of individuals in these statements and their reluctance to share their views. Can you guess what the exception is?

Here are two graphs showing particularly strong correlations between degree of belief of a controversial statement and the degree of “self-censorship”; each point represents one individual. Surprisingly, the first one is the binary nature of biological sex. The more strongly you accept it, the more likely you are to keep it to yourself. That’s not true for Luana and me! It’s bloody obvious and we’ll shout it from the rooftops!

This one is more understandable as it’s the hottest of the hot potatoes: the claim that IQ differences between races are appreciable (at least 10% of the difference is based on genetic differences). The more you think that IQ differences between races are genetic, the more likely you are to keep it to yourself:

Did you guess that the one statement that people didn’t self-censor about was a statement in line with liberal ideology. Yes, it’s this one: “Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”  The more confidence you have in that, that more likely you are to espouse it publicly, because it makes you seem less racist to be public about it.

All of the correlations, negative and positive, were statistically significant.

The authors note two differences in responses between males and females (that assumes a sex binary!), though of course these not be based on genetics or evolution (bolding is mine):

As seen in Table 3 and Figure S1 in the Supplemental Material, men believed more strongly in the truth of every single taboo conclusion relative to women, with two exceptions: (a) For political bias in social science, there was a small but not significant effect in the same direction, and (b) women believed more strongly that academia discriminates against Black people. In some cases, differences were quite large. For example, female psychologists (on average) were quite confident that academia discriminates against Black people, but male psychologists (on average) were on the fence; male psychologists (on average) were quite confident that men and women evolved different psychological characteristics, but female psychologists (on average) were on the fence. Future research should explore whether male and female psychology professors present to their students different evidence and arguments regarding the veracity of taboo conclusions.

As has been noted by some, women are likely to be more empathic than men, and this may explain the result vis-à-vis racial differences.  Here’s another:

Female scholars were more left-leaning (M = 20.86, SD = 16.03) than male scholars (M = 27.90, SD = 18.70), t(401) = 3.93, p < .001, and younger, t(400) = 4.73, p < .001.

Since most academics are left leaning, I would expect this sex difference based on my hypothesis (which is not mine) that females are more empathic than men, and being more empathic makes you lean even more to the left (a hypothesis that is mine).

Finally, although self-censorship is rife in academia, I was glad to see that most scholars (but only by a bare majority) don’t think that people should be penalized for working on anything they want.

A slim majority of professors (52.3%) reported that scholars should be completely free to pursue research questions without fear of institutional punishment for their conclusions. By contrast,1.6% said scholars should not have this freedom, and 46.0% said it’s complicated.

Well, it is a bit complicated, for, as we said in our discussion in Amsterdam, there are some questions (though very few) that people should not be free to work on. But such work is banned anyway by research stipulations of granting agencies and academia, as this work involve harm to humans and other animals (i.e., the kind of experiments on inmates that Josef Mengele did in Auschwitz). Readers may want to think of some questions NOT involving harm to humans and other species that still should not be allowed.  Right off the bat I can’t think of any. There are plenty of experiments that I think are not worthy of doing on humans, but none that should be banned if they don’t cause mental or physical harm.

The belief in academic freedom does conflict with the ability of researchers to investigate some of the questions above, particularly those that have implications for social policy (i.e. is there bias against blacks or women in academia?).  It’s the “politically correct” thing to say that there is, but you really need to know how much bias there is versus other factors (culture, preference, etc) that can cause inequity before you start intervening to achieve equity. But I’ve discussed this before.

It would be a good thing if people didn’t have to self-censor, for that kind of censorship inhibits free discussion, the kind of discussion essential for a university to function and for people to examine their ideas and/or sharpen them.  But we’ll never get rid of self-censorship on questions like the ones above so long as academia is pervaded by ideology, which it must be since scientists are humans and don’t want others to think poorly of them.

Readers’ wildlife photos

June 10, 2024 • 8:15 am

PLEASE send in your good wildlife photos as we’re running low. I am considering making this post sporadic rather than daily, as I don’t like repeatedly asking for photos. But if you got ’em, send ’em in.

