HARARI'S DISSENT: At times, Harari's assessments are dark!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2019

How accurate are those assessments? Professor Harari's best-selling book is a major best-seller.

We refer to Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which currently sits at number 1 on the relevant New York Times list.

It's been a best-seller round the world since it first appeared in 2011. Beyond that, its current American paperback edition carries a blurb by Barack Obama. Even more dispositively, a complimentary blurb by Bill Gates sits atop the front cover!

As part of a much longer assessment, Obama is quoted saying the book is "interesting and provocative." That assessment is intriguing, because Obama is known for his upbeat outlook, and Harari's portrait of our species is, at least at times, provocatively dark.

How did our species, Homo sapiens, emerge as potentate of the planet? Why did our species survive and thrive, even as a half dozen other human species disappeared from the earth? (See yesterday's report.)

To Harari, it wasn't our massively rational nature which gave us dominion over the planet. He describes our ascent in a gloomier way right in his opening chapter:

HARARI (page 17): But if the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other human species didn’t merge with Sapiens, why did they vanish? One possibility is that Homo sapiens drove them to extinction...

Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.

Oof! We're simplifying the possibilities that Harari imagines in that full passage. But he keeps suggesting that our prehistorical ancestors drove other human groups into extinction—colloquially, into the sea.

In the passage above, he even floats the term "ethnic cleansing" to describe what our ancestors may have done—and yet, Obama loves the book! Leave it to a Democrat to "blame Homo sapiens first!"

At any rate, Harari keeps suggesting that our species' advantage over The Others was built upon a couple of chance mutations. According to Harari, these mutations gave us two unique abilities—the ability to "gossip," plus the ability to invent and promulgate sweeping group "fictions."

We'll grant you—those are the very activities which characterize the work of our upper-end journalists. But just as Dorothy found herself a long way from Kansas at one point, Harari's portrait takes us a long way from Aristotle's more stately assessment, in which our first great logician is said to have said that we humans are "the rational animal," full and complete total stop.

By way of contrast:

In the first two chapters of his book, Harari paints a slightly unsettling portrait of the emergence of our famously self-impressed species. The rational animal emerges as a beast—an intolerant beast which may have driven The Others into the sea.

These assessments may be "interesting and provocative," but is there any reason to believe that these claims are accurate? For our ongoing purpose this year, that question doesn't matter a lot. We'll explain that slip-slide in more depth tomorrow.

We don't enormously care if those assessments are accurate. But just for the record, we decided to check with the leading authority on Harari's book to see what the registered experts have said—and uh-oh!

As the leading authority starts, the note of sadness comes in:

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is a book by Yuval Noah Harari first published in Hebrew in Israel in 2011, and in English in 2014. The book surveys the history of humankind from the evolution of archaic human species in the Stone Age up to the twenty-first century, focusing on Homo sapiens. The account is situated within a framework provided by the natural sciences, particularly evolutionary biology.

The reception of the book has been mixed. Scholars with relevant subject matter expertise have generally been very skeptical of the book. Public reaction to the book has been positive.

Public reaction has been positive; according to the leading authority, "the scholars" are less sure. Later on, the leading authority puts a bit of meat on those bones. In the interest of full disclosure, we now present some of what's said:

Anthropologist Christopher Robert Hallpike reviewed the book and did not find any "serious contribution to knowledge." Hallpike suggested that "...whenever his facts are broadly correct they are not new, and whenever he tries to strike out on his own he often gets things wrong, sometimes seriously." He considered it an infotainment publishing event offering a "wild intellectual ride across the landscape of history, dotted with sensational displays of speculation, and ending with blood-curdling predictions about human destiny."

Science journalist Charles C. Mann concluded in The Wall Street Journal, "There’s a whiff of dorm-room bull sessions about the author’s stimulating but often unsourced assertions."

