Category Archives: Philosophical and speculative

Virtuous victimhood

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This was an article of such sublime interest that I can hardly believe how well done it is: Signaling Virtuous Victimhood as Indicators of Dark Triad Personalities. It’s about how a seriously good income can be made from playing the victim since there are so many people about who love to minister to the needs of these phoney victims. This is the abstract, but read it all. As a bonus, unlike almost every academic paper I have come across, this is brilliantly written and as clear in its arguments as I have ever seen.

We investigate the consequences and predictors of emitting signals of victimhood and virtue. In our first three studies, we show that the virtuous victim signal can facilitate nonreciprocal resource transfer from others to the signaler. Next, we develop and validate a victim signaling scale that we combine with an established measure of virtue signaling to operationalize the virtuous victim construct. We show that individuals with Dark Triad traits—Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy—more frequently signal virtuous victimhood, controlling for demographic and socioeconomic variables that are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. In Study 5, we show that a specific dimension of Machiavellianism—amoral manipulation—and a form of narcissism that reflects a person’s belief in their superior prosociality predict more frequent virtuous victim signaling. Studies 3, 4, and 6 test our hypothesis that the frequency of emitting virtuous victim signal predicts a person’s willingness to engage in and endorse ethically questionable behaviors, such as lying to earn a bonus, intention to purchase counterfeit products and moral judgments of counterfeiters, and making exaggerated claims about being harmed in an organizational context.

Much of the paper is an attempt to test their proposition using various data sets. Not to everyone’s tastes, but interesting in itself. But this is the conclusion that comes at the end.

The obligation to alleviate others’ pain can be found in most of the world’s moral systems. It also appears to be built into the structure of the mind by evolution, as evidenced by the human tendency to feel distress at signs of suffering. It is therefore not surprising that many people are motivated to help perceived victims of misfortune or disadvantage. But the downside of this proclivity is that it can also lead people to be easily persuaded that all victim signals are accurate signals, particularly when they perceive the alleged victim as being a “good person.” When this occurs, well-meaning people might allocate their material and social resources to those who are neither victims nor virtuous, which necessarily diverts resources from those who are legitimately in need. Effective altruism requires the ability to differentiate between false and true victims. Credulous acceptance of all virtuous victim signals as genuine can also enable and reward fraudulent claims, particularly by those with antisocial personality traits. Our work raises this possibility and by doing so it advances our understanding of how the moral goals of those who seek to minimize human suffering can be most effectively pursued.

This is a pathology that is doing much to undermine our way of life since there is a sucker born every minute, and with population growth the way it is, we may be up to one a second. Our open borders policies have been the product of this wish to help others, but to allow wolves to come in at the door is seldom a policy that works into the longer term.

Whatever sort of new world we are in it cannot be described as brave

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Just been to the National Gallery and when I walked in I asked about masks and was told they were completely optional so off mine went. But of the other patrons of the arts down here in DanAndrewStan, 90% kept them on. Whether they did it to protect me from them, or to protect themselves from me I do not know. But that these same people are also terrorised by global warming seems a virtual certainty. The only question now is when will they start the distribution of soma. Perhaps they will mix it in with the vaccine.

Political crime and punishment

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Fyodor Dostoevsky: philosopher of freedom, the opening two paras:

On December 22, 1849, a group of political radicals were taken from their prison cells in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been interrogated for eight months. Led to the Semenovsky Square, they heard a sentence of death by firing squad. They were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps—their funeral shrouds—and offered last rites. The first three prisoners were seized by the arms and tied to the stake. One prisoner refused a blindfold and stared defiantly into the guns trained on them. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up with an imperial decree reducing death sentences to imprisonment in a Siberian prison camp followed by service as a private in the army. The last-minute rescue was in fact planned in advance as part of the punishment, an aspect of social life that Russians understand especially well.

Accounts affirm: of the young men who endured this terrible ordeal, one had his hair turn white; a second went mad and never recovered his sanity; a third, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate in 2021, went on to write Crime and Punishment.

I’m not sure I knew this, or if I did, I didn’t remember. I remember the story but not that it was Dostoevsky who had been about to be hanged. The article should be read in full, as anything by Gary Saul Morson should be read in full.

Shrink wrapped political loonies

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In a world of square pegs and round holes, the fact of human unhappiness and dissatisfaction is just the way it is and always will be. The left has been taking aim for more than a century at the two most important forms of refuge in this heartless world: the family and religion. I think of socialist thought as the most hideous of all of the psychological traumas of the modern world. It is a replacement of sorts for religion but offers no consolations that I can think of whatsoever. This has all come to mind having run across this: Trump history and behavior suggest destructive mental processes that put America at risk. I thought it was against the professional ethics of a psychiatrist to be diagnosing without actually knowing the patient, but ethics are for other people. Having read their stuff, I can plainly see they are a couple of screwballs. This is what they said:

Since President Donald Trump’s election, the psychiatric community has debated calling out his illness(es). The American Psychiatric Association says we should remain silent out of fear that we would violate the Goldwater Rule — an APA rule adopted largely to prevent the partisan misuse of psychiatric diagnoses to unduly influence an election. But it is clear what many psychiatrists know privately, and a few have said publicly. The threat to our democracy is too great to remain silent.