Today we have some from Athayde Tonhasca Júnior on depictions of fantastical wildlife, gargoyles, and persons on buildings. Athayde’s captions are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Eerie fauna of yore

If you walk by a medieval cathedral, university or town hall in France, Italy, Spain, Germany or the United Kingdom, you may look up and catch sight of a creature staring back at you with stony eyes and an unearthly smile or grimace. These hallucinatory figures are gargoyles or grotesques, types of sculpture carved in the form of mythological beings or unsightly human faces. A gargoyle is a fancy waterspout that projects from a roof and carries rainwater away from the walls of a building, protecting the masonry from water damage. Grotesques look like gargoyles but have no architectural purpose: they are decorative carvings fixed to walls, high ledges or rooftops. When sculpted as faces, grotesques are known as mascarons. Inside a building, you may spot one of those figures carved on a boss, which is an ornamental knob on a ceiling, wall or sculpture.

A gargoyle standing guard by a saint in Pisa, Italy:

A sphynx-like grotesque in Bari, Italy:

A mascaron in Bologna depicting a lecherous-looking faun.

Below: one of the hundreds of bosses at The John Rylands Library in Manchester (they are not easy to photograph with a telephone because of the dim light). The spectacular collection of rare books and manuscripts and the building’s neo-Gothic architecture make the library alone worth a visit to Manchester. You will feel like you’re entering Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry (but despite some claims, Harry Potter was not filmed there):

Animal-shaped waterspouts have been used by ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans and Romans, but gargoyles and grotesques really picked up during the Gothic period (12th century). By the Renaissance, these structures become elaborate and fanciful, with a profusion of chimeras (mythical combinations of animals, including humans). Gargoyles and grotesques were generally painted with vivid colours, and some were also gilded. The drab figures we see today have been weathered by the erosive effects of rainwater.

Gargoyles in Perth, UK.:

Sheridan & Ross (Grotesques and Gargoyles: Paganism in the Medieval Church, 1969) suggested that gargoyles and grotesques were modeled after pre-Christian Celtic deities whose images could ward off malevolent spirits. The more bizarre and alarming the figures, the better; by drawing attention to themselves, they would deflect harm from people and their buildings. Christians could have adopted these pagan traditions that were tolerated by the Church for their usefulness as PR. But Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), Saint Bernard to Catholics, didn’t buy any of that nonsense: “What are these fantastic monsters doing in the cloisters under the very eyes of the brothers as they read? What is the meaning of these unclean monkeys, strange savage lions and monsters? To what purpose are here placed these creatures, half beast, half man?… Surely if we do not blush for such absurdities we should at least regret what we have spent on them”. Indeed, nobody knows for sure the reason for these skilled carvings. The craftsmen who created them left no written records, so their motivation is a mystery: these sculptures may very well be whimsical, nothing more than the product of master masons’ irreverence and sense of humour (Woodcock, 2011. Gargoyles and Grotesques).

A mascaron adorning the bell tower door of the church of Santa Maria Formosa, Venice:

Some of the hundreds of gargoyles and grotesques decorating the magnificent Milan Cathedral (Duomo di Milano), which took nearly six centuries to complete. You need binoculars or a camera with a good zoom to properly appreciate them:

A building guardian in Altamura, Italy:

Gargoyles and grotesques have celebrity status at Notre-Dame Cathedral, but those structures are not particularly old. They were created by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879), who in 1844 was given the task of renovating the cathedral. Viollet-le-Duc was criticized for adding more figures and sculptures than was historically accurate, probably because he was caught up in the resurgent interest in medieval art and architecture. This Gothic revival was inspired by Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and other popular stories involving mysterious castles, gloomy mansions, and the supernatural (Reilly 1966, The Dictionary of Art, Vol 12).

Gargoyles of Notre Dame, Paris:

The tradition of artistic freedom among master carvers continues. Salamanca Cathedral in Spain features an astronaut grotesque, and the Alien monster was carved into the structure of Paisley Abbey in Britain. Punks, Queen Elizabeth, nurses and local personalities have also been immortalised as gargoyles and grotesques.

This mascaron on a bridge over the river Spree in Berlin is supposed to represent Cesar, but the cheeky locals call it Angela Merckel:

With time, aesthetics replaced functionality and religiosity. Stonemasons, sculptors and blacksmiths used gargoyles and grotesques to display wealth, status and fashion.

Fancy corbels (structural brackets) in Noto, Syracuse Province, Italy.

From buildings, the fantastical human-animal imagery diffused into other designs and types of ornamentation such as doorknobs and knockers, and there’s no better place than Venice to admire their craftmanship. Elaborate bronze doorknobs (modern ones are usually made of brass, iron or wood) depict people, mythological characters or animals. Lions are quite popular for representing bravery, nobility and strength, or the Lion of San Marco, Venice’s symbol.

