Monthly Archives: May 2016

No One Won The Game of Life

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The Game of Life

When I was a kid, my favorite game was The Game of Life. I mean, really, what’s not to like. It has little cars and baby blue stick figures for men and pink stick figures for women. You can go to college if you want. You can get a good job (which you keep for life — a charming assumption that was even then unraveling). You had children. You could speculate on the stock market. And it had that cool spinning wheel for making your moves. I loved it and I played it hundreds of times with friends and siblings. But the funny thing is that no one ever won the game.

The way you win The Game of Life is by having more money than anyone else at the end. So if you think you have enough money, you just stop when you reach the end of the board. But if you don’t think you have enough money, you can bet everything you have on one spin of the wheel. If you pick the right number, I think you get ten times as much money; if not, you end up in the poor house. Now I know all this, but it is not how we played. We all risked it all at the end and we never counted money.

The point is that none of us seemed to care about the outcome of The Game of Life. It was fun to play and that was about all. I was much the same way with Monopoly, but not with as many people. That game is much more combative. But I played it a lot with one friend where we would play Monopoly until we had built our little empires and then we would call a truce. The only thing I get aggressive about is the piece I use. I really like the Terrier.

But it was only the other day that I realized that it isn’t kids who are all excited about winning games and getting trophies. This is something that is mostly forced on them by adults.

The reason I bring this all up is that for years I’ve been hearing men (Always men!) complain about tee-ball games not keeping score and how everyone gets a trophy for participating in everything and blah blah blah. There are a lot of people who think there must be a point to everything. Why would you ever play a basketball game if it wasn’t to win?! Of course, if that’s really the case, then why does anyone ever watch a basketball game all the way through? Why not just show up for the second half of the fourth quarter?

But it was only the other day that I realized that it isn’t kids who are all excited about winning games and getting trophies. This is something that is mostly forced on them by adults. Kids play games because they are fun to play. There really is no other point to them, unless you want to look at it in a developmental sense — games help us to improve and develop.

The same thing, of course, is true in education. I don’t recall ever meeting a child that didn’t delight in learning. Just the same, I’ve known lots of children who hated school. I was one of them! But there has been a big push in recent years to take an educational system that was pretty bad and turn it into one that is even worse. Because again, adults think that education is about the goal: getting a good job. And that ain’t education.

It would be great if everyone who wants to turn children into little goal-oriented automatons could have watched the way my siblings and friends played The Game of Life or, I’m quite sure, the way most kids play it today. If the journey is not worth taking, the goal will not help, since the goal of the “game of life” is death.

Playing Game of Life by Fabian Bromann, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

NAFTA’s Been Bad for US; What About Mexico?

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Mark WeisbrotThe thing about free trade is that it makes markets more efficient. One country doesn’t have to depend upon itself for all of the things that it needs. This lowers costs all around and makes the world richer. In theory, I’m all for free trade. In practice, I’m against it. This is because as trade barriers have been taken down over the last four decades, the economic gains have not been shared; they have gone overwhelmingly to the already rich. This is what happened with NAFTA in the US: it did increase profits, but it didn’t help the American worker. But we hear a lot that it was at least good for Mexico.

There is a certain strain of liberalism that likes this idea very much. From their vantage point, the poor here in the US may have it bad, but they should shut up because the poor in Zimbabwe have it even worse. I discussed this in an article last year, Data Journalists Don’t Know Anything About the Poor Anywhere. The problem is that these journalists are usually in the top quintile of income in this country and so the poor everywhere are abstractions to them. So they are the kind of people who would argue that damage done to US workers would be acceptable for the sake of the even more poor people in Mexico.

Part of the problem here is that this whole globalization game isn’t much different in other countries than it is here. The greater trade might lead to more GDP, but its all captured by those at the top. But sadly, we don’t even have to make that argument. The truth is that since NAFTA, Mexico’s economy has done really poorly. Mark Weisbrot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) wrote two years ago, NAFTA: 20 Years of Regret for Mexico. And he summed up what the first two decades brought Mexico:

Didn’t Mexico at least benefit from the agreement? Well if we look at the past 20 years, it’s not a pretty picture. The most basic measure of economic progress, especially for a developing country like Mexico, is the growth of income (or GDP) per person. Out of 20 Latin American countries (South and Central America plus Mexico), Mexico ranks 18, with growth of less than 1% annually since 1994.

