The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)

But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Air superiority and the American way of war

The last 3 times the US armed forces went into combat for a campaign without air superiority were:

The Philippines 1942 (largest surrender of US forces outside of the US Civil War)

Guadalcanal 1942-1943, (First months of the battle, US forces dont have air supremacy and have to hold on)

Battle of the Bulge, December 1944, (first few days, US has no air supremacy because of weather, Much of the 106th division surrenders, second largest surrender of US forces outside of the Civil War).

The US has fought with overwhelming air superiority in every campaign since, and yet we are supposed to believe that Ukraine is to blame for failing to breakthrough a well-defended defensive line with equipment they had just been given?

— Phillips P. O’Brien

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The fate of Marxist historiography

[I]n response to complaints on the right that the crimes of right-leaning authoritarian regimes are somehow over-taught and left-leaning authoritarian regimes are under-taught […] I should note that I took my Russian and Chinese history courses at the University of Massachusetts located in the beautiful People’s Republic of Amherst; a conservative campus or department it was not. And yet the ruthlessness of Lenin, the brutality of Stalin and the callousness of Mao were all well discussed; even ‘leftist’ professors these days do not generally feel the need to carry water for those regimes and in any case the historical record on the failure of those regimes is really clear. Never in a history department have I met a teacher who was not quite frank about the horrifying aspects of the regimes in question; I’m sure such historians must exist somewhere, but they must also be very rare birds indeed.

But back to ‘historical materialism.’ Now that’s a slippery phrasing which can mean two things. One the one hand, it can be an argument that the issue looks differently from a materialist lens of analysis – that is, if you considered the concrete material conditions (income, living standards, food security, nutrition, life expectancy, infrastructure, gross production, etc.) rather than cultural, intellectual or religious conditions, you might see something different. A claim of ‘what you see depends on where you look,’ which is a fair point to make assuming the initial analytical lens was not already a materialist one. On the other hand, because ‘historical materialism‘ is what Marxists – and not many others, because it is relatively rare (in my experience, at least) to hear historians use that phrasing – call doctrinaire Marxist historical theory, it can also mean, “if you adopted a historical school that presupposes my conclusions, you too would have to presuppose my conclusions.” Which is true in so far as it goes, which is not very far. But it can be hard in many cases to immediately tell the difference between these two statements.

In the latter case, while almost all historians use tools out of the toolbox that is Marxist historiography – we talked, for instance, about the Annales approach, which is one such tool; critical theory is another – very few historians adopt a doctrinaire Marxist interpretation of history anymore. The reason ought to be fairly obvious: Marxist ‘historical materialism’ asserted a series of stages of economic development which, because neither Marx nor Engels were particularly gifted historians and were working with very incomplete information about the economy of the past to boot, turn out to map very poorly to both the way that economic systems developed before the 1800s and to how they came to develop after the 1800s, which is a problem for a historical theory which argues that most important historical developments are predicated on economic systems. Consequently, portions of Marxist historiography have been largely abandoned (in most cases for many decades) because it became clear that the actual historical record could not support them, while other portions have become standard tools used widely by historians with non-Marxist viewpoints.  In a sense, historians have looted Marxist historical theory, plucking from it the still use concepts but leaving much of the less useful dogmatism behind. Those useful concepts, in turn, are so pervasive that I must imagine no historian could get a PhD without being made to learn them and demonstrate that they can understand and deploy them.

– Bret Devereaux

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The freedom to say what discomfits

Freedom of speech in general and academic freedom in particular have always been placed under pressure or even active assault because they are, by design, uncomfortable. After all, no one needs the freedom or protection to utter comfortable pablum or to make statements which flatter the rich and powerful. Those statements do not require protection because no one is trying to silence them.  It is the uncomfortable statements which require speech protections, which in turn means that free speech and academic freedom are in a sense always going to be unpopular. Now just because a statement is uncomfortable doesn’t make it true, but the wisdom here has always been that this discomfort is good, that it is valuable to create spaces in society where uncomfortable things can be said, precisely because sometimes those uncomfortable things are true and necessary to say and systems which try to selectively limit what can be said end up co-opted by the powerful to serve their interests, rather than the interests of the community.