A doorknob poised to bite unwelcome visitors to a Venetian house:

A Venetian doorknob suggesting an African model:

A sour-looking escutcheon, which is an ornamental plate surrounding handles or key holes and designed to protect the door against nicks and scratches:

Well-off ancient Greeks seem to have come up with the idea of attaching a heavy ring to a metal plate to let guests announce their arrival, so doing away with uncouth shouting or door-banging. Rich Romans, who looked up to the chic Greeks for new trends, quicky adopted the practice. Their homes were fitted with fancy knockers and an ostiarius, a gate-keeping slave. Some door knockers have magic powers, like the one that transubstantiated into Jacob Marley, Scrooge’s old business partner, to help the miserly old git change into a happy, generous man (Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol).

The Sanctuary Knocker on Durham Cathedral. In Medieval times, people who had committed ‘a great offence’ (usually murder or theft) would come to the cathedral and grasp the knocker’s ring – there was no knocking, despite its name. A monk on watch above the door would ring a bell to announce that sanctuary had been granted. The fugitive could stay for 37 days; afterwards, if no royal pardon was forthcoming, he had to decide whether to face trial or go into exile. If choosing the latter, the miscreant had to confess his crime and swear to leave the country and never come back:

An end comes to us all: a gargoyle or grotesque eroding away in Bari:

Monday: Hili dialogue

June 10, 2024 • 6:45 am

Photo of the Month:

Welcome to Monday, June 10, 2024, and National Black Cow Day (that’s a root beer float: root beer with ice cream), a good drink and also a song by Steely Dan. Here’s a good photo from Wikipedia:

Arnold Gatilao, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s also National Frosted Cookie Day, Ballpoint Pen Day (it was on this day in 1943 that “László Bíró applied for a patent for his pen,”, National Iced Tea Day, National Egg Roll Day, and World Art Nouveau Day.  I love Art Nouveau, and if you want to see the good stuff, go to the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, on the first floor east. Here’s the quintessence: the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, where I was the only American to have been stripped nude by the Spanish police (but that’s another story. . )

By C messier – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0

There’s also a Google Doodle today (click to go to site), honoring the Dragon Boat Festival this year, in which, yes, they race dragon boats, but, better yet, everyone eats sticky rice dumplings.  It looks from the top like a truncated millipede:

Here’s a real Dragon Boat from the Wikipedia page, labeled “Dragon boat of the team Lapátolók on River Danube, Budapest, Hungary. 10th of July, 2010.

By Lajos.Rozsa – Own work, Public Domain

And a sticky rice dumpling (zongzi). I love these things!

Oiginal uploader Allentchang at English Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the June 10 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*The rescue of the hostages by the IDF special operations branch, Yamam, was clever, but not all details have been disclosed, presumably to protect future operations. What we know is described in a WSJ article, and it’s extremely complex, like the famous Entebbe rescue operation of 1976.  (See also this site for a minute-by-minute account.) Just a bit here:

For months, a small team of U.S. military personnel has been helping the Israeli search for hostages, using drones. Before Saturday’s raid, 120 people taken on Oct. 7 remained captive in Gaza; many are believed to have died.

In May, Israel located the female hostage Noa Argamani in a low-rise apartment block in Nuseirat, central Gaza, and three male hostages in another building about 200 yards away: Almog Meir Jan, Andrei Kozlov and Shlomi Ziv.

The Gazan families residing in the apartments were present there, together with the Hamas captors and their prisoners, Hagari said.

Raiding only one building would alert captors at the other location, so the Israelis decided to raid both buildings simultaneously, he said.

The Israeli police’s counterterrorist unit, Yamam, trained for the raid on models of the two buildings, Hagari said. The unit reached central Gaza from Israel, he said, and denied rumors that it had arrived via the U.S.-built pier designed for aid delivery.

Hagari declined to say whether the officers were disguised as Palestinian civilians, a tactic that Israeli special forces have previously used.

Once the order to proceed was given, the Israeli air force struck a preplanned list of Hamas targets in Nuseirat, creating cover for the rescue raid. Ground forces from Israel’s paratroopers division stood ready to support the operation.

The Yamam commandos reached the apartment entrances undetected, the families of the hostages told Israeli TV later.

One Yamam team stormed the first-floor apartment where Argamani was held and took the captors by surprise, according to the military.

On the third floor of the other building, a gunfight with the guards broke out. The Yamam squad leader, Arnon Zamora, was hit and later died of his wounds.

But the hostages were alive. “We have the diamonds in our hands,” the commandos radioed to the command center.]