They said quite a bit more but you get the idea. Having been reading quite a bit of psychology lately having just run across this ferocious scam – see The Therapeutic State for a previous discussion – it is quite clear that the diagnoses of most psychologist’s is based on the moral and political beliefs of the therapist and has virtually no objective value. These shrinks have even less to contribute to public debate than Keynesian economists, and that really is rock bottom. How much does the conclusion look like psychology rather than a political judgement which, of course, is just what it is?

Whatever President Trump does leading up to Jan. 20 — whether it is reckless actions abroad or lawless and destructive acts of commission or omission at home — it should be clear that these are not normal nor acceptable actions by an American president.

They are miseducated in every known falsehood found across the social sciences. It really is a disgrace but eventually you just have to get used to it.

The joke’s on us

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1984 was the most visionary, prescient book ever written. “He who controls the past controls the future.” Joe says he never said it and therefore he didn’t, even if he did.

Same with the millions he and his son took from the Chinese, Ukrainians and others. If Joe says he never took a cent, then you can have all the laptops full of documents you wish, and not a dollar went into his pocket. As in: NPR tells readers the Hunter Biden story is a ‘waste’ of time and a ‘pure distraction,’ so they’re not reporting on it. Did an event that was never reported ever happen?

And do you really want to bet your career and future on saying anything else?

Saving Grace

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I will begin with a single statement: if you do not already subscribe to Quadrant, then you should; it is the best political magazine of conservative thought in the world and I read them all. Subscribe here. Here is only part of the reason why.

Both TAFKAS and myself wrote posts in reaction to a Weekend Australia article by Katrina Grace Kelly: Public safety becomes a casualty to the culture wars. This was his: Safety, and this was mine: Australians watching American politics according to The Oz. To understand what she wrote, I will provide the following from Spartacus:

In her piece this past weekend, titled Public safety becomes a casualty to the culture wars, Kelly writes some “unusual” things.  To start with, it was a very odd mashing of Covid management in Australia, the US and the performance of President Trump.

This aside, it is Kelly’s closing paragraph that got to TAFKAS:

“Voters expect politicians to do everything to keep them safe, and many will vote along these lines.”

I just shortened her argument to, “Save me, she begs, save me.” You get the idea.

Then I turned to my latest October Quadrant which I go through end to end and read through every article that interests me, which most do. But not everything, and this was an article I expected to pass over, titled: The Sea. Turned out it was an investigation of the literature in relation to The Sea as a metaphor of danger. And then in the midst of this wonderful article, there was a passage from The Book of Common Prayer, which brought me back to that pathetic article by Princess Grace:

“O most powerful and glorious Lord God, at whose command the winds blow, and lift up the waves of the sea, and who stillest the rage thereof; We, thy creatures, but miserable sinners, do in this our great distress cry unto thee for help; Save, Lord, or else we perish.”

I am afraid Ms Kelly is a lost soul. She has lost touch with G-d; she can think of no other to save her woebegone self from the dangers of life but the Government. There are many lost souls such as herself who seek salvation in the hands of government from whom no salvation can ever be found. She turns to Joe Biden instead. If it weren’t so tragically sad it might be funny. She is a metaphor for our times.

Our 40th anniversary is tomorrow

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Tomorrow is our 40th wedding anniversary and other than in dwelling on how many years have gone by, I could not be more happy. When I was young, teenager-ish, I came across an article about Charles Boyer’s own 40th anniversary.* Boyer was the ultimate French luuver, and there he had been married to one person, rather than being a man with many women, as is the ideal in these decadent times of ours. And in reply my mother said that the true sign of a great lover is that he can keep the same woman happy for the whole of her life. In fact, literature up until that time was about finding and winning the perfect girl. Today, such a notion would not work for Hollywood nor for most “romantic” fiction. Certainly very few boys would buy into it. It is numbers that matter, a Don Giovanni type love-life that counts as the standard of excellence. A bad standard since it is one that leads to so much unhappiness and discontent. Marrying your high school “sweetheart” is the last thing on anyone’s mind for virtually everyone in our Western world today. And not until I have arrived at this moment myself did it really occur to me that this truly is the ideal, just as my Mother had said all those years ago, bless her.