Reviewing the book in The Washington Post, evolutionary anthropologist Avi Tuschman points out problems stemming from the contradiction between Harari's "freethinking scientific mind" and his "fuzzier worldview hobbled by political correctness", but nonetheless wrote that "Harari’s book is important reading for serious-minded, self-reflective sapiens."

Can't anyone here play this game? There's more negativity in the report, but those excerpts give you a taste of what some scholars have said.

In fairness, the single statement attributed to Mann may have given a false impression concerning his overall view. This was the closing paragraph of his Wall Street Journal review:

MANN (2/6/15): There’s a whiff of dorm-room bull sessions about the author’s stimulating but often unsourced assertions. Or perhaps I should use a more contemporary simile: “Sapiens” reminded me occasionally of a discussions on Reddit, where users sound off about supposed iron laws of history. This book is what these Reddit threads would be like if they were written not by adolescent autodidacts but by learned academics with impish senses of humor. As I write, my daughter is glumly making flashcards full of names and dates for an AP Euro exam. I bet she wishes she had a textbook like “Sapiens.” Me? I’m not so sure. I like the book’s verve and pop but wish it didn’t have all those fleas.

To Mann, Harari is "a learned academic" whose book is full of "verve and pop" but carries a roster of fleas. No letter grade was assigned.

Nothing here tells us if Harari is right in his claims about the rise of our species. Other reviews don't go there either, in part because Harari's book covers the whole of human history, not just the limited story of Homo sapiens' rise.

That said, does Harari know what he's talking about? Did our species end up ruling the roost because our ancestors developed the ability to gossip, along with the ability to invent and promulgate sweeping acts of fiction?

Granted, those are the fuels which drive our own modern pseudo-journalism. But are those the fuels which drove our species' rise? And do "gossip" and "fiction," as Mann defines them, perhaps explain Who We Are?

"Man [sic] is the rational animal," Aristotle is constantly said to have said. As it's generally understood, this upbeat portrait tends to reinforce the tradition in which we humans see ourselves as "the epitome of creation," to quote Harari again.

We're a long way from Stagira, Greece when Harari floats his gossip-and-fiction dissent. But does he know what he's talking about on this particular matter?

Tomorrow, we'll pay a visit to our oldest friend, the rabbit-duck, as we explain why we don't hugely care.

Tomorrow: The culture needs a new pair of shoes...

Reporter dreams of "full integration!"

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2019

The Times should be ashamed: Once again, we show you the data which define one modern version of "the problem we all live with."

These data concern academic performance within the New York City Public Schools. Similar data obtain nationwide:

Average scores, Grade 8 math, 2017 Naep
New York City Public Schools
White students: 290.71
Black students: 255.63
Hispanic students: 263.56
Asian-American students: 306.03

Below, we'll show you the corresponding data for public schools nationwide. For now, let's stick with "the problem we all live with" in Gotham.

Those data seem to define "achievement gaps" which are brutally large. If we apply a conventional though very rough rule of thumb, in which ten points on the Naep scale roughly equates to one academic year, the average black eighth grader in New York City is performing more than three years below the average white eighth grader, five years below the average Asian-American.

Those are brutal gaps. But in the face of those punishing data, the New York Times—our dumbest, least comprehending upper-class newspaper—continues with its self-involved, pointless magical thinking.

In yesterday morning's front-page report, the Times continued its quest for a largely pointless state of affairs it has now even described as "full integration." The report was written by Eliza Shapiro, who is presumably being held hostage by her unnamed editors.

Would it be better if Gotham's schools were more diverse, more "racially balanced?" In theory, yes, it would be.

That said, there's only so much "full integration" you can get from New York City's student population. If the Times could wave a magic wand from the Hamptons and produce that "full integration," the student population of each New York City school would magically look like this:

"Full integration," New York City Public Schools
White kids: 15 percent
Black kids: 30 percent
Hispanic kids: 40 percent
Asian-American kids: 15 percent

That isn't a lot of "integration." That's especially true since the propagandistic definitions of "segregation" devised by our pseudo-progressive thought leaders only count interaction with white kids as a marker of integration.