Leaving the buildings, the teams came under fire from Hamas fighters armed with rocket-propelled grenades, Hagari said. He accused Hamas of deliberately firing at the Israelis from streets full of civilians.

Israeli airstrikes and ground forces hit the militants. The many dead likely included both fighters and bystanders.

Video footage shared by the military showed a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter loading soldiers and hostages before whisking them off the beach. Tears and relief awaited them in Israel. In Gaza, more anger and smoldering rubble.

What does Hamas expect when they guard the hostages with gunmen and fire rocket-propelled grenades at the IDF when it’s evacuating the hostages?  As for those killed, we still don’t have a definitive total, as estimates range from 50 to nearly 300. And among those, we have no idea how many were terrorists and how many were innocent civilians. And among the latter, how many were killed by the IDF versus Hamas, which, after all, was firing RPGs.  The Western media, of course, don’t seem to be asking these questions, but couch the figures as if they were all civilians killed by IDF fire.

*Apparently Jews are not only NOT allowed to defend themselves, but aren’t allowed to rescue their hostages. This Honest Reporting piece analyzes the media coverage of the IDF’s rescue of four Israeli hostages, which instead of being seen as something to celebrate, becomes just another reason to criticize Israel.

Media outlets went out of their way on Saturday (June 8) to make Israel’s heroic rescue of four Gaza hostages look tainted or even immoral, with a reframing that served Hamas’ strategy.

Instead of simply reporting the news — that Israeli hostages Noa Argamani, Almog Meir Jan, Andrey Kozlov, and Shlomi Ziv had been rescued in a rare and complex operation in the heart of Gaza — media outlets chose to label it as one of the “bloodiest” raids of the war.

They used three tactics to achieve that goal, which effectively turned justice into injustice:

  • Minimizing the achievement by using the term “freed” instead of “rescued” to describe the hostages
  • Emphasizing the Palestinian death toll based on Hamas figures
  • Whitewashing the terrorists’ use of civilians as human shields

The Washington Post, for example, committed two of these journalistic crimes:

Its headline led with the number of Palestinian casualties (without questioning how many of them were terrorists), its sub-header called the operation “brazen” and the lead paragraph labeled the operation “one of the bloodiest raids of the war.”

The fact that the hostages were rescued alive is mentioned only in the second paragraph. And the word “Blitz” is casually thrown into the fifth paragraph, evoking comparisons to Nazi warfare.

But what’s hidden in plain sight is the complete whitewashing of Hamas’ strategy of using civilians as human shields. The article simply mentions that the hostages had been held in “buildings,” omitting the fact that they were kept in families’ homes in the crowded multi-story structures, amid the civilian population.

NPR‘s coverage has similar faults: The Palestinian death toll is used to frame the hostage rescue with descriptions like “the streets were…covered in blood,” and the sites of the hostage captivity are called “locations in Nuseirat in central Gaza” — which could mean anything from tunnels to military compounds.

Did the Washington Post or NPR journalists independently verify whether the blood in the streets belonged to terrorists or innocent civilians? Or is blood used here — as in ancient times — to demonize Jews?

Either way, their coverage whitewashes the terrorists.

Reuters, which also called the operation “one of the single bloodiest Israeli assaults of the eight-month-old war,” used another tactic while focusing on the Palestinian casualties.

One of its headlines used the vague term “freed,” which can be attributed to the goodwill of the terrorists, instead of the value-laden word “rescued” that may paint Hamas as bad:

There’s a lot more in the article, but I’ll just give their conclusions:

The underlying premise of such biased coverage is that Israelis should not fight for their lives because it comes at a cost. They should just sit back and let terrorists slaughter and kidnap their brethren because they run and hide among innocent people.

But media should stop ignoring the increasing evidence of Gazan civilian complicity with Hamas, as well as the fact that Hamas bears responsibility for putting the entire Gazan population in danger since its October 7th attack on the Jewish state.

Some other chiding that I found:

Even the NYT is sour about this (click to read):

And the UN special rapporteur for Palestine accuses the Israelis of “perfidy” because they were “hiding in an aid truck” (the IDF denies this).  And even if it was an aid truck, I really can’t see why that’s morally wrong, for the consequences (getting closer to the hostages, meaning fewer deaths overall) don’t seem to be worse than hiding in, say, a soap truck.

But this may be the worst one, which I retweeted with a quote:

I’ll add this here to raise my spirits after the world’s usual onslaught on Israel (h/t Rosemary).

*In the NYT, Nicholas Kristof explains “Why Biden is right to curb immigration.”