If you want to take a deep dive into the subject, check out the CEPR document, Did NAFTA Help Mexico? An Assessment After 20 Years (PDF).

Weisbrot’s colleague at CEPR, Dean Baker, has been documenting the way that The Washington Post consistently exaggerates how well the Mexican economy has done. This is entirely typical of mainstream US news coverage. And it is in direct contrast to its coverage of official US government enemies like Venezuela, where nothing that they do will ever be seen as good.

The truth of the matter is that trade deals like NAFTA are created by the rich for the benefit of the rich. And even economists who once thought they were wonderful (for theoretical reasons), are now backing away. As Weisbrot noted, “When economists who have promoted NAFTA from the beginning are called upon to defend the agreement, the best that they can offer is that it increased trade.” But no one cares about trade as a goal; it is a means to a goal: shared prosperity. And Mexico has not shared in that prosperity.

Image of Mark Weisbrot licensed under Fair Use, via The Guardian.

Indian Rope Trick Still Obsessing People

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Thurston - Indian Rope TrickBack when I first started this blog, I wrote two articles about the Indian Rope Trick. The first, Indian Rope Trick Part I, was about Peter Lamont’s excellent book, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick. It was about how the trick did not actually exist in the form that was reported: magician outside causes a rope to rise, their assistant climbs up it, and disappears as the rope falls back to the ground. The effect was just made up by a lazy newspaper reporter in 1890. The newspaper later printed a retraction, but it was too late: the fake trick fascinated the world.

The second article, Indian Rope Trick Part II, was about an actual trick that was performed by Indian magicians hundreds of years ago. In it, a chain is made to rise after which a pig and other animals scurry up it and disappear. The basis of that article is my long experience of hearing and reading people’s descriptions of magic tricks and how they diverge from what they actually saw. In this particular case, I suspect that some kind of shadowbox effect was used, making the audience think the animal was climbing the change, when it had already been dropped through a trap door.

Since 1890, there have been many magicians who have performed the Indian Rope Trick. In particular, there was Howard Thurston, whose poster you can see above. But I’ve never seen it. And it is hard to talk about exactly how it is done, because there are a number of different ways. I’ve long thought that a hydraulic system would work. But then I saw a guy performing the trick in some Penn & Teller show. The trick here is painfully obvious:

The enormous diameter of the rope and its stuttering climb both point to it being hollow with a steel rod pushing it up from an underground chamber. Once it reaches its full height, the underground assistant secures it so the boy can climb up. Afterward, the rod is released, falling back down into the chamber. Since the hollow rope is stiff, it would fall slower in a natural way. No big surprise there.

What’s more interesting is the following video. When you first watch it, it is hard not to be impressed. But watch it a couple of more times and you will see that it is a hoax:

Notice how the rope rises at 0:16 mark. Does that seem odd? It should! It is being run backwards: we see a rope falling. But it is worse than that. We see the magician in a medium show as he throws a rope in the air. It cuts to the crowd. And then it cuts to a long shot of the reverse footage. This is, rather clearly, completely staged. That includes the audience. But how can I say that?

At 0:33 in the video, as the boy is climbing the rope, you can see a metal rod that is behind it. The rope has simply been attached to the rod in such a way that the camera is fooled. From any other angle, it would clear that there is just an bar that the boy is climbing. Although the film is made to look like documentary footage, it is as staged as any Meg Ryan romantic comedy.

I do understand people’s fascination with the Indian Rope Trick. Just the same, I much prefer little things like Daryl’s Rope Routine, which is actually quite simple, but brilliantly done in his own nerdy way:

Was Cervantes Part English? Does It Matter?

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Jáuregui's CervantesThere has been a lot of reporting on some recent scholarship by historian Julio Mayo that finds that Cervantes, author of Don Quixote along with a bunch of stuff you’ve probably never heard of, had a relative that was British. There are two ways to look at this. First, it’s interesting because we know so very little about Cervantes. Second, it is not interesting because Cervantes’ lineage is not interesting.

The whole thing has to do with the an English family of traders, the Timtams. They apparently moved from England to southern Spain in 1480. As early as 1481, John Tintam was involved with the slave trade between Guinea and Spain. Now I know, Tintam and Timtam are not the same words, but that is the way it was at that time — spelling was all over the place and people often spelled their own names in different ways. Anyway, Tintam was the father or grandfather of Juan Titon de Cervantes. Is this Cervantes’ father’s father, Juan de Cervantes?

