REPOST: "What's a woman?"

I'm not sure it's really the government's job to define a gender. But since that's where we're going, here's a relevant re-post from a couple of years ago ...

"What is a woman?"

Trans issues, for some people, have become a sort of "litmus test." Part of the so-called "culture wars." Asking the question "what's a woman?" -- asking it even of Prime Ministers, as a "gotcha" -- has become something of a popular test, a method to confront others in that so-called "war."

Which makes the whole issue tiresome.

And largely obscures the real issues.

What is the real issue? Answer: that everyone is entitled to pursue their own happiness in their own way -- as long as they don't force that on others. Everything else comes from that — including questions about sports and toilets.

In some ways, anti trans-activists are opposed to people pursuing their individual happiness.

In the same way, pro trans-activists are in favour of forcing some people's choices on others.

Both buggers are confused.

Yes, there are some legitimate issues involved here. Medicine can now transform people in some pretty fantastic ways, in ways that help some people see themselves better. It might take some time to get used to that. Some time for both sides and for our human institutions to get used to it, and to all the implications of it. (Sometimes sports and bathroom use might get more complicated because of that.) That doesn't mean shouting at each other about it; it might instead mean thinking about these things a bit more deeply.

Radical, I know.

I'd suggest both sides might think about it a bit more. A lot more. 'Cos both sides, as currently structured, are wrong.

Yes, there is a reliable definition of a woman: a woman is an adult female human being. So far so simple. Without that definition, we'd have no ability to define a girl (young woman), or a lesbian (a woman sexually attracted to women). But let's understand what a definition is: it's not a closed set with firm boundaries. It's a description of what exists in the world, identifying and describing the particular units subsumed under a particular concept, under a given label. But things change. If new things are identified, or created, we can create and recognise new and wider (or narrower) concepts, new labels, and new definitions. So much, so uncomplicated. (Or so you would think.)

Point being that definition comes after existence. Not before. So the definition (adult human female) doesn't thereby determine what that adult should do. Or become. In this context, individual adults themselves come first.

Let's recognise that each person, each adult, is an individual — an individual entitled to pursue their own happiness in their own way. [" ...full respect for the life project of others," as Javier Milei said in his inauguration speech.] Furthermore, let's acknowledge that modern life offers them more choices in that pursuit than ever before. That they might sometimes be mistaken, especially about something as deeply-seated as their sexuality, and they may even need guidance. And they might be wrong. But it is their right to choose — a right however that gives them no special right to force their choices on others.

Maybe we just try respecting each other. How about that, eh? 

How about we all try to act as adults.

"Astrology is alive and well in some New Zealand classrooms"

"Astrology is alive and well in some New Zealand classrooms thanks to the Education Ministry’s push to give indigenous knowledge equal standing with scientific knowledge. ... [These include] an array of online resources intended to enlighten teachers and students on the wonders of the Māori Lunar Calendar, or Maramataka [,which suggesting that a particular phase of the Moon can influence human behaviour, health, horticulture or the weather.]

"Unfortunately, most of these resources are woefully uncritical and fail to mention that there is very little science [in] support ...

"[Teachers] fear ... being branded racist or anti-Māori [for bing opposed], but just because something is part of Māori culture should not render it immune from criticism. ...

"[Other] teachers are now consulting the Calendar to plan their lessons around ‘high’ and ‘low’ energy days to determine which phases of the Moon are best to conduct assessments, carry out sporting activities, and even when to go on trips. Some teachers have even taken to scheduling meetings on days deemed less likely to trigger conflict, all under the moniker of ‘ancient Māori wisdom.’ Indoctrination is also starting early.

"In the Far North a group of ECE teachers have been giving lessons on the waxing and waning ‘energy levels’ of the Moon to over 10 early childhood centres. ...

"It is time to get government-sponsored pseudoscience out of our schools and health system. It begins by having the courage to call a spade a spade. If supporters of Māori knowledge want parity with science, then it needs to be subjected to the same rigorous standards that other forms of knowledge undergo. ...

"If people want to teach this ‘folklore’ as a cultural belief – that’s fine, but don’t teach it as a reality and leave out the scientific perspective. That’s educational malpractice and indoctrination."

~ Robert Bartholomew from his post 'The Māori Astrology Craze – Stop Teaching Pseudoscience to Our Kids'

Countdown to Anzac Day, 2025

On the 100-year anniversary of the first Gallipoli landings, I posted here at NOT PC a series of 'Countdown to Anzac Day' blogs, which I thought were pretty good. Here's the introduction, ten years later, with a few surprising revelations explained in the series ...

Pic NZ Herald

Several media and veterans organisations have now begun their own “countdown to Anzac Day” — counting down to the 100-year anniversary of the disastrous Anzac landings on a 700m stretch of Turkey’s Dardanelles, many miles and several  mountain ranges distant from Turkey’s capital.

It was one of the most disastrous operations amid a whole war replete with disasters. A war begun with no purpose, fought with no quarter, at the end of which three empires had been destroyed, a fourth all but bankrupted, and a platform for big government and for future conflicts was laid across both victors and vanquished for a century (not least WWII, the Cold War and a century of Middle-Eastern conflict).

And more than twenty-million families across the globe were left mourning their dead.

No-one across the world was untouched. And not one of them could really have said what they had been fighting for.

New Zealand, of course, had no argument with Turkey. Neither, before the war began, had the British empire, or Britain. Fact is, Britain had no real argument with Germany either, or with Austro-Hungary. Which didn’t stop Britain's ruling Liberal Party – also destroyed in the wash-up of war – voting to enter the war on the back of a Treaty with Belgium that obliged them to do nothing (and a Belgian government that concurred).¹

There are many things to say and understand about this conflict. A war that brought down the curtain on a half-century of prosperity, and nearly a century in which (with some exceptions¹) global peace had almost broken out. Some of those things are things you might not know, or think you do know but are just not so.