I don’t think the solution is to swing the doors open.

Too often, we Americans approach immigration as a binary issue. We’re in favor, or we’re against. In fact, immigration should be seen as a dial we adjust.

However much we believe in immigration, we’re not going to welcome all 114 million people around the world who have been forcibly displaced, not to mention perhaps one billion children globally who are estimated to suffer some kind of severe deprivation. We must settle for accepting a fraction of those eager to come, and determining that fraction is the political question before us, with many trade-offs to consider.

Immigration overall offers important benefits to the country, and employers and affluent people are particular winners: Immigrants reduce labor costs for people hiring gardeners or caregivers. But poor Americans can find themselves hurt by immigrant competition that puts downward pressure on their wages, although economists disagree on the magnitude of that impact.

I’m influenced in my thinking by a terrific book by my Times colleague David Leonhardt, “Ours Was the Shining Future,” which examined many studies on the impact of immigration on wages. Leonhardt concluded that immigration wasn’t the primary reason for income stagnation among low-education workers over the last half-century, but that it nonetheless was a significant secondary factor.

Relatively recent immigrants may also be hurt by newer immigrants — which may help explain why Pew found that three-quarters of American Latinos believe that the increasing number of people seeking to enter the country via the southern border is a “major problem” or a “crisis.”

Some working-class voters feel betrayed by Democrats who pushed to open borders, and there may be an element of xenophobia or racism in this anger — but also an element of truth. The United States makes it difficult for foreign doctors to practice in America, protecting physicians from competition. But the United States makes it relatively easy for low-skilled immigrants to work here and push down wages of our most vulnerable workers.

. . .Politics is of course a central reason Biden has acted on this issue, but that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily wrong. Plus, frustration at immigration makes it more likely that Trump will win the White House and that Trump Republicans will dominate Congress and the Supreme Court. That’s something the left should consider a disaster worth trying hard to avert.

One way or another, an angry public will force change on immigration.

. . . Are we, the people of an immigrant nation, pulling up the ladder after we have boarded? Yes, to some degree. But the reality is that we can’t absorb everyone who wants in, and it’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.

Yes, doing it for political reasons doesn’t make it wrong, it just makes it mendacious. Do we want a President whose policies increasingly seem to be guided by what will get him reelected? (Do I need to add here that Biden is still a far better choice than Trump, for whom I’ll never vote?) Biden was elected promising to put Kamala Harris on the “border problem”. She didn’t do squat, and Biden waited until the last minute.

*Why is the India/Pakistan cricket match, held in New York as part of the Men’s T20 World Cup, like a Taylor Swift concert? Answer: ticket prices become stratospheric.

Probably the most-watched sporting event on Earth in the year 2024 plopped down here Sunday morning in the gigantic Long Island park named Eisenhower, and some early drama happened outside the gates upon phone screens. Here came one of those rare India-vs.-Pakistan cricket colossi, this one in the group stage of the men’s T20 World Cup being held in the Caribbean and the United States, and as droves filed in wearing India blue or Pakistan green (or more intricate attire), some fans stood and scrolled like addled day traders as they managed agonizing ticket crises while staring at pulverizing ticket prices.

The match would happen in a pop-up stadium seating 34,000 and set for post-Cup disassembly and departure, at the sporting wee hour of 10:30 a.m., in a park bigger than Central with two golf courses and an outdoor concert venue named for Harry Chapin and a New York Islanders training facility. It would happen in a map dot of fervor surrounded by the American general obliviousness. Yet as the world’s largest (India) and fifth-largest (Pakistan) populations set to watch from afar, two Indian men from Ahmedabad now based in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, had a reading of global mania in their hands.

It read $1,636 Canadian dollars each (about $1,187 U.S.)

Don’t forget the service fee.

How about $4,183 (Canadian) for two?

. . . They have tickets for other matches here, but India vs. Pakistan in the world’s second-biggest sport never falls into any category resembling “other matches.” Its allure owes heavily to its rarity, and its rarity owes heavily to the hard feelings and harder border between two governments. The two generally need something like a World Cup to get together. When tickets opened for sale, tickets closed for sale two minutes thereafter as screens froze around the globe.

And the winner. . . .Jai Hind!

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is fussy:

Hili: You’ve just changed the water in this bowl and something fell into it.
A: Try to take it out with your paw.
In Polish:
Hili: Dopiero co wymieniałeś w tym pojemniku wodę i już coś do niej wpadło.
Ja: Spróbuj to wyciągnąć łapką.

