You Belong with . . . Who Again?

Taylor Swift: the gift that keeps on giving.

Consider, for a moment, a clarinet player in the high school band.

Our clarinetist isn't much interested in football. He would like to play the clarinet in an orchestra, where people could come to listen to him play the clarinet. But alas, the school is only interested in having a band insofar as it provides background noise during football games. So his talent is subordinated to someone else's stardom.

Our clarinetist isn't happy about this, but he's reasonably phlegmatic: after all, the school has to sort people by status somehow. Yeah, it sucks being a musician at a football school, but on the other hand, it's not like music has some inherently superior claim to admiration over athleticism. That's just the luck of the draw. So when he sees the gridiron hero in the company of the captain of the cheerleader squad, he says to himself, well, that kinda figures.

But when he then turns to his fellow clarinetist, a skinny girl with dorky glasses and a slight overbite, he discovers that not only is she also pining after the football player, but she is literally rolling her eyes at the indignity of having to sit next to him in the bleachers. It doesn't matter that he's "in a relationship" (or the high school facsimile thereof); she plots and schemes and waits her turn, meanwhile ignoring (when not actively hating on) the clarinetist playing in the same band that she is.

Ironically, the football player himself could be as pure as the driven snow. He might even double as the FCA chapter president. It is rather the black little hearts of women that cause him to emotionally monopolize goodness-knows-what percentage of his school's females.

This is what we mean when we talk about modern polygamy.

[This post was inspired by the conversation here.]

Nice Girls, Mean Girls

Warning:  the following is a generalization.  I am aware that there are exceptions.  The usual rule applies:  if it doesn’t describe you, then I’m not talking about you.

It is a commonplace that unattractive girls have the best personalities.  It has even become a backhanded way of saying a girl is unattractive to call her “the girl with the great personality”.  The explanation is usually some variant of the fact that unattractive girls must develop their personality in a pleasing way to socially survive.  I agree with this:  some of my closest female friends have been unattractive girls.

And yet, when I think about it, I can’t really complain about super-attractive, out-of-my-league girls either.  While I would stop short of calling them “friends”, I can’t recall many instances of gratuitous cruelty, either.  This may be a pretty low bar, but I’ll take kindness anywhere I can get it, and the fact is that I’ve always been treated better by really beautiful women than they could have gotten away with.

Most of the complaints I make about women are leveled at “average girls”, girls of moderate attractiveness that, physically speaking, I would put roughly within my own percentile.  It is from these that I have suffered the worst behavior.

A few possibilities:

• I am mistaken in my generalization.  It may be my perceptions are colored by higher expectations.  (I can’t think of any other cognitive biases that may apply, however.)
• A charmed life begets a charming personality.  Truly beautiful women, who Never Have Any Problems, view the world and its inhabitants as full of sweetness and light, and this is reflected in how they treat others.
• Social power begets social confidence.  Spungen once put forward this hypothesis:  women firmly in position at the top of the hierarchy, and secure in the knowledge that they can rely on others to deter and punish any betas that get uppity, can afford more social condescension.
• The middle is the most ambitious.  Women of average attractiveness have sufficient social access to know where the top is and believe themselves capable of reaching it if they can only improve their peer group.  Their social climbing inevitably involves snubbing anybody below their desired set.
• The “bad behaviors” are actually “shit tests”.  Average women put me in their “potential” category and screen me for alpha qualities.  I misread this behavior and otherwise fail.  (I would be most surprised if this one is true.)
• I induce the behavior.  Only around average women do I behave in a way that is, or is perceived to be, “showing interest”; thus, it is only here that I am the recipient of rejection behavior.  (I would here protest that my generalization still applies even though I have been married for over 12 years.  You can make of this what you will.)

These possibilities are not mutually exclusive.  Thoughts?

Dumbest Smart Thing I’ve Read in a While

Robin quotes Matt Yglesias:

In the spectrum debate, a commons is considered a “left-wing” position, while property rights are considered “right-wing.” In contrast, in the carbon debate you find right-wingers advocating a “carbon commons” while left-wingers advocate a property-like regime called cap and trade.

… To borrow an idea from Robin Hanson, I think it’s useful to think about political conflict in terms of valorized figures. On the right, you see a lot of valorization of businessmen. On the left, you see a lot of valorization of pushy activists who want to do something businessmen don’t like. Formally, the right is committed to ideas about free markets and the left is committed to ideas about economic equality. But in practice, political conflict much more commonly breaks down around “some stuff some businessmen want to do” vs “some stuff businessmen hate” rather than anything about markets or property rights per se.

Where to begin?

First, while I can’t speak for them, I’m pretty sure that the Left identifies with specific activists, not activists in general. Just ask them for their opinion of the NRA or the Tea Party.

Second, Yglesias is being disingenuous when he suggests the Right tries to valorize businessmen. The elite economic Right along the National Review – Megan McArdle axis is much more interested in maximizing both freedom and utility than they are in privileging one class of people over another.

It may be true that the popular Right sometimes sound as if they “valorize” businessmen, but even here the exceptions quickly accumulate.  There is outrage aplenty among the Tea Party activists over tricksy banksters carting off the national wealth, for instance.   In any case, while their economic anecdotes may echo the frustration of many businessmen, the focus is on jobs destroyed and/or not created in response to the government, oh, say, capping carbon emissions.

