Author: VD

The unteachables

We see the results of this educational phenomenon from time to time on this blog:

Instructors who award low grades in humanities disciplines will likely be familiar with a phenomenon that occurs after the first essays are returned to students: former smiles vanish, hands once jubilantly raised to answer questions are now resentfully folded across chests, offended pride and sulkiness replace the careless cheer of former days. Too often, the smiles are gone for good because the customary “B+” or “A” grades have been withheld, and many students cannot forgive the insult.

The matter doesn’t always end there. Some students are prepared for a fight, writing emails of entreaty or threat, or besieging the instructor in his office to make clear that the grade is unacceptable. Every instructor who has been so besieged knows the legion of excuses and expressions of indignation offered, the certainty that such work was always judged acceptable in the past, the implication that a few small slip-ups, a wrong word or two, have been blown out of proportion. When one points out grievous inadequacies — factual errors, self-contradiction, illogical argument, and howlers of nonsensical phrasing — the student shrugs it off: yes, yes, a few mistakes, the consequences of too much coffee, my roommate’s poor typing, another assignment due the same day; but you could still see what I meant, couldn’t you, and the general idea was good, wasn’t it? “I’m better at the big ideas,” students have sometimes boasted to me. “On the details, well … ”.

Meetings about bad grades are uncomfortable not merely because it is unpleasant to wound feelings unaccustomed to the sting. Too often, such meetings are exercises in futility. I have spent hours explaining an essay’s grammatical, stylistic, and logical weaknesses in the wearying certainty that the student was unable, both intellectually and emotionally, to comprehend what I was saying or to act on my advice. It is rare for such students to be genuinely desirous and capable of learning how to improve. Most of them simply hope that I will come around. Their belief that nothing requires improvement except the grade is one of the biggest obstacles that teachers face in the modern university. And that is perhaps the real tragedy of our education system: not only that so many students enter university lacking the basic skills and knowledge to succeed in their courses — terrible in itself — but also that they often arrive essentially unteachable, lacking the personal qualities necessary to respond to criticism.

The phenomenon isn’t new, of course. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle was dividing the world into those who were capable of learning through dialectic and those who were only capable of changing their minds through exposure to rhetoric. What is new is that the educational system has converted a great mass of the youth who were capable of dialectic reason and rendered them literally unteachable. The problem is, as we have seen, that they have no idea that their dialectic is nothing more than rhetoric, their skepticism is actually dogma, and what they believe to be facts are merely opinion.

And it is intriguing to contemplate how Delavagus’s attempted defense of his ill-considered defense of ancient skepticism was mostly a sophisticated version of this phenomenon, as his main response to my identification of his various departures from the text, definitional mutations, errors, and assorted hand-wavings was to claim that my reading was “uncharitable”. Which, of course, is little more than the larval academic’s way of saying “you could still see what I meant, couldn’t you?”

Mailvox: understanding the exotic

TPB-01 postulates an inability to understand the mental exotics of Voxkind in a series of comments I have abbreviated for focus:

”I mean, sure, I see someone on the street, I have no idea whats going on in their minds. Yet there is the possibility of recognition, of understanding through communication.”

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is a common human illusion of believing they do indeed have a lot in common with a random other “human”

You see someone on the street. He has a wiring not unlike that of Bundy (naturally so), and what then ? You don’t have the benefit of understanding – you will never understand each other. If you’re lucky, you’re just a boring bit of scenery to him. If not, you’re fresh meat. You can communicate with him alright – but what possible understanding could you achieve ?

Or maybe it’s someone like Vox, living in his very own private reality which is besieged by demons (and not some fancy-shmancy metaphor demons, the real shit – supernatural evil and all that jazz). Unless you also have a worldview that includes invisible horned douchebags, what possible understanding could communication bring?

Well, *some* degree of mutual understanding is possible with distinctly inhuman agents, like say, wolves, and human “mental exotics” like Vox (We have painstakingly established that Vox’s model of reality includes exotic paranormal entities and a constant low-intensity conflict with said entities, and I am reasonably sure that Vox understands that I find such a world model, as well as agents who sincerely subscribe to it, highly comical.)

The same understanding that is possible between an individual who is aware of the existence and purpose of x-rays and one who does not. Or, to take a more extreme example, between blind and sighted individuals. Communication might be difficult, though not impossible, concerning certain matters, but that leaves the vast realm of human reason, emotion, and behavior still on the table. I have no problem understanding either your attitude or your belief system; you don’t actually have any problem understanding me, your problem is accepting the possibility of my belief system.