So here we are at 40 years. Alas, were these normal times we would be having a big, big party, bringing together all of our friends, and with it being a Sunday we could have started early and gone on all day and into the night. But being in the odd times we are, it will just have to be a catered romantic dinner for two around our kitchen table.

The story of how we met I have told many times so will tell it again. It was at a Fancy Dress party – on April Fools Day, in fact. I had been invited by an old friend I used to know from my early days in Melbourne. It was a Saturday night and I came dressed as an American tourist, in a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, thongs and a roll of toilet paper in my back pocket. And into this room came the prettiest, most engaging girl I had seen in a very long time who was easily the most enchanting woman I had ever come upon. Upbeat, happy, full of laughter and adventure. She came as a 1920s flapper which she was the perfect embodiment of. She worked the room coming towards where I was, and finally made it to me after about an hour. My eyes had, of course, never left her – and as she tells it herself, she was working her way towards me since I, bless my soul, was her perfect type, at least from a distance. 

We then sat and chatted, talked about this and that – I actually still remember the conversation surprisingly well – and then I offered to drive her home when it was all over, in my beat up 25-year old Cortina. Which would have been fine except that the car would not start and needed a push-start from everyone else to finally get the engine to turn over. She was definitely not looking for wealth and status. So we drove out to the airport and back to charge the engine, and then after a night of more chat and more coffee and cake, we went on the Sunday morning to see her best friends to see how I would fit into her life, and then we went to see my best friends, so that I could do the same. And then we met again on the Monday in the city since we were both working not all that far from each other.

But this morning at work was the moment that mattered. I told the story at our wedding and a number of times since. It is known, and I do mention it from time to time, that before I became the sober man of the right and a proper bourgeoisie, I had been a long-haired hippy new-left loon, even having gone so far as to live in a “commune” in Vancouver, hanging out with all forms of disreputable types, of whom I was amongst the more disreputable. This, mind you, when I had already become a B.A./M.A. I was at work in the morning in the Economics Department of one of our Big Four banks, and I went to the chap who did the mining analysis and forecasts and asked to borrow his copy of the I Ching. The I Ching, if you don’t know it, is an ancient Chinese “oracle” to which you can pose various questions about what to do, and which will provide answers that usually requires a certain kind of wavering judgment and careful interpretation to make sense of. My friend David used the I Ching, along with his astrological charting plus numerology, to make his forecasts for the mining industry. Bear that in mind next time you think about buying shares, whether bank shares or mining shares. I might just mention that he eventually left the bank because he was sure that there was going to be a California earthquake as foretold by Edgar Cayce, that would send a tidal wave across the Pacific leading to mass drownings in Melbourne. David therefore sold up his beautiful house in Carlton and moved to Nimbin. I only once again ever saw him, at an economics conference, where he presented a paper on the use of astrology in making economic predictions.

But on this day, being already very familiar with the I Ching from my earlier days, I asked to borrow his copy, which is the last time I ever used it or any other form of forecasting technique, other than, of course, economic theory. And I asked David for the book and put the fateful question: Should I marry this girl? I might also here mention that I introduced these devices to my children by telling them that they are a fun part of life, but the moment you find even the slightest tweak of a notion entering their heads that these things will accurately foretell anything, they must be discarded and never be used again. That is my advice to everyone. Now let me return to that moment in 1978.

And here was the point about the question. I was a young lad, only just having turned thirty. I was living the life that many young lads at that time of life foolishly prefer to live. And having met the perfect girl, the reason I was going into this further investigation of the proper course of action was, I am ashamed to admit, so that I might find some reason, anything at all, where is that straw for me to grasp, not to continue along this path towards marriage, but so that I could have some reason not to. And as you might know with all of these devices, there is a certain fuzziness that allows you to read things in many different ways. An easy way out, right?

I tossed the coins and then the most astonishing thing happened. And this was the only time this had ever happened. It gave me an absolutely clear answer that was unambiguous in stating without any possible way to equivocate: YOU SHOULD MARRY THIS GIRL!

And it was even worse than that. The way the oracle works is that there are almost always “Change Lines” in the result so that what might be the advice at the moment of consultation will over time slither into its opposite or at least towards some other answer. But here, for the first and only time in all the times I had used the I Ching where there were no Change Lines. How it was on that day in 1988 would be how it would be for all times. Honestly, I was truly amazed since nothing like it had ever happened before. It is a rare occurrence, I can tell you.

And so it has turned out. The entire universe in its cosmic unfolding had told me in no uncertain terms that this was the girl I must marry if I sought happiness and a blessed life of marital contentment that would continue forward exactly how it had  begun. I now know this is the only form of true happiness, the only one that counts. The greatest of all of G-d’s blessings is a happy marriage. 

