Links 29 August 2025

Landscape interventions by Finnish artist Annti Laitinen. Above, Broken Landscape VI.

Heavens Doorways, a fun Tumblr featuring pictures of doors and windows.

Utter confusion about what happened in the Alaska meeting between Trump and Putin.

Scott Siskind on AI psychosis, internet psychosis, and other psychoses.

A long Tweet about the war within the conservative movement between the "post-liberals" – people like Deneen and Pappin who are focused on religious and moral issues – and economic libertarians. The author says the post-liberals are trying to drive economists out of the conservative movement.

Review of Buddha, Socrates, and Us, a new book by Stephen Batchelor, who is a scholar of both Buddhism and western philosophy. Sounds interesting. Incidentally the author of the review is Costica Bradatan (aka Costică Brădăţan, but bookstore search engines can't cope with the diacriticals), a Romanian American philosopher; since I have loved all the little essays and reviews of his I have stumbled onto I just went and ordered one of his books. 

Long but very interesting essay on Shulamith Firestone, who was briefly an icon of second wave feminism before descending into paranoid schizophrenia. She had many friends who tried to help her, but "a mental patient, like an alcoholic, is endlessly cunning when it comes to subverting salvation, and Shulamith Firestone was one of the best."

Interview with a scholar who thinks democracy has ruined American education.

Large British study finds that while trans youths do have mental health problems, they do not have a particularly high suicide rate.

Scott Sumner's final blog post at EconLog is a plea for integrity in government.

NY Times feature on New Orleans, which received more than $100 billion in outside funding after Hurricane Katrina but still somehow never recovered. My then employers were involved in this, and one issue was a conflict over vision. FEMA's general plan for flood recovery is to buy people out of the low-lying areas and move them to higher ground, but in New Orleans the low-lying areas are black and the high ground is mostly white, and the politicians said we're not signing onto a plan that invests in white neighborhoods while telling black residents to move on. So from the beginning there was no plan. But the authors of this essay are still talking about "equity" and ignoring geography, so the next time this happens the same fight will happen all over again.

A claim that Medicare delivers very small value to the people who receive it (Twitter/X). Obviously this is a hard number to calculate, but we have long known that the US spends an enormous amount on medical care for the dying, some of whom would probably rather be left to die in peace.

Large Bronze Age hoard found in Germany, likely related to three daggers found nearby in 1900.

I did not know that single men earn the same amount as women; the gender pay gap is entirely about how much married men earn. (Twitter/X) This is partly because they work more hours than anyone else.

For decades, Polish migration to Germany has been a major economic factor in Germany and a political irritant. But recently the rate turned negative, with more Poles moving back to Poland than going the other way.

In 2024, Barbados had 1,995 births and 3,008 deaths. We don't know about some other Caribbean island nations because they have stopped releasing these numbers. (Twitter/X)

St. Cristopher used to be depicted fairly often with a dog's head.

Re-reading Moby Dick at 58, Ahab's age.

New study finds that the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine reduced Covid mortality among the elderly by more than 50%. Via Marginal Revolution.

A philosopher ponders the eventual death of the universe, besides its general tendency to make things difficult rather than easy.

Huge lightning flash from 2017 is confirmed as the longest on record.

Tree fall in the Amazon reveals seven pre-Columbian funeral urns unlike anything I have seen from the region.

This week's past post is Dissatisfaction with Democracy in an Anti-Racist Age, from 2021.

Labor Day Garden

Above, the seeds of my blackberry lilies, showing how they got their name.

Global Fertility Map

The Witches of Orkney

I have been studying the European witchcraft persecutions for more than 40 years, and I have never read anything on the subject more enlightening than one amazing chapter of Peter Marshall's Storm's Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney (2024). This vast book is a detailed (sometimes too detailed) history of Orkney from 1468, when it passed from the Kingdom of Norway to the Kingdom of Scotland as part of a marriage settlement, to the early 1800s. Marshall is deeply learned in the history, language, folklore, geography and documents of Orkney, and his broad expertise is part of what makes his treatment of witch cases so compelling. I highly recommend this 48-page chapter.

I want to dwell here on two particular cases. There is an idea out there that there "were no witches," that is, that the people burned at the stake were just unfortunates caught up in a malignant system. There is a monument in Kirkwall today on the spot where many witches were strangled and burned, and it bears the words "They were cheust folk": they were just people. However, this was not always true. Yes, when the big panics got going and accused witches were tortured until they named their accomplices, anyone could be condemned. But so far as we can tell, most accused witches were people widely reputed to have magical powers, and some of them absolutely did try to harm their neighbors with black magic.

The magic of Orkney, like everything else about the islands, was drawn in part from their Norse past. During the period of the persecution, the 1500s and 1600s, English and Scots were gradually replacing Orkney's old Norse dialect, but the magical formulas that come down to us were mostly in Norn. The witches often spoke of "going with the good wights." The word "wights" is usually rendered into modern English as "fairies," and of course the grim ministers of the Reformation Kirk translated it "demons." But it seems to denote a unique class of beings more like Norse trolls than British fairies. Marshall believes that people "went with" the wights in dreams or trance, and we do have some accounts of meeting them in dreams, but I suspect people thought they could be met in the physical world as well.

This brings us to Oliver Leask, a man who was condemned in 1616 after what looks like a very long career as a healer, enchanter, thief, extortionist, and expert on the spirit world:

Leask's modus operandi involved travelling around, begging money, food, and drink, and making veiled threats when his requests were denied. That he continued in this manner for so long suggests a reluctance to tangle with those thought to possess magical powers. Not everyone complied. During 'bere seed time', Leask  came to John Craigie's farm at Swandale, on the east side of Rousay, 'boasterously' demanding grain. When Craigie refused, bitter words ensued, and Least got a blow from 'the shaft of the Clodmell' – a large mallet for greaking up clods of earth. Since that time, Craigie had found 'ane great number of his horses and beasts all dead.' (192)

One woman responded to Leask's threats by saying, 'If God be with me, what can ye do to me?' Leask answered that he could harm her whether God was with her or not. Leask was also a healer, and one of the charges against him concerned a time when he heard that a wealthy man was sick and travelled a long distance to offer his services as magical physician. Leask was found guilty of witchcraft, but the jury also declared that he was insane, so he avoided the death penalty. Which raises another interesting question: was Leask crazy? If so, what was the relationship between his mental illness and his career as a sorceror? Consider the way he lived, homeless, wandering the islands begging for his keep while believing that he had great magical powers: does that not seem a bit mad? There is a strong association between shamanism and lunacy in many cultures, so it would not be surprising if it existed in 17th-century Orkney

Leask sometimes used an alias, 'Walliman.' This was no ordinary name, but an old word for sorceror likely derived from the Norse völva. Sort of like calling yourself 'Warlock.' And this brings us to our next case, which I find even more interesting. Jonet Rendall was condemned in 1629 for a long bill of charges stretching back 20 years, the most damning of which was regularly consorting with the devil:

Her acquaintance with the Devil began two decades earlier, 'above the hill of Rendall' – somewhere along the windy ridge joining the summits of Hackland, Enyas and Gorseness Hills. . . Satan arrived at a vulnerable moment: Jonet had 'sought charity and could not have it'. He made her an offer, and though the dittay [bill of charges] uses the theological language of a 'pact', the Devil does not seem to have demanded anything in return. He promised to 'learn you to win alms by healing of folk, and whosoever should give you alms should be the better either by land or sea. And those that gave you no alms should not be healed . . . whatever you craved to befall them should befall." Despite this promise of vengeance on the mean-fisted, Satan, it appears, wanted to make Jonet Rendall into a magical healer.