Which is fortunate for you. Once you find yourself in the presence of sufficiently naked evil, you will likely find yourself more open to the possibility.

Actually, I do have a problem understanding you, since your peculiar belief goes well beyond anyone’s ability to demonstrate/prove .
A sighted person could contrive numerous means to demonstrate existence of light-based detection systems to the blind (much like sighted humans have managed to build systems for detecting neutrinos, a task for which human sensory system is radically unfit).

Yes, we do have a “degree” of understanding – you “understand” that I happen to have a grievously inaccurate model of “reality” that is characterized by an absence of “demons”. I happen to “understand” that you happen to have a grievously inaccurate model of “reality” that is characterized by a presence of “demons”. Unless I invent a way to somehow “disprove” unfalsifiable entities 😉 , or you invent a demon detector I can replicate and use to go find some horned invisible doucheroos, there is no way we could advance understanding beyond this boundary.

I strongly doubt that you would bother to demonstrate a protocol that would reliably permit me to detect demons, though of course I am quite eager to listen if you do.

“Why not? Surely your imaginations are not so limited as to make it impossible for you to postulate how your thinking would be modified by personal experience of some aspect of the religious supernatural! Whereas you see Vox-kind as crazy, Vox-kind merely sees you as something akin to colorblind.”

I can totally imagine living in your Lovecraft County – after all, I called it “Cool Lovecraft county”.

Now, I doubt you can actually “argue me into your Lovecraft County” (unless there’s a demon detector in your pocket, or something) and thus there is a fundamental limit to how well I can understand your position, let alone predict your further activities.

Imagination can only go so far in modeling the behavior of someone who faces a radically divergent “reality”.

I am pretty sure both you and me would have a lot of trouble really understanding someone who sincerely believes that Republican party is actually lead by disguised space aliens hellbent on conquest, while Democrats are time-travelling cyborgs from a dystopian future.

“Actually, I do have a problem understanding you, since your peculiar belief goes well beyond anyone’s ability to demonstrate/prove.

Why? We all harbor peculiar beliefs that go well beyond anyone’s ability to demonstrate or prove. Perhaps you believe your dead grandmother loved you. Perhaps I believe my brother is the nicest person in the world. Perhaps we both believe in human equality. None of these things can be demonstrated or proved any more than the existence of demons and none of them need inhibit understanding.

You might point to a letter that your grandmother wrote. I claim that it’s a forgery. I might point to the behavior of the dead Miami face-eating cannibal. You claim “cocaine psychosis”. Repeat as needed.

In any event, your conclusion simply doesn’t follow from the premises. And the existence of a working demon-detector would not make my position more intelligible, it would make it correct. The concept is perfectly intelligible already and has been understood for thousands of years. Nor is the claim of demonic unfalsifiability correct any more than the rings of Saturn were unfalsifiable prior to the invention of the first telescope powerful enough to see them; even setting aside the fact that there is considerable evidence for the existence of demons, TPB-01 has presented a temporally limited technological argument that is intrinsically invalid from the perspective of proper Popperian falsifiability. This is hardly uncommon, as I previously pointed out the flaws of such arguments in TIA.

TPB-01 responds:

Well, I find it kind of remarkable that when you proceed to illustrate possible exchange between two agents disagreeing in regards to allegations of a poorly documented deceased person, you kind of make my point for me.

There is a distinct “understanding horizon” at work here, running along a number of allegations regarding the deceased relative, and claims related to those. Same goes for allegations regarding “human equality” (whatever the fuck that is…)

Consider the case of nice fellow who thinks that both US parties are run by “Secret Inhumans”, specifically conquest-crazy space aliens for Republicans and creepy cyborgs from the future for Democrats. We can establish *some* degree of understanding (at least, we can find out hypothetical person’s weird beliefs and establish an understanding in regards to the fact that we disagree with him and he disagrees with us), but there’s only so far we could go. When imagining ourselves in his shoes we will only muster a distorted projection reflecting neither his actual state nor our own (kind of like imagining yourself as participating in a battle and actually participating in a very real fucking battle are two different things), and same would be true for him (assuming he ever bothers to try imagining what our worldview feels like).

Same of course goes for unverifiable and unfalsifiable assertions regarding dead relatives.

