Burning the Witches, 2015

So there was a measles outbreak at Disneyland.

I should start this post by saying, in the vain hope of heading off some small amount of the hate it will provoke, that my family were vaccinated on the standard schedule.  We're conformists that way.

Jail 'anti-vax' parents: Column

Put simply, no person has the right to threaten the safety of his community. Like drunken drivers, the unvaccinated pose an imminent danger to others. They pose a lethal threat to the most vulnerable: the immunocompromised, such as HIV or cancer patients, and infants who have yet to receive their vaccines.  Anti-vaccine parents are turning their children into little walking time bombs. They ought to be charged for endangering their children and others.

This strikes me as not quite right.  People with measles endanger the safety of others, be they infants, immunocompromised, or simply unlucky.  Had Alex Berezow asserted a moral obligation on the part of the sick, or even the exposed, to quarantine themselves, he would have been on much firmer ground.  But an unvaccinated child doesn't turn into a "walking time bomb" simply by turning a-year-and-a-day without a vaccine.  Indeed, he doesn't turn into a "time bomb" at all; the metaphor fails because the disease doesn't spontaneously generate.  If you get it, you got it from somebody who also has it.

People who elect to forgo vaccinations may be misguided, and indeed, the California outbreak ought to provoke anti-vaxxers to recalculate their priors (though perhaps not).  But I don't believe they are any more evil than the year-less-a-day infants because I don't see them as any more vulnerable than those infants, any more likely to spread the disease than those infants.  The exact same public health argument in favor of keeping the year-and-a-day child isolated from the rest of us applies to the year-less-a-day child.  In fact, if everyone were vaccinated on the standard schedule, infants and immunocompromisees would still be at risk from each other.

It's odd, though, that for all the talk of jailing non-conformists, I suspect (admittedly without citation) that most of these outbreaks originate outside the U.S., especially in poor countries with much lower rates of vaccination and much higher probability of having their citizens here illegally.  Yet nobody in the media wants to talk about the threat of our derelict border control and illegal immigrant policing poses to everyone, conformists and non-conformists alike.

Funny how that works.

Choosing Chaste

Good Grief.  Does late-stage Evangelicalism do anything other than validate our worst instincts?

I am a virgin by choice and will be until my wedding night. But if my future beloved has engaged in pre-marital affairs I do not consider that in itself to be a deal breaker. Why?

Because I believe in the power of restoration.

I believe that decisions of the past can remain there.

I believe that our pasts do not necessarily define our present.

I believe that the love of today is not necessarily tainted by relations of the past.

Fine words . . . and also empirically false.  But the point is:  given that Christian women are already eager to find reasons to ignore the boring lifelong churchgoers in their midst in favor of excitingly pre-selected men who show a glimmer of tame-ability, what kind of incentives are we presenting to young Christian men?

• Exercise extreme self-restraint (or alternatively, organize your life in such a way that self-restrain is seldom called upon) in a commitment to chastity and discover that not only will Christian girls hold your inexperience against you, but your own church’s leadership will discourage them from seeing even relative merit in your sacrifice; OR
• Enjoy both the physical pleasure and increased self-esteem that come from sexual conquest, and in the event you go to church to “find a nice girl and settle down”, you will enjoy better success precisely because of your prior (or “prior”) life of sin.

I can’t think of a better way of alienating the loyalty of the church’s young men.

Movie Tears

FiveThirtyEight (H.T.: Ace) takes a survey to find out what movies make grown men cry:

Meh.

Don’t misunderstand me.  It’s not that these movies aren’t good.  Many of them are great.  (And a few are nigh unwatchable.  Titanic?  Srsly?)  But with the exception of The Lion King, I don’t remember actually shedding tears during any of them.

And would it not be more accurate to speak of crying during movie scenes rather than whole movies?  Even mediocrities can sometimes pull off an emotion-provoking scene.