Did you know, for instance, that for some months before the Anzac landings British naval ships had been bombarding the forts along the narrow Dardanelles Peninsula – all but sending a telegram directly to the Pasha and Gallipoli's defenders, giving them time to organise the defence. And if that wasn't enough, the British parliament's gabbling had been making it explicit, removing any element of surprise.

Did you know that Australian and New Zealand soldiers embarking in November 1914 on ships towards Britain thought they would be fighting for Britain on the Western Front, against a German aggressor. Not fighting against a peaceful Turkey to gift Constantinople to Russia --against whom for decades New Zealanders and Australians had been defending their shores and ships?

Did you know that the  Triple Entente, the so-called “alliance” shared between Britain, France and Russia, was not in fact a formal alliance committing Britain to war. And that not one of the so-called Allies, France, or Russia, nor Germany (nor even most people in Britain or in the British Cabinet), knew until Britain’s Commons vote in August that Britain or its Empire would enter the war at all?

Did you know that in going to war against Germany, in an alliance with Russia, the British Empire was opposing itself to one of Europe’s few fledgling democracies —and against its biggest trading partner in Europe — and allying itself with Europe’s most autocratic dictatorship? (So what was it fighting for again?)

And, since Germany and Britain were each other’s best European customers, what about the idea so often voiced that “when goods don’t cross borders armies will”? What happened to the arguments that a half-century of free trade would cement peace?

And what happened to the knowledge about the machine gun, about its massive destructive power that each major power had learned in colonial combat, but refused to take into account in their “cult of the offence” and mutually unrealistic fantasies for swift European victory?

There is much to be said about the origins of this war, and of the Gallipoli landings that “gave birth to a nation.” So over the next two-and-a-bit weeks in some of this series's links below I’ll be saying some of them in ways you may not have heard before.

I hope you can join me.

This post is part of NOT PC’s #CountdownToAnzacDay series. Other posts in the series:

• Countdown to Anzac Day
• Q: But what were the ANZACs fighting *for*?
• Q: So why were Britain and NZ at war with Turkey at all?
• Q: So why was WWI so calamitous?
• Q: Who started the whole bloody mess?
• The Horsemen of non-apocalypse
• War and Peace
• May 17, 1915: The Day Classical Liberalism Died

As often happens, satire tells more truth than the reality does...

NOTES
1. There were other, strategic reasons given, about which more later, but this was the explicit reason of principle given by Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in his speech to the British House of Commons ending ending in an almost unanimous vote to enter the war against Germany and Austro-Hungary. Yet the 1839 Treaty of London (signed as a result of the Napoleonic Wars) had committed French, Prussian and British troops to respect Belgium’s neutrality, not to share in its defence. And when asked for military assistance by both France and Britain, both the Belgian King and his Government declined.
2. The Franco-Prussian and American Civil Wars were the obvious two exceptions, along with the various “Imperial Wars” erupting around the globe. But, unlike virtually the entirety of human history up to that point, the whole world was enmeshed for a century in trade rather than conflict. A remarkable state of affairs.

[Images by Wikipedia Commons, The Onion & NZ Herald]

'The Moral Case for Globalisation'

"THE TERM TYPICALLY USED to denote advocates of globalisation is 'globalists,' which has emerged primarily as a term of abuse, especially on the far right. 'There is no more left and right [says one]. The real cleavage is between the patriots and the globalists.' ...

"[T]his essay’s definition of globalisation is the relatively free movement of people, things, money, and ideas across natural or political borders. .... A consequence of increasing globalisation is an increasingly integrated and complex global system of production and exchange. ...

"There is a vast amount of evidence that documents the impact of reducing barriers to trade, travel, and other forms of exchange across borders. Much of it is presented in other essays in this series, such as Johan Norberg’s 'Globalisation: A Race to the Bottom—or to the Top?' Contrary to some critics of globalisation, the results have been spectacularly positive for the world’s poor, as wages have increased, jobs have become safer, and the use of children for labor has plummeted. Increasing wealth, in turn, is strongly connected to improving health, and the global spread of improvements in medicines and technologies has improved health outcomes even in regions that have not participated as much in the exchange of goods. ...

"People agree to exchange because they expect to be better off by exchanging than by not exchanging. Making it possible to exchange with more people is beneficial to those whose range of potential exchange partners has increased. Adam Smith titled the third chapter of his 'An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations' “That the Division of Labour is Limited by the Extent of the Market,” a thesis that he illustrated by demonstrating the greater prosperity and progress in the ancient world for those nations with proximity to the sea and to navigable rivers. Due to the lower friction of transportation over water compared to land, that proximity facilitated exchange with much larger areas and with many, many more people. To the extent that policies of governments erect barriers to exchange, it is analogous to making transportation deliberately more difficult, which would generally be understood to be harmful to the vast majority of people. ...

"Globalisation is not limited to the exchange of goods and services across borders; it also encompasses the exchange of ideas, as well as scientific, economic, artistic, and other forms of cooperation. ...

"Ever since Plato’s assault on the open society, critics of globalisation have tended to view cultural innovation and exchange as a pure loss rather than as the emergence of new forms of human life that increase the available store of possible human understandings and experiences. ...

"PEACE AND HARMONY ARE consequences of trade.

