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Conservative stalwart Christopher Rufo used to be all for meritocracy:
The principle, first promised by the Declaration and supported today by a large majority of Americans, would mean that the state would treat all Americans equally, regardless of ancestry, and leave as much discretion as possible to individuals to determine their own futures, without the government imposing or requiring racial favoritism of any kind. . . . Rather than pit ourselves against one another, we should aspire to a higher standard that subordinates racial faction to a broader national identity.
But that was back when the big issue was woke attempts to carve out special treatment for minorities. Today the issue is the stunning success of immigrants from India (and to a lesser extent the rest of Asia). These days Rufo sounds very different.
Recently, however, Rufo has backed away from his previously forthright defense of meritocracy, and by all available evidence, he has done so because the principle turns out to contain a fatal flaw: Many of the Americans who benefit from meritocracy have brown skin. More to the point, a lot of Republicans resent those brown-skinned Americans. Given the right’s commitment to anti-intellectualism and populist resentment, and President Trump’s open embrace of job promotions based on loyalty or appearance (“central casting”) rather than qualifications, Rufo’s turn against race-blind merit might have been inevitable.
This is from Rufo's appearance of the podcast of Jonathan Keeperman:
Indian Americans, Rufo argued, are “going to grind on spelling-bee words like unlimited hours,” whereas American culture says, “You’re not supposed to study for the spelling bee.” Keeperman agreed: “What actually makes America so dynamic—it’s not the kid who studies all night for the spelling-bee test. It’s the kid who is the fullback on the high-school football team, who puts his head down and is willing to run through a freaking wall on behalf of his teammates and then spends the night drinking beers at the kegger and wakes up in the morning and gets a 1500 on his SATs, okay?” . . .It's almost self satire: the problem with immigrants from India is that they study too hard and don't play football.
“The right always says”—here Rufo adopted a mocking tone—“Oh, meritocracy, meritocracy, meritocracy. You morons. Meritocracy, the origin of the term meritocracy, it’s pejorative. It’s satirical. It’s not good. You actually don’t want meritocracy, because it perverts these unspoken cultural assumptions in ways that aren’t always visible, aren’t always, say, rationally defensible or problematic, but they strike at an essential component of the national character.”
Twitter warrior Richard Hanania has been all over this issue for past two years, arguing the MAGA crowd were all for meritocracy and capitalism when they seemed to benefit white people but turned to racial privilege when open competition meant they were losing out to immigrants from India. Anti-Indian rhetoric, he wrote, is "the dumbest form of racism and socialism."
I believe that all policies based on dividing people into groups and calling one of those groups "us" are inherently corrupt. So of course a policy based on trying to advance "heritage Americans" is inevitably going to collapse from self-contradiction. It is simply hate, and deserves nothing but scorn from people who care about creating a thriving world.
Human societies have built up a huge repertoire of ways to fight disease, many of them involving herbal remedies. But when these remedies were tested by scientific doctors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they proved to have no or very little benefit.
But bacteria evolve very rapidly, especially when it comes to resistance to antibiotics. Which raises the question: did those old remedies once work, before bacteria evolved resistance to them? Some studies have suggested that this might be true:
In 2015, Harrison and a team of microbiologists and historians brewed a remedy from the Leechbook, called Bald’s eyesalve, in the lab. They mixed garlic, onion, bovine bile and wine in a brass vessel, then allowed it to stand for nine days. In laboratory tests, Bald’s eyesalve displayed surprisingly effective antimicrobial activity against both Staphylococcus aureus and its drug-resistant form, MRSA.
These researcher also say that it may be harder for bacteria to evolve resistance to those old herbal mixtures than to moder, single-compound drugs.
Learning and thinking about this completely changed my attitude toward ancient and medieval herbal medicine. I used to think about this entirely in psychological terms, wondering why people devoted so much effort to useless remedies, but not I wonder which compounds had real value, and when, and how much ancient and medieval people understood about their effects.
Study of news sources finds, among other things, that left-leaning outlets are more likely to focus on institutions while right-leaning outlets focus more often on individuals.
Perun on Ukraine's recent offensive around Lyman and the problem of Russian false reporting, fascinating 1-hour video.
Comparing how men and women rate TV shows.
Six very short short stories by eminent writers, interesting collection.
Sarah Paine on the end of the Cold War, one hour lecture followed by another hour of interview.
Tyler Cowen reminds us what miracle West Germany was: "At the end of the World War II, Germany was one of the sickest and cruelest human societies in history, ever. Not too many years later, it was one of the best and most successful societies ever."