I will add something else which I have only found out recently, but which when I read turns out to have been exactly what I did in wending my way towards that moment. And in its own way this is as mystical an approach, and no doubt about as accurate as my tossing the coins to consult the I Ching. This time, however, it is by using advanced statistical methods to find your one true love and companion for life (I think this may only works for males, by the way, but perhaps not). Let me quote from the text. This is from Amir D. Aczel: Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market & Just about Everything Else, p86):

“You will maximize your probability of finding the best spouse if you date about thirty-seven percent of the available candidates in your life, and then choose to stay with the next candidate who is better than all the previous ones.

“This is, indeed, a strange-sounding rule. But mathematicians have proved it works better than any other. The number thirty-seven percent is an approximation of the exact number 1/e, where e is the base for natural logarithms, or 2.71828.” 

The science is settled, and you don’t want to go around arguing with science, do you?

We have had a remarkably friction-free 40 years, although I do have to say there is that one area where we do not perfectly line up, and as with many couples, it is with politics. We have managed to work it through, but as it turns out, of the two of us, she is the more conservative, the most hardline on the right. I may waver here or there, but she never, and apparently from a very young age. 

There we are in the photo below, me looking as cheerful and debonair as ever.

The only lesson I feel I have learned in all this time is that what is best in life is to turn seventy and find you have been happily married to the same person for the previous forty years.

 

* Charles Boyer was the husband of British actress Pat Paterson, whom he met at a dinner party in 1934. The two became engaged after two weeks of courtship and were married three months later. The marriage lasted 44 years until her death.

The Battle of Salamis 2500 years ago this month

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Western civilisation has been put to the test many times but this may have been the most critical, and it happened exactly two and a half millennia ago. Here is a memorial to that day: Freedom, Barbarism, and Triremes. It begins.

Twenty-five hundred years ago this month, a Greek naval armada, composed largely of Athenian ships led by the brilliant statesman Themistocles, won a decisive victory over the massive navy of the Persian king Xerxes in the straits of Salamis. This victory effectively ended a decade of Persian efforts to subjugate the autonomous cities of ancient Greece to barbarian rule.

Commemorating this event is not antiquarianism. By preserving the freedom of the Greeks, the victory at Salamis made possible a period of human flourishing in the arts, sciences, philosophy, and politics that the world has rarely seen, one that would prove foundational to Western civilization and whose rival for significance might only be found in the Italian Renaissance. In remembering it, we remind ourselves of what makes the West both so distinct and so fragile.

When I, as a professor of political science, teach my students about an event so critical to our shared history, I try to show them how the texts of the ancient world convey both the dramatic urgency of political life and the human wisdom inherent in learning about its affairs. In reading accounts of the battle by Herodotus, Thucydides, Aeschylus, and Plutarch, I’ve often wondered about that morning two and half millennia ago—about what Themistocles was thinking in the hours and minutes leading up to a battle that he had engineered. After all, the placement and timing of this battle were largely his own doing; through subterfuge practiced on both the Persian king and his own allies he manufactured a battle on which the liberty of Greece rested.

The Melbourne Syndrome in pictures

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It would be much funnier if it weren’t actually true.

AND THIS FROM TODAY’S FINANCIAL REVIEW: Mask crackdown mad, health experts warn. Their headline, with this text:

Asked why he would require Victorians to wear masks when there is no health purpose, Mr Andrews dismissed the question. “That’s an esoteric debate, isn’t it? Maybe there will be a time when we have the luxury of having those sorts of debates.”

Maybe there will be a time! “Mad” is just the word.

And indeed, Andrew Bolt now specifically asks

Has Daniel Andrews gone mad?

I cannot tell if this is just hyperbolic exaggeration or is meant literally. To me, it could be either, but what if it’s literally true? I keep coming back to The Caine Mutiny and Captain Queeg. The Caine is a US battleship during the war in the Pacific. Captain Queeg is its captain who has gone insane. The leader of the mutiny is Maryk.

Maryk keeps a secret log of Queeg’s eccentric behavior…. Soon afterward, the Caine is caught in a typhoon, an ordeal that sinks three destroyers. At the height of the storm, Queeg’s paralysis of action convinces Maryk that he must relieve the captain of command to prevent the loss of the ship. Willie, as Officer of the Deck, supports the decision. Maryk turns Caine into the wind and rides out the storm.

The political works of Gary Saul Morson

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We have previously drawn attention to Professor Gary Saul Morson’s New Criterion essay “How the great truth dawned,” Professor Morson’s New Criterion lecture “Leninthink,” Professor Morson’s New York Review of Books review “The horror, the horror,” and Professor Morson’s book Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (Steve wrote about it here).

To these I now want to add Professor Morson’s First Things essay “Suicide of the liberals.”

His Wikipedia entry.