Cultural exchange is foundational to living cultures. Pasta, for which Italian cuisine is famous, has origins in Asia, whether it was brought to Italy by Marco Polo, as folklore tells, or earlier, and the tomatoes that form the base of many Italian sauces are cultivated from plants brought from Meso-America by Spaniards. Food has been globalised for millennia, but somehow that has not stopped it from developing an amazing diversity of identifiable cuisines, styles, and dishes with many distinctive characteristics. The same can be said of architecture, traditions, mores, religions, and every other element of human culture. ...

"The key to such peace is not merely the movement of goods and services across borders but voluntary exchange. ... Freedom to trade refers to the voluntary transfers of goods and services and not to state trafficking in tanks and missiles, the sale of products of forced labour (such as the products of Uyghur labourers imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party), or the sale of nationalised products (such as the oil and gas resources that were confiscated by Putin). Exchange and transfers organised by conquest are mutually impoverishing, as Adam Smith demonstrated of the British Empire ...

"SINCE PLATO'S TIME, OPPONENTS of globalisation have sought to protect established orders from the voluntary choices of those who live in them. Increasing the opportunities for exchange, cooperation, communication, and travel is enriching for the majority, although it may threaten the hold on power of the rulers. Some prefer war over peace, because 'making bigger profits in peace' is worse than war. Reasonable people should think before embracing such attacks on globalisation ...

"Rigorous thinking and empirical research refute, one by one, attacks on globalisation in the name of morality. The world is better when barriers to free and voluntary cooperation are reduced. The world is better because of globalisation."

~ Tom Palmer from his article 'The Moral Case for Globalisation'

There is Nothing Noble About Sacrifice

With the conjunction of Easter and ANZAC in the same week, the word "sacrifice" is being sickeningly over-used.

"Sickeningly" because so few users of the work are fully aware of just how barbaric the ethic of sacrifice is. As I say in this repost of a blog from 2019:

There is Nothing Noble About Sacrifice.

Since so many have used the word so often, let's define it:

"Slaughter." "Surrendering..." "Immolation." Nothing noble about any of that. 

Let's examine it further:

“Sacrifice” is the surrender of a greater value for the sake of a lesser one or of a nonvalue. Thus, [the ethic of] altruism gauges a man’s virtue by the degree to which he surrenders, renounces or betrays his values (since help to a stranger or an enemy is regarded as more virtuous, less 'selfish,' than help to those one loves). The rational principle of conduct is the exact opposite: always act in accordance with the hierarchy of your values, and never sacrifice a greater value to a lesser one. [Emphasis added.]

And further:

“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious.
“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
    If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbour’s child and let your own die, it is.
    If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue, according to this sort of moral standard; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is the virtue of sacrifice in full.
    If you renounce all personal desires and dedicate your life to those you love, you do not achieve full virtue [by this moral standard]: you still retain a value of your own, which is your love. If you devote your life to random strangers, it is an act of greater virtue. If you devote your life to serving men you hate—[by this depraved moral standard] that is the greatest of the virtues you can practice.
    A sacrifice is the surrender of a value. Full sacrifice is full surrender of all values.

"The surrender of all values." There is nothing, nothing at all, that is noble about that.

'Sacrifice,' by sculptor Rayner Hoff, inside the Australian War Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park

Does that mean you should never fight at all? Never fight for those you love? No:

Concern for the welfare of those one loves is a rational part of one’s selfish interests. If a man who is passionately in love with his wife spends a fortune to cure her of a dangerous illness, it would be absurd to claim that he does it as a “sacrifice” for her sake, not his own, and that it makes no difference to him, personally and selfishly, whether she lives or dies.
    Any action that a man undertakes for the benefit of those he loves is not a sacrifice if, in the hierarchy of his values, in the total context of the choices open to him, it achieves that which is of greatest personal (and rational) importance to him. In the above example, his wife’s survival is of greater value to the husband than anything else that his money could buy, it is of greatest importance to his own happiness and, therefore, his action is not a sacrifice.
    But suppose he let her die in order to spend his money on saving the lives of ten other women, none of whom meant anything to him—as the ethics of altruism would require. That would be a sacrifice. Here the difference between Objectivism and altruism can be seen most clearly: if sacrifice is the moral principle of action, then that husband shouldsacrifice his wife for the sake of ten other women. What distinguishes the wife from the ten others? Nothing but her value to the husband who has to make the choice—nothing but the fact that his happiness requires her survival.
    The Objectivist ethics would tell him: your highest moral purpose is the achievement of your own happiness, your money is yours, use it to save your wife, that is your moral right and your rational, moral choice.

Fighting for your values, fighting for those you love, these are acts of integrity. Not of sacrifice.

We may honour a man acting in support of his values, even at the risk of his life. We should neither honour, nor call it, a sacrifice.

Why?

First, because honouring their memory demands it. That's a question of our integrity.

Second, there is a very practical reason; one of self-defence:

It stands to reason that where there’s sacrifice, there’s someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there’s service, there’s someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master.

Such people exist in every age. 

They called men to war in 1914 in the name of, says one historian, "an altruistic willingness to sacrifice oneself for the cause of righteousness." They call people now, Great Leaders of every description seeking sacrifice to a "higher cause" -- to the State, to the Climate, to any Great Cause selected by the Great Leaders, expunging the sin of selfishness in their answer to the call of "Duty."

But as a great writer once observed: "Under a morality of sacrifice, the first value you sacrifice is morality itself."

There is nothing noble about sacrifice. 

"The AI market bubble is a con. People are pouring billions into it, and they're not going to get it back. Most of the new AI companies will go bust."

"'The real golden goose for America’s economic future [claims Preston Byrne at the Adam Smith Institute] isn’t re-onshoring manufacturing by erecting new trade barriers; it’s artificial intelligence.'