Turning to Yglesias’ charge that the Right behaves inconsistently in opposing cap-and-trade, I am willing to concede him half a point: his example illustrates that property rights don’t always have the power to resolve conflict that the Right often claims on their behalf.  But this limitations specifically occurs when there is a dispute as to the extent of one person’s property interest in another’s activity.

At one extreme is the property owner who decides to construct an oil derrick on his front lawn in a residential neighborhood.  Does his activity materially impact his neighbors’ quality of life?  I am reasonably certain that anybody who thinks the neighbors don’t have a property interest in their neighborhood’s quality of life is not a resident of that neighborhood.

At the other extreme would be a cap-and-trade scheme on the world’s stock of, say, iPods: no new iPods can be manufactured except to replace an existing iPod, and the current holders of iPods are given an “iLicense” that can be freely traded.  Would such a scheme be “free market”?  Again, I am reasonably certain that any actual “free marketer” would say that the “commons” has nothing to do with it:  the world’s iPod carrying capacity is essentially unlimited.

The fundamental issue separating the Left and Right on the subject of carbon emissions is whether they are more like the first case or more like the second.  Is there a limit to the ability of the earth’s organic life to convert CO2 into O2?  The Right may be right or wrong about this, but this is the issue, not a sudden preference for commons over property.

Metaphysical Cynicism

I do NOT trust the media coverage of the Phoebe Prince case.

I do NOT believe the public reaction to be grounded in anything more than a cute picture and an obviously airbrushed narrative.

I do NOT trust the judicial system with the impartial administration of the law.

I do NOT trust policymakers to take any meaningful steps to prevent bullying in public schools.

I do NOT trust the public school teachers who allowed this to happen to enforce anti-bullying policies against actual bullies.

I do NOT believe anything that anybody says or does will make any difference.

But I DO like my solution.

It’s Not a MAD World Anymore.

Regarding the administration’s announcement that it forswears the use of nuclear weapons in retaliation for non-nuclear WMD attacks:

Other than to serve as yet another example of Obama’s moral preening, I’m not sure what this policy is supposed to accomplish.  It is one thing to tell another nuclear power, in the interests of stability, “No matter what happens, we don’t want you to be afraid that the U.S. will launch a preemptive first strike that destroys your retaliatory capability.  We will therefore renounce the use of nuclear weapons under circumstance X.”

But Obama is telling non-nuclear states (in compliance with the NPT, yada yada) that the U. S. won’t use nuclear weapons against them no matter what they do.

How is this supposed to encourage good behavior?  How does it make America safer?

UPDATE: Ace argues this doesn't make any difference because after 9/11 nobody took our deterrent threat seriously anyway.

Beware Shapeshifters

Hot New Relationship Book Warns Women: 'Wake Up! He's A Shapeshifter'

I started dating a guy I met in a bar, and he turned out to be just as shallow as the last guy I dated that I met at that bar. What am I doing wrong?

Accountability. It's a wonderful thing.

Two Quick Examples of How Politics Hurt Art

Don't get me wrong: there is nothing inherently wrong with political propaganda, as long as its authors are up front about what they are doing. For instance, everybody knew that the movie Rendition was a piece of leftist agitprop, and its box office reflected the market for said agitprop. Which is fine, since the movie never pretended to be anything else.

What is a shame, though, is when otherwise good art is marred by propaganda. I offer two examples. (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

• The movie Moon was reasonably good considering its budget, but at the film’s epilogue, an audio mash of news clips informs us that the protagonist, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) has been successful in drawing public attention to how his erstwhile employer, Lunar Industries, is choosing to man its helium-3 extraction facility on the moon.  The closing clip is of what is obviously a Rush Limbaugh sound-alike complaining that Sam is an “illegal immigrant.”

  What’s irritating about this is not only that nothing in the film’s narrative concerns immigration.  The film’s narrative does support a pretty obvious conservative* talking point:  the immorality of human cloning.  This point is so obvious, in fact, that nobody with even a liberal’s understanding of conservative knee-jerk reactions could fail to anticipate it.  Unfortunately for the writers, most of the film’s audience would agree with this reaction, and since the writers goal was to make conservatives look foolish, they are forced to make up a reaction that is wildly implausible.

• The movie The Time Traveler's Wife was an excellent film with a plot twist so cliched that I was embarrassed for the filmmakers. After establishing that Henry DeTamble's father-in-law Craig is (1) a pompous plutocrat of a type that was already worn out when John Houseman was doing it in Silver Spoons, (2) a Republican, and (3) a hunter, the movie has Henry getting shot by Craig in a hunting accident that didn't even nod towards plausibility. While it is true that hunting accidents do happen, they almost invariably happen when either the target or the victim is in motion relative to the other. (See, e.g., "Dick Cheney".) In this case, both Henry and the target are standing still when Craig shoots him with a scoped rifle without realizing it even after the fact. No half-way experienced hunter would make that kind of mistake, but the filmmakers decided to take a shot at wealthy Republican gun owners anyway.

* Conservative in general.  I have no idea whether or not Rush Limbaugh has a position on human cloning.