It was, however, the prosecutor who identifiedthe mysterious figure 'clad in white clothes, with ane white head and ane grey beard' as the Devil. Jonet had her own name for him: Walliman. It seems very likely that her life-changing encounter was with a human not a supernatural being: the showman-warlock Oliver Leask, whose professional technique was precisely as described in the offer to Jonet, and who frequented this part of Orkney in the first decade of the seventeenth century. (199)

If Marshall is right, this case is a very important one, because one of the things we know the least about such cunning folk is how they learned their trades. 

It also looks to me like Jonet Rendall shared something else with Leask, a weak grasp on sanity:

If Jonet Rendall learned her secrets of curing and cursing from Oliver Leask, their last meeting must have been prior to Leask's banishment in the spring of 1616. In the succeeding years, he evidently assumed in her mind a more than human status. Jonet's confession spoke of 'praying to Walliman', and in admitting nearly all the charges she emphasised his power rather than hers: 'Walliman took away the profit of the ky'; 'Walliman slew the mares.' (200)

One of the charges against Jonet raises other important themes:

In 1621, Andro Matches of Sundiehous in Hackland Denounced Joney to the sheriff after losing the profit of his milk. Nine months later, he took complaint to the Evie Kirk Session. Matches was clearly unusual in his willingness to cause trouble for Jonet; a few days later, she remonstrated with him for 'always dealing with and complaining' of her, and said he would repent it.

Sure enough, three days later, Andro went out of his wits. His wife's reaction may seem curious to us, but is one commonly met with both in Orkney and elsewhere: she sent for the woman she believed to have cursed her husband. As soon as Jonet arrived, Andro began to feel better, and Jonet was rewarded with a plate of meat. Before tasting it, she spat three times over her left shoulder, and Andro's wife, 'fearing ye had been doing more evil,' spring forward to strike her. 'Let me alone,' Joney snapped, 'for your goodman will be well.'

The image of Andro's anxious wife, unsure if she was witnessing a ritual of healing or harming, captures the uneasy relationship between those who knew how to work magic and those who were eager to benefit from its effects. People in the farms of the West Mainland put up with Jonet's presence because she offered useful services and because they were afraid of her.

I believe that Europe was full of such characters throughout the medieval and early modern periods, and quite likely going much farther back in time. But we can know few of them in the wonderful way Peter Marshall helps us to know Oliver Leask and Jonet Rendall.

Hampton National Historic Site

I finally made it to Baltimore County's most famous historical monument, Hampton Mansion. The property is now run by the National Park Service.

The main house was constructed in 1783 to 1790 by Captain Charles Ridgely, one of the richest men in America; when finished, this may have been the largest private house in the new nation. The design is supposed to have been inspired by Howard Castle. Famous guest include Charles Carroll and the Marquis de Lafayette.

The Captain was the second of seven Ridgelys to own the property, a run that extended from 1745 to 1948. Their money came from farming – at one point the estate was 10,000 acres – stone quarries, and the iron business. They had iron ore mines, coal mines, and a furnace, which is now under Loch Raven Reservoir but peaks out at low water.

View of the house from the rear, up from the terraced garden.

Plan of the property made in 1843, recording many now-vanished buildings.

Eliza Ridgely posing with a harp in 1818, by Thomas Sully.

What really fascinated me about the place was the outbuildings, most of them built of stone in an identical style. I had to look these up to figure out that they were the stables; why are they so tall?

Even the random sheds are lovely.

Fascinating Dairy, dug into the ground over a spring. Water flowing through the sunken room cooled the milk.

This strange building has at least four sections built at different times, one of which may have been standing on the property when the Ridgelys bought it in 1745. After the mansion was built this served as the overseer's residence.

View of the farm complex. The overseer's house is to the left, and the stone buildings to the right are slave quarters built around 1850. They are eerily similar to the ones John Custis had built at Arlington in Virginia.

The Quarters from the northeast.

Ruined greenhouses. A delightful place to explore.

Robert Frost, "Villanelle of the Circus Villains"

A "villanelle", in 19th-century poetic parlance, was a very structured 19-line form based on Italian popular song; the first and third lines must repeat in a standard pattern. Many modern poets have tried their hand at them, but of those I have read, this is my favorite.

Head toward the exit if you can.
Smiling, pointing at the dollar seats,
we crawled beneath the tent. They pulled us in,

gave us candy bars, red paper fans,
free soda pop, though we were clearly cheats.
Head toward the exit if you can.

We tried to leave it, once the show began,
ducked below the bleachers and the feet.
We crawled beneath the tent. They pulled us in.

The players caught us even though we ran,
Gave us better places and more sweets.
Head toward the exit if you can.

They masked us, made us join the caravan
to ride their cycles, wheeling in dead heat.
We crawled beneath the tent. They pulled us in.

The circus is on fire to a man.
The band is clowning out some new retreats.
Head toward the exit if you can.
We crawled beneath the tent. They pulled us in.

1924

The Italian Chapel

After the medieval cathedral in Kirkwall, the most visited religious site in the Orkneys is probably a small metal church on the uninhabited island of Lamb Holm. This little place was built in 1942-1945 by Italian prisoners of war.

One of the Royal Navy's main anchorages during both World Wars was Scapa Flow, a huge natural harbor in the Orkneys north of Scotland. The British thought they had closed all the subsidiary entrances to the harbor using sunken ships and other barriers. But on the night of October 14, 1939, a daring U-Boat captain named Günther Prien steered his vessel through the barriers and sank the battleship Royal Oak as it rode at anchor. Among the 835 men killed were so many teenage boys that the Admiralty was obliged by Parliamentary pressure to limit the number of such youngsters deployed on warships at sea. 

Then First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill ordered the construction of an elaborate system of causeways and obstacles that were called the Churchill Barriers.

Among the more than 2,000 men who labored on the barriers were 550 Italians who had been captured in North Africa. Sometime during 1943 their priest convinced the British commandant of their camp that these men needed a place of worship.

Wikipedia:

The chapel was constructed from limited materials by the prisoners in the form of a tin tabernacle, and comprises two Nissen huts [Quonset huts to Americans] joined end-to-end. The corrugated interior was then covered with plasterboard and the altar and altar rail were constructed from concrete left over from work on the barriers. Most of the interior decoration was done by Domenico Chiocchetti, a prisoner from Moena in Trentino, northern Italy. He painted the sanctuary end of the chapel and fellow prisoners decorated the entire interior. They created a facade out of concrete, concealing the shape of the hut and making the building look like a church. The light holders were made out of corned beef tins. The baptismal font was made from the inside of a car exhaust covered in a layer of concrete.

Funny that a bunch of male POWs thougt they needed a baptismal font; I guess it was in their minds an essential part of any church.