Attending school with (high-performing) Asian kids? We're sorry, but that doesn't count!

Of course, the ratios shown above would never obtain in real life. The white student population would quickly drop as parents moved their kids out of the reconfigured schools.

Why would parents do that? In part, because of thinking like that we've highlighted below. In this passage, Shapiro is describing recommendations from a recent report by a City Hall task force:

SHAPIRO (2/12/19): Mr. de Blasio should also focus on integrating schools in neighborhoods that may have wealth disparities and segregated schools, the group said.

The report prompted the mayor to require nine such local school districts, including the Upper East Side, Ditmas Park in Brooklyn, Forest Hills in Queens and all of Staten Island, to come up with integration plans.

Mr. de Blasio should also ask all 32 of the city’s local school districts to consider whether their gifted and talented programs and schools that admit students using academic criteria are causing further segregation, the report suggests.

Pseudo-progressives, please!

So-called "gifted and talented programs" allow higher-performing students to be presented with the type of work appropriate to their achievement levels.

In a school system with achievement gaps as large as those in New York City, it's impossible to teach the same curriculum to all the kids within a single grade. Everyone on the planet knows this—except the kinds of people who wrote this report for the mayor, along with people who pose as education reporters across the upper-end press.

In a system like New York City's, would differential instruction produce increased "segregation?" We refer you again to those average scores. This represents a basic problem, except in newspapers like the Times, where those achievement gaps don't exist and don't need to be discussed.

The size of those achievement gaps is never reported and never discussed in the New York Times. That's because the people who work for the New York Times are either too dumb to know about this state of affairs, or are too uncaring to examine how this tragic state of affairs should be addressed.

Instead, the Times offers its readers feel-good magical thinking! It loves the preening and posturing which come with the fight again "segregation," a tribally thrilling, repurposed term which once had a specific meaning.

It loves the utterly crazy implied idea that increased racial balance in Gotham's schools would do much of anything about those punishing gaps.

Those gaps are ugly, dark and deep, but they don't exist in the Times. Instead, the Times instructs Shapiro to play these persistent reindeer games, and the ballyhooed hire complies.

(As for de Blasio, please! Don't even ask.)

Again and again and again and again, we've shown you the size of those gaps. These gaps have existed since roughly forever and, for exactly that long, our big newspapers have found various magical ways to avoid discussing their import—to pretend they can be wished away, to pretend that it's all a mirage.

If you subscribe to the New York Times, you'll never be asked to read about the size of those punishing gaps. Nor will you ever see any discussion of what could possibly be done to help Gotham's black and Hispanic kids achieve at higher levels.

What should happen in kindergarten, when low-income kids are already way "behind" their middle-class peers? How about in preschool? How about in low-income children's actual homes, starting in the first few weeks of life?

People at the New York Times don't worry their heads about that. Instead, they hand you their silly magical thinking about the need to fight "segregation." And yes, this brain-dead conduct exists in this most rational of all possible worlds.

No one cares about black kids. Timesfolk like to pose.

Corresponding scores nationwide: The corresponding achievement gaps are roughly the same nationwide. That doesn't necessarily mean that gaps this large obtain in any particular school system:

Average scores, Grade 8 math, 2017 Naep
United States, public schools
White students: 292.16
Black students: 259.60
Hispanic students: 268.49
Asian-American students: 309.52

Are those gaps are large as they seem? Is there any reason to doubt data from the Naep?

Questions like these don't arise in the upper-end press. In the upper-end press corps, they care about wardrobe and who's BLEEPing whom, and they care about the way major candidates are inclined to eat their fried chicken.

Gillibrand ate her chicken wrong! Such meat has been the fuel of the press for many, many years.

Is this the work of "the rational animal?" We ask, you decide!

HARARI'S DISSENT: How accurate are Harari's claims?