Human equality… well, for starters it would be nice to define it in a way that does not summon Captain Obvious 😉 then see if anything approaching a framework for pragmatically assessing various such “claims”. I find it entirely plausible that there is as little chance of understanding between you and hypothetical “equality fellow” in regards to this vague “equality” thingamajig as between you and me in regards to the existence of supernatural intelligent forces scheming to affect the world in some manner.

The dilemma of a dynamic perspective

It would appear I’m hardly the only one to see the similarities between the rhetoric of the Israeli government and the behavior of the Jewish mob and the past rhetoric and behavior of other nations:

Last Thursday morning I woke up feeling more embarrassed for the state of Israel than almost ever before. Considering pogroms, racism (known in Israel almost exclusively as Anti-Semitism) and refugees are such central topics in Jewish history, collective memory and the Israeli education system, one would think that we would be the first to recognize such acts happening in our own backyard.

Apparently not.

Rather, it seems that the recent influx of migrants from Africa and their “taking over” of “our” cities has created a blind spot in our national conscious. Sadly, the riots in south Tel Aviv have demonstrated that nearly a century later, some of us are no better than our former European and Russian hosts who wanted nothing more than for us to leave their country.

Is it a blind spot or is it a newly clarified vision? Ironically, it would appear that I have less problem with Israelis who wish to maintain a Jewish state than some Jews. I do, however, take exception to those who actively oppose the idea of Israel or any other country being permitted to preserve its primary national identity by closing itself off to migrational waves, and American Jews are only a small, if vocal, percentage of a broad range of globalist multiculturalists who oppose that right. I have to give some credit to Feldman and others who would have Israel abide by the same principles that they insist other countries should obey, even though I think they are mistaken and that both the current Israelis are, and the historical non-Jewish nations were, operating fully within their rights to refuse to permit foreign nationals to dwell among them. That doesn’t justify pogroms or violence, of course, merely the peaceful deportation of foreigners to their former country or nation of origin.

On a related note, Chelm Wiseman has begun to respond to my first point, first with what he terms a primer on Jewish immigration views, followed by a post contemplating the four different types of residents and his perspective on a country’s responsibility to them. I don’t fully agree with his perspective, but it is far closer to mine than one might imagine, as he asserts “I believe that a sovereign state has the right to determine who resides within its borders, although that comes with some limitations.”

The devil, of course, being in the details of those limitations, which we shall no doubt discuss in future posts. However, I think the issue of the observed Jewish hypocrisy on the issue of immigration is quite easily explained, and without resorting to any bizarre collectivist theories. The fact of the matter is that until very recently, the Jewish perspective on immigration was entirely shaped by their 2,000-year experience as migrants, with no sense of ownership in a geographically established location or even a viable, self-sustaining society to call their own. Now finally they’ve got one again, so naturally, their perspective has begun changing in precisely the same way that a worker promoted into management has no choice but to begin to understand that the past decisions of management are not necessarily based in pure evil, avarice, and hatred for the working class, but are much more often the necessary consequences of events.

Of course, this process of promotion-based perspective-broadening is often intellectually painful, as it usually involves giving up long cherished myths, some of which have sustained the worker and perhaps even driven him to the success that led to his promotion. One would hope that the Jews of Israel can learn from the mistakes of those who historically sought to defend their nations from the influence of unwanted foreigners even as they begin to understand the reasoning of those who deported their ancestors long ago. There will always be some who hate Jews for one reason or another, but I suspect many Israelis, especially those in positions of responsibility for the continued survival of their country, will soon understand, assuming they do not already, that most of the nations that expelled their ancestors harbored no more intrinsic hate for the Jews than modern Israelis harbor intrinsic hate for the Sudanese now in their midst. A desire to live among one’s own kind and protect one’s own people from dissolution and eventual destruction by foreign influences is not hate, but rather love. It is love for one’s people, and love for their culture, language, and traditions. This is a concept that Jews should understand and respect as well as anyone.