The church was still unfinished at the end of the war, but some of the Italians returned to complete the job; others participated in the restorations of the 1960s and 1990s. If you are wondering why the British were so accomodating to these former POWs, it is the same in the US; there are several old buildings on US military bases that are considered historic because they once housed Italian POWs, and I have been told that for old soldiers to return, often with their families, was routine into the 1990s. The switch of Italy from enemy to key NATO ally – without the Nazi stain that hung over the Germans – changed those men into comrades, and much was done to make their returns pleasant.

What a remarkable thing to stand on this tiny island, a monument to human resilience, faith, and the peace that some enemies are able to make with each other.

Karl Polanyi, "The Great Transformation"

The Great Transformation, published in 1944, still has a huge following both inside and outside academia. Economists, sociologists, and political scientists all cite Polanyi regularly; I have seen it asserted that the only author more often cited by social scientists is Foucault. But this book also gets cited in random debates on Twitter/X and in YouTube comment wars. Its fans are people looking for a different way to understand 19th- and 20th-century history. Surely, a certain sort of intellectual or pseudo-intellectual thinks, there must be some other angle on these events, some deeper tide, some key that unlocks what seems so mysterious: the way Europe built an astonishing civilization and then ripped it to shreds. In this book, Polyani tried to explain that astonishing history. 

Karl Polyani (1886-1964) sprang from the world of rich, German-speaking Hungarian Jews that gave the 20th century so many of its iconic thinkers. He was involved in left-wing democratic politics, what we would now call Social Democracy or the center left. He served in the Austrian cavalry during World War I and was wounded on the battlefield. After the war he returned to politics, but when Hungary was convulsed, first by communist revolution, then the semi-fascist Horthy dictatorship, Polanyi fled to Vienna. From which he fled to Britain in 1934. Despite throwing himself into the study of British economic history – the The Great Transformation displays an astounding level of knowledge about things like the Poor Law debates of the 1660s – as a foreigner and a Jew he was never able to find an academic post. So in 1940 he moved to the US, teaching first at Bennington and then at Columbia. But his wife, who had been a member of the Hungarian communist party, was not able to get a US visa, so he divided his time between New York and Canada, where she lived.

The way Polanyi saw the world in 1940 is perhaps best explained by the lectures he gave at Bennington College when he first arrived there. The first one begins like this:

The subject matter of these lectures is a vast and unique event: the passing of 19th-century civilization in the short period that elapsed between the first and second wars of the 20th century. At the begging of this period, 19th-century ideals were paramount, indeed their influence had never been greater; by its close hardly anything was left of that system under which our type of society had risen to world leadership. Within national frontiers representative democracy had been safe-guarding a regime of liberty, and the national well-being of all civilized nations had been immeasurably increased under the sway of liberal capitalism; the balance of power had secured a comparative freedom from long and devastating wars, while the gold standard had become the solid foundation of a vast system of economic cooperation on an almost planetary scale. Although the world was far from perfect, it seemed well on the way towards perfection. Suddenly this unique edifice collapsed; the very conditions under which our society existed passed forever. The task which faces us in the present cannot, we believe, be understood except in the light of this tremendous event. It is both national and international, political and economic – all our institutions are involved.

The historian hardly knows where to start.

But while a generic "historian" might not have known where to start, Polanyi did: with the creation of the free market in goods, land, and labor. He dated this precisely to the 1830s, in England. As he shows at some length, the free movement of workers was curtailed in Britain and France by Poor Laws dating to the 1500s. These laws provided that each parrish had to provide food and housing for its own indigent people, and try to find work for the unemployed. These measures worked to the extent that they (most of the time) prevented homelessness and starvation, but they had horribly distorting effects on the careers of workers. They also kept most workers close to home, since they had a safety net within their home parrish but none anywhere else. 

Polanyi was as well read in anthropology as in history, and he understood that in most premodern societies markets played a very limited role. Most economic activity was embedded within social relations, with trade taking place between people who were relatives or neighbors or had some traditional, well-defined connection to each other. Everything David Graeber ever wrote about what village economies were actually like, which he tended to phrase as a radical attack on the economic mainstream, was much better explained by Polanyi. So Polanyi understood that the Poor Laws of early modern Europe were just one expression of ancient ways of thinking about work, time, neighborhood, obligation, and much more. 

When the British Poor Law was repealed in 1834 – by the first Parliament elected after the great 1832 reform handed power to the urban middle class – Britain embarked on a brave new economic world. Polanyi wrote that these reforms meant

the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system. (57)

As Polanyi noted, this political change was accompanied by new economic thinking. The creators of neo-classical economics, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx, thought that economics was governed by impersonal laws. There was, to this way of thinking, not much governments or people could do about economic conditions, because they respond, not to our desires, but to these impersonal, implacable laws. Attempts at meddling could only damage the machine, not improve it.

Polanyi came from a family of wealthy manufacturers, and he fully understood the power of the factory system. Everything he said against capitalism was prefaced by extensive observations on how much richer Europe and the average European grew between 1834 and 1914. This is something missed, I think, by some of his admirers, especially on the anarchist left. Polanyi had no interest in going back to the pre-modern world.

But though free markets in labor and goods launched a fantastic surge of wealth, they lasted only a few decades before governments began to pass limits on them. Already in the 1870s Britain and France passed many anti-market laws: unemployment relief, tariffs to protect key industries, and so on. One that Polanyi focuses on is what we call Workers' Compensation, the requirement that employers pay for the health care of employees injured on the job, and support them while they recover. Such laws were passed across much of Europe within a period of less than ten years.

Polanyi called this dialectic, the surging power of free industry and the corresponding attempts to limit its harm, a "double movement." This was the inevitable result, he thought, of an economic system that was outside of society rather than embedded in social relations. On the one hand, markets made us rich, but on the other hand, by abstracting work and trade from the community, they took away the supporting structures, both financial and emotional, that buoyed up people's lives, which required governments (of any party) to step in and support workers and their families.

Polanyi was an internationalist and he was very interested in trade. The longest chapter in The Great Transformation covers the establishment of the gold standard and its eventual collapse. The idea behind the gold standard was simple: regulate international currency exchange by requiring that each nation be willing and able to swap its own currency for gold at a published rate. But no nation actually had enough gold reserves to cover all of its bank notes, which rendered the whole system vulnerable to what amounted to runs on the bank. All governments, therefore, whether of the right or the left, had to put the stability of the currency at the center of their policies. Any false step could unsettle the currency: too much spending, too little spending, too high a deficit, too much taxation. All governments found themselves boxed in by the money markets and unable to respond to the needs of their people. Some governments therefore abandoned the gold standard after WW I, and the rest did when the Depression struck. But that introduced even more uncertainty into international trade.

In the 1940s Polanyi thought the era of free markets and free trade was over. He looked forward to societies oriented more toward the needs of the people than those of the market, and he is sometimes a considered a prophet of postwar social democracy in Europe. But I suspect he would have been suprised by the continuing vitality of capitalism in our time. He seemed to think that the "double movement" rendered all market-based systems inherently unstable, so that the collapse of the European system after WW I was inevitable. And it may well be that market economies are unstable, and that managing one  really does box governments into narrow policy ranges. But over the past 70 years our technical and organizational creativity has been sufficient to keep the economy booming, giving us pretty nice lives. The alternate system Polanyi imagined, which would put the economy back within the boundaries of social relations, has never come to pass, and I have never seen any convincing formula for making it happen.

We seem to be stuck with markets and with the discontent they breed.

Links 22 August 2025

French postcard, 1913

Alex Tabarrok with an American economic manifesto.