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13, 2019

For our purpose, that's not the point: In Chapter 1 of his best-selling book, Professor Harari offers an instructive point about the way we in our self-impressed species may have long been inclined to "see ourselves from afar."

The species in question is Homo sapiens. The title of Harari's rolling best-seller is Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. At the New York Times, it's still number one on the relevant list. For background, see yesterday's post.

Are we humans "the rational animal," as Aristotle is constantly said to have said? Does that famous assessment, as commonly understood, really capture our essence?

Staing the obvious, anyone who has ever read the New York Times will tend to wonder about that famous assessment. And sure enough! Right there in his opening chapter, Harari delivers a glancing blow at the way we've long viewed ourselves:

HARARI (page 18): Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it’s hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. When Charles Darwin indicated that Homo sapiens was just another kind of animal, people were outraged. Even today many refuse to believe it...

Within our floundering, war-like species, do we really tend to see ourselves as "the epitome of creation?" It has ever been thus!

At least over here in the western world, we've described ourselves as "made in God's image"—and of course as the rational animal. We've tended to think that we alone possess a soul, even that we alone possess consciousness or, by apparent implication, the "rational" faculty itself.

(Meanwhile, when we hear that our upper-end journalists often "went to the finest schools," this only tends to increase our sense that they must be possessed of sound moral judgment and may even know what they're talking about! That's the way our human brains are possibly wired to work!)

Meanwhile, what did Harari mean with his slightly snippy remark about our being "the only human species?" He was referring to information in the following, earlier passage—information about prehistory's other human species, the ones he says we drove into the sea, presumably in much the way God would have wanted it done:

HARARI (page 5): Homo sapiens, too, belongs to a [biological] family. This banal fact used to be one of history’s most closely guarded secrets. Homo sapiens long preferred to view itself as set apart from animals, an orphan bereft of family, lacking siblings or cousins, and most importantly, without parents. But that’s just not the case. Like it or not, we are members of a large and particularly noisy family called the great apes. Our closest living relatives include chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. The chimpanzees are the closest. Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

Homo sapiens has kept hidden an even more disturbing secret. Not only do we possess an abundance of uncivilised cousins, once upon a time we had quite a few brothers and sisters as well. We are used to thinking about ourselves as the only humans, because for the last 10,000 years, our species has indeed been the only human species around. Yet the real meaning of the word human is ‘an animal belonging to the genus Homo’, and there used to be many other species of this genus besides Homo sapiens.

It wasn't just the Neanderthals, whose brains (and muscles) were bigger than ours. Along the way, Harari calls the roll of the other human species which were driven into extinction after our own species emerged from Africa about 70,000 years ago.

It wasn't just the Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis). It was also Homo erectus (Upright Man), Homo soloensis (Man from the Solo valley), Homo floresiensis and Homo denisova.

While we're at it, let's not forget Homo rudolfensis (Man from Lake Rudolf) and Homo ergaster (Working Man). "They were all human beings," Harari notes. And they were all in existence, in various parts of the world, when our own species, Homo sapiens, emerged from its point of origin in East Africa, not all that long ago.

None of these species exists today. And uh-oh! When Harari explains why our species ended up as the only human species around, he attributes our dominance, not to our rational powers, but to our unique ability to engage in "gossip" and to develop and promulgate group "fictions."

It wasn't our rational powers, he says. He says research supports his claims.

Before the week is done, we'll review Harari's treatment of gossip and fiction, noting that these are the obvious engines on which our upper-end "press corps" runs. For today, we'll merely float an obvious question:

Does Professor Harari know what he's talking about? Barack Obama and even Bill Gates may have loved, and blurbed, his best-selling book. But when Harari seems to offer surprising assessments, is there any particular reason to assume he knows what he's talking about? Are his assessments correct?

Are Harari's assessments correct? That doesn't especially matter to us, for reasons we'll run through in a bit more detail tomorrow.