WND column

De Facto Marriage

It is no secret that marriage has been on the decline in the United States even as illegitimacy is on the rise. The problem is obvious: No-fault divorce combined with abusive child support and post-marital support laws has increased the incentive for women to end marriages while simultaneously driving up the cost of ending them to men. As economics would predict, providing incentives for ending marriages to women has increased the percentage of women ending them, while increasing the potential cost of marriage has decreased the number of men willing to take the risk. As is the case with so many government actions, the laws intended to revise marriage, beginning with the California Family Law Act of 1969, were predicated on static human behavior and failed to take into account their own influence on how men and women would subsequently behave

Peasant Game

This Alpha Game post is dedicated to my friends at Fraters Libertas:

I would be remiss if I did not mention that there is a much more serious and underlying problem [than the Beer Shield] on display here. By holding a beer, by drinking beer, by even being credibly identified as a beer drinker, a man is signifying that he is an illiterate peasant, of solid, but hearty stock, the sort of man thick-waisted farm girls with red faces and ankles the size and shape of overstuffed German sausages expect to meet out behind the haystacks. Civilized men who attract beautiful women drink wine, preferably red wine, although prosecco and lambrusco are acceptable alternatives in the summer heat or on Friday night with pizza.

Enter the zombie

All those movies and television shows and cute rewrites of Jane Austin weren’t fairy tales… they were warnings:

One man was shot to death by Miami police, and another man is fighting for his life after he was attacked, and his face allegedly half eaten, by a naked man on the MacArthur Causeway off ramp Saturday, police said…. Police theorize the attacker might have been suffering from “cocaine psychosis,” a drug-induced craze that bakes the body internally and often leads the affected to strip naked to try and cool off.

That’s just the police trying to keep everyone calm. Don’t believe the non-hype. It’s obvious the Zombie Apocalypse is upon us.

Why the USA can’t win wars

VDH considers the question:

Given that the United States fields the costliest, most sophisticated, and most lethal military in the history of civilization, that should be a silly question. We have enough conventional and nuclear power to crush any of our enemies many times over. Why then did we seem to bog down in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? The question is important since recently we do not seem able to translate tactical victories into long-term strategic resolutions. Why is that? What follows are some possible answers….

The most obvious answer is why we argue over the results of our interventions is an inability to articulate our strategic objectives—what exactly do wish to see follow from our use of force and for how long and at what cost? Do we wish to rid the world of Bashar al-Assad? We could do that quite easily and probably without ground troops. But would the region be more or less stable? Would Iran suffer a blow or find ways to fund more terrorists? Would the collateral damage from funding insurgents or bombing be worse or not as bad as the current Assad toll? Would the insurgents prove reasonable, or more like those in Egypt and Libya—or even worse? Many of our problems seem to hinge on explaining to the public what we wish to do, why so, how, at what cost it is to be accomplished, and what we want things to look like when we’re through.

The real answer is that we don’t articulate a strategy because we don’t have one that is palatable to the American people. Most of our actions are not in the American national interest, so naturally the objectives underlying those actions can’t be explicated in a simple and straightforward manner because they would be rejected. There was no national interest at stake in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, in Serbia, or in Uganda. There is none in Iran. And where there is no coherent and strictly delineated objective in the national interest, there is no strategy, and where there is no strategy there will be no victory regardless of the tactical excellence.

Mailvox: one down

Chelm Wiseman begins what apparently is the Herculean task of responding to me:

I wrote my response to Vox’s charge #1 of Jewish Hypocrisy on immigration policy, but I decided I don’t like it and will have to rewrite it before I post…. I fully concede the point that Vox did not really think that the Amelek comment was a credible and realistic threat of violence. I just found it amusing to assure Vox of my non-violent intent every time I say something that could be vaguely misinterpreted as a threat. It makes me laugh and so I will probably repeat the joke. Following this theme, the title of his post also made me smile. [Insert Top Gun Quote Here]

I will also note that Vox’s continued the strategy of overwhelming me with charges to respond to continued in his post today. He seems to recognize a pattern of that he calls the fighting withdrawal, where a commenter will simply declare him wrong and decide not to respond. Vox should take a moment to think about this. If this is a consistent pattern, then perhaps the problem is his debate style. I must admit that I had a moment of … is this really worth it? …before I posted yesterday. Basically, Vox has given me a todo list of between 4 and 7 posts to adequately respond to him. I think that it is fine (and frankly fair given the nature of what I wrote) and because the topic of each is relevant to the theme of my blog I think it appropriate to continue.

It’s a start, anyhow. And while there is certainly nothing wrong about Chelm’s repeated assurances of non-violent intent, what he skates over here is the fact that necessarily following from his concession is the implicit admission that his interpretation revealed nothing about my thinking. A minor point, but still relevant.