Matt Yglesias: "Trump is doing the part of socialism where you destroy the economy's long-term potential with central planning, but skipping the part where you take care of the poor and the sick."

Turning a nineteenth-century island fortress into a modern party venue.

Thread on class and air conditioning in Germany, or, The Anti A/C Jihad.

Robin Hanson on the orbiting "glints" that some think are evidence of aliens. I find it pathetic that so many people take anything they don't understand and say, "it must be aliens."

An AI system comes up with an idea for improving the sensitivity of a major experiment in physics: "Initially, the AI’s designs seemed outlandish. The outputs . . . were too complicated, and they looked like alien things or AI things. Just nothing that a human being would make, because it had no sense of symmetry, beauty, anything. It was just a mess."

The fight over M dashes and AI writing. I have an intense personal relationship with the M dash, because when I write quickly I use too many dashes or other ways of breaking up the text, and then if I want it to sound good I go back and smooth things out. Very few sentences read better with dashes in them, and my advice would be to use them very seldom.

Long but interesting review of the Peruvian play Ollantay, which may be either a Spanish fantasy about Indians or a Spanish rendering of a Quechua tradition. From Scott Siskind's "Review Anything" contest.

Long article on "Alpha School,"an educational program based on AI tutors that makes great claims for itself. Summary at Marginal Revolution. Can be compared to the even longer review of Alpha School from Siskind's contest.

New work from Antony Gormley, playing with big wooden blocks and human forms. Earlier work here.

Dirty Dick's, a famous and famously weird London pub.

Story of one of the black women drawn to Jim Jones' cult; before the apocalypse the point of Jonestown was supposed  to be an anti-racist socialist utopia.

An entrant in the competition for "most epic domino crash ever."

Ukraine's new FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, range 3,000 km, claimed production rate 1/day. Twitter/X, wikipedia.

People Thinking that Everything is Bad, Part N

Some masked federal agents in DC yesterday refused to give their names or even say what agency they worked for. This exchange followed:

Bystander: "You guys are ruining this country, you know that, right?" Agent: "Liberals already ruined it."

I see this kind of stuff constantly now. Some people defend Trump and say he is making things great. But many – more, in the stuff that makes it into my feeds – respond to any criticism with "it's no worse than Obama" or "it's what liberals deserve for what they did" or "Trump can't wreck the economy it's already wrecked" and so on.

In particular, any suggestion that Trump is notably corrupt gets a lot of "you're another" responses. I recently said something to an acquaintance about Trumpian criminality and he responded, "So long as people in Congress can trade stocks they're all insider traders who should be in prison." Many Americans believe that the government has been for sale for decades, if not centuries, and the Democrats are just mad because Trump is better at it.

The awfulness of America in this moment is downstream from a widespread sense that things have been so awful for so long that complaining about particular awful acts is a pointless waste of time.

Newsom has a Chance in 2028

From an unofficial Newsom-linked Twitter/X account:

MANY PEOPLE ARE SAYING — AND I AGREE — THAT I, GAVIN C. NEWSOM (AMERICA’S FAVORITE GOVERNOR) DESERVE THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE. WHY? BECAUSE OF THE “MOST INCREDIBLE MAPS IN THE HISTORY OF MAPPING” (EVEN COLUMBUS). THESE MAPS WILL END THE “VERY RIGGED” ELECTIONS, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN (MAGA!!!), RETAKE CONGRESS “FOR THE PEOPLE”, AND SAVE DEMOCRACY. NOBODY ELSE COULD HAVE DONE THIS — CERTAINLY NOT THE “SELF-PROCLAIMED” MASTER DEALMAKER DONALD “TACO” TRUMP (TINY HANDS) WHO MISSED “THE DEADLINE” AND LOST (SAD!). PEACE THROUGH MAPS — NO ONE HAS EVER THOUGHT OF THIS BEFORE. I AM THE “PEACE TIME” GOVERNOR NOW, STOPPING “POLITICAL WARS” BEFORE THEY START. HARMONY, UNITY, EVEN LOVE. THE NOBEL COMMITTEE HAS GIVEN THIS AWARD TO LESSER PEOPLE FOR MUCH LESS. I, GAVIN C. NEWSOM, ACTUALLY EARNED IT. THE WORLD WILL BE SAFER, KINDER, AND FRANKLY MORE “BEAUTIFUL” BECAUSE OF MY MAPS. GIVE GAVIN THE NOBEL, MANY ARE SAYING. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! — GCN

Slavery, Complicity, and US Economic Growth

Those Americans determined to find nothing but misery and wickedness in our past like to say things like this:

The white folks who did not personally own slaves gleefully participated in the economy and white supremacy created by slavery. Slavery turned America into an economic superpower. That is indisputable.

But as far as the last statement goes, most economic historians very much do dispute it. First, the US was not an "economic superpower" until a generation after the abolition of slavery. And, the real engines of US growth seem to have little to do with slavery or plantation agriculture:

One central issue is that much historical writing conflates complicity with slavery—for example, routinely engaging in business with slaveholders, including transactions that facilitated slaveholding and the domestic slave trade—with national economic impact. Complicity with slavery was indeed widespread in the free states. Indifference to the enslaved status of southern labor was more the rule than the exception among northern shippers, manufacturers, and financial firms. Further, such groups often supported slaveholder interests in national politics, fearful that turmoil over slavery would disrupt economic activity. However, accounts of the sources of US economic growth in the nineteenth-century suggest that slavery and the shift of the slave-owning South to cotton production early in the century had relatively little effect on growth for the nation as a whole. The southern economy shared in the growth acceleration, expanding lands committed to cotton production and raising labor productivity in the process. But the deeper sources of long-run US economic growth were improvements in technology, internal transportation, finance, and education, and the slave-owning South lagged in all of these areas. A simple summary of these patterns might be this: Slavery enriched slave-owners, but impoverished the southern region and did little to boost the US economy as a whole. 

Which is not to say that slavery was not, in certain situations, economically productive; I have written here before about the advantages that large plantations had in sweet-scented tobacco production, for example. The spread of plantations worked by slaves or indentured laborers is one of the great themes of the colonial era, and a driving force of the first global economy. But when they look in detail at the specific question of what made the US rich, most economists do not think slavery was helpful. If slavery made countries rich, then Brazil and Jamaica should have been richer than North America, and they were not. South Carolina should have been richer than New England, and it very much was not. Worldwide, economists find a very strong association between a free, mobile labor force and modern economic growth. Think about it this way: when left-wing historians write about the spread of plantations across Africa and Asia, they usually assume that the main beneficiaries were, not people in those countries, but European merchants; so why does anyone think that the spread of plantations across North America was a big benefit to North Americans? Other than the plantation owners, that is.

The biggest contribution of plantation agricultue to the US economy was growing cotton, but cotton production did not fall after the end of slavery.

I am not a big fan of mathematical economic counterfacturals, but FWIW when economists rerun the history of the US without slavery they find that the nation would have been richer in 1860, not poorer. Africans made a huge contribution just by being here and working, but the (lousy) numbers show that they would have added even more had they been free.

My own view is that Lincoln was elected partly because people in the North were feeling less and less connection to or dependence on the slave economy of the South, and therefore less inclination to compromise with the South politically. The energy in the North was in railroads, steel, and the ever-expanding wheat lands of the old Northwest. Northern businessmen viewed the plantations as an old-fashioned drag on their modernizing commercial and industrial world, and modern economic historians agree.