I thought about it for a while and came up with a list of movies that have successfully jerked Φ’s tears.  I have organized them by what about the scene made it compelling.  These are not endorsements, mind you; some of the movies are pretty silly.  Nor do all these scenes succeed as well on repeated viewings.  And the scenes are seldom actually sad in the way we think of sad things that ought to bring tears.

Art for its own sake.

Sometimes, I can get emotional over sheer creativity.  Disney seems especially good at this.  “The Presentation of Simba”, did things I hadn’t seen in an animation before, like adjust focus from ants to Zebras and track ZaZu’s’ flight over his shoulder.  (These elements contribute to the scene’s majesty, which is itself emotional.)  “I want much more than this provincial life” was brilliant in its virtuosity; didn’t that song win an Oscar nomination? (as we will see, music factors heavily into the emotional power of all these scenes.) Ralph’s first entry into Power Strip Central in Wreck-it Ralph was similarly striking, not for the animation, which by 2013 was pretty standard, but for the concept itself:  a power strip as a terminal for video game avatars!

For a non-animated example of the emotional power of creativity, I mention the “Carousel Presentation” from the final episode of the Mad Men, Season 1 (sorry in advance for the crappy video; it seems to be all YouTube had):

I don’t actually know the story of the marketing strategy behind Kodak’s Carousel, but I’m old enough to be overwhelmed by the flash of recognition:  I remember those!

Now I just want to cry over how far the series has fallen.

Triumph Over Adversity

A movie most of you have no doubt forgotten is Renaissance Man, in which Danny DeVito undertakes to teach literature to a group of underperforming Army basic trainees.  One of them had a father killed in action many years prior; DeVito looks into the case and convinces the army that the man’s heroism hadn’t been properly recognized.  At graduation, the trainee accepts on his father’s behalf the Silver Star.  Now, as this list demonstrates, my eyes moisten a lot during movies, but this scene was the closest I ever came to actually breaking down.

An honorable mention goes to St. Crispin's Day:

“The Speech” from The Kings Speech was the moment to which the entire movie built and invested with both personal and historic significance.

Wreck-it Ralph again, for “Shut Up and Drive”:

Forest Gump, for “Run Forest Run” (as a boy, when he breaks free from his leg braces.  Yeah, I know it didn’t make any sense, but who cares?)

Independence Day, for President Bill Pullman’s Independence Day speech.

Temple Grandin, for Claire Danes’ standing up at the National Autism Society and riveting the audience with her personal story.

That moment when she says, “I am autistic.”  And every head in the room turns in her direction.

Innocence

Two scenes from Apollo 13 come to mind:

When Marilyn Lovell tells her son that “something went wrong on your daddy’s spaceship”, he replies, “Was it the door?” – A reference to the 1967 fire that killed the entire crew of Apollo 1;

When Jim Lovell’s elderly mother greeting the news by calmly replying, “If NASA could send a washing machine to the moon, my Jimmy could fly it.”

And . . .

Miscellaneous

I’m not sure how to categorize the scenes below.  You be the judge.

Forrest Gump’s concern about this son:

“Is he smart?”  The fear and longing that went into that question.  (and one of the few scenes that didn’t require music for its impact.)

Touched by an Angel, “For Such a Time as This”:

That moment at 6:52 when the congresswoman trades her gold locket for the freedom of one more Sudanese Christian slave.  The backstory is that the locket contained a picture of her son Sam, whose death at an early age was the source of considerable bitterness.

Return of the King, “Arwen’s Vision”:

The backstory (for those of you living in a cave on Mars) is that Arwen is departing Middle Earth with her fellow elves when she has the vision of what she is abandoning:  a family with Aragon.

Moneyball:  “It’s a Metaphor”

Backstory:  the Jeremy Brown metaphor is to Billy Beane himself, whose disappointment that the Oakland A’s lost the postseason made him miss that his use of statistics had revolutionized baseball.