"No it isn't [explains a commenter]. The current models don't have any general intelligence, or actual understanding of the data they are manipulating. They are statistical models that note that certain words are statistically associated with other words in their training data (the text contents of the internet), and estimate the probability distribution of what words are likely to come next.

"So it might note that when the word 'Adam' occurs next to the word 'Smith' in a sentence, words like 'markets' and 'economics' and 'trade' will be especially common. It's a lot more sophisticated than that in the s'rt of patterns and relationships it can recognise, but that's basically all it's doing. It doesn't know what 'Adam' and 'Smith" denote. It doesn't know what a market is. It just has a big bucket of related phrases and combinations that people have put together in the past, and it picks them randomly from the bucket and pastes them together.

"If lots of people have written about a topic on the internet, it has a bigger bucket to pick from, and can generate something that is at least originally phrased, repeating the information in those phrases. If it's only been discussed once or twice on the internet, it will reproduce what they said verbatim. And if it hasn't been discussed before, it will make something up that seems plausible. So if you ask it for a biography of Adam Smith, it has lots to choose from. If you ask for a biography of Joe Random, it will select randomly from all the biographies and news articles it has read, which is why people have put their own names in and been shocked to find it falsely accusing them of crimes and scandals.

"If it doesn't know, it won't say 'I don't know,' because fundamentally it never knows. It has no concept of truth. These are not facts about the world. They are strings of meaningless symbols that it is looking for patterns in. So it can never solve a problem that hasn't already been solved and written about on the internet. It doesn't know anything that isn't on the internet. You either get the product of human intelligence regurgitated, or you get sentences picked and put together at random.

"There are some very basic new word-smithing capabilities that it may be able to help with. It can generate summaries and paraphrases, and restructure information scattered across multiple sources to pull out the bits relevant to a particular aspect. It might be usable as a first-pass helpline assistant to answer questions from people who haven't read the documentation. But it can go no further, because it is a statistical model of the text on the internet, not any sort of general intelligence. We still have no idea how to do that.

"The [AI] market bubble is a con. People are pouring billions into it, and they're not going to get it back. Most of the new AI companies will go bust.

"That said, it's their own money to lose, and I'm very much in favour of deregulating it and letting innovation try. You never know. Somebody might come up with an actual advance in the process of all the messing around. But I will note in passing that the main obstacle to doing it in the UK is energy prices — it uses vast amounts of electricity to do the training — so if you want to do it [in the UK], the best thing you could do would be to abandon Net Zero.

"And that's not likely to happen, so as usual, it's politicians talking about how they're going to solve all our problems ('Growth!') while misguidedly doing everything in their power to prevent that."

~ commenter NiV arguing against the post 'AI, not Tariffs, is the Future of U.S. Economic Dominance'

“LLMs [Large-Language Models] are regurgitation-with-minor-changes machines. When a particular prompt is close enough to a bunch of prior data points, LLMs do well; when they subtly differ from prior cases in their databases they often fail. …
    
“As … Brad DeLong just put it in a blunt essay, ‘if your large language model reminds you of a brain, it’s because you’re projecting—not because it’s thinking. It’s not reasoning, it’s interpolation. And anthropomorphising the algorithm doesn’t make it smarter—it makes you dumber.’”

~ Gary Marcus from his post ‘OpenAI’s o3 and Tyler Cowen’s Misguided AGI Fantasy’

"OpenAI launched its latest AI reasoning models, dubbed o3 and o4-mini, last week. According to the Sam Altman-led company, the new models outperform their predecessors and 'excel at solving complex math, coding, and scientific challenges while demonstrating strong visual perception and analysis.'

"But there's one extremely important area where o3 and o4-mini appear to instead be taking a major step back: they tend to make things up — or 'hallucinate' — substantially more than those earlier versions ...

"According to OpenAI's own internal testing, o3 and o4-mini tend to hallucinate more than older models, including o1, o1-mini, and even o3-mini, which was released in late January. Worse yet, the firm doesn't appear to fully understand why. ...

"Its o3 model scored a hallucination rate of 33 percent on the company's in-house accuracy benchmark, dubbed PersonQA. That's roughly double the rate compared to the company's preceding reasoning models.

"Its o4-mini scored an abysmal hallucination rate of 48 percent, part of which could be due to it being a smaller model that has 'less world knowledge' and therefore tends to 'hallucinate more,' according to OpenAI."

~ Victor Tangerman from his article 'Open AI's Hot New AI Has an Embarrassing New Problem'

"The greatest achievement of AI might be in the irony: by oppositional example, it will teach us to love human creativity more than ever. It turns out that human intelligence, while deeply fallible, offers something AI cannot: Sincerity, creativity, and apparently (and for now) a greater degree of old-fashioned accuracy."

~ Jeffrey Tucker from his post 'How Much Can We Really Trust AI?'

Who cares about 'Cultural Christians'?

SO MANY ATHEISTS, AGNOSTICS, no-theists, pantheists, and otherwise non-Christian coves like Richard Dawkins, Elon Musk, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are now calling themselves "cultural Christians" that it's become a phenomenon. Even Nick Cave is signing up. The argument, many say, for subscribing to the nonsense is that, they say, Christianity built western civilisation — so any decent supporter of civilisation should subscribe as well.

A book by Tom Holland is cited as one of the main influences on this movement. Holland is a prolific podcaster who has previously written — and written well — on the histories of Rome, Greece, Persia, and Islam —  Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind "isn’t a history of Christianity," he says, so much "a history of what's been revolutionary and transformative about Christianity: about how Christianity has transformed not just the West, but the entire world." So transformative, says the author, that we of the west find ourselves unable to even see the cultural transformation clearly.

In some in Christian circles this “Tom Holland train” is spoken of as a new route to Christianity.