A Discussion about Intelligence

I attended a discussion last night focused on the question, "What is Intelligence?" Nine people attended, three of whom work in AI. 

We started from a very simple definition: that intelligence is that ability to take in information and use it to generate some result, that is, information processing. By this definition, of course, all sorts of things are intelligent, from hand-held calculators to trees. This was kicked around but most of us were willing to assign some degree of "intelligence" to very simple organisms and devices. For example, no one disputed that mice are intelligent.

One participant was focused on the notion that intelligence is inference, the ability to look at data and draw from it a conclusion that is not obviously present in the source. I get that this is a good way to think about what AI can and cannot do, but am not sure how it can really be distinguished from information processing at a fundamental level.

Incidentally it seems that when professionals think about the usefulness of LLMs, they regularly employ the "intern test." If you say, "LLMs are not smart, you can't even trust them to do X," somebody will reply "I would never trust an intern to do that."

There was some discussion of speed as a factor. Some people want to say that computers aren't smart, they are just fast, but as was pointed out we often use speed as a way of juding how intelligent things are. E.g., it took this dog an hour to learn this new trick, but it took that dog a month, so this one is smarter.

One of my favorite questions got discussed: can you say that something is intelligent from the outside, based solely on its output, or do you want to posit some internal state of mind? E.g., some people say that while an LLM can produce what looks like intelligent output, it is not truly intelligent, because it has no understanding. It can search for words, but it does not think. In a related point, someone mentioned the ideas of a philosopher who, in thinking about intelligence, assigns much importance to the sense of self; would you call something intelligent that has no idea that it even exists? 

You can see the importance of that last question with regard to vast, vague systems. When we were talking about the ability of fungi to solve mazes, I said, in that case would you want to say that the intelligence resides, not in the fungus, but in the evolutionary system that created it? I mean, we couldn't even make a single dog, but evolution has made a thousand different kinds of dogs, besides all the other stuff. But there was a lot of reluctance to assign "intelligence" to evolution.

This relates to the question of goals; people are often unwilling to assign intelligence to AI, because it cannot set its own goals. But if the goals of, say, a mouse are set by evolution, how is that different from humans assigning goals to AI?

The AI people were focused on two points that I found interesting. First, there is the "Lookup Table" problem. If your system is just using its ultra-fast processor to look up answers in a huge database, most people would not consider that intelligent. It was generally agreed that IBM's old Deep Blue chess program was not intelligent, because it was basically just looking up situations and moves in its database. This is akin, of course, to the old Chinese Room problem, and I found it a good sign for the status of our civilization that nobody felt any need to debate the Chinese Room.

The second point was about the complexity of the algorithm. The history of AI is full of systems that seemed intelligent, in limited circumstances, but turned out to be employing very simple algorithmic tricks. LLMs, by contrast, are highly complex, so much so that we often have no idea how they do what they do. Human brains are astonishingly complex. Should that be part of our definition of intelligence? One way to think about this is "compressibility": what is the shortest statement, in language or computer code or whatever, that could describe the operations of a brain or device? Do we want to say that any truly intelligent system should be too complex to be fully described in a simple way?

But in that case, someone said, are you putting the emphasis on mystery, saying that only systems we don't understand should be considered intelligent? Someone else said, yes, absolutely, if superintelligent aliens showed up who found it very easy to describe how our brains work, they would not consider us intelligent.

On the whole it was a fine way to spend two hours on a weekend evening, maybe not as much fun as a really great movie, but much better than a mediocre one.

The Constitution is Failing

The authors of the US Constitution worried deeply about democratic populism. They very much had men like Donald Trump in mind when they created our government, demogogues who would rile up the people and use the mechanisms of democracy to seize power and overthrow it. Their solution was to set up the Senate and the Supreme Court as bulwarks against populism and what they called "faction." The idea was that those institutions would be made up of wealthy, prominent men who were to some extent above the fray, whose personal fortunes and devotion to their own reputations would lead them to oppose factional fury. 

When the Supreme Court declined to strike down Trump's tariffs, and all the Republicans in the Senate voted to confirm RFK, that vision comprehensively failed. There is now no force in America but faction, and nothing to our politics but all-out war between factions that, I fear, will recognize fewer and fewer limits on how they pursue power.

We have also relied on other parts of our society to limit presidential power: the business world, the labor unions, the universities. The unions have been destroyed as a political force by divisions over social issues, and lately we have seen a miserable, disgusting parade of businessmen kowtowing to Trump. The universities lost all their independent power when they become dependent on Federal funding, giving them no choice but to acquiesce in whatever the President demands.

What is left?

Factionalism, or partisanship as we usually say these days, is nothing new in America. It has risen and fallen over the decades, and our politics have always been contentious. They have often been ugly. But I always thought there were some limits, some things people would not do. Trump's attempt to undo the 2020 vote failed, with many Republican local and state officials faithfully counting Democratic votes. Congress ratified Biden's election, with Republican support. 

Will that ever happen again?

We have major tests coming. Will the votes in the 2026 elections be counted fairly? And will Trump be forced from office in 2028 as the Constitution requires?

I don't know. I worry that Americans simply hate each other too much to care about anything but victory over their enemies.

The provisions the framers of our Constitution put in place to prevent dictatorship have failed. It remains to be seen if Americans can find some other way to curb their passions, share power with each other, and live in peace.

Links 15 August 2025

Serving dish from Fiji

Surveys are finding major changes in the big five personality traits of young Americans, with neurotocism up and extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness all down. (Twitter/X)

A claim that US airlines lose money flying people around but make it back off their credit card operations. (Twitter/X)

Amusing entry in Scott Siskind's "review anything" contest: My Father's Instant Mashed Potatoes.

Crazy story in the NY Times: "On Instagram, the artist Joseph Awuah-Darko asked the world to invite him to dinner before he ended his life. More than 150 meals later, he is still going."

A review of The Mirror and the Light, covering both Mantel's novel and the TV show, with thoughts on the politics of the time, Cromwell's actual character, and the rise of the modern state.

The latest in math teaching fads: Singapore Math.

All the data that companies collect on you, and what they do with it.

More Roman mosaics in Sicily, including a sandal.

We are not running out of fresh water.

The history of dates (the fruit), and how they came to be cultivated in the US.

Tyler Cowen interviews Nate Silver about poker, expected value, and politics: "people in the center have migrated away from the Democratic Party. . . I do think there’s a chance that Democrats will overestimate how tolerant the rest of the country is for progressive governance."

On Twitter/X, Robin Hanson links to a paywalled article that says people who are more mentally active and acute over 80 are much more sociable than others.

Has AI development hit a plateau? According to this article, many researchers think all progress is now just from more computing, and we need a new approach to get to superintelligence.

Surveys find that most Americans do not believe that building more housing will lead to lower housing costs. Economists find this bizarre, but on the other hand if you look around the world you see that we have built a ton of housing over the past 50 years but housing has gotten a lot more expensive. I personally don't think there is any real solution for places like New York and Shanghai where millions want to live; prices in such places will always rise to the point where many people are excluded.

A Twitter/X rant about moderation on Twitter/X, both about how it was terrible before Elon and how it is now terrible in a different way.