I fail to see any problem with my debate style at all. The general consensus appears to be that it is as successful as it is maddening to opponents. The idea that providing detailed and substantive points is somehow a problem when one is attempting to make a case is ludicrous, and anyone who has read my blog should understand by now what they are in for prior to deciding to engage. It’s not my problem if the occasional drive-by critic wants to fire a pop gun in my direction and then finds himself overwhelmed by the artillery barrage he receives in response. The fact is that I seldom express an opinion without having something to support it, and I seldom enter a substantial discussion without having a significant amount of evidence upon which to draw. That doesn’t mean I’m always right, of course, but it does mean that I’m never going to be an easy out even when I have somehow managed to reach the demonstrably wrong conclusion.

Anyhow, make your case or concede has always been the standard to which I hold both myself and others. However, I have to point out that what Chelm is describing is not a Fighting Withdrawal, as that is a tactic which involves continuing to defend a position by sacrificing the larger part of it. What he is describing is Silence That Gun, which involves falling silent and disappearing rather than defending a point when the arguments supporting it have been contested, or conceding a point when the arguments defending it have been refuted.

As for the label “Alt-Right”, I didn’t object because a) I don’t know what it means, and, b) I don’t care how others choose to categorize me. I might wonder about the sanity of someone who describes me as part of the “conservative media”, but I doubt I’d even bother to comment on that. I’ve simply run across too many people who call me a conservative, or even a Republican, to concern myself any longer with whatever label others choose to apply. Raciss, sexiss, misogyniss, anti-semiss, whatever. But to the best of my recollection, the only time I ever registered to vote, I registered Libertarian, and the only time I voted, I voted Libertarian as well. However, I don’t belong to the Libertarian party and I depart from it on a number of policies because I don’t believe they are in line with the combination of libertarian principles with valid logic.

I do agree that Americans are largely unprepared for European openness about matters of race in general and Jews in particular. I would simply assert that I am using primarily American language on the blog, though I suppose it’s entirely possible that I’m not always as conscious of the distinctions anymore given how long it has been since I left.

Mailvox: tools of the trade

LB wonders what I use to write:

Thank you for the near constant intellectual stimulation you provide. I’m a long time fan of yours and have often wondered something. You often write about your adventures in writing and I can recall several instances when you have answered readers questions about your particular methods. What I don’t remember ever reading though is what you use as the tools of your trade. I’ve noticed that I seem to get the very least accomplished when using my Windows 7 laptop, and that I seem to get the most accomplished when using a composition book and a pen or the ColorNote app on my Android phone. What do you currently use and in what proportions?

It’s a pretty simple answer. I use my Dell XPS laptop running XP and LibreOffice 3. Nothing else. I’ve used the laptop long enough that the paint is worn off three of the keys, but it works fine for my purposes. I’ve written 52 columns, three short stories, hundreds of blog posts, and 626 words per day on the current novel with it in the last year, so it would appear to suffice. The only change I’ve made in recent years was to switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice following Oracle’s decision to interfere with the OpenOffice board. I find that the key to getting work done on your laptop is to ignore the Internet and refuse to get sucked into doing “research”. Sure, you can use it to look up a name or a piece of vital information, but then, get back into the word processor right away. I’ve found that for me, the key for staying focused is maintaining a spreadsheet that contains both my word count progress and keeps track of the various organizations. So, no matter if I want to know how many more words I need to write today, who was consul five years ago, or how old a character’s uncle is, I have the information readily to hand.

And since we’re on the subject, I’m expecting to see the cover of the book next month. It’s being done by the same artist who did the SE cover, so I have great expectations of it.

The anti-abortion trend

One of the informative things about those who draw conclusions from purely linear poll-based trends is that they do so on a very selective basis. For some inexplicable reason, we’re supposed to believe that legal gay “marriage” is inevitable because more people – though still less than half based on most polls – support it than before, and yet an abortion ban is impossible even though the anti-abortion trend is not only every bit as clear, but is also supported by demographic logic.

About four in 10 Americans said they support abortion rights in a new Gallup poll — the lowest figure recorded by the organization since it began asking the question in 1995. Fully half of Americans, meanwhile, told Gallup they were against abortion rights.

Of course, the more stories like this one of murdered little girls being literally thrown to the dogs leak out into the press, and the more third-worlders enter the country and begin to exercise their feminist “right to choose” by aborting baby girls, the stronger the anti-abortion movement will grow.