And a picture of the uber-affectionate Szaron:

*******************

From img.flip:

From Science Humor:

From Wrinkle the Duck and reddit:

 

From Masih, listen to her video if you have time.  One of the three pillars is “compulsory hijab”.

UCLA made a stupid decision: that moving events from in-person to virtual, when the speaker is controversial, was GOOD. FIRE strikes back.  UCLA needs this explanation?

From Bob. I’m sure I’ve posted this before, but we can’t see too many duckling rescues:

From Jez; Male fun:

From Barry, who says, “The cat has to be thinking, ‘What the hell is wrong with you, man?'”

From the Auschwitz Memorial, one that I retweeted

Two tweets from Dr. Cobb. Matthew says “Poor Anders,” but I’ve put the Earthrise photo below. Other transcripts have “(joking)” after Borman’s comment!

Beautiful!

Dave is higher!

Richard Dawkins interviews John McWhorter on linguistics and “woke racism”

June 9, 2024 • 12:15 pm

Here Richard Dawkins interviews linguist and author John McWhorter, a person familiar to readers of this site. And most of the 54-minute discussion is about linguistics.

It’s refreshing to hear McWhorter’s enthusiasm for linguistics, and this bit of the discussion goes from the start of the interview until about 37 minutes in. It’s sad that McWhorter has, by his own admission, been more or less drummed out of the fraternity of academic linguists because of his heterodox views on racism. I’m sure, based on this interview alone, that he was a terrific teacher.

At any rate, McWhorter explains why he began studying linguistics (it involves Hebrew), how many times he thinks language originated (McWhorter thinks just once, though he’s not convinced that this is supported by the existence of a “universal grammar” or universal “recursion”: subordinate phrases embedded within phrases). Rather, McWhorter is convinced of a single origin of language by parsimony alone. As to when it originated, McWhorter makes rather unconvincing arguments (criticized by Richard) that Homo erectus could use syntactic language; he’s on more solid ground when he thinks that Africans, because of evidence of their mental sophistication, used language around 300,000 years ago.

They discuss evidence that the FOXP2 gene was implicated in origin of language, and McWhorter is accurate in saying that this theory hasn’t worked out, though he believes, along with Steve Pinker, that the ability to use syntactic language is encoded in our genome.

The discussion of “woke racism” (the title of McWhorter’s well known book, which was originally “The Elect”) begins at 36:40.  Dawkins moves the discussion into why McWhorter considers woke racism a “religion”, even though there are no supernatural beings involved. I’m not particularly concerned whether one conceives of progressive racial activism as an ideology or a religion, for it seems a semantic question. To me the more interesting questions are the characteristics of the movement (Does it promote irrationality? Is it disconnected from reality? Does it promote “safe spaces”, which McWhorter sees as a religious concept?)

The discussion moves to the question of why you are considered black (or claim you are black) if you have any black ancestors, which leads to McWhorter’s assertion that we have to go beyond race as a personal identity.

The discussion finishes with McWhorter pushing back on the “defenestration” of figures like Thomas Jefferson because they were either slaveholders or didn’t denigrate slavery. He sees this demonization as “pernicious for education”, although he agrees that some extreme versions of racism (e.g., Woodrow Wilson) warrants taking down statues or erasing names. And what, he muses, will demonize us to our descendants.

It’s a very good discussion, I think, and shows McWhorter’s passion, eloquence, and thoughtfulness.

Since McWhorter mentions Jamaican patois as a form of English that isn’t recognizable as English, I wanted to hear some of it, so I’ve put the video showing such patois below.

h/t: Williams Garcia

Cathy Young criticizes Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “conspiracy theory” of attacks on Western values

June 9, 2024 • 10:00 am

Just two days ago I wrote about a viral piece written by Ayaan Hirsi Ali for The Free Press, arguing that three forces—Chinese Communism, radical Islamists, and American Marxists, with Putin helping out from the sidelines—were aiming at destroying Western values in a sequential process. This sequence was first suggested by Russian spy and defector Yuri Bezmenov, and involved these four steps: demoralization of the West (several decades), destabilization of society (5 months to two years), crisis (short, time not specified), and “normalization,” in which a new authoritarian society gains hegemony.  According to Hirsi Ali, we appear to be at the end of the demoralization phase.