It is possible. However, since Cervantes’ paternal grandfather had a brother who was mayor of Cabra, the family was so integrated, and thus bred, into Spanish culture, that I have a hard time thinking much of this great English connection. Ultimately, we are all related. But more than that, people moved around a lot in the 15th and 16th centuries. There was a lot of breeding of people from different areas. And that brings up the whole “So what?” factor in this story.

I’m worried that the reason people are interested in this is to take away some of the Spanish of Cervantes — that there is an implication that a “pure” Spaniard could never have written such great books.

I’m worried that the reason people are interested in this is to take away some of the Spanish of Cervantes — that there is an implication that a “pure” Spaniard could never have written such great books. But if only he had some of the magic dust from the island of Shakespeare, well then, it is all explained. The truth is that Cervantes was very much a Spaniard. In fact, it’s a bit disturbing at times to read his thoughts on the matter. What’s more, he tried to join the Spanish Armada, but was refused service (due to his lost hand, as I recall).

But there’s something else here. Throughout his life, Cervantes wanted to be a poet. But he was never successful at this. And the reason is that Cervantes wasn’t a very good writer on the micro-scale. What makes Don Quixote great is not the fine writing. It is first and foremost that he is a funny guy — the early 17th century Terry Pratchett. And the reason that we think him great today is because in those two novels he created the blueprint for both the modern and the postmodern novel.

Certainly others had written long books before. In fact, people had written long and funny books, like Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel series. But Don Quixote is remarkable in a number of ways. First, the characterizations are much deeper than anything ever seen; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza seem like real people. Second, the books actually go somewhere — they have narrative arcs. Other books were just much more like real life: this happened, then that happened, then another thing happened. Don Quixote pulls all that together and comes to a satisfying ending.

I think that Cervantes stumbled upon greatness because he was rather bad at the kind of writing that was popular at the time. Don Quixote was not the first “novel” that he wrote. It was just the one were he happened upon something new: two glorious characters who propelled his story to greatness. Exactly how Rodrigo and Leonor Cervantes came to produce the great writer is only marginally interesting and of no relevance at all.

I put the image above as a kind of joke. As I’ve written about before, This Is Not Cervantes. But it’s what everyone thinks he looks like, probably because of the Gustave Doré’s illustrations of the book.

Diaper Stamps & the Infantilization of Poor People

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Diapers for Poor PeopleMatt Bruenig brought my attention to something, Diaper Stamps. It’s the kind of idea that I very much associate with the modern Democratic Party. The thought is great: give poor people access to diapers. But the implementation is just awful. To begin with, a whole new program for diapers?! Why not a special program for car seats? And blankets? And those mobiles people hang over cribs?! Really: why don’t we create a program for every single aspect of the lives of poor people? Because that’s what this is all about. Underneath this proposal is the idea that the poor can’t manage their own lives.

We have conservatives like David Brooks and Charles Murray who tell us that the poor suffer from some sort of cultural problem. That is why they are poor. If only they acted like the middle class then they would magically be in the middle class. It’s offensive. Most of the time, it is racist — implicitly or explicitly. But at least these guys know what they are doing. They want their taxes low and so it is just good rhetoric to come up with “reasons” to do nothing about poverty. The situation is rather worse for liberals.

In my experience, upper income liberals buy into the exact same garbage that Brooks and Murray push, but they aren’t aware of it. This is why they are always coming up with programs where poor people are told what to buy. You see, the poor can’t be trusted. So the two sides of the political fence on the issue of the poor is either do nothing (conservative) or treat them as if they were children (liberal). It’s shameful.

I think the reason we have this is because Americans have convinced themselves that we do not live in a class system. In the UK, people are much more likely to see that people are born, live, and die poor because that’s just the way it is. But here, in the land of “opportunity,” anyone can supposedly grow up to be president. And in that paradigm, if people are poor, it is their own damned fault.

In my life, people tell me food stamp “horror stories” all the time. Let’s look at two classics:

  • “I saw this guy at the grocery store buying a candy bar and a coke. And then he whips out his EBT card to pay for it! Can you believe it?!”
  • “I saw this gal at the grocery store buying New York steak. And then she whips out her EBT card to pay for it! I wish I could afford to eat New York steak!