Biologists think complex cells formed when larger cells incorporated small bacteria into themselves as symbionts; those bacteria evolved into mitochondria and chloroplasts. One intriguing way to study this is using an organism known as Paulinella, which seems to have incorporated bacterial algae cells into its fabric less than 100 million years ago. (NY Times, wikipedia, scientific paper)
Interesting photographs of people and horses in the Sahara desert.
On twentieth-century revolutionaries in the West: some of their goals may have been noble, but "their methods were nonsensical, their goals were impossible, and their organizations were infiltrated by egomaniacs, psychos, and informants."
Another fragment of the Treaty of Kadesh, signed between the Hittites and the Egyptians in 1269 BC, has been found in Turkey.
A statistical argument that common estimates of death from medical errors are grossly exaggerated.
YouTube video of an interesting video installation by teamLab. More links here.
Justin Wolpers: My Libertarian Friends were Right.
What is in the Senate's regulatory reform bill: some significant changes to NEPA and the Historic Preservation Act, including limits on lawsuits under NEPA.
The invention of Islamic invention: the rogue wikipedia editor who inserted claims that medieval Islamic scholars invented or discovered everything from microscopes and microorganisms to relativity.
Richard Hanania on slut-shaming and the Cornell Seven. Summary on Twitter/X.
Photo set documenting 60 years of opposition to Fascism and racism in East London.
Roman-period shipwreck off Turkey was full of luxury ceramics probably bound for Italy.
Huge cuts in admissions to Ph.D. programs at major universities. At Harvard, "Departments in the arts and humanities will see their enrolment of doctoral candidates decrease by 60 per cent over the next two years, according to reports in October, with cuts in the social sciences estimated at between 50 and 70 per cent." Given how few jobs there are for university teachers in those fields, this is necessary. But it would be even better if half the universities ended their programs altogether, so graduate students in the remaining programs would have more peers to interact with. Many schools can't have graduate seminars because there just aren't enough students to fill them.
RFK Jr.'s cooking show.
Does being raised in adversity make people stronger? A very old question considered by a new generation of researchers.
What studies of modern and ancient DNA says about when people entered the Americans, with a plea for much more data.
Piece about an infertile couple who achieved pregnancy after consulting ChatGPT.
The grand-ducal workshop of Casino di San Marco was one of several founded by Francesco I as a laboratory for experimentation where painters, sculptors, academics and artisans worked together to investigate natural phenomena and invent new materials and processes. Francesco had a great personal interest in alchemy and glassmaking, as well as in collecting at and antiquities, and he invested much time and money promoting technical innovation by marrying the experimental sciences in the applied arts.
On the first floor of the palace alone were glass works, an alchemy laboratory, foundries for metal work, including the forging of steel tools hard enough to hew porphyry, furnaces where rock crystal was fused to create decorative objects and precious stones (emeralds, rubies) were counterfeited, and ovens for producing a soft paste porcelain that became known as “Medici porcelain.”
Unable to find suitable clay, the Florentine craftsmen tried to make their own:
It is thought that the body of Medici porcelain consists of glass, powdered rock crystal, and sand, as well as clay from Vicenza and white earth from Faenza.
So, an economic failure of no great significance. But look closer and you get yet another glimpse of the wave of innovation that was sweeping across Renaissance Europe, building into a tsunami of growth and change. Everywhere you look you see people trying new ways of doing things: of building ships, of making glass and pottery, of printing books, of erecting buildings. People invented machines for making ceramic water pipes. It took a long time for all this innovation to transform Europe, but once this competition in innovation was launched it did not stop until everything was different than it had been.
Chemical skill built up slowly, but by 1700 every sort of chemical process, including making gunpowder and casting bronze, had been greatly improved.
This restlessness, this refusal to stick to the tried and true, this endless searching for more knowledge and better ways of doing things, is what gave us the modern world.
As wild bear populations rebound in some areas, encounters between bears and dogs are increasingly common. The NY Times has a weird story about people trying to study these interactions, which are, of course, more complex and diverse than many people would suspect.
Anyway I was struck that the article fails to mention one of the most important and best understood facts about these interactions. Dogs, and even sometimes cats, regularly scare away wild predators because they have much less fear of being injured. An injured wild predator can't hunt and will likely starve. An injured domesticated animal can retreat to its comfortable home and be fed by its owner; if it is more seriously hurt it will get a trip to the vet for medical care.
This greater risk tolerance of domestic animals with a support system behind them underlies all those videos of pets chasing away bears and mountain lions.