Quality vs. Quantity

Scott Alexander:

– I had a patient, let’s call him ‘Henry’ for reasons that are to become clear, who came to hospital after being picked up for police for beating up his fifth wife.

So I asked the obvious question: “What happened to your first four wives?”

“Oh,” said the patient, “Domestic violence issues. Two of them left me. One of them I got put in jail, and she’d moved on once I got out. One I just grew tired of.”

“You’ve beaten up all five of your wives?” I asked in disbelief.

“Yeah,” he said, without sounding very apologetic.

“And why, exactly, were you beating your wife this time?” I asked.

“She was yelling at me, because I was cheating on her with one of my exes.”

“With your ex-wife? One of the ones you beat up?”

“Yeah.”

“So you beat up your wife, she left you, you married someone else, and then she came back and had an affair on the side with you?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” said Henry.

. . . .

When I was younger – and I mean from teeanger hood all the way until about three years ago – I was a nice guy. In fact, I’m still a nice guy at heart, I just happen to mysteriously have picked up girlfriends. And I said the same thing as every other nice guy, which is “I am a nice guy, how come girls don’t like me?”

There seems to be some confusion about this, so let me explain what it means, to everyone, for all time.

It does not mean “I am nice in some important cosmic sense, therefore I am entitled to sex with whomever I want.”

It means: “I am a nicer guy than Henry.”

After hearing the above excerpt, Mrs. Phi speculated that the women "Henry" was getting were of "low quality", by which she primarily meant low social class. This would be consistent with Scott's psychiatric practice, which appears to be in Detroit. Mrs. Phi pointed out that that, in contrast, I, and likely Scott as well, had restricted my search for a wife to venues where I was likely to meet mostly girls from middle and upper-middle class backgrounds. And mostly, that's what I did meet.

Mrs. Phi was making two points: (1) that I would not actually envy Henry his particular conquests; and (2) that the women to whom I was marketing myself were not actually making quite the colossally bad decisions as Henry's were. (1) might be true, but perhaps only in hindsight. (2) is true as far as I know: among my own contemporaries, I only know of a couple of failed marriage, and those didn't involve domestic violence. Rather than dating Henrys, many of the girls I knew from church spent their twenties sitting around grousing about how we nerds weren't actually good enough for them.

The Only Thing Worse than No Game is Bad Game

Scott Alexander's 10k-word commentary on Scott Aaronson's Cri de Coeur, linked by Steve and others, is well worth the investment. Granted, Alexander avows that he is "97% on board with feminism", whereas my own on-board-with-feminism meter zeroed out in 1922 and has been running negative since the 70s. But Alexander has done his research and gives us a chapter-and-verse account of the feminists ongoing and relentless social persecution of nerds.

Among the piece's many quotables, I wanted to bring attention to this one:

Any space with a four-to-one male:female ratio is going to end up with some pretty desperate people and a whole lot of unwanted attention. Add into this mix the fact that nerds usually have poor social skills (explaining exactly why would take a literature review to put that last one to shame, but hopefully everyone can agree this is true), and you get people who are pretty sure they are supposed to do something but have no idea what. Err to one side and you get the overly-chivalrous people saying m’lady because it pattern matches to the most courtly and least sexual way of presenting themselves they can think of. Err to the other, and you get people hollowly imitating the behavior they see in famous seducers and playboys, which when done without the very finely-tuned social graces and body-language-reading-ability of famous seducers and playboys is pretty much just “being extremely creepy”.

This is a point I've made myself a couple of times: alpha behavior is really hard for us nerds to immitate in practice. Anyone who trots out a James Bond line with being, you know, James Bond is going to embarrass himself colossally. We have to find versions of ourselves that work for us, not versions that would work for who we wish we were, but aren't.

