Hmm, it seems to have been several months since anything has been posted here.  We haven’t disappeared from the internet completely in that time.  One thing we’ve been doing is tweeting links.  Such as:

1. A couple of years ago, there was a thing on Cracked by John Cheese about bad ways to respond to bullies.  It is very hard to read, for three reasons.  First, John Cheese tells stories about how several of these bad ways cost him and his family dearly when he was a boy beset by bullies.  Second, he doesn’t suggest any ways of responding to bullies that would be  more successful.  Third, he raises the terrible thought that “bullying” and “politics” are two names for the same thing.

John Cheese’s “5 Bad Ideas for Dealing With Bullies You Learned in Movies” are: “Tell An Adult- They’ll Teach You to Fight”; “Just Ignore Them- Unless You Can Verbally Slay Them”; “Run!  You’ll Have Your Victory Soon Enough”; “Fight Back- You’ll Always Win!”; “Fight Back- There Are No Consequences.”  A political scientist of my acquaintance is fond of the axiom “No unmixed strategies are valid.”  An opponent who can predict your reactions with a high degree of accuracy is one against whom you have little chance of winning in any sort of contest.  That applies at every level.  So the bullied child, or adult, or nation-state can achieve little by choosing the same response consistently when provoked.  The only hope is in regarding each response as a tactic, a tool to be used in conjunction with other tools, chosen and applied based on a cold-eyed assessment of the situation at the moment.   Sometimes you fight, sometimes you ignore, sometimes you run away, sometimes you report the situation to the authorities, sometimes you organize fellow targets in a coordinated resistance, sometimes you combine these responses with each other or with other techniques.  Whatever you do, make sure you surprise your opponent.

When I had to cope with bullies as a child, I was acutely aware of how little tactical sense I had.  I tried several methods, never in quick succession, never with much success.  If I had been shrewd enough to contain our neighborhood bullies then, maybe I would be rich and powerful now.  In which case you would not be reading this, as rich and powerful people do not maintain WordPress blogs.

2. John Wilkins is trying to figure out “why otherwise sensible men might harass a woman.”  His theory is that we might be able to answer this question if we frame it as a failure to operate in a rule-governed manner, so he calls the post “On knowing the rules.”   I’m skeptical of that approach.  I suspect that the men we see as sensible are those who have persuaded us to see them as sensible, and that to persuade anyone of anything is the result of a successful application of strategy.  Moreover, sexual harassment, like other forms of bullying, is targeted precisely at a person’s ability to seem sensible.  Tell a story about a federal judge interrupting you at lunch to quote movie lines about pubic hair, and people will probably wonder if you’re “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty.”  Some strategies for establishing oneself as a sensible person hinge on making other people seem not-so-sensible.  So my suspicion is that the question should be, not “why otherwise sensible men might harass a woman,” but how some men secure their reputations for sensible-ness by harassing women.

3. Speaking of tactics and strategy, the avocado has a reproductive strategy developed in response to a situation that ceased to exist 13,000 years ago.  This turns out not to matter, as the avocado has been flourishing all this time.  So maybe there’s hope for those of us who are not dynamic gamesmen.

4. Let’s assume you don’t want to be a bully, and you are having a debate.  You notice that the person you are debating is getting upset.  Leah Libresco suggests you ask what your opponent thinks is at stake in the debate.  She puts it memorably:

I’ve tried using this kind of approach in non-philosophical fights (with varying success) to keep forcing myself to ask “What is this person protecting?” I’ve tried explicitly reframing whatever the other person is saying to me as “Watch out! You’re about to step on a kitten!!” and then working out what the kitten is. This way, intensity in argument isn’t necessarily aggressive or insulting, and it’s not something I need to take personally. It’s just a signal of how passionately my interlocutor loves the thing they think I’m about to blindly trample on, and I’d best figure out what it is sharpish.

5. If the US government sends you a subsidy in the form of a check, you are very likely to think of yourself as a tax recipient and to find yourself on the defensive in political discussion and appropriations battles.  If the US government subsidizes you by means of other instruments, such as tax credits, you are very likely to see yourself as a taxpayer and to take the offensive.  As they say in xkcd, “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.”  The difference between a benefit administered through the congressional appropriations process and a benefit administered through the tax code may be purely verbal as far as economists are concerned, but it has tremendous consequences for public policy and the long-term future of the USA.

6. While we’re talking about xkcd, it dealt the other day with one of the big differences between the artificial games we design to play for fun and the games we play to establish our relationships with each other in real life is that the artificial games allow only moves drawn from a single restricted set.  So if you are boxing and you throw a right cross, your opponent is allowed to respond only by guarding against the blow, dodging it, or anticipating it with another punch.  In real life conflicts, however, there is little or no restriction on the sets of possible moves from which a competitor can draw.  So when a legislator defeats a policy initiative with a parliamentary procedure, or an appropriations cut, or a personal attack, it’s as if the winning response to a right cross was a bishop’s gambit.

