Category: Culture

Ken is in the New York Times today


In September 2018, Ken and I hiked across the eight-mile width of the island of Ulva to get to the island of Gometra. This photo of Ken was shot on the Mull side of Ulva. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ken’s article in the New York Times today is “What a Small Island Off the Coast of Scotland Could Teach America.” He writes:

“As an American who lived for years in North Carolina, I saw firsthand the decline of rural communities. The boarded-up shops, political disengagement and ‘No Trespassing’ signs of rural America may be less picturesque, but in important ways they’re not so different from the stone ruins and abandoned fields of Scotland’s Highlands and islands. Could community ownership let people reclaim control over their land and their futures in rural America?

“Some think it might. In the United States, federal and state governments can claim land using eminent domain, but we rarely see communities take control to provide affordable housing, let alone empower local residents to make it happen themselves. ‘It is impressive,’ said John Lovett, a law professor at Louisiana State University, who studies Scotland’s land reform laws. Scotland is ‘trying to achieve something that we just don’t even think about in the U.S. It’s creating a way for the government to enable or facilitate the disassembly or the decentralization of landownership. We’ve never tried that in the U.S.'”


Ken picking blackberries on Ulva, September 2018.

Jura


Jura Scotch, aged 10 years in American oak barrels that were used for Spanish sherry. More on the little shot glass below.

When I was in Scotland last fall, there was a pub downstairs in the little hotel I stayed in in East Linton. With advice from the bartenders and the people sitting at the bar, I sampled a good many Scotches. By far, my favorite was from the Isle of Jura. It’s impossibly smooth and incredibly complicated, with just the right amount of smoke. At about $50 a bottle in the U.S. for the Scotch in the photo, it’s not even on the high side of what good Scotches cost.

“Single malt” just means that the Scotch comes from one distillery. That’s as opposed to blended Scotches, which buy (I assume) less distinguished Scotches from multiple distilleries and blend them into something as pleasing as possible. But Scotch is to Scotland as wine is to France (or California). It’s all about what part of Scotland the Scotch came from and the choices and skills of the distilleries’ operators. I don’t have enough experience with Scotches to judge how the aging matters. Some Scotches are aged (in barrels) for more than 20 years. I stick with 10- or 12-year old Scotches to avoid bankruptcy.

I hope I remain healthy enough to visit many more islands on future trips to Scotland. I’ll probably make another trip this fall. I have been to Lewis & Harris, Skye, Ulva, Gometra, and Mull. I have not been to Jura, but Jura and Islay probably are next on my list. There’s a woolen mill still in operation on Islay that I’d like to visit. I have a jacket made from Islay tweed.

I bought the little shot glass on eBay. It’s made from uranium glass. It’s not very radioactive. My Geiger counter measures the glass’s radioactivity as around double the background radiation here, a perfectly safe level. Uranium glass is a distinctive green color that glows under ultraviolet light. The glass is tiny. It holds only an ounce if filled to the brim.

An exercise in moral reasoning


Luigi Mangione

After a powerful, inhumane, and heartless health care CEO was shot and killed in New York City (presumably by Luigi Mangione), the pundit class flooded the zone with sanctimonious pieces scolding the masses for making a hero out of Mangione. I tried to work up some sympathy for the CEO. I failed, because I think there are millions of people — powerless people — more deserving of our sympathy. Does that make me a bad person?

First I should mention that Mangione’s lawyers have released a statement from Mangione thanking people for their support. Obviously he has become a hero for a great many people. Mangione’s legal team also have started a web site so that people can follow the case.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I thought that Jonathan Haidt, with his “moral foundations” theory, held a monopoly on studying how the moral values of liberals differ from the moral values of conservatives. Now I know that Haidt has a competitor. That’s Kurt Gray, at the University of North Carolina. As Gray writes on his web site, “If you want to understand the morals of the ‘other side,’ ask yourself a simple question — what harms do they see?”

I learned of Gray’s existence after a friend in Washington (who knows that I think Haidt is a schmuck who claims to be objective while implicitly flattering the moral crudeness of conservatives) sent me a link to a YouTube video. In the video, Gray is interviewed by Michael Shermer, who founded Skeptic magazine. I have seen Skeptic magazine from time to time over the years, and I always found it to be smug and snarky. Thus I was not surprised to find, in the video, that Shermer comes across like a used-car salesman. If you watch the video, I’d recommend discounting and skipping over Shermer’s jabbering. Only what Gray says matters.

In the video, Gray mentions the Mangione case. Liberals see a great deal of harm in people dying, or being bankrupted by, the greed of a health-care CEO. But liberals (I can testify to the truth of it) aren’t as alarmed by harm to a CEO who is responsible for those deaths and bankruptcies. What can be said about that kind of ethics?