Note first the attribution bias here. All of the people complaining about the first case have, from time to time, eaten junk. But this one guy buying junk food with an EBT card is assumed to be the norm. That guy just doesn’t know how to feed himself! But the complainer would realize that they normally have a reason when they make each food choice. Similarly, in the second case, every complainer has eaten New York steak. It is probably even more unusual for the gal on food stamps.

But what’s even more telling in this is that people on food stamps can’t win. Unless they buy only dried rice and beans, someone is going to complain that they aren’t eating well enough or that they are eating too well. The truth, of course, is that, People on Food Stamps Make Healthier Grocery Decisions Than Most of Us. This is very much in alignment with the twice as good myth, a strain of African American thought that if they were just twice as good, the white community would accept them.

And the truth is that when the vast majority of people who get food stamps use them to make wise decisions, it is either not noticed or taken as the exception that proves the rule.

So diaper stamps. Instead of just giving poor people more money, kindhearted liberals want to give them diaper stamps. Matt Yglesias used to be fond of saying, “If you want to help the poor, give them money.” It’s a shockingly simple approach. Certainly too simple for the modern Democratic Party! But on most metrics, poor people are more reliable than affluent people. For example, they use drugs less. And there’s an obvious reason for that: drugs are expensive. But we keep pushing this idea that poor people can’t be trusted with money. And that’s just not true.

Afterword: The “Bad” Poor People

It is true that there are poor people who take loads of drugs. There are poor people who do lots of terrible things. But just because one poor person turns out to be a serial killer doesn’t mean we should put all poor people in jail. I’m making a case based upon the class of poor people. And they can be trusted. People who want to base policy on that one person they saw misusing food stamps are just idiots. Maybe we should start making food choices for them.

Image cropped from one by ParentingPatch — own work, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

John Kasich Would Not Beat Hillary Clinton

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John KasichSteve M over at No More Mister Nice Blog made an interesting point about how the push for a third party candidate may be an attempt to recreate the conditions in 1992 and 1996, where Bill Clinton did not get a majority. I don’t really buy the argument (nor does he) because it doesn’t matter what happens when a Democrat is elected president: the Republican Party treats them as though they are invalid. Most conservatives are convinced that if it weren’t for voter fraud, the Republicans would win every election in a landslide.

But he wrote something that I am very skeptical about, “That may not be completely crazy polls show that Clinton would lose to a Republican who was less offputting than Trump or Ted Cruz — Kasich, for instance.” And he linked to a study by Morning Consult, 50 State Snapshot. I don’t buy it — at all. We can start with the fact that polls this early are generally meaningless. But it is especially meaningless when it comes to John Kasich.

So what this study really shows is how people feel about Hillary Clinton generally. And like anyone who is well known, she has high disapproval ratings.

There are a few things that make any polling results related to John Kasich particularly stupid. First, most people don’t even know who he is. And those who do know don’t know much about him. And everything that is known about him is put through the lens of Donald Trump. Kasich is the “reasonable” Republican. The fact is that he is ridiculously conservative and not a very nice guy (very much like Chris Christie). This is not the kind of thing that would stay hidden in a general election.

So what this study really shows is how people feel about Hillary Clinton generally. And like anyone who is well known, she has high disapproval ratings. So that poll is more or less Clinton vs Clinton. And the fact that she comes close to winning even in that theoretical match up is pretty amazing. But to show you how absurd it is, the match up indicates that John Kasich would win Oregon, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. There is no way they are going red, so that brings Clinton’s total up to 255. And I also have a hard time believing that Michigan would go red in a presidential election, and that would put Clinton over the top.

None of this is to say that the Democrats can just skate through this election. The economic fundamentals are very slightly negative for the Democrats. But what I expect is for the unemployment rate to stay roughly flat during the next five months, which will make this campaign roughly a wash. But if unemployment starts to take off, a candidate like John Kasich really could have won. I tend to think that Donald Trump is so horrible a candidate, that even a stark rise in the unemployment rate wouldn’t put him over the top.