7. Zach Weinersmith of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has been on a roll lately.  The other day, he posted this epitome of misleading infographics.  He also wondered what it would be like “If Arithmetic Were Debated Like Religion” (or anything else people are passionate about); pointed out that even people who are most cautious about trying to be reasonable “have a huge collection of specific views, the arrangement of which would not be held by anyone who died more than 50 years ago”; and revealed that the Sphinx of Thebes took some time to develop her riddling ability.

8. One of our favorite publications is The American Conservative; one of our favorite Americans is the thoroughly unconservative Alison Bechdel.  If this sounds like a paradox, think again- The American Conservative raves over the musical Fun Home, based on AB’s memoir of the same title.

9. Speaking of The American Conservative, I’ve been reading Rod Dreher’s blog there.  Here’s a post of his, drawing on his book about his sister, in which he talks about the pros and cons of small-town life.  A quote:

The epiphany I had, the thing that made it possible for me to move back, is realizing that the bullying and the rejection that helped drive me away came from the same place as did the gorgeous compassion and solidarity with my sister Ruthie as she fought cancer. You can’t have one without the other.

I like this.  In bits 1 and 2 above, I’ve put a lot of emphasis on bullying as a set of moves in games individuals play.  It is that, I believe, but if course it is also more than that.  Bullying is a symptom of broader social structures, some which would be very hard to do without, and Mr Dreher does a good job of bringing that out in this post.

In another post, Mr Dreher thinks hard about Dante and W. H. Auden, ending with Auden’s line that “the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to.”  I suppose this is what “Virtue Epistemology” is getting at, in part, by its examination of ways in which ethical and intellectual qualities interpenetrate each other.

10. While on the topic of The American Conservative, I’ll mention one of its former writers, a person well and truly loathed by most of the people who have been regular readers of this site.  I refer to Steve Sailer, or as some of my acquaintances know him, the hated SAILER.  Mr Sailer has recently posted a series of pieces about how odd a style of thinking utilitarianism presupposes.  He concentrates on the fetish utilitarians make for decontextualization, which in their case usually means taking scenarios and abstracting out everything but the question of cost and benefit.  There are many other criticisms one might level at utilitarianism, of course.  So Virtue Ethicists focus on the incoherence of utilitarian conceptions of “pleasure” and “pain,” which is a bit of a concern in a school of thought that sets out to reduce all of experience to pleasure and pain.  Other thinkers focus on the fact that the hedonistic calculus utilitarians describe presupposes a level of knowledge that no human being can attain.  Since ethics is supposed to be about the standards by which humans evaluate their behavior, utilitarianism is thereby disqualified from the label “ethical philosophy.”  If you believe in a God to whom all desires are known and from whom no secrets are hid, utilitarianism could be a theodicy, but theodicy is not ethics.

11. I am a fan of Irving Babbitt, and therefore sit up and take notice when Babbitt scholar Claes G. Ryn is mentioned.  A few years ago, Professor Ryn cast Paul Gottfried out of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters, declaring Professor Gottfried to have strayed too far towards opinions that Professor Ryn deemed racist.  Professor Gottfried is still sulking about his banishment, and grouses about it in the course of a column about his and Professor Ryn’s criticism of the followers of Leo Strauss.   The heart of the column is in these three paragraphs:

Also not surprisingly, given their contemporary focus and ambitions, Straussians over the decades have turned increasingly to political journalism. Pure scholarship seems to count less and less significantly in their putative field of study. And the reason is not primarily that they’re battling the “America-hating” Left—it’s that their interpretations are methodologically eccentric and brimful of their own ideological prejudices. They represent neoconservative politics packaged in academic jargon and allied to a peculiar hermeneutic that I earnestly try to make sense of in my work.

Ryn raises the question of why Straussian doctrines have caught on among self-described conservatives. His answers here do not surprise me, since for many years the two of us discussed this puzzling matter and reached similar conclusions.

Conservatism Inc. has been so totally infiltrated from the Left that those ideas that used to define the Left—abstract universalism, the rejection of ethnic differences, the moral imperative to extend equality to all human relations—has spread to the official Right. The political debate in America now centers on Leftist propositions. Accordingly, someone like Bloom, who could barely conceal his animus against what remains of a traditional Western world based on what Ryn rightly calls a “classical and Christian” heritage, could be featured in the late 1980s as an American patriot and cultural traditionalist.

That the “classical and Christian” worldviews could be so utterly submerged by stale leftovers from the anticommunist Left of the mid-twentieth century would rather seem to lead one to doubt that these worldviews had much life left in them at the time this “infiltration” began, but Professors Ryn and Gottfried are among those who would disagree.  I know that the kittens on their floors (to borrow Ms Libresco’s image) include most of the things that a sizable fraction of the people in the world cared most deeply about for a couple of thousand years, so far be it from me to step carelessly in my hobnailed boots of postmodern secularism.