Most people would agree that, if one of the 40 plots to assassinate Hitler had succeeded, then something like 50 million lives would have been saved, not to mention that Hitler was just plain evil. It is no great leap of moral reasoning to hold that the world would have been much better off if Hitler had died sooner rather than later. I think it reasonably follows that there are plenty of other people whom the world would be better off without.

Whether assassination is justified is a separate, and much more difficult, question. Reasonable people would always hope that there are humane and legal ways of preventing bad people from doing harm. Bad people have lately been very successful in finding new ways of preventing us from using humane and legal ways of stopping them from doing harm. Reasonable people also will disagree on when humane and legal solutions have failed, and when, if ever, the harm someone does in the world is so great that that person should be dispatched. Those who support capital punishment have already taken a stand on this question, which, as I see it, puts them on a slippery slope toward hypocrisy, especially if they demand the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, as many of them will.

It all boils down to what Kurt Gray is arguing: Different people assess harm in very different ways. It’s hard for me, as a liberal, to believe, but many people worry much more about harm to the harmful and powerful than they worry about harm to the harmless and powerless. Luigi Mangione has become a hero because he took the opposite — and, I would argue, the less morally crude — position.

Anyway, my intention here is only to bring up different ways of looking at these things. I am not arguing that Luigi Mangione was right to kill Brian Thompson. Certainly I would not have done that. But I also refuse to be scolded by the morally crude people who today are strutting and gloating over having the upper hand and new power to do harm in the world, with impunity. After all, remember who it was who said this and whom he was talking about: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

The right-wing propaganda campaign against “wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion is all about the glorification of moral crudeness, because everything they want to do is morally crude. It’s no wonder that they had a fit over Luigi Mangione. Someone actually struck back, and a great many people found it inspiring.

Consider skipping to around 39:00 for what Kurt Gray says about Jonathan Haidt.

Not your cinematic pour

I always laugh out loud when someone pours Scotch in a British movie. Almost always, a huge tumbler is involved, into which someone pours what looks like at least five or six ounces of whiskey. Yikes.

In this new advertising campaign for Glenmorangie Scotch with Harrison Ford, Ford pours the Scotch into a proper wee shot glass, and it looks like a standard shot — 1.5 ounces.

I’ve only ever bought Glenmorangie once or twice, because it’s pretty expensive. But I think that my next bottle of Scotch will be Glenmorangie, in appreciation of these videos.

My guess is that there will be spike in Scotch sales now, as well as an increase of tickets to Scotland this summer.

Episode 1 may require you to sign in because of an age restriction.

At least we’re smarter than they are


A dragon descends on Oxford. Image by ChatGPT.

Ezra Klein has a must-read piece in the New York Times this morning: Now Is the Time of Monsters. (You can read this link without a subscription to the Times.)

Klein lists the monsters:

1. Authoritarian resurgence

2. AI and technological upheaval

3. Climate crisis

4. Demographic shifts

As Klein writes, “Any one of these challenges would be plenty on its own. Together they augur a new and frightening era.”

I should hasten to say, as Klein also does, that demographic shifts in the form of falling birth rates don’t scare me. That’s mainly a right-wing goblin, and I suspect that it’s only falling birth rates for white people that matters to them. I think I would merge Monster No. 4 into Monster No. 1 — the racism of authoritarians.

I’m also not as worried as some people are about AI’s taking over the world and making the human mind obsolete. But again I think there is a connection to Monster No. 1: Authoritarians will find all sorts of ways to use artificial intelligence as a tool to keep the rest of us down — ever better lies and disinformation, for example. To me, Monsters No. 1 and No. 3 are the biggies, with Monster No. 3 amplified by the authoritarian denial of climate change because of the money and power they get from an oil economy that oligarchs own and control.

When I lose sleep over Monster No. 1, the greatest comfort comes from knowing that no one is alone. The smartest people in the world see what’s happening. It’s the smartest and best people in the world up against the richest and meanest, with the richest and meanest having persuaded the poorest and dumbest that they’re on their side.

Yes, the people who are developing AI’s must be very smart, but they are more like idiots savant interested mainly in the technology and the money.

As for the MAGA crowd — Trump, his appointees, the Christian nationalists, the brownshirts, the right-wing radicals, Trump voters — they are all as dumb as rocks. We’ve got to outsmart them.

Klein offers no solutions. He only describes the monsters. As the smartest and best people in the world try to figure out how to deal with the dumbest, the meanest, and the richest, it occurred to me to wonder if Monster No. 2 — artificial intelligence — might have some useful advice.

