looking for the door...............

 

This feels like one of those NYT articles that's mainly performing the service of tending to the readers' emotions. Let's all do panic together this morning. When I encounter that sort of thing, my natural instinct is to go somewhere else. If we're doing group emotion, I'm looking for the door.

-Ann Althouse

invested...................

 

The more useful a term is for marking my inclusion in a group, the less interested I will be in testing the validity of my use of that term against—well, against any kind of standard.  People who like accusing others of Puritanism have a fairly serious investment, then, in knowing as little as possible about actual Puritanism.  They are invested, for the moment anyway, in not thinking.

-Alan Jacobs, How To Think

this aged well.................................

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so.

-William F. Buckley, Jr., from this 1955 mission statement

Chasing............................

 

           from the wide, wide world of xkcd.

Herds.................................

 “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

-Charles MacKay

image via

Truth telling........................

And yet one only has  to listen to the inflammatory rhetoric, much of it directed against anonymous others, which is today heard across the European continent and in the United States  to realise that the tribal aggression which has been part of human nature since humans evolved is never far below the surface.

-John Kay, as excerpted from here

distracted by faction............................

In a nation distracted by faction, there are, no doubt, always a few, though commonly but a very few, who preserve their judgment untainted by the general contagion. They seldom amount to more than, here and there, a solitary individual, without any influence, excluded, by his own candour, from the confidence of either party, and who, though he may be one of the wisest, is necessarily, upon that very account, one of the most insignificant men in the society.  All such people are held in contempt and derision, and frequently in detestation, by the zealots of both parties.

-Adam Smith,  The Theory of Moral Sentiments

It's a strange, strange world..................

Victor Davis Hanson tries to make some sense out of a very strange 2016:

"Buying a jet-ski on credit is typical redneck stupidity; borrowing $200,000 to send a kid to a tony private university from which he will graduate more ignorant and arrogant than when he enrolled is wise."

On the problems of groups..........

      "Individual men may be moral in the sense that they are able to consider interests of others than their own in determining problems of conduct, and are capable, on occasion, of preferring the advantages of others to their own. ... But all these achievements are more difficult, if not impossible, for human societies and social groups.  In every human group there is less capacity for self transcendence, less ability to comprehend the need of others and therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the groups, reveal in their personal relationships."

-Reinhold Niebuhr,  as excerpted from Moral Man and Immoral Society

On the Paris climate conference, or..................

.............Why multilateral negotiation is so difficult

"What world leaders have actually signed us up to is: voluntary emission limits with no enforcement mechanism, voluntary progress reviews and voluntary contributions to a trillion-dollar green climate fund. Nothing is binding except that each country must resubmit its voluntary national goal every five years and even that does not apply to the G77 developing nations."

"World leaders essentially solved the problem of where to go to dinner by changing the topic of conversation to how much they would all like to go to dinner. On this they were all triumphantly agreed. For the poor people of the world, the vagueness of the Paris agreement is good news: it means development can continue, making them less vulnerable to all harms, including weather. Those who think climate change is a huge threat should be worried, but those of us who think climate change is not such a big threat should still be concerned about just how bad the world would be at responding when a really big collective-action problem comes along: mega-volcano, alien invasion, etc."

as excerpted from this Matt Ridley post

In an essay about "confirmation bias".............

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,one of my favorite thinkers shows some confirmation bias:

"It is generally possible to predict what people will think about abortion from what they think about climate change, and vice versa; and those who are concerned about wealth inequality tend to favour gun control, while those who are not, do not. Why, since these seem wholly unrelated issues, should this be so? Opinions seem to be based more and more on what team you belong to and less and less on your assessment of facts."

Conflicted........................

"Observing heated political conflict in the U.S. today, one does not know whether to shake one’s head in sadness or to be thankful that it provides a relatively non-violent outlet for group hatred."
-Arnold Kling, as excerpted from this post

Doesn't our wee corner of the blogosphere count as a tribe...............?

“Copious scientific data proves that loneliness is a greater risk to your health than smoking or lack of exercise, and finding your tribe is better than any vitamin, diet, or exercise regimen.” 

-Lissa Rankin, M.D. as excerpted from this blog post

The usual crisis..................