I’m willing to admit that a head-to-head polling match up between Clinton and Trump might have some predictive value. They are both, after all, widely known and for a long time. And you could make a case for Cruz (who actually loses worse in the poll, because he doesn’t win Maine). But ultimately, this is going to be another race between a Democrat and a Republican. John Kasich may have the reputation of being a different kind of Republican, but he isn’t. And his negatives would go way up in a general election.

Goodbye Morning Music and Anniversary Posts

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Frank MoraesAs you may already be aware, this post did not start with, “On this day in…” That’s because I decided, only today, that I’m not going to do regular anniversary posts anymore. I’m not going to do morning music posts either. There are various reasons for this, not the least of which is that they have become too rote. But the biggest reason is that I find they are taking away from the fluidity of the blog. Pretty much every day, I find that there are two feature articles that I want to post. But I don’t have the time.

So I’m going to go back to writing about whatever I find that is interesting. As a going concern, the anniversary posts and morning music will go away. But the posts about historical events and music will not go away. In fact, the other day, I had wanted to write something that I considered insightful about a song, but it didn’t fit into the theme this last week. What’s more, it would have been a lot longer an article and I didn’t want to waste the effort on de rigueur posts that I just don’t think are as important in the grander scheme of the blog.

Doing these daily posts made sense when I was running Frankly Curious as a publishing house. They were always supposed to be two easy ones I could do to go along with what was an ever growing schedule of feature articles. But from now on, I’m taking the site back to my original intent: whatever interests me. And the truth is things are just piling up. Before I started writing this, I closed about a dozen tabs related to articles I had wanted to write about. But I still have many up that I hope I can now get to:

  • How NAFTA affected Mexico;
  • Acrophobia and free will;
  • The Game of Life and non-goal oriented entertainment;
  • Medieval currency and modern monetary policy;
  • Fun as a goal of education.

And that’s just some of them. That last one reflects on this decision, because doing the anniversary posts and morning music were not fun for me anymore. And I want to enjoy my time at Frankly Curious, because it is a major part of my social life. And it has always been the random nature of Frankly Curious that made it interesting. At least, that’s what I’ve always thought. It’s the place to go to check out what’s on my mind. I can assure you, yesterday, the sinking of the Lusitania, was not on my mind.

At the same time, I’m in the process of creating what’s called “cornerstone content.” There are certain things I’ve written about a lot, and I want to create major pages (not posts) for them. Right now, I’m working on one for Don Quixote. As it is, I think that Google ought to rank such a page at number one for “Don Quixote translations.” (Currently, I think I’m at about number nine.) I’m one of very few people who write about all the English translations. And I’d like to get all my thoughts in one place.

Anyway, with the morning music and anniversary posts gone, I am expecting to do two feature articles per day. I’m planning to stick with the one scheduled post at 11:05 am. And then another one at some other random time. But I’m not going to kill myself on that. And I may post pointers to updates in pages that I’m working on. Regardless, I won’t be working any less. I’ll just be working differently. Goodbye morning music and anniversary posts.

Bernie Sanders Shouldn’t Drop Out

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Bernie Sanders Shouldn't Drop OutAlthough I’ve long been as certain as I am about anything that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, I have never wanted Bernie Sanders to drop out. Part of this is just an intuition that I’ve had that these hard-fought battles really don’t hurt candidates in the general election. So I was pleased to see some backup on this from political scientist Julia Azari over at FiveThirtyEight, Sanders Shouldn’t Drop Out For Clinton’s Sake. The take away from the article is that it doesn’t look like hard-fought primary fights affect the general election.

But this, I think, is key, “You could cherry-pick studies to argue that contentious primary races hurt a nominee, but even those effects are small.” So this idea that Sanders ought to drop out of the race for the good of the Democrats’ general election chances don’t really hold up. I don’t blame Clinton supporters for calling for him to step down. (To her credit, Clinton has not called for him to drop out, as far as I know.) This is always what supporters who are winning say. But the idea that Sanders is doing something wrong is sub-mental (ie, tribal). And I think we really should allow this process to continue, even though I don’t personally like the conflict.

