Culture
“Mixed heritage” versus “mixed race”
I have an extraordinary acquaintance on social media whose skin is dark, whereas his wife’s is light. It’s the things he does, and his unusual heritage, that makes him extraordinary. But he also thinks a lot about “race” because of how he and his daughter get categorized.
His daughter is also light-skinned, and was categorized as “white” a few days ago in a class where basically everyone else was a POC (as they say) and they “decided to lean hard into race being about physical characteristics, basically how people look, rather than even addressing the even slightly less dicey definition of shared ancestry.” The story has started a little social media discussion.
In the course, my acquaintance drew a distinction that I’d not heard before:
The main thing to understand is that race is a completely made up construct with no basis in scientific method (with the many, many, outliers like my daughter as proof of that). [So far, so familiar.]
Heritage is scientifically inescapable as it is based on who your direct ancestors are.
This is why I’m careful to say [my daughter] is of “mixed heritage” and not “mixed race”. Because, no one is of “mixed race” because race is based solely on looks and looks are a matter of individual perception.
If I ruled the world, “race” would be banished in favor of “heritage.” It seems like a helpful mind-hack.
Viva la difference!
Japan is very Japanese, intentionally so. You rarely see foreigners here beyond a few Filipinos and Bangladeshis. This annoys the economist technocrat types, sometimes for moral reasons, but mostly for pragmatic reasons. They see immigration, and open borders, as necessary for economic growth, which they view as the only goal for a country. A place must grow, change, and evolve, or else it’s a failure. Or to put it in the words of the economic development IMF types, every country should adopt the US western model of open borders, labor and pension reform, global treaties, and free markets, etc etc etc.
Japan, of all the G7 members, has stubbornly refused to do much of this, from the smaller things like eating whale to the larger things like increasing immigration, especially when it comes to any policy that could corrupt or dilute its culture.
So the technocrat/policy types look at Japan’s last few decades of relative economic stagnation as a failure, while the Japanese just shrug it off and chalk it up to one of the costs of maintaining their cultural identity. Something I intellectually respect, even if it’s not for me. A national identity, through a shared and specialized culture, is one of the easiest webs of meaning to construct, that works for the largest number of citizens, and in a largely secular place like Japan, certainly helps add to its functionality. To it being a high trust society.
That model of “maintaining Japan for the Japanese” might work for Japan, but that doesn’t mean I’m suggesting it would be good for the US. Immigration is central to the US’s last remaining shared web of meaning, which is what we generally call the American Dream. The idea that anybody, with enough hard work, can be successful, without having to break the rules. That someone can come to the US from literally anywhere, with nothing, and build a life for their kids that’s better than their own.
In contrast to Japan, cultural change rather than preservation is our national model, and entrepreneurialism is our national identity. So much so that we have made it a transcendent and spiritual ethos, even though it’s grounded in the material. A nationalism built around a kind of prosperity theology — which is inclusive of different peoples and cultures, as long as they buy into the concept of aspirational wealth.
Chris Arnade, Walking across Japan, part 2: A retreat to Niigata.
I could do with a bit more Japan in my life, figuratively speaking. I’ll never move, and it would not be to the far east if I did. I’m not opposed to (controlled) immigration even at a fairly expansive rate. But the dynamism, the churn, of American modernity I find pretty uncongenial much of the time.
Self-induced flatness?
Most consumers don’t know that by using internet-based (or -generated) platforms—by buying from Amazon, by staying in an Airbnb, by ordering on Grubhub, by friending people on Facebook—that they are subscribing to a life of flatness, one that can lead directly into certain politics. But they are. Seduced by convenience, we end up paying for the flattening of our own lives. It is not an accident that progressive ideas spread faster on the internet. The internet is a car that runs on flatness; progressive politics—unlike either conservatism or liberalism—are flatness.
Alana Newhouse, Everything is Broken
Happy places
In a previous life, Jamie was a MacBook-using, flat white-sipping hipster photographer from east London, growing slowly disillusioned with the pressure and precarity of the city’s gentrification. Then, one day, while hungover at a music festival, she stumbled upon a sauna. “I came out of the sauna into nature and plunged into a cold lake and was reborn,” she says.
Months later, Jamie left London, moved to Sussex and set up her first sauna venture. After just five years, she’s flourishing: “I’ve created a really beautiful life for myself. I live on the beach, I work in a forest, I run my own business. I’m doing work that feels purposeful and impactful.”
Louis Elton, The dawn of the Bohemian Peasants
Tech
Technological downsides
[T]he tendency to disorder [is] greatest when social arrangements are both increasingly complicated, and increasingly unnatural. Hackers couldn’t have kept our ancestors from building cooking fires, but it is very difficult to keep them from knocking out the electrical grid.
ChatGPT scholarship
I’ve written before about the ways that ChatGPT and the like are revealing the unimaginative, mechanical nature of so many assignments we college teachers create and administer. In that post I wrote, “If an AI can write it, and an AI can read it and respond to it, then does it need to be done at all?“ Might we not ask the same question about our research, so much of which is produced simply because publish-or-perish demands it, not because of any value it has either to its authors or its readers (if it has any readers)?