The loved ones we call the dead
depart from us and for a while
are absent. And then as if
called back by our love, they come
near us again. They enter our dreams.
We feel they have been near us
when we have not thought of them.
They are simply here, simply waiting
while we are distracted among
our obligations. At last
it comes to us: They live now
in the permanent world.
We are the absent ones.–Wendell Berry
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In the NY Times, Amanda Hess covers some recent blowups in the Tradwife social media sphere:
The first time Bernadine Barber saw the word “tradwife,” it was being used to describe her. She was not yet 30, she had three children, and her Instagram content promoting traditional gender roles was gaining a following. She had started going by Bernadine Bluntly online, a name to reflect how plainly she spoke her truth. . . .
Onstage and online, Bluntly argued the tradwife’s cause with passionate intensity. But privately, “I was already going back and forth about leaving my marriage,” she told me recently. Soon she would have six children, 141,000 YouTube subscribers, friends at Evie Magazine and Turning Point USA, and a commitment to an ideology that she now says made her suffer. “You’re told that if you really love God, then you submit to your husband, you fight for your marriage, you forgive no matter what, and you stay for the kids,” she said. “It’s honestly a miracle of God that I woke up and got out.”
Last year, Bluntly left her husband and got a restraining order against him.
I already wrote about this phenomenon last year, so I won't elaborate my position here; suffice to say that I think most influencers are narcissists of questionable sanity, and ideology and family life make for a really bad combination.
Amanda Hess is one of several feminists I have seen who are downright gloating about this development. See? See? If you don't fight the patriarchy, next the know your trapped at home with five kids and an abusive husband. Well, sure, but two things. First, if you find yourself gloating about this failure of "traditional" family life, you might also ask why thousands of smart women are attracted to the Tradwife ideal. Life is hard for everyone, no matter how free and feminist you are. And second, if you are relying on these women, who are least high strung and possibly mentally ill, to discredit partriarchy, I don't see how that's much better than relying on them to model an ideal of patriarchal marriage.
But the new thing I learned from Amanda Hess is that there is now a whole constellation of Ex-Tradwife influencers who go on making videos no matter what happens in their lives.
Enitza Templeton, a 43-year-old Colorado mother of four, identifies as a “former tradwife” and “current baddie” to her 247,000 TikTok followers. When she became disillusioned with her own tradlife, Templeton created an Instagram account called Sweet by the Slice.
What a world.
The most interesting of this work—past, present, or future—is or will be that which dismantles, boycotts, ignores, destroys, takes liberties with, or at least pokes fun at the avant-garde’s long commitment to the idea that the shocks produced by cruelty and violence—be it in art or in political action—might deliver us, through some never-proven miracle, to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative, and just way of inhabiting the earth, and of relating to our fellow human beings. For as Arendt puts it succinctly in On Violence, “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”
—Maggie Nelson, from The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Here is my principle, stated here many times: violence begets violence. If you want a kinder, more peaceful, more equal world, you must start by renouncing violence.
Richard Hanania wrote a piece this week attacking what sounds like a stupid article about Korean adoptees in the US. The study's authors found that while most adopted children in Sweden do worse academically, those adopted from Korea in the 1960s and 1970s do better. Refusing to consider genetics, they speculate that the cause must be that Korean orphanages gave these kids some kind of miraculous start on life. Um, sure.
Hanania on Twitter/X:
After I published my article on Korean adoptees today, a professor at an R1 university wrote to me: "It's a pity I can't assign this in one of my quantitative methods classes."
I got his point, but asked what exactly was stopping him. He wrote the following:
"In one sense, nothing. I have tenure and academic freedom and I don't think I would face the kind of Amy Wax style retaliation that FIRE could sue over. But there would be consequences. The most immediate would be that I would no longer teach or advise grad students – and not because the department chair was punishing me but because students would refuse to take my classes or have me on their dissertation committees. But the more important thing is reserving my credibility for when it is most likely to be effective. You want people to take you seriously when you speak in a faculty meeting or advocate a policy at your university or in your discipline. This isn't careerism, it's about strategic understanding of picking battles to have the most impact, especially given that I am not teaching about inequality and there are other ways to teach the auxiliary hypothesis problem that would be much more effective because they wouldn't make students too upset to appreciate the methodological point."
Good demonstration of how academic pressure comes from below. You can have all the free speech protections you want, and maybe you won't be disciplined or fired, but no law or regulation can stop students from refusing to take your classes, other academics from not wanting to write papers with you, etc.