Do automated license plate readers violate the Constitution?

What, actually should we do about the homeless mentally ill? It seems pretty clear, based on statistical comparisons, that many mentally ill people in the US are in prison; could we do better? (Twitter/X)

Silver in a Viking Age hoard from England came from the Middle East. 

Polish metal detectorists had an amazing lucky streak.

"A new study finds that nearly nine in ten students fake more progressive views than they really hold, often to appease professors or stay in their peers’ good graces." A more correct version of this statement is that 88% say they have faked progressive views at least once, but still quite striking. Of course there may be opinions that one hopes people will keep to themselves in public, but the numbers in this survey do not portray a sustainable situation.

More in the same vein: Taboos and Self-Censorship Among U.S. Psychology Professors. "Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs."

The Minor Mystery of Chehel Burj

The internet, aware that I am a fan of cool historic sites, recently tossed me this image of a place identified as Chehel Burj. I thought, that looks like a place I might want to write a post about, so I did a search. 

And found this place. This was at an official and learned-looking site called the Helmand-Sistan Project. They also tell us this:

The site is an extensive complex of at least five large buildings. Though the standing buildings probably date to Ghaznavid times in the 11th century, ceramic evidence suggests they were first built in the early centuries CE. Two large fortresses—one square and approximately 170 m on each side, the other round and 85 m in diameter—are the most prominent buildings in the complex. Each has a courtyard in the center and rows of rooms around the edges, mostly two stories. The name chehel burj, “forty towers,” probably was used to describe the large square fortress, though it has 87 towers around the exterior. Because of its impressive size and extensive preservation, this site had been visited by previous researchers and was only quickly examined by our team.

The Helmand-Sistan Project also offers us this overhead view:

Now, I don't know about you, but this does not look at all like the fortress I started searching for. Among other things, is in the middle of an extensive plain, while our first fortress is in a mountain valley.

Another view of the first fortress.

So, a puzzle. While I could only find text about the square fort with 83 towers, outside that one site I could only find images of a completely different place.

So I tried YouTube. And there I found two videos about the mountain fortress I started with, the first one titled "Why Chehel Burj Is One of the Most Impressive Fortresses on Earth." Yep, that's our site.

This video tells us that this Chehel Burj also does not have forty towers. In fact, its authors assert, it may once have looked like this and had 300 towers. I have to say, though, that this video does not really inspire confidence, so I wouldn't necessarily believe that. This Chehel-Burj is in Bamyan province, which is in central Afghanistan a long way from Sistan and Helmand, which are in the southwestern corner.

This video reports that the site was founded in the early centuries CE, but most of the construction may date to the 6th century by the Ghurid Dynasty. But that has to be wrong, because the Ghurid Dynasty doesn't seem to have existed until after 750 AD, and its great period was after 1175. I am guessing that the main period of this fortress's construction was medieval, when the Ghurids, Ghaznavids, and Seljuk Turks were vying for dominance in the region. So the same period as the other Chehel Burj.

Google Earth, incidentally, also locates Chehel Burj at the central Afghan site that is the focus of our video.

So I am going to have to conclude that there are at least two places in Afghanistan called Chehel Burj. Since neither one has or ever had forty towers, I am also going to guess that this is a traditional term for "big fortress", or else that in Pashto "forty" is a way of saying "a lot."

Feminism, Motherhood, Mental Health, Ideology, Politics, Celebrity

In today's NY Times, another one of those stories. This one concerns Lauren Southern, who became a minor right-wing celebrity at 19 by posting anti-immigrant, anti-feminist rants, tried to become a tradwife, hated it, fled from her creepy husband, fell into depression, and then wrote a memoir about it.

I have been around long enough to have seen this story dozens of times, and most of them give me the same thought: that in our world ideology and psychological issues form an explosive mixture that regularly blows up and destroys people.

I think most celebrities are crazy. I have an intense suspicion of ideology. I also think that life is just hard, and that only the very lucky slide easily into happy marriages and happy lives. 

I think many people throw themselves into ideology as a way to cope with inner turmoil. As it happens, some of the most salient ideological disputes in our age concern family life and the roles of husbands and wives. The partial shift from a patriarchal model in which women work around the home to more equal relationships and more women working outside the home has been wrenching and confusing, and many conservatives hate it and think it is at the root of our current problems. So, some women attracted to retro ideologies try to reverse the trend and disappear back into what they imagine is a better past.

But ideology is, fundamentally, fantasy, and never more so than when it gets involved in family life. Very few women like Lauren Southern – raised feminists, and with their own careers at 19 – are ever going to be happy as tradwives, and I am intensely suspicious of any man who would try to turn such a woman into a tradwife. Of course there was an explosion with harm all around.

I hate what extreme ideologies do to people's minds.

Tragedy

The modern temperment is anti-Tragic. We believe that problems have solutions, that things can be worked out. If the economy is bad, we just need to elect a new government that will fix whatever is wrong and get people back to work. If tax cuts won't fix things, it will be tariffs, or subsidies, or something. 

If we are sick, that must be because of some fixable problem: poisons in the air, chemicals in the water, bad food, bat attitudes. 

We are reluctant to admit that problems are unsolvable and that sometimes life just sucks.

We also love good guys and bad guys, and rebel when we can't find one side in a story to root for.

Tragedy, as both the ancient Greeks and the early modern Europeans understood it, was about people confronting impossible situations. Like all of us, the characters in Tragedy are doomed. Sometimes they make things worse by their foolish actions, but if one is left thinking that if only the hero had done this or that obvious thing, everything would have worked out, then the tragedy is not successful. Tragedy only works if the audience believes that sometimes people are destroyed by events completely beyond their control.

Here is the chorus from Agamemnon:

Where is right and wrong
In this nightmare?
Each becomes the ghost of the other.
Each is driven mad
By the ghost of the other.
Who can reason it out?

Elektra:

By dread things I am compelled. I know that. I see the trap closing. I know what I am. But while life is in me I will not stop this violence. No. Oh my friends who is there to comfort me? Who understands? Leave me be, let me go, do not soothe me. This is a knot no one can untie. There will be no rest, there is no retrieval. No number exists for griefs like these. . . .

But when a god sends harm, no man can sidestep it, no matter how strong he may be.

Here is King Lear, accepting his defeat and failure:

Come, let’s away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.

As Teju Cole once put it, "Tragedy finds us where reasons end."

So here's the question: is this good or bad?

Does our belief in solutions motivate us to make the world better? and was the traditional belief in hopeless cases an excuse to leave bad practices as they were?

Or does our aversion to tragedy weaken us in the face of unsolvable problems, leading to grievance mongering and blame games? I feel like after every natural disaster in the US somebody is blaming the other political party. Do the horrible politics of the moment flow from our need to blame somebody for every bad thing in our lives? From our refusal to accept that sometimes the only choice is bad or worse, and that sometimes there are no choices at all?

I wonder.

It Sucks to be Trans in Denmark

Part I: Transition and Teenage Mental Health

Many people, including me, have the general impression that trans people are kind of crazy. Trans teenagers seem to be particularly mad. It is, however, hard to find good statistics on the problem. In most countries nobody official is tracking how many people consider themselves transsexual or transgender, so most of the numbers you might see are dubious. But the Danish government tracks its citizens with a true teutonic thoroughness, and they do have such a list. Which allowed researchers to discover the following:

• 43% of trans people have a diagnosed mental illness, compared to 7% of the general population;
• the rate of suicide attempts among trans people is 7.7 times the average;
• the rate of death by suicide is 3.5 times the average;
• even excluding violence the overall death rate for trans people is twice the average.