Countless times in my career I have heard people talk about their need to publish research — to get tenure or promotion — in an AI-like pattern-matching mode: What sort of thing is getting published these days? What terms and concepts are predominantly featured? What previous scholarship is most often cited? And once they answer those questions, they generate the appropriate “content” and then fit it into one of the very few predetermined structures of academic writing. And isn’t all this a perfect illustration of a bullshit job?
Yes, I’m worried about what AI will do to academic life — but I also see the possibility of our having to face the ways in which our work, as students, teachers, and researchers, has become mechanistic and dehumanizing. And if we can honestly acknowledge the conditions, then maybe we can do something better.
Alan Jacobs, noting another facet to Dan Cohen’s concerns about AI in scholarship.
Jacobs’ path requires reflection and painful course-correction, so I reckon we’ll use AI to fight AI — the usual layering of a technical solution on top of a technology-induced problem.
Until it all breaks.
Legalia
The Lawless GOP Law-Enforcers
I had forgotten that the Republican Attorneys General Association sent robocalls asking people to join a certain rally on January 6, 2021. Hindsight shows this to have been a bad idea.
But foresight would have done the same: what legitimate interest did Republican Attorneys General have in turning out throngs of deluded populists for a rally in support of the idea that Donald Trump had won the election he’d lost two months earlier? Much worse came of it than expected, but no sane person would have expected any good of it.
They should have been supporting the rule of law, not becoming violence-enabling political hacks.
Aim at fat-cats, hit do-gooders
My colleagues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (where I am a writer in residence) are taking the lead in what will be, almost certainly, the most significant case the Supreme Court hears in its next term: Moore v. United States. (Do not confuse it with the surveillance case of the same name.) Like many such cases, this one really involves, at heart, very little more than the question of whether the Constitution says what it actually says or whether the government can, citing needful exigencies, simply pretend that the Constitution says whatever the powers that be in Washington decide it needs to say on any given day.
Charles and Kathleen Moore invested in a social enterprise in India, KisanKraft Machine Tools Private Limited, which helps Indian farmers in poor and underdeveloped areas improve their businesses—and their lives—by acquiring more modern equipment. KisanKraft now employs hundreds of people in India and has helped a great many marginal farmers—and their families and communities—improve their economic situations by means of their own work and enterprise, not as clients of some political patron or as dependents on some charitable program. (The next time someone tells you free-market economics is for people who care only about themselves … ) KisanKraft is one of those businesses that exists to make a difference rather than a profit, and, for that reason, it reinvests all of its earnings into the business itself. The Moores have never received a penny of income from their investment in the firm, never expected to, and, barring some unforeseeable development, never will.
But, thanks to the special kind of imbecility that can be produced only by the intellectual fusion of Donald Trump with Elizabeth Warren, the Moores have been given a tax bill not for any income they have realized from their investment—of which there is $0.00—but for imaginary income. KisanKraft could have paid out dividends to its investors, who would then have investment income to pay taxes on. But KisanKraft did not do that. Donald Trump, who has the resume of a villain from an unpublished Ayn Rand novel—second-rater, inherited money, serial business failure, corrupt, seething with hatred for people who succeed in the businesses he failed at—has spent years railing at American investors and businesses with the unpatriotic gall to invest in overseas businesses (that are not golf courses), and in 2017 congressional Republicans, caught up in that unsavory nationalist-populist moment, produced the grievously misnamed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which imposed a “one time” (“It’s only this once, we promise!”) tax on unrealized overseas investment income, simply “deeming” profits to have been realized and repatriated for tax purposes. It was one of the dumbest policy ideas of a remarkably dumb era. Of course, it was supposed to wring money out of the scheming shifty corporate “fat cats” who populate the fever dreams of well-heeled Washington populists.
Of course, it landed on people like the Moores.
Early precedent for 303 Creative
Creative artists refusing to create works that violate their conscience is nothing new. Consider, for instance, the Roman Emperor Diocletian:
… the last glimpse that we have of his personal life is his irritation at the refusal of his Christian stone-masons to make him a statue of Æsculapius.
Rebecca West, Black Lamb & Grey Falcon, (Kindle Location 3520).
Sex and gender
Sanity or a ban?
I don’t want to ban any medical procedure. It may be that in a few cases, transition will help at such a young age. But recommending them as a general rule, the minute a child says they’re the opposite sex, without exploration of other possible mental health issues? Reckless beyond belief. That has got to stop. Someone has to protect the children, especially the gay ones, who cannot protect themselves.
Andrew Sullivan. This is the concluding paragraph of a too-long-to-fully-quote item on the continuing scandal of the American medical establishment using junk science or made-up science to support mutilating gender dysphoric children as the first treatment option.
Shmocial Shmontagion
[N]early forty percent of Brown’s student body identifies as “not straight,” which is five times the national average. To be fair, the definition of “not straight” ranges these days from being in a same-sex relationship—which somehow rings very traditional now, very problematic, very “there’s only one sex allowed in this relationship”—to having an edgy haircut. There are two options for what’s going on here. The first is that Alex Jones was right, that our drinking water is screwing with our hormones, and that indeed everyone is becoming gay from it. The second rhymes with Shmocial Shmontagion.
Suzy Weiss, The Free Press
We are in the grip of a grim, despairing rebellion against reality that imagines itself to be the engine of moral progress.
The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here (cathartic venting) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). Both should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it. I’m even playing around a bit here, but uncertain whether I’ll persist.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 