“You could cherry-pick studies to argue that contentious primary races hurt a nominee, but even those effects are small.” —Julia Azari

On the other hand, if Sanders really does want to litigate this at the DNC, I might change my mind — especially given that he is likely to lose California by a good deal. But I don’t really think that’s what’s going on. I think Sanders is just positioning himself to get as much out of this campaign as possible. And as one who thinks that the Democratic Party has moved much too far to the right (and thus deserves a good deal of blame for the Republicans moving into crazy-land), I want to see some changes. And the fact of the matter is that there are only about five percentage points separating Clinton and Sanders. And I don’t think that’s nearly a fair assessment of the Democratic Party base, because Clinton has a long history and a lot of good will among the base.

What was most interesting in Azari’s article was here discussion of a recent study that found that hard-fought primary battles don’t divide parties, but rather the other way around. Hard-fought primary battles are the result of divided parties. And I think that’s clearly the case in the Democratic Party. The party has moved steadily rightward and it is due for a correction. (And I’ve written before about how the right turn of the party was not necessary, so I won’t go into that.)

But there are some practical issues here. Clinton didn’t drop out this early in 2008. She stayed in the race until after the final primary. And I mean no disrespect, but we should remember that Sanders has done better as time has gone on, and the opposite was happening to Clinton in 2008. So if she didn’t drop out then, why should Sanders drop out now?

What I most dislike about this idea is that I think it does represent a kind of aristocratic impulse in people. Ultimately, people do want a coronation — if they think they happen to be winning. And this is something that really bothers me about us as a species. I think that liberals are a good deal more rational than conservatives in the modern political context. Yet we are all motivated by these primitive instincts. It’s sad.

But it is way too early for Sanders to drop out.

Anniversary Post: Sinking of the Lusitania

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LusitaniaOne hundred and one years ago, the RMS Lusitania was sunk by a German submarine. It is widely credited for getting the United States to enter the war. It seemed a heartless act: the Germans sinking a ship filled with civilians. But if there is one thing that I have learned in this life, it is that things are never that simple. In general, people have reasons for doing things. They don’t just go around doing evil things for the hell of it. It is a matter of perspective. Yet everywhere I look in the world, I see people who don’t understand this. As smart a guy as Sam Harris seems to think no deeper about the 9/11 attacks than George Bush’s facile, “They hate our freedoms.”

Both sides in the early days of World War I gradually increased the field of battle. On 4 February 1915, Germany announced that the entire sea around the United Kingdom was now a war zone. I’m not clear why the Lusitania was not given military escort into the United Kingdom. It was, nominally, a civilian ship. But it was carrying a lot of military equipment, including over four million rifle cartridges. Technically, everything it was carrying was legal, but the information was kept from the public given that it did tend to muddy the waters. It made it seem much less black and white.

I understand the outrage factor of the sinking of the Lusitania. Just the same, in an objective sense, it doesn’t mean much. World War I was a terrible tragedy. There were roughly 10 million military deaths and over two million civilian deaths. When the slaughter gets that big, it is hard to put a face on it. But the sinking of the Lusitania was a much greater tragedy in terms to pushing the war forward than it was because of the 1,200 people directly killed — tragic as that alone was.

So we mark this sad day just over a century ago.

The Neuter in Grammar: Letting Go

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Pronouns - NeuterThere was a change in the grammar style here at Frankly Curious on the first day of this year: I changed how the neuter is used. What I mean by this is how indeterminate third person pronouns are handled. For over four months now, I’ve been using “they” and “them” for the neuter. And I expect to do so for the rest of my life, because I’ve given up.

Traditionally, English has used the masculine. So you would get sentences like, “We don’t know who the next prime minister will be, but he will inherit a difficult situation.” But through most of my life, anyway, there has been pushback against this. And there’s a very good reason: it shapes the way people think. If a physics text book constantly refers to “he” and “him,” it creates the image that physicists are men.

Last year, I used “she” and “her” for the neuter with the idea that this year I would use “he” and “him.”

This is an issue that I’ve grappled with for a long time. Being the analytical type that I am, I’ve long believed that we should just use “it,” which is totally neutral. But I have found that people hate this idea. It doesn’t make much sense to me. Most people love their cats and dogs more than they do other people, but no one gets upset about cats and dogs being referred to as “it.” Still, I understand that it would be jarring to hear, “We don’t know who the next prime minister will be, but it will inherit a difficult situation.” And if George Bernard Shaw couldn’t get spelling reformed, I’m definitely not going to work this into a popular cause.