The numbers are small, so this is not a great data set, but it is the best one we have, and trans advocates in the US have long claimed that their suicide rate is high. The other studies I have found are much less comprehensive, but they point in the same direction. Kaiser Permanente recently did a study of its policy-holders in California, and they found the following:

We looked at mental health in transgender and gender-nonconforming youth retrospectively between 2006 and 2014 and found that these youths had 3 to 13 times the mental health conditions of their cisgender counterparts. . . . Among these young people, the most prevalent diagnoses were attention deficit disorders in children, 3 to 9 years of age, and depressive disorders in adolescents, 10 to 17 years of age.

The pro-trans Trevor Project found that "46% of transgender and nonbinary young people had considered suicide within the past year."

Equally bad data shows that trans people have high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction. I do not find this at all surprising; consider that one of the most basic tests of mental health is to ask, "Do you feel comfortable in your own skin?"

This same bad data also shows that there are a lot more trans people in recent generations than there used to be. For my generation the number was 1 in 1,000 or less; recent data on young Americans finds 2 to 3 percent identifying as trans, and up to 5 percent identifying as curious about it.

Which brings us to the question that I am going to write about, despite the risk to my personal reputation. I have tried to raise this topic with friends recently only to be shut down with some version of, "Only cranky conservatives talk about trans people and mental health, and you don't want to go there." The subject makes everybody mad, so no doubt somebody will soon be mad at me, but I have a very strong sense that it needs to be discussed as rationally as we can manage. I need to ask: how should we feel about the fact that the rates of mental illness, suicide, and early death are so high among trans people? And what should we do about it?

One response, which has been the general progressive response in the US and Europe, has been to say that what trans people need is what everyone needs: acceptance, support, compassion. This is what motivates people to do things that strike me as very strange, like giving double mastectomies to teenagers. They see young people in pain, and try to help. They see troubled people who believe that changing gender would help them, so they try to assist them along a path that everyone hopes we be a journey of healing. They believe the mental health struggles of trans people stem from lack of acceptance, from being condemned and attacked and bullied for just trying to be who they are. The way to fight suicide among trans people is with celebration and love.

There certainly is data showing that transgender young people report much more bullying than non-trans people. However, after years of reading all I can find about bullying I can tell you that being bullied is to some degree a matter of self-definition and all such numbers have a lot of problems. In terms of my personal experience, the two young trans people I have known best do not claim to have been bullied, and they both have serious mental health problems. So my position is that while bullying probably makes all of this worse, it is not the root cause.

The desire to offer acceptance is also what motivates people to push for trans-inclusive language like "pregnant people;" trans people, the argument would go, have suffered more than enough and shouldn't regularly be confronted with denials of their identity built into the fabric of our speech.

On the other side we have conservatives who seem to think that transgender is a stupid fad, the latest thing dreamed up by bored teenagers to tweak their parents. Something they learned from Tiktok or Instagram. Various Republicans in the US have denied that trans teenagers have an elevated suicide rate. When I first encountered this line of reasoning I was puzzled, because it absolutely does not match the intense seriousness I have seen in the young trans people I have known. (I should say that I have only known young trans people.) Maybe there are teenagers who declare themselves trans in a flip way, because it seems cool, but, if so, who cares? They will get over it. I am going to wave all of that off for now and focus on a different conservative argument: given that transsexuality is so strongly associated with mental illness, is it maybe something we should discourage rather than celebrate?

Imagine a 14-year-old of your acquaintance comes out to you as trans. Should you say, "How exciting that you are discovering who you really are! What can I do to help you along your journey?" Or should you say, "You should think really hard about that, because transition is a hell road littered with dead bodies and ruined lives. If there is any way you can live with the body and identity you have, you should cling to it, because it is your best chance for a halfway normal and happy life. Have you considered therapy?"

The question gains complexity from the parallel to being gay. Gay people used to ask this question of themselves all the time, and despite the much greater acceptance of homosexuality in our century, they still ask it. What many trans advocates want is what we have done a much better job of offering to gay people: a road that is neither self-denial nor darkness. After all, young gay people also seem to have higher rates of suicide and mental illness, although so far as I can tell the rates are not as high as the ones we are seeing for trans people.

There is also the issue of age. Transsexuality is rooted in a discomfort with our adult bodies, and those bodies take form long before legal adulthood. If you want to prevent a boy who identifies as female from developing a man's body, you have to intervene in middle school. Now, my attitude toward middle schoolers is that they don't have a single frickin' clue about life, so letting them choose anything important about their futures is an invitation to disaster. A certain amount of discomfort with changing bodies is also perfectly normal, and many teenagers are unhappy with the prospect of becoming a man or a woman with all that implies. This suggests to me that we should maybe wait and see if the discomfort goes away, as it eventually did for me. Besides, it is an old principle of psychoanalysis, going back to Freud himself, that people in the midst of a psychological crisis should not make important life decisions. But the hormones don't wait for the age of reason; progressive people have said to me that waiting until people are 18 before intervening condemns them to a false life in the wrong body, so the cost of waiting is too high. It is also, the (bad) data shows, as teenagers that trans people are at the highest risk of suicide.

Against that one might set the growing movement for "de-transition." Some people who transition in adolescence later decide that it was a mistake and return to the gender identity they were assigned at birth. The data here is even worse than the rest, but what I have seen suggests that about one tenth of people who transitioned over the past decade are trying to go back. Some of them have even sued the doctors who helped them transition. One of these people, the one who received a double mastectomy, said when she later sued her doctors that "all I needed was for someone to tell me I was fine the way I was." I would not say that the existence of de-transitioners refutes in any fundamental way the concept of transition; even if one tenth of trans people regret it, for anything to be 90 percent successful is pretty good. But for me it again brings the focus back to the age of the people we are talking about, as well as their shaky mental stability. Not transitioning may haves lifelong consequences, but so does transitioning.

(You may be thinking that I am leaving out something important by not making a distinction between sex and gender. Like, say, gender is how you present yourself in society, whereas sex is biological, and so we should not make a big deal about people changing gender. But there is no consistency at all among trans advocates about this, and so far as I can tell most use these words promiscuously. Trans is about who you are, not just how others see you. The subject of surgical transition is also much debated among trans people, with some saying that if you don't have surgery you are a fraud, while others recoil from it.)

I work hard to avoid coming to any conclusion that requires telling other people what to do. If adults want to change gender, why should that matter to me? I am also not much concerned about transition for people who have identified with the other sex since they were young children. But I am troubled by the nexus of teenage depression, teenage suicide, and teenage transition. The Danish numbers confirm that what we are doing is not working very well. I have no firm conclusions about what we should do here, but I think anyone who is celebrating teenage transition as a great and good thing is blind to a very painful reality. Many trans kids are severely depressed and there is no data I know of that says transition is a good way to help them. 

Part II: Metamorphoses

But as important as the dilemmas of teenage transition are, my thinking about transition is fundamentally about something else. I am a theoretical sort of person, so I want to ask a different question: what is real? Don't worry, I will get back to mental health at the end.