—Bret Devereaux (emphases in the original)

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Weeknote 37, 2023

§1 Lunar Days

“As the summer turns / I seem to fall away / Gaps in the light / The Lunar Days…”

§2 The Lion Sleeps Tonight

Which cover version is better? Anne Reburn’s five-part self-a capella? Or They Might Be Giants’ rock re-intepretation (featuring Laura Cantrell)?

§3 What’s the Matter with Kansas?

Small Kansas town summarily fires two library staff for making an LGBTQ display.

It…wasn’t an LGBTQ display.

§4 Quotation

“The weird, artsy loner gets the girl in movies because movies are written by weird, artsy loners.”—Unknown

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Weeknote 28, 2023

§1 Python

A habit I’m working on breaking as I learn Python: Skimming lightly through the introductory material because “I already know that.” No harm is done by remaining open to the possibility that I don’t.

§2 “Skilljacking”

“Will Truman” is the pseudonym of an ordinary gentleman with an extraordinary pen, which he wields without mercy in this parody of how business journalists discuss paying for labor.

§3 Mario Lanza

This album was #1 on the Billboard album chart for 36 weeks in 1954-1955, but has been more or less forgotten. Learn why an earlier generation loved it!

§4 Lalo Schrifin

According to musical historian Ted Gioia, composer Lalo Schrifin’s inspiration for the rousing motif of the Mission: Impossible theme was the Morse code for “M” and “I”! He gave a beat-and-a-half to each of the two dashes of the M and a beat to each of the two dots of the I, then set those five beats to a 5/4 rhythm.

§5 Quotations

“Therapy isn’t about being happy, it’s about honestly knowing who you are, and then picking a suitable life. Every day you must consciously choose who you are. Choose.” — “The Last Psychiatrist”

“When an expert writes a book for the public, he is writing for an audience largely unqualified to assess its claims[.]” — Charles Lambdin

“To operate efficiently and effectively, the Nation relies on the flow of objective, credible statistics to support the decisions of individuals, households, governments, businesses, and other organizations.” — The Office of Management and Budget of the United States Government

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Weeknote 27, 2023

§1 Python

Hello, World!
My home computer now has the default Python 3.11.4 package. I’m using the IDLE shell for now, and plan to switch later to Nova, which I have been using as an html editor for years.

§2 Philip Agre

When I was in graduate school for library and information science (1998-2000), Philip Agre’s name came up often in discussions about how the Internet would change society. After a while, though, I rarely heard his name. Now I know why.

§3 Music

The album “The True Story of Bananagun” by the Australian band Bananagun is a fun 1960s-style mix of pop, tropical, and psychedelic sounds.

§4 xkcd

Actual Progress

§5 Observation

Sometimes the way in which someone approaches dealing with a problem explains a lot about why the problem exists.

§6 Quotation

“The whole point of having an office job is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively.” — Molly Young

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Weeknote 26, 2023

Copying an idea from Mita Williams…

§1 Python

At 12, I taught myself BASIC programming. Can I repeat the trick at 52 with Python?

My plan: Work through Allen B. Downey’s Think Python, letting each section sink in before moving on. Once I’ve finished that book, see where I am and decide what to do next.

Downey’s implication that most programming instructions can be classified in one of five ways fascinates me. (Those five basic classifications: input, output, math, conditional execution, repetition.)

§2 Fusion

A blog post originally written in 2012 (and updated in the meantime) to argue that nuclear fusion will never be used for energy generation, not for the scientific reasons doubters usually raise, but for economic ones.

§3 Music

The story goes that Charlie Puth made this track in 2014, then disowned it years later when jerks mocked it. If he would release it as a single, I would buy a copy.

§4 Quotations

“You can’t beat an ideology with evidence. The ideology controls the rules of evidence, not the other way around.” — Tressie McMillan Cottom
“His determination to tell it like it is has been hampered by his towering ignorance.” — source unknown

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The History We Elide

At Harvard Law School in the 1950s, I noticed the case books on property and contract law did not include commercial cases over slave ‘ownership.’ In pre-Civil War generations, the courts were full of litigation–slave families were valuable ‘property’ whose exploitation led to contractual conflicts between slave ‘owners.’ Yet law students were not exposed to this brutal side of the so-called rule of law. A law professor told me that casebook publishers excluded these cases because they wanted to sell books in the South. I think there were other taboos at work, as [The 1619 Project] points out.