Last year, I used “she” and “her” for the neuter with the idea that this year I would use “he” and “him.” Thus I would alternate years, as I explained in the prematurely celebratory article, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Solved! But I found it awkward. Maybe in a global sense, I was equalizing gender roles, but in any given instance, things did not read as neutral. Consider, for example, “After the serial killer finished, she apparently had sex with the corpse.”

The same problem exists in the common approach to use the masculine or feminine randomly. In addition, I just find such an approach maddening. I’m not a random number generator. I can’t be depended upon to get the proportions right over time. (One could, I suppose, create a WordPress plugin that would alert the reader as to which gender should be used in any given article.) Similarly, people have tried to make up new words, but that works as well as getting everyone to use “it.” In fact, it’s worse, because at least no one is confused by using “it” to refer to human beings.

Neuter: Accepting Plurals

So I’ve given up — or at least let go of a past prejudice. I’ve always believed that using “they” and “them” for the neuter seemed lazy — too much like spoken English. And it was technically incorrect in as much as these words have traditionally been plural. But they’ve been used as singular for long enough that I don’t see a problem. They still sound wrong to me, but I’ll get over that.

There are other aspects of this choice as well. For one thing, my approach to grammar is to make things as easy as possible. And this is something I don’t have to think about. But the major force behind this change is being an editor at a big money-making website. There I can’t depend upon people knowing what I’m doing (or just trying to do). The worst the readers will think of using the plurals is that the website has some sloppy writing. And anyone who thinks that, will have thought it anyway. We aren’t publishing Virginia Woolf there.

So my (hopefully) final decision on the neuter is the old plural standbys. “We don’t know who the next prime minister will be, but they will inherit a difficult situation.” It doesn’t thrill me, but it’s okay.

Anniversary Post: LZ 129 Hindenburg Disaster

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Hindenburg DisasterOn this day in 1937, LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed while attempting to land in New Jersey. What’s perhaps most amazing about the whole thing is that only 35 of the 97 people on board died. Look at the video below. It’s hard to believe that anyone (besides Robert Clary) had survived.

I’ve always assumed that the Hindenburg disaster was just waiting to happen. After all, the Germans had used hydrogen instead of helium for it. And hydrogen is just ridiculously explosive. But I learned that this was not a decision they made willingly. Helium was extremely expensive — when you could get it. And mostly, you couldn’t get it, because the United States was about the only country that produced it (it comes from natural gas mining, if you care to capture it). The US refused to export it. And given that construction of the Hindenburg was started in 1931, this probably had nothing to do with Hitler and the Nazis.

Before I always thought that the designers of the Hindenburg were at fault. But now I don’t. In fact, they took great precautions to make the ship as safe as possible. And that brings up the other amazing thing about this disaster: we don’t know what the cause was.

At the time, most people thought it was sabotage. There is even a theory that Hitler called for the Hindenburg to be destroyed because the great old man of Luftschiffbau Zeppelin (builder of the Hindenburg), Hugo Eckener, was an outspoken critic of the Nazis. It seems a bit indirect to me.

I tend to think that it was just an accident. Hugo Eckener thought it was a spark from built up static electricity. One of the crew members suggests that the landing maneuver caused sparks. But there are lots of other theories. In fact, this is one of the cases that is just going to get more confusing as time goes on.

Hey! Check it out: a brand new Anniversary Post! I hope you all appreciate it…

The Paranoid Style in Trump Supporters

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Richard HofstadterIn American experience, ethnic and religious conflicts, with their threat of the submergence of whole systems of values, have plainly been the major focus for militant and suspicious minds of this sort, but elsewhere class conflicts have also mobilized such energies. The paranoid tendency is aroused by a confrontation of opposed interests which are (or are felt to be) totally irreconcilable, and thus by nature not susceptible to the normal political processes of bargain and compromise. The situation becomes worse when the representatives of a particular political interest — perhaps because of the very unrealistic and unrealizable nature of their demands — cannot make themselves felt in the political process. Feeling that they have no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception of the world of power as omnipotent, sinister, and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power — and this through distorting lenses — and have little chance to observe its actual machinery. L B Namier once said that “the crowning attainment of historical study” is to achieve “an intuitive sense of how things do not happen.” It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him. We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.

—Richard Hofstadter
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
H/T: Understanding Society.

Cropped image of Richard Hofstadter licensed under Fair Use, via Wikipedia.