What was classical philosophy about? Part was about ethics, but the biggest and oldest part was what we call ontology. The philosophers at the root of the western tradition asked the questions, what is most real? And can what is most real change? They had every sort of answer to these questions, from Heraclitus saying that you cannot step twice in the same river to Parmenides saying that change cannot happen at all. Zeno's famous paradoxes were all about showing that change is not logically possible, so it must be an illusion. Plato became one of philosophy's gods by developing a system that allowed ordinary, everyday things to change without altering the underlying reality of the universe, where important things do not change. 

Nor was this limited to the Greeks. The philosophy of the ancient druids seems to have been built around a model of a world in constant flux, in which all things were constantly changing into other things. Much classical Hindu thought is taken up with these same questions, the relationship between the constantly shifting veil of experience and the other, deeper, truer levels of reality.

Consider Ovid's Metamorphoses, a long poem recounting all the many Greek myths in which people changed into trees, stags, grasshoppers, or strange things. It seems very clear to me that intellectually-minded people in the ancient world loved to talk about what could change and in what sense, and what if anything was permanent and unchangeable; I can imagine many of them leaping into a dinner party conversation about whether humans can change their sex and what that would mean.

Which is to say that the question of sex or gender change is not just about teenage mental health, but about the oldest questions of philosophy. Those questions are fundamental to our thought because they are basic to our lived experience. We all exist in a sort of dance with change, longing for some things to change while clinging to other things that we hope will never change. We wonder if we are the same people we were a decade ago, or somehow fundamentally different. We wonder the same about those close to us. One of our most persistent fantasies is a love that "lasts forever."

Especially in the modern world of fantastically rapid change people cling, for deep psychological reasons, to what they hope are permanent realities. One North Carolina grad wrote a whole book about hating Duke, which had been the only real constant in his life and therefore a rock to cling to when everything else was threatened. Many, many people want for male and female to be rocks where they can find stability.

There is no perfect alignment between people who dislike change and political conservatives, but there is certainly a connection. I would say that conservatives certainly seek out islands of stability toward which they can offer allegiance, and around which they can build their identies: God, nation, the "traditional family," and so on. So it is no surprise that many conservative people are deeply unhappy about the trans movement. 

Trans is a project of self-transformation. Which explains, I think, both its connection to mental health and its explosive political ramifications. Who needs self-transformation more than the mentally ill? And wouldn't any project devoted to undermining the certainties of family life and personal identity anger conservatives?

Part III: Pregnant People, Feminism, and Female Identity

Changing sex is not the only kind of self-transformation one can imagine. You might, for example, change your ethnicity instead. Except that in our world this is forbidden. We have been treated over the past few years to a parade of "Native American" professors unmasked as white people who tried to self-transform into Indians. (1, 2, 3) We consider this offensive, and in certain contexts it is even illegal. Many black and Indian people absolutely hate this, considering it a new and sinister form of theft: you already took our land and our power, and now you want to take our identities, too? On the other side people who "pass for white" are often said to be "denying who they are." 

I find this puzzling, because genetically the difference between ethnic groups is a rounding error compared to the enormous and very real genetic difference between men and women. "Race", so far as I can tell, is a modern invention, but sex has been the fundamental division of most animal species for 500 million years. So why can you change one but not the other? The answer I usually get is that while sex may have more biological importance, race has so much recent political importance that it cannot simply be waved away. For many progressives, the grievances of oppressed ethnic groups are the most fundamental and important issues of our time.

But it seems very weird to me to forget that sex is also a political issue and to wave away the oppression of women as something we shouldn't care about any more.

Many feminists feel the same way about trans men as Native American activists feel about white people "playing Indian."  I think this has two sides, the political and the personal. On the political side they see this as an invasion of their world by agents of their oppressors, who now seek to appropriate whatever they have of value that men haven't managed to take in other ways. 

But I want to focus on the personal side, because that is where I think the real issues lie. There are many women who have not taken any kind of feminist stand against transition but are made uncomfortable by trans women, and this includes many liberals and progressives. 

Consider "pregnant people."

When it comes to humans, you all know, everything is about identity. Everybody identifies as something. I, for example, identify as a cool-headed intellectual who wants to explore difficult and important questions regardless of who is upset about it or bored by this kind of analytical excursus. 

Many, many women identify first and foremost as women or mothers or grandmothers. NOT as people or parents or grandparents. 

The point of this long philosophical detour is this: arguing that you can change your gender or sex is not a trivial matter, but touches on the deepest regions of biology, philosophy, and language. In asking people to recognize that you can change your gender, you are asking a lot; in asking them to recognize that you have changed your sex, you are launching a broadside against the way many and maybe most people understand reality.

Part III: Feminism

I am all for freedom. I generally think people have the right, as John Stuart Mill put it, to pursue their own good in their own way. I think people should be allowed to define their own identities and decide for themselves who they are.

But we are not alone. Everything I do affects other people somehow, even if only by leaving footprints. Freedom is never, therefore, any kind of absolute, but must always be negotiated with others. Your freedom does not extend to punching me in the face, or smashing the windows of my house.

I have a strong sense that if you want to be free, you should support everyone's freedom and never use your own quest for freedom as an excuse to tell other people what to do and say. 

And this is what bothers me about the trans movement as it now exists: it is too much about defining an identity by forcing other people to recognize it. Claims of identity seem to function mainly as weapons in the culture wars, as a way to force our society to accept a certain view of human life and even of the universe. The trans movement sets the claims of their own self-understanding above all other claims. 

But cis people have identities, too, and no more than trans people do they feel fully supported in them. What it means to be a woman, for example, is a hard social and psychological problem, and many assigned-female-at-birth people struggle for a sense of womanhood. And then along come trans people saying that the way most women use the word is wrong, because it excludes them. "Pregnant people" is a particular flash point, because there are women who struggled their whole lives with a sense that they were failing at being women until they had babies, and to be told that they can't make motherhood the center of their female identites really pisses them off. 

There is a tendency among progressives to say that the claims of trans people must take precedence over those of cis women, because trans people are suffering far more. Which is, the Danish study shows, true. But everybody suffers, and in our world most people struggle to define and feel good about their identities. My gut reaction to trans people complaining about words like motherhood, is, "stuff it." Your pursuit of your own identity is no reason to attack other people where their own identities are most vulnerable. I follow the Buddha in this: the master virtue is compassion, and whenever you act without it, you fail in a fundamental way.

If you're thinking, John, how can you demand compassion from people who are depressed and bullied to the point of suicide? And I answer, because I demand compassion from everyone.

But compassion does not mean always supporting teenagers in whatever they want to do. If there is any consistent finding in mental health, it is that children who grow up without parents suffer horribly. It is the duty of the older and wiser to guide the young as best we can.

But what guidance should we give? Beats me. Because I think we are dealing with issues we don't understand at all, I have no particular stand on all the political questions being debated in the US. But I do have a very firm stand on this: since we do not understand teenage transition, and because the stakes here are obviously very high, shutting down rational discussion and debate is the absolute worst thing we can do. A world in which progressives are all required to defend trans teenagers in everything they do, while MAGA folks feel required to mock and abuse everything about them, is not one that will ever arrive at a helpful view. When people are suffering, it never helps to shut down conversation about why, and what should be done.