As the year goes along, we'll be offering Harari's assessment as an alternate paradigm through which to imagine our own human race. We'll be presenting his portrait as an alternative to the more pleasing traditional view, if which we've long seen ourselves as "the epitome of creation," even as an essentially "rational" being.

That may not be our self-impressed species' essence at all, Harari's book seems to suggest.

That said, how accurate are Harari's views, especially those our species' cheerleaders may not be inclined to like?

Tomorrow, we'll show you what the leading authority on this question has said. We'll also visit that famous duck-rabbit, further discussing our method.

Tomorrow: Two paradigms

Two reports from the Times' front page!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2019

It's narrative all the way down: Do voters maintain an invidious double standard in the case of female candidates?

It's a very important question. That's especially true right now, as talent begins to emerge from all the demographic branches of the Democratic Party.

That said, how well does the New York Times do with that important question today? Is the paper presenting a careful analysis, or is it running a familiar type of report? Is it narrative all the way down?

This morning, on the paper's front page, Maggie Astor devotes 1800 words to the important topic. Before long, though, Astor is writing this:

ASTOR (2/12/19): How much sexism ultimately influences votes is a matter of debate...

What is not a matter of debate is the array of ways that sexism can manifest on the campaign trail, affecting not only how voters perceive candidates but how candidates present themselves to voters.

The likability trap

The very first question of Ms. Gillibrand's campaign was about her likability. ''A lot of people see you as pretty likable,'' a reporter told her. Did she consider that a ''selling point''?

Ms. Warren's evaluation arrived with similar speed, in a Politico article that asked how she could ''avoid a Clinton redux—written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground.''

Might we note a problem here? Astor seems to be discussing the way voters react to female candidates in sexist ways. But in her first two examples, she describes the conduct, appropriate or otherwise, of two mainstream reporters—two members of her own guild.

As we've noted over the years, our journalists routinely do this sort of thing. In earlier campaigns, journalists routinely attributed their own braindead attacks on certain disfavored candidates to "late night comedians." In this instance, Astor describes the conduct of two reporters, but seems to be sliming the voters as she does.

Our journalists routinely find ways to attribute their own guild's behavior to someone else! Three paragraphs later, Astor's slip-slide continues:

ASTOR: Women also tend to be viewed as unlikable based on their ambition. Harvard researchers found in 2010 that voters regarded ''power-seeking'' women with contempt and anger, but saw power-seeking men as stronger and more competent. There is often some implication of unscrupulousness in descriptions of female candidates as ''ambitious''—an adjective that could apply to any person running for president but is rarely used to disparage men. Within 24 hours of Ms. Harris's campaign kickoff, some critics were bringing up her onetime relationship with a powerful California politician, Willie Brown—a common tactic faced by women that sexualizes them and reduces their successes to a relationship with a man.

In that passage, Astor describes a research finding that is specific to the reactions of voters. Meanwhile, were "some critics" bringing up Harris' past relationship with Brown?

We challenged that stupid critique ourselves, but those "critics" weren't American voters. Instead, they were the eternal flyweights of Astor's own upper-end press corps!

Meanwhile, the notion that male candidates aren't criticized, by journalists, for being unlikable or ambitious is utterly absurd. Disfavored male pols have been battered that way, within the press, for a great many cycles now.

During the twenty months of Campaign 2000, mainstream reporters and pundits generated and promulgated endless scripts about the way Candidate Gore had allegedly been running for president since he was 6 years old. In line with prevailing press corps preferences, reporters and pundits said, again and again, that Gore "would so and say anything" to become president.

In September 2000, Chris Matthews formally apologized for having said, for more than a year, that Gore "would lick the bathroom floor" in order to reach the White House. Matthews was apologizing because Gore had shot ahead in the polls and seemed on the way to a win. But Gore had been trashed for his alleged ambition for quite a few years at that point. Disfavored male candidates are trashed by journalists, all the time, for allegedly being too ambitious and/or not likable enough.