But there are problems with the book. Most especially that he speaks of a philosophical transformation that preceded and informed the cultural change, yet his philosophical discussions are all but absent.

Not so in another book, by Charles Freeman.

Freeman's book The Reopening of the Western Mind is a magnificent 2023 sequel to his investigative opus The Closing of the Western Mind — an exploration of how Christianity's rise saw the fall of independent thought —the rise of faith bringing the death of reason — ushering in a millennia of darkness age only (en)lightened, eventually, by the revival of interest in Greek and Roman thought. (You can read my own summary of that great story here.)

You can see almost immediately how that might pit Freeman's books against the tale told by Tom Holland. Not least because Holland's overlooking of the importance of Greco-Roman thought (most especially that of Aristotle) undermines the very basis of his story.

An absorbing discussion with scholars from the Ayn Rand Institute (part of a "Bookshelf" series that I hope takes off) examines these two contrasting perspectives (above), evaluating their arguments and assessing their historical and philosophical accuracy. The discussion covered: 

• The central arguments of the books; 
• Why the Church feared Aristotelian philosophy; 
• How Freeman’s books provide a more thorough and philosophical analysis than Holland’s; 
• How Holland diminishes Greek influence on modernity; 
• How Holland appropriates secular ideas and thinkers into Christianity; 
• The role of Christianity in the abolition of slavery; 
• The relationship between Christianity and science; 
• Why Holland’s book gained popularity while Freeman’s did not.

Fascinating.

[NB: The books are published with different titles in the US and the UK, confusingly, so here in NZ you might see the same book with two different titles. I've linked below, if you click the cover pics, to what seem to be the best sources here.]

Hey, hey, it’s Easter!

Christus Hypercubus, Salvador Dali.

IT'S GOOD FRIDAY. AND YOU know what that means here at NOT PC: time to call out (again) the 2000-year ethic of sacrifice as nothing but inhuman. In a more rational place, we'd view the worship of human sacrifice not with celebration, but with horror. ("If you knew a father who gave up his only son to be killed in expiation for the crimes and misdemeanours of other people, would you call that chap a loving father? Or would you call him a psychopath?") 

"What's the theme of Easter, and of Easter art? In a word, it's sacrifice: specifically human sacrifice. And more specifically, the sacrifice of the good to the appalling.
    "That's the Easter theme we're asked to respond to every year."
    Easter through art 

"Let’s summarise. In Pagan times, Easter was the time in the Northern calendar when the coming of spring was celebrated -- the celebration of new life, of coming fecundity. Hence the eggs and rabbits and celebrations of fertility. Indeed, the very word  'Easter' comes from Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, and means, symbolically, the festival celebrating the rebirth of light after the darkness of winter. 
    "But with the coming of Christianity, the celebration was hijacked to become a veneration of torture and sacrifice ..."
    Easter Week, Part 4: Surely There Are Better Stories to Tell? 

"AND MAN MADE GODS in his own image, and that of the animals he saw around him, and he saw these stories were sometimes helpful psychologically in a a pre-philosophical age. But one of these gods was a jealous god. For this god was so angry at the world he sent one-third of himself to die to expiate the sins of those with whom he was angry, for sins that (in his omniscience) he would have always known they would commit.
    "It’s not just history the christian story challenges, is it. It’s logic."
    Easter Week, Part 3: The Holy Art of Sacrifice 

"Christianity didn’t start with Jesus, any more than the Easter story did. Paul, who never even met Jesus but who played the largest part in explaining his life, and his death, had a big hand in both.
    "Jesus’s death was a secular event his followers struggled to explain."
    Easter Week, Part 2: Enter Hercules…

"IT’S EASTER WEEK – a time, since human cultural life began up in the northern hemisphere, when men and women and their families came together to celebrate.
    "To celebrate what?
    "Why, to celebrate spring, of course. ..."
    Hey, hey, it’s Easter Week! 

Oh, and a gentle reminder that the state still owns your shop at Easter. And it still owns you all year. That's the secular sacrifice demanded by the Season.

Cartoon by Nick Kim

And a note that the greatest artists can nonetheless find the sublime within the story. Here's Wagner's 'Good Friday Spell,' aka Karfreitagszauber.  Turn it up!

The role of experts

DOUGLAS MURRAY TOOK OVER Joe Rogan's podcast recently to call him out for platforming "revisionist, amateur historians who inflate their own importance while disavowing any expertise." In other words, ignoramuses on the very topic of their alleged speciality.

I wouldn't know if Rogan fits that bill because I've never listened to his podcast. But I do know it's widely influential. So bullshit begun there and in similar fever swamps elsewhere ('Hitler was right,' they might nod sagely, while laughing that 'the Holocaust never happened') spreads far and wide. So he's right to criticise these non-experts who swing their dicks in total ignorance of their topic — as if it's their ignorance, rather than their expertise, that demands they have a hearing. 

This problem is everywhere right now. Just take a look around, and you can see the crisis playing out in real time.
There’s plenty of noise and spin. But people want something rock solid, and as reliable as a Swiss watch.
But where can you find it now? Who can you really trust? Who do I really trust?

Yes, there is a role for those with expertise in a subject. But as Ted Gioia asks, Who Are the Real Experts Now?

Q: Do you distrust experts?

TED: No, the exact opposite is true. I respect expertise. But I think that some outsiders have more expertise than insiders. ... I never make distinctions on the basis of titles and degrees. Sometimes they correlate with expertise, but many times they don’t.

We all know that. Don't we. 

Here’s an interesting fact—if you made a list of the Stanford and Harvard students who have had the biggest impact on technology, at least half of them would be dropouts.

Expertise doesn't necessarily come wrapped in a degree. 