As I said, although Hirsi Ali’s article has its good points—notably that there are forces, like Islamists and their Western “progressive” running dogs, setting out to destroy Western values, though they purport to buttress them—I don’t see evidence that there’s any kind of concerted effort among the indicted groups to take over the West. Further, Hirsi Ali lumps together disparate phenomena as evidence for the demoralization (George Floyd riots, covid restrictions, pro-Palestinian protests, etc.), including some that don’t even seem to be real (she argues, for example, that pedophilia is becoming normalized, which I vigorously contest, and criticizes the spread of regulated assisted suicide, which I support).  In the end, Hirsi Ali simply forces all the stuff going on now into the Procrustean bed of Bezmenov’s scheme, and since everything can be fit into that scheme, her thesis can’t be disproven.

Yes, Hirsi Ali’s piece is valuable in underlining the attack on Western values, but this point has been made many times before; see for instance Douglas Murray’s 2002 book The War on the West.  As for fitting everything into Bezmenov’s scheme, Cathy Young, in a percipient analysis at The Bulwark Substack, says that this is simply a “conspiracy theory.”

Click below to read:

Hirsi Ali’s is indeed a conspiracy theory. That doesn’t make it wrong, but it is if the alleged conspirators are not conspiring. The long essay shows that they’re not: what looks like conspiracy is simply a concatenation of various social forces whose results are visible today. I’ll indent Young’s words below:

In fact, the essay is notable mainly for one thing: it represents a startling plunge, for Ali and evidently for the Free Press, into outright, unabashed conspiracy theory.

. . . Chinese propaganda, radical Islamism, and homegrown social justice radicalism absolutely deserve criticism and pushback (and they are already getting it: for instance, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statements, which Ali asserts are “now a requirement at universities across America,” have already been jettisoned by some major institutions including Harvard and MIT). But the Grand Unified Theory of Subversion should be just as resolutely rejected. Like all conspiratorial explanations of complex phenomena, it inhibits rather than promotes understanding.

And, like me, but in a far more sophisticated analysis, Young concedes that Some forces Hirsi Ali names are indeed eroding Western values, but are doing so independently. There is no conspiracy, and if that’s not true, and Bezmenov’s theory is fuzzy and untestable, which it is. then Hirsi Ali’s essay loses much of its force.

WHAT MAKES ALI’S CONSPIRATORIAL TURN so unfortunate is that her critique of toxic cultural trends in America and the West is often on point. Yes, shunting fourth-graders into “racial affinity” groups and having them map their “oppressor” and “oppressed” identities is bad. Yes, focusing on Thomas Jefferson’s slave ownership while giving short shrift to the liberatory politics of the American Revolution that eventually paved the way for the abolition of slavery can invite what Ali calls “civilizational self-loathing”—the idea that America and the West are no better than authoritarian societies around the world, or even uniquely evil. Yes, the embrace of Hamas by many social justice activists in the wake of the October 7 attacks on Israel exposed the movement’s moral bankruptcy, and the emergence of groups like “Queers for Palestine” which try to blend a Hamas-friendly worldview with an LGBT-friendly one is a spectacular case of intersectionalist idiocy. Yes, the movement for transgender equality raises some difficult questions—about women’s sports, single-sex spaces, puberty blockers, etc.—that often get labeled “transphobic” instead of being given a nuanced look. Yes, the push to destigmatize nontraditional sexuality can lead to almost certainly unhealthy trends like the romanticization of polyamory. And so on.

. . .Ali concedes that Bezmenov’s formulation of “subversion” may not explain or address “all the West’s problems.” However, she writes, “once I immersed myself in his formulation, many of the topsy-turvy developments in our institutions fell into place.”

Of course they did. That’s how conspiracy theory works: Everything falls into place once you accept it. And it’s unfalsifiable.

Here’s part of Young’s critique that Hirsi Ali is mixing disparate phenomena (or even nonexistent phenomena) into the theory:

For instance, Ali writes that for many people, the alarm bell signaling something wrong was the 2020 “omni-breakdown . . . with the crises [of] the Covid-19 pandemic and the draconian controls that governments imposed, and the George Floyd riots.” In her view, this was “the revolution” reaching boiling point after years of subversion. Is she suggesting that the “draconian controls”—which differed greatly from country to country—were somehow part of the same agenda as the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd? You could certainly argue that social tensions in the summer of 2020 were exacerbated by stresses caused by the pandemic and by the mitigation strategies. But sometimes, a perfect storm of crises happens. It doesn’t mean that someone is pulling the strings and levers, or even that someone set the machinery in motion at some point in the past.

. . . Ali’s grab-bag of “demoralization” also includes the “defund the police” movement as one of the assaults on traditional institutions. But that movement turned out to be extremely short-lived; now, even progressive jurisdictions (San Francisco!) are boosting police funding.