— Ralph Nader, The New York Times Magazine (2019 Sep 8), pg. 6

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How Form Can Distort Reality

…some of the academics want to write like they’re writing for The New Yorker, and The New Yorker does so many wonderful things, but I think The New Yorker has also convinced us all that we need to find one perfect avatar that embodies the complex story we want to tell, and we have to start and end with this character, and this character has to somehow go through in this Forrest Gump-like way all the major milestones of the history we want to get out of our pens. But just like Forrest Gump, nobody is a perfect avatar, and while we want to make things accessible by humanizing them and telling stories, the problem with that is that it then collapses the story to an individual experience, when even an individual doesn’t experience the same thing the same way each time they experience it.

— Michael S. Kideckel, during a 2021 interview by Brian Hamilton for the New Books Network

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The Cathedral of St. Ranke

The view that the great cathedral of history is being built brick by brick by historians, some of them filling gaps and forming pillars, while the majority of them add their small bricks in the form of monographs […] is not entirely a wrong one–but we must recognize that the greatest of cathedrals are never finished; they are in constant need of cleaning and refurbishing, indeed, of all kinds of repairs–and also that every generation may see them differently.

— John Lukacs, A Student’s Guide to the Study of History (Wilmington, Del. : Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000), pg. 21fn

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Perishing by publishing

[K-]72. There is no greater impediment to progress in the sciences than the desire to see it take place too quickly. This is very characteristic of brisk and lively people, which is why they seldom achieve very much: for they are cast down and give up as soon as they perceive they are not advancing. Yet they would have advanced if they had used less energy and taken more time.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (translated by R. J. Hollingdale), The Waste Books (New York : New York Review of Books, 2000 [1990]), pg. 201.

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A bottleneck in cultural transmission

Yet what any individual in the Frankish Empire [of the 8th century AD] got to read was often a matter of chance. The full range of classical literature was by no means still available in its entirety. Much had disappeared and had been lost forever. Because of lack of knowledge of the language, almost everything in Ancient Greek had by now vanished from the educational canon of the Latin people, insofar as those works had not been translated or popularized in Latin in the classical period or late antiquity. Indeed, the image we have of ancient Roman literature has to this day been fundamentally shaped by the Carolingian age’s eagerness to read such works. Every piece of Latin literature that this period managed to get hold of and save has been preserved for posterity; conversely, the works it shunned or never got to know have been lost forever.

— Johannes Fried, Charlemagne (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University, 2016), pg. 274.

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The accumulative cycle of civilization

The most impressive application of Ibn Khaldun’s approach is his historical and sociological elaboration of the cyclical pattern of rise, peak, and decline. If a society becomes a leading civilization or even the dominant culture in a region, according to Ibn Khaldun the peak of this civilization is always followed by a period of decline. This means that the next cohesive group that conquers this civilization is a gang of barbarians by comparison. Once they have established their control over the conquered civilization, these barbarians are attracted by its more refined aspects, such as literature, art, and science, which are subsequently assimilated or appropriated by the oppressors. The upshot is that the next group of barbarians repeats this process, as a result of which the pattern of peak and decline actually leads to an accumulation of knowledge and culture.

— Rens Bod, A New History of the Humanities; Oxford, England : Oxford University Press, 2013; pg. 97.

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When people had to see

“Before cameras, educated, well-to-do travelers had learned to sketch so that they could draw what they saw on their trips, in the same way that, before phonograph recordings, bourgeois families listened to music by making it themselves at home, playing the piano and singing in the parlor. Cameras made the task of keeping a record of people and things simpler and more widely available, and in the process reduced the care and intensity with which people needed to look at the things they wanted to remember well, because pressing a button required less concentration and effort than composing a precise and comely drawing.

–Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece : On the Art of Life and Vice Versa (New York : Penguin, 2005), pg. 33.

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