The REAL Enemy

From Joseph Bottum’s An Anxious Age:

After the attacks of September 11, 2001, I was at the Episcopalians’ National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., to participate on a panel to discuss violence and religion.  The evening began with a prayer from Jane Dixon, the cathedral’s acting bishop, and her invocation was as revealing as any short speech could be of the concerns of the contemporary Episcopal Church.

While asking the divine gifts of wisdom for the speakers and understanding for the listeners, Bishop Dixon was vague – not merely failing to name the name of Jesus but straining to phrase all her requests in the passive voice to avoid even naming God:  “May we be given . . . , may it be granted to us . . .”  When her prayer unexpectedly swerved toward abortion, however, her language suddenly snapped into hard specificity as she reminded God that “America at its best stands for the spread of right around the world, especially the right of women to choose.”  The discussion that evening, she prayed, would not turn vindictive, for we could not condemn the destruction of the World Trade Center until we remembered that “even in the United States, people have bombed abortion clinics.”

Bottum goes on to explain how representative this attitude is among the class of people from which Episcopalians are usually drawn.  But I want to foot-stomp the perversity:  just shy 3000 Americans had just been killed by Muslim terrorists, and Bishop Dixon wants to remind everyone not to lose sight of the real enemy:  pro-lifers!

Liberals have no loyalty to America and her people.  They only have tribal loyalties to People Like Themselves, and designated minorities, be they blacks or Muslims, are mere weapons in their unyielding war against the hated conservatives.

I remember reading how there was a surge in church attendance after 9-11 that quickly died off.  If this was the message being preached, then who can blame people for losing interest?

Establishment Treason, 1924

From Joseph Bottum, An Anxious Age, among other things a history of the decline of mainline American Protestantism:

Early in the twentieth century a trend toward consolidation [among mainline Protestant denominations] began to take hold.  Several things facilitated the trend . . . there was the fight between the fundamentalists and the modernists.  Thoughtful observers had seen that fight developing for some time, but it would come to a head when the powerful liberal preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick delivered his famous 1922 sermon “Shall the Fundamentalists Win” at New York’s First Presbyterian Church, and Princeton’s conservative John Gresham Machen published his defining book, Christianity and Liberalism (1923).

Part of the result was new fissures:  Machen, probably the best American theological mind of his generation, would flee Princeton, moving to Philadelphia to found the more conservative Westminster Theological Seminary in 1929.  but another part of the result was increased agreement about what was and what wasn’t the American Mainline.  The liberal churches all felt they were under assault from a fundamentalist offensive that detested both their social gospel theology and their ecumenically minded church organization.

. . . .

“Shall the Fundamentalists Win”” was not universally applauded at the time, even by the congregants at First Presbyterian.  The local presbytery investigated Fosdick for heresy in 1924 (his defense counsel was the future secretary of state John Foster Dulles, father of the Catholic convert Avery Cardinal Dulles), and he resigned his pulpit – only to have John D. Rockefeller, Jr., build New York’s Riverside Church for him, an avowedly interdenominational church, the flagship of Mainline Protestantism in America.

A couple of terms need some clarification.  First, the term “fundamentalist” in the 1920s referred, ironically enough, to Machen himself; ironically, because the self-described fundamentalists of today would be loathe to embrace Machen for reasons having little to do with modernism.

Second, “social gospel” isn’t just (or isn’t even) “good works”; nor is it merely “social reform”.  As Bottum explains, it is a complete repudiation of the core doctrines of Christianity, a substitution of faith in the saving work of Christ with an adversarial attitude towards the existing structures of civilization.

So I found striking the extraordinary level of support for heterodoxy that the 1920s establishment was so eager to provide.  We have grown accustomed to the elites of today acting out on their ethnic prejudices to wage war on America (though the Presbyterian mainline is far too irrelevant today to attract the notice of people with names like Zuckerberg).  But Rockefeller?  Dulles?  They, too, were hard at work, using their wealth and status to destroy the moral foundation upon which their own success was built.

The elites have been our enemies for a long time.