Th[is is] how the world should work. Your expertise should be your credential. Instead we pretend that your credential is your expertise.

There’s a huge difference between those two approaches. And I’m a firm advocate of the former. ...

Many of the intellectuals who shaped my own thinking were outsiders without PhDs. Consider the case of Susan Sontag, who never got her doctorate, but was the most celebrated literary critic of her generation. The same is true of Northrop Frye and Edmund Wilson, both of them critics of immense stature.

C.S. Lewis is still another example. ... He taught at Oxford for 29 years, and was famous all over the world. But his title was just tutor. ...

Consider the case of George Steiner—one of the most illustrious polymaths of my lifetime—but his doctoral thesis was initially rejected at Oxford.

He turned it into a famous book, The Death of Tragedy, and eventually received his doctorate, but he never really got accepted by insiders. Even after a half-century of publishing and lecturing at the highest level, he faced intense hostility from professional academics.

I think it was due to envy. ...

Steiner was an intellectual superstar—an expert at the highest level.

Expertise is the credential. The credential is not the expertise.

Gioia's own insights come from a lifetime shared between jazz ("I didn’t have a music degree. But I had ability, and I could back it up.") and corporate consulting.

I learned a big lesson from [consulting]. I learned that positional power is not the same as true expertise. And expertise always earns respect, even if it doesn’t come with a fancy job title.

I believe that is true in every field. There are experts who don’t have elite credentials—but everybody trust them. And, if you ask around, you will find out who they are.

Let me blunt. People with the highest level of expertise are very rare. So they stand out, even if they lack an impressive degree or prestigious institutional affiliation.

So you need some expertise to find the genuine experts. Gioia suggests five ways to judge the reliability of what he calls "indie experts" — that is, folk who aren't just talking their book, who don’t have institutional overseers or gatekeepers controlling what they say. They could be outsider academics, bloggers, or even big-mouthed podcasters.  But they first and foremost need a grip on reality. And then:

• Pay attention to which indie voices correctly predict the future. 
• See which ones identify key issues before others notice them. 
• See which ones tell you truths that insiders won’t mention. 
• See which people offer coherent explanations of situations that others find confusing.
• And, finally, see who is willing to speak out bravely in the face of powerful embedded interests.

When you find people who do that, you are in safe hands. They are the real experts.

It's unlikely they're going to be supporting, or promoting, Holocaust denial. 

Those slow-moving near-invisible market crashes ....

"Trump’s tariff mayhem has crashed stock markets across the globe. ... Doing nothing would have been far better than doing what he did. ... [When the stated policy risked a sovereign downgrade from Moody’s and probably kicked off a small recession, reversing course is indeed a win for all Americans, much in the same way that surviving a self-inflicted gunshot wound is a win.]

"[But consider.] Are there any pre-2025 policies that have already done damage on the scale that Trump is now inflicting on the global economy?

"While you might object, 'If any such policies existed, we would have noticed,' you shouldn’t. Imagine Trump imposed his current tariffs gradually over the course of the year, while constantly reassuring the world that he had no intention of raising overall tariffs. The total damage of this would ultimately be about the same as what we’ve seen. The visibility of the damage, however, would be far lower. ...

"Once you accept the possibility of pre-existing massive wealth-destroying policies, plausible candidates are easy to find. Here are [two]:

"1. The near-ban on international trade in labour. Raising tariffs from around 3% to around 30% crashed the market. But the effective tariff on foreign labor ranges from about 250% to 1500%. Indeed, that understates the damage, because arbitrary non-tariff barriers are a greater burden than precisely-defined tariffs.

"2. Draconian regulation of construction. Existing regulations roughly double the price of housing, imposing a massive burden on not only consumers, but any business requiring offices, factory space, and so on. ...

"We recently got to watch a horrific spectacle of policy dysfunction unfold before our eyes. Tariffs spiked; markets crashed. But after seeing this crash with your own eyes, you shouldn’t merely acknowledge that ... one mistake. You should open your mind to the possibility that ... for every major market crash heralded on the news, there could easily be a dozen invisible crashes — policies that wantonly but stealthily destroy trillions of dollars of value. Immigration, housing, and nuclear power are only my top candidates.

"A further deep lesson: ... We’re habituated to their harm ... to the point that few of us realise how much wealth we’ve lost, how much wealth we’re losing, and how much wealth we and our descendants will continue to lose for decades or centuries to come.

"[P]opulists [like Trump] do immense harm blatantly. Traditional politicians, in contrast, favour stealth. When they inflict immense harm, they do it gradually. And in the face of blatant opportunities to to make the world dramatically better, they yawn. ... But once you learn to see the invisible crashes, you won’t be able to unsee the ugly truth ... "

~ Bryan Caplan from his post 'The Invisible Crash'

The US 'Rustbelt' explained

"[M]any people reflexively blame trade for the decline of [what's become knows as the American] 'Rustbelt.' ...
    "But ... [d]oes trade explain the decline of steel employment from roughly 190,000 to 84,000?

If trade [alone] explained the loss of employment in steel mills, then you would expect to have seen a precipitous decline in domestic steel production. In fact, there’s been very little change in steel output during a period where employment has plunged sharply:

"[I]mports have had some impact on employment in manufacturing. But the primary cause of job loss has been automation [exacerbated by] unionisation forcing jobs to other parts of the country, rather than trade."

~ composite quote by Scott Sumner and Jon Murphy from Scott's post 'Trade as a scapegoat'

Why don't you live where we tell you to?

"So many suggestions come down to 'what if instead of allowing housing where there is demand for housing, we tried to make people live somewhere else,' and I feel like the downside of that approach is pretty obvious."