Even more mystifying, Ali asks us to “consider, for example, our culture’s attitude toward pedophiles, now rebranded as ‘minor-attracted persons.’” But rebranded by whom? (Ali’s link on “minor-attracted persons,” which I removed, goes to an obscure advocacy site.) There have been fringe efforts to rebrand pedophilia for decades—dating back to NAMBLA in the 1970s—and they have all been met with public scorn and revulsion. That remains true today. While a few articles have appeared in progressive publications over the years advocating tolerance toward non-offending pedophiles, they have invariably caused a strong backlash. Salon, which ran a couple of such articles in 2015, eventually took them down. In 2021, Allyn Walker, an assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Old Dominion University in Virginia, published a book that attempted to reframe adult-child sexual attraction as a sexual orientation rather than a disorder and “minor-attracted people” as a part of the “genderqueer community.” The outcry that ensued was such that Walker was placed on an administrative leave and then agreed to step down from the faculty.

Here are some of Young’s disparate causes for phenomena, some of which aren’t even intended to subvert Western values:

THE REASONS FOR THOSE UPHEAVALS—some of which are cycles in long-term trends going back to the 1960s and 1970s, or even earlier—are varied and complex, especially since Ali is trying to pull together such disparate phenomena. Changes in family structure, for instance, are the result of women’s evolving roles, the advent of reliable contraception, and the rise of the affluent consumer society. The right-to-die movement, which is now widely viewed as having gone too far, is partly a response to medical advances that can keep people alive—and in pain or at least severe discomfort—for much longer than was possible in earlier generations. Finally, many of the trends Ali discusses are extensions of the principle of individual autonomy, a part of the set of post-Enlightenment Western values that she (rightly) credits with enabling unprecedented human flourishing. Can such principles as personal freedom and tolerance be taken too far? Can some important humanistic values clash with other equally important ones? Yes, of course. But free societies constantly negotiate such questions.

Likewise, the social justice movements that Ali regards as subversive—and which are, in fact, often toxic in their attacks on modern liberal democracies—are largely an extension, or distortion, of liberal principles that seek to extend the benefits of liberty and equality to traditionally excluded groups (women, racial minorities, gays, etc.). The 1619 Project, which Ali mentions in passing, arguably distorted American history. But the impetus for it came in large part from the failure to grapple with the tragedies of black history in America (not just slavery, but the betrayal of black Americans after the Reconstruction for the sake of national unity). The feminist movement was born from the contradictions between the Western, and especially American, ideal of the autonomous individual and social and cultural norms that circumscribed female autonomy. Sexual liberation movements applied the principles of liberty to sexual choices.

I didn’t mean to quote so much of Young, but there’s a lot that I didn’t quote, and all of it goes to show that Hirsi Ali’s piece is hyperbolic and doesn’t hang together well. But it was not useless, for these days there are some people and social pressures that, knowingly or not, will seriously undermine America, or the West as a whole. (The Encampers come to my mind immediately.)  Donald Trump, not mentioned in Hirsi Ali’s article at all, may be the greatest threat to Western values on the horizon.

One reason Hirsi Ali’s article, flawed as it is, got such purchase is simply because of her own fame and life history. Many of us, including me, see her as a hero who went up against her upbringing as a strict Muslim, shed religion entirely to become an atheist (and a member of the Dutch parliament), and then fled after she and Theo van Gogh made the feminist and anti-Islamic film “Submission“, (the short movie is here) for which van Gogh was subsequently murdered. (There was a note pinned to the knife in his chest warning that Hirsi Ali was next.) I’d urge you to watch the ten-minute movie, which to us seems both moral and reasonable, but for which van Gogh, deemed an infidel, gave his life.

Hirsi Ali is eloquent and persuasive, as you can see in her books with their one-word titles (Infidel, Prey, Nomad, and Heretic), though with the last book I began to be disillusioned. While it properly calls out Islam, its program to defang the religion (the subtitle is Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now) is simply impractical. And now Hirsi Ali has shed her atheism, touting Christianity as the one bulwark against the same forces she names above (see critiques here; the links are working though some look wonky). No, I don’t think the return to Christian values, the good ones which are simply humanistic values that don’t come from Christianity at all, is what we need right now.

I’m a bit concerned that the Free Press gave Hirsi Ali’s piece so much air time (with a big boost by Bari Weiss), but Young’s critique is a good palliative.

h/t: Steve