Using ChatGPT’s “o1” engine, which is supposed to be better at reasoning than “o4,” I asked a question:

I am going to paste in an essay from this morning’s New York Times written by Ezra Klein. The headline is “Now is the time of monsters.” He lists several existential problems that the world faces today. Please analyze this piece with an eye toward philosophy and psychology. These problems are collective problems. But the question I would like for you to answer is, given these collective problems, what can an individual do not only to help, but also to preserve individual stability in a time of rapid change and chaos. These ideas need to align with my personal politics and philosophy. I am am a progressive. I would like to live in a world shaped by John Rawls’ “justice as fairness.”

The link below is the AI’s response. Most of it, I think, is what any nice and well-mannered intelligence would say. It contains very generalized ideas; there is no brilliant strategy that no one has thought of before. I do like the point about “narrative reframing,” though: “Successful social transformations often begin in the imagination, with bold visions that inspire people to action.”

If AI’s are capable of imagination and “bold visions,” I haven’t yet figured out what questions to ask. But I do think that, as smart people, we should be learning how to use AI’s, and we should keep abreast of their development. The Wikipedia article on ChatGPT says that the man who exploded a truck in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas used ChatGPT to help plan it.

Can AI’s help us plan the resistance?

Ezra Klein: Now Is the Time of Monsters

ChatGPT’s response

Alcohol as an institution


At the Belhaven pub, Dundee, near the fireplace

I am nine days into a dry January. We all seem to be rethinking alcohol these days, and that can only be a good thing. But, speaking only for myself, I don’t think the time has come for me to give up alcohol.

A lot of ink has been spilled of late after the Powers That Be reversed course and told us that even light drinking has no health benefits. Most of what has been written, though, has a one-size-fits-all tone and seems to forget three important things.

The first thing is that, genetically, one size does not fit all. There are genetic differences in how people metabolize alcohol. This is a little complicated, but it’s worth understanding. The differences have to do with how quickly a certain enzyme cracks apart the alcohol molecule, and how quickly a different enzyme detoxifies the cracked-apart byproduct.

The second thing is that, genetics aside, we are all very different. How old are we? How healthy are we? How stressed are we? Do we tend more toward bad habits, or more toward good habits? When we drink, what do we drink, and how much?

These are all factors that change throughout our lives. The day probably will come when, at a certain age, I will stop drinking because of my age, just as I have realized that, because of my age, I should drink less. Consider Queen Elizabeth II. Her doctors advised her, at the age of 95, to stop having her evening cocktail. She was 96 when she died. I seriously doubt that alcohol shortened her life or impaired her health, even though, on average, Britain, like most countries, has a big drinking problem.

The third thing is that alcohol is an institution. Institutions provide social glue. Alcohol as an institution has many forms — a glass of champagne at a celebration, a pint at a pub with a friend, wine with dinner, cocktails at a reception. The growing of grapes and the making of wine are an art as well as an economic institution, as is the making of fine whiskey and the brewing of beautiful ales. Pubs are a social institution of which I highly approve. These institutions are ancient. People have been making alcohol for at least 10,000 years. Even the most important of Christian sacraments requires wine.

The genetic mutation that allows humans (and some other primates) to efficiently metabolize alcohol was definitely a good thing. That mutation occurred about 10 million years ago, and it allowed our ancestors to eat fallen fruit that had started to ferment. Other fruit-eating animals can metabolize alcohol — birds, for example. Dogs are not fruit-eating animals, and they don’t have the mutation. Bees, because they consume nectar, can metabolize alcohol, and to do it they use the same enzymes as humans.

In short, for humans and some other animals, it would be perfectly correct to think of alcohol as a kind of food, even though it’s an optional food and clearly not something that we can make a diet of.

As for my dry January, my goal is January 25, not January 31. That’s because January 25 is Burns Night, an annual Scottish institution (with toasts!) that I’ve been happy to adopt. Burns Night marks the death of Robert Burns, January 25, 1759. Burns was only 37 when he died. But I don’t think it was alcohol that did him in.

Midwinter pottage


Click here for high resolution version

If C.J. Sansome was right in his Shardlake novels set in Tudor England (and I think he was), then pretty much everybody (except for Henry VIII) lived on pottage then. What was in the pottage depended of course on what you had. A good variety of garden vegetables would have made a huge difference. If you had some meat or fish, so much the better. If you could eat your pottage with a dark, hearty bread made from rye, oats, or barley, with some ale, then you were truly rich. And probably healthy as well. Butter and cheese? Princely.

Historians say that medieval peasants burned 4,000 calories a day. That would mean that they worked from dawn until dark. They probably were very thin, because that’s a lot of calories for poor people. Henry VIII weighed almost 400 pounds when he died. Thus I think it’s safe to assume that he wasn’t living off of pottage and that he wasn’t working from dawn until dark.