~ Matt Yglesias

"We (the public) still have no idea what actually happened to the Reserve Bank governor"

"IT IS ALMOST SIX weeks since the shock announcement early on the afternoon of Wednesday 5 March that the Governor of the Reserve Bank, Adrian Orr, was resigning effective 31 March, and that in fact he had already left . ...
    

"In his seven years in office he’d ... not only let inflation run out of control then ... a (mild) recession to get back in check, [and generated] $11 billion of losses the Bank had sustained punting in the government bond market. ... On many occasions – including at numerous select committee hearings – his relationship with the truth also seemed tenuous.

"It is good to see the back of him, but it really isn’t adequate that we’ve had no explanation at all for the sudden departure. ...

"'Let’s be very blunt,' [said Infometrics’ Brad Olsen on the day of the resignation]. 'The Board of the Reserve Bank needs to front, they need to front urgently, and they need to be open and transparent. Anything less is just not acceptable.'

And yet 'anything less' is just what we have got. No straight answers from either the Board or the Minister of Finance. ...

"If anything, the mystery – and a sense that the Board and Minister are keeping important stuff from us – was highlighted by the OIA response obtained from the Minister of Finance by the Herald’s assiduous Jenee Tibshraeny, as reported here. ...

"Faced with the set of facts (the unquestioned known ones), and applying something like Occam’s Razor, most reasonable people would deduce that something pretty serious and potentially scandalous must have gone on [in the organisation backing this country's paper currency] ...

"We (the public) still have no idea what actually happened. And that really isn’t good enough from either the Board or the Minister about the holder of such a consequential office. But what we do know is enough to lead a reasonable interpreter to fear that it really may have been something around Orr’s conduct. If not (and one genuinely hopes not) a straightforward explanation could set the record straight very quickly. And if so, people shouldn’t be able to hide behind private commitments to secrecy that might serve the interests of some of the powerful, but are hardly likely to serve the public interest."

~ Michael Reddell from his post 'What was the story re Orr’s resignation?'

The authors of the Constitution separated powers for a reason

"Donald Trump decided [last week] to lift, temporarily, most of his arbitrary tariffs* ... his personal decision ... his whim ... And his whim could bring the tariffs back again.

    “The Republicans who lead Congress have refused to use the power of the legislative branch to stop him or moderate him, in this or almost any other matter. ... No one, apparently, is willing to prevent a single man from destroying the world economy, wrecking financial markets, forcing this country and other countries into recession if that’s what he feels like doing when he gets up tomorrow morning. ...
    "After arguing about how to limit the powers of the American executive, the writers of the Constitution decided to divide power between different branches of government. More than two centuries later, the system created by that first Constitutional Congress has comprehensively failed. ... The people and institutions that are supposed to check executive power are refusing to restrain this president. We now have a de facto tyrant who thinks he can bend reality to his will.

    "In recent years, many people who live in democracies have become frustrated by their political systems, by the endless wrangling, the difficulty of creating compromise, the slow pace of decisions. Just as in the first half of the 20th century, would-be authoritarians have begun arguing that we would all be better off without these institutions. ... In the United States, a brand-new school of techno-authoritarian thinkers find our political system inefficient and want to replace it with a ‘national CEO,’ a dictator by a different name.⁠
    “But in the past 48 hours, Donald Trump has just given us a pitch-perfect demonstration of why legislatures are necessary, why checks and balances are useful, and why most one-man dictatorships become poor and corrupt. ... If the Republican Party does not return Congress to the role it is meant to play and the courts don’t constrain the president, this cycle of destruction will continue and everyone on the planet will pay the price.”⁠

~ Anne Applebaum from her op-ed 'This Is Why Dictatorships Fail'

* Rob Tracinski, today: "After the markets crashed for a few days, and the bond market made some particularly ominous noises, Trump suddenly pulled back his disastrous tariffs to mere Smoot-Hawley levels, and apparently just today, his people figured out it would be unpopular to put massive tariffs on laptops and iPhones from China, so they exempted those products."

Bastiat on the stupid "balance of trade"

"The ship that carried them off sank on its departure. The customs officer, who had noted on this occasion an
export of 100 francs, never had any re-import to enter in this case. Hence, Monsieur Mauguin would say, France
 gained 100 francs; for it was, in fact, by this sum that the export, thanks to the shipwreck, exceeded the import."

Protectionists of all stripes often rail about trade deficits. An unfavourable balance of trade. One of the catch phrases of these people, because at some level even they realise the value of trade, is that they want “fair trade.” That’s just protectionism under the guise of being pro-free trade.

So what exactly is the stupid goddamn "balance of trade"? And how do bloody protectionists calculate their alleged profits and losses?

One of history's best economic story-tellers, the great Frenchman Frederic Bastiat, explained the fallacy way back in the nineteenth century with the help of a contemporary protectionist ...

ALLOW ME TO ASSESS THE validity of the rule according to which Monsieur Mauguin and all the protectionists calculate profits and losses. I shall do so by recounting two business transactions IN which I have had the occasion to engage.

I was at Bordeaux. I had a cask of wine which was worth 50 francs; I sent it to Liverpool, and the customhouse noted on its records an export of 50 francs.

At Liverpool the wine was sold for 70 francs. My representative converted the 70 francs into coal, which was found to be worth 90 francs on the market at Bordeaux. The customhouse hastened to record an import of 90 francs.

Balance of trade, or the excess of imports over exports: 40 francs.

These 40 francs, I have always believed, putting my trust in my books, I had gained. But Monsieur Mauguin tells me that I have lost them, and that France has lost them in my person.