Astor summarizes some studies which claim to demonstrate the differential ways voters react to female candidates. That's a very important topic, but she handles those studies in the flimsy way familiar to reporters who are simply advancing a Favored Press Corps Narrative.

Meanwhile, she complains about all sorts of conduct which afflict male and female candidates alike. Consider the types of bellyaching found in this pointless passage:

ASTOR: Perhaps the most obvious way female candidates are judged differently is on their appearance: not only how ''attractive'' they are and how they dress, researchers say, but also their facial expressions, their body language and their voice. Accused in 2015 of ''shouting'' about gun violence, Mrs. Clinton responded: ''First of all, I'm not shouting. It's just when women talk, some people think we're shouting.''

Women are conscious that small elements of how they present themselves are subject to scrutiny. Representative Madeleine Dean—one of four Democratic women elected to the House last year from Pennsylvania, whose congressional delegation was previously all-male—said an aide would stand in the back of the room during her campaign events, holding up a cardboard sign with a smiley face to remind her to shift the serious expression she naturally wore while listening to voters.

She was also coached, ''though I did not take his coaching, not to cross my arms in front of myself because then you look mad,'' Ms. Dean said.

We hate to provide the buzzkill here, but Rep. Dean is hardly the first candidate to receive such advice about body language. Stating the obvious, male candidates are routinely coached, and judged, in all those ways as well.

Meanwhile, how about the way Candidate Hillary Clinton was criticized for "shouting?" As everyone but the youthful Astor recalls, Candidate Howard Dean was almost driven from the 2004 for an alleged shouting incident after the Iowa caucuses. Five years earlier, when he made his formal announcement speech. Candidate Gore was savaged all across the pundit corps for the way he had allegedly shouted during his speech—but only after that strange criticism of the mild speech emerged from a spokeswoman for the RNC.

When the complaint emerged, the children stampeded, as their sub-rational souls are always eager to do. Here was the terrible Lady Collins, right in Astor's own newspaper, though Astor, 8 or 9 at the time, may not fully remember:

COLLINS (6/21/99): Al Gore has been trying to be more exciting on the stump—trying so hard that if he keeps it up, he'll rupture his vocal cords before the New Hampshire primary.

The new Al Gore yells quite a lot. Caught between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, two natural campaigners, the Vice President is trying to make up in decibels what he lacks in spontaneity. ''I am not satisfied! INDEED I AM RESTLESS!'' he cried in New York, announcing his candidacy for President with a list of promises about what he would do to move the country TOWARD AMERICA'S NEW HORIZONS, a goal that will involve eliminating EVERY LAST DIME OF WASTE, fighting GLOBAL WARMING and making our public schools THE FINEST AND BEST IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

This is our fault. We have been carping about how boring Al Gore is, and the poor man is all but howling at the moon in an effort to sound more compelling. We are being forced to watch him go through an enormous effort to look effortless, and it is as discomfiting as looking at the underside of a swan swimming on the lake. Voters are not going to elect a President who makes them feel like nervous parents at the second-grade class play. Mr. Gore has to give up this futile attempt to become Kennedyesque and embrace the boredom.

Let Gore be Gore! Where is it written that the American people want a fun guy for President? Most of our chief executives were not people you would necessarily want to pal around with. No one ever accused George Washington of being the life of the party. ''Today I dined with the president, and as usual the company was as grave as if at a funeral,'' reported one of his supporters.

Certainly it is a disadvantage to have to campaign in the age of mass media when the only TV star you resemble is Howdy Doody...

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Meanwhile, children are dead all over Iraq because people like Collins behaved this way all through the 2000 campaign.

("Even his hair looked less stiff," Collins went on to say in her column, thinking about an earlier appearance when Gore wasn't yelling so much. In the passage posted above, you'll note that she's correctly blaming the press corps for saying that Gore wasn't sufficiently fun—that he wasn't likable enough.)

In fairness, it wasn't just Collins. Everybody shouted the claim