I’m 98 percent vegetarian. This was the first beef stew I’d made in more than two years. The midwinter gloom made me do it.

The beef, though, is almost like a seasoning. You don’t need much beef. It’s the vegetables that make the stew, the heavenly combination of potatoes, carrots, onions, and peas, in a sauce reddened with tomatoes. The key to good beef stew is the brown flavor, umami, which comes from browning the beef, the onions, and the flour (for thickening) before the other ingredients or any water are added.

When I think of beef stew, I automatically think of cherry pie for dessert. There was no cherry pie today, though. That’s something I’d make only for company.

Young men and the right-wing rabbit hole

⬆︎ Two Europeans who are not down the right-wing rabbit hole. Listen with headphones, or with a good sound system.

That people like Donald Trump, or Elon Musk, should be what they are makes a certain kind of sense. They have money and power, and they want more money and power. In their narcissism, they think they totally deserve what they have. They think they deserve our adulation for having it — lords of the universe.

But for young men there is no excuse. If voices like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson sound like hope, then something inside is stunted. The options outside the rabbit hole are unlimited. They’re just not as easy.

The New Testament in Scots

If you are a native speaker of English, then Scots is a language that you already 65 percent (more or less) understand. Totally aside from my interest in Scotland and Sir Walter Scott, I find that fact, from linguistics, fascinating. At first I conceived of Scots as just a dialect of English. But scholars see it otherwise, and now I’m convinced: Scots is its own language.

There is a second reason why the Scots language warms my heart (other than the fact that it is beautiful to listen to). It’s that speaking Scots has long been stigmatized in Scotland. To feel properly respected outside the places they grew up, people who grew up speaking Scots learn to “code switch” to standard Scottish English. This is very much like what happens with people, like me, who grew up where the Southern Appalachian English dialect is spoken. We learn to code switch to avoid stigmatization of the way we talk. Some of us can learn to mask our Southern Appalachian accents almost completely. Others retain traces that, to a careful ear, give them away. (More on that below.)

During my recent trip to Scotland, I made a pilgrimage to McNaughtan’s Bookshop in Edinburgh. It is a fascinating place, and, I think, the only seller of rare and antique books in Edinburgh. The owner is very knowledgeable and very helpful. I bought two books while I was there. I had them shipped home so that I didn’t have to deal with them as luggage. One of the books is The History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 4, from the Edinburgh University Press. I will write about that book later. The other is a translation of the New Testament into Scots, published in 1983.

To convince you that you already 65 percent understand the Scots language, I’ve included below an image from page 101. It’s Luke, chapter 2, verses 1 – 14, a section of the New Testament familiar to us all — the Christmas story. For comparison, I’ve also included the same verses from New International translation.

I suggest reading the Scots aloud, paying attention to the sound and phonetics. Most of it will be perfectly understandable, though there are some words you won’t recognize (though many are decipherable from context). I will list those words below.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

Siccan a thing: Such a thing

Ilkane: Those of that ilk; that family

Haundfastit: Betrothed

Boukin gin: Very pregnant

Brocht: Brought

Barrie: A baby’s flannel coat

Heck: A slatted wood frame or rack

Hirsel: A flock of sheep

Uncolie frichtit: Extremely frightened

Liggin: Lying

Syne in a gliff: Then all of a sudden

Kythed: Appeared

Yird: Earth


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.

The translator of this work was William Laughton Lorimer, a language scholar who taught Greek at St. Andrews University and who died in 1967. The translation was, of course, from the Greek.

Many people in Scotland are working to reverse the stigmatization of Scots. Sadly, Southern Appalachian English remains just as stigmatized.

I mentioned above that some traces of Southern Appalachian are detectable even in professional actors. For example, there is the tendency not to distinguish between “ken” and “kin,” and “pen” and “pin.” The actor Samuel L. Jackson, who grew up in Chattanooga, provides some good examples of this, especially in Star Wars.

The smartest podcast I’ve ever listened to

Jonathan Rauch is one of my oldest friends. I’ve known him for forty years. Ken Ilgunas is one of my newer friends, fourteen years. I’ve listened to them at the dinner table a good many times, but listening to them in a podcast is even better.

Both are writers. They are of different generations, which makes their conversation even more interesting.

Here’s the link: Jonathan Rauch on the 2024 election, 1960’s Star Trek, and the magnetism of sociopaths.

Jonathan’s next book, to be published by the Yale University Press in February 2025, is Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain With Democracy. My own tiny press, Acorn Abbey Books, has brought out new editions of two of Jonathan’s books that were previously out of print, Denial and The Outnation.