And why does Monsieur Mauguin see a loss here? Because he supposes that any excess of imports over exports necessarily implies a balance that must be paid in cash. But where is there in the transaction that I speak of, which follows the pattern of all profitable commercial transactions, any balance to pay? Is it, then, so difficult to understand that a merchant compares the prices current in different markets and decides to trade only when he has the certainty, or at least the probability, of seeing the exported value return to him increased? Hence, what Monsieur Mauguin calls loss should be called profit.

A few days after my transaction I had the simplicity to experience regret; I was sorry I had not waited. In fact, the price of wine fell at Bordeaux and rose at Liverpool; so that if I had not been so hasty, I could have bought at 40 francs and sold at 100 francs. I truly believed that on such a basis my profit would have been greater. But I learn from Monsieur Mauguin that it is the loss that would have been more ruinous.

My second transaction had a very different result.

I had had some truffles shipped from Périgord which cost me 100 francs; they were destined for two distinguished English cabinet ministers for a very high price, which I proposed to turn into pounds sterling. Alas, I would have done better to eat them myself (I mean the truffles, not the English pounds or the Tories). All would not have been lost, as they were, for the ship that carried them off sank on its departure. The customs officer, who had noted on this occasion an export of 100 francs, never had any re-import to enter in this case.

Hence, Monsieur Mauguin would say, France gained 100 francs; for it was, in fact, by this sum that the export, thanks to the shipwreck, exceeded the import. If the affair had turned out otherwise, if I had received 200 or 300 francs’ worth of English pounds, then the balance of trade would have been unfavorable, and France would have been the loser.

From the point of view of science, it is sad to think that all the commercial transactions which end in loss according to the businessmen concerned show a profit according to that class of theorists who are always declaiming against theory.

But from the point of view of practical affairs, it is even sadder, for what is the result?

Suppose that Monsieur Mauguin had the power (and to a certain extent he has, by his votes) to substitute his calculations and desires for the calculations and desires of businessmen and to give, in his words, “a good commercial and industrial organisation to the country, a good impetus to domestic industry.” What would he do?

Monsieur Mauguin would suppress by law all transactions that consist in buying at a low domestic price in order to sell at a high price abroad and in converting the proceeds into commodities eagerly sought after at home; for it is precisely in these transactions that the imported value exceeds the exported value.

Conversely, he would tolerate, and, indeed, he would encourage, if necessary by subsidies (from taxes on the public), all enterprises based on the idea of buying dearly in France in order to sell cheaply abroad; in other words, exporting what is useful to us in order to import what is useless. Thus, he would leave us perfectly free, for example, to send off cheeses from Paris to Amsterdam, in order to bring back the latest fashions from Amsterdam to Paris; for in this traffic the balance of trade would always be in our favor.

Yet, it is sad and, I dare add, degrading that the legislator will not let the interested parties decide and act for themselves in these matters, at their peril and risk. At least then everyone bears the responsibility for his own acts; he who makes a mistake is punished and is set right. But when the legislator imposes and prohibits, should he make a monstrous error in judgment, that error must become the rule of conduct for the whole of a great nation. In France we love freedom very much, but we hardly understand it. Oh, let us try to understand it better! We shall not love it any the less.

Monsieur Mauguin has stated with imperturbable aplomb that there is not a statesman in England [in the nineteenth century at least] who does not accept the doctrine of the balance of trade. After having calculated the loss which, according to him, results from the excess of our imports, he cried out: “If a similar picture were to be presented to the English, they would shudder, and there is not a member in the House of Commons who would not feel that his seat was threatened.”

For my part, I affirm that if someone were to say to the House of Commons: “The total value of what is exported from the country exceeds the total value of what is imported,” it is then that they would feel threatened; and I doubt that a single speaker could be found who would dare to add: “The difference represents a profit.”

In England they are convinced that it is important for the nation to receive more than it gives. Moreover, they have observed that this is the attitude of all businessmen; and that is why they have taken the side of laissez faire and are committed to restoring free trade.

[Text by Frederic Bastiat from his masterpiece: Economic Sophisms; introduction excerpts by Marco den Ouden]

Liberty Upsets Patterns

"If, now, it was possible to devise a scheme of legislation which should, according to protectionist ideas, be just the right jacket of taxation to fit this country to-day, how long would it fit? Not a week. Here are 55 millions of people on 3½ million square miles of land. Every day new lines of communication are opened, new discoveries made, new inventions produced, new processes applied, and the consequence is that the industrial system is in constant flux and change. How, if a correct system of protective taxes was a practicable thing at any given moment, could Congress keep up with the changes and readaptations which would be required. The notion is preposterous, and it is a monstrous thing."

~ William Graham Sumner from his book Protectionism: The ‘Ism Which Teaches that Waste Makes Wealth. Hat tip Don Boudreaux — with a great short discussion here by David J. Henderson

What Donald Trump is really after.

The commentariat has spilled a lot of electronic ink in recent years trying to deduce what Donald Trump is really after.

Is it just power?

            ...influence?

            ... to truly make America great again?

Is he just deluded about tariffs/deficits/the Constitution/history/economics/every other thing within range?

            ... or is it all because he has mummy issues?

            ... or because the short-fingered vulgarian really swings a short sword?

It seems clear to me that it's all pretty simple really.  You can see what he's really after right here:

It's as simple as that. The stupid, orange bastard just likes to be noticed. To be talked about. To have his name on everyone's lips.

"Likes"? No, it's more than "likes." The narcissist craves excessive attention and validation from others. He insists on constant praise and recognition.  He demands lackies who follow orders, abase themselves, kiss the ring. Sound familiar?

As we can all see, the Toddler-in-Chief obviously doesn't even care why he's talked about. The only thing worse would not to be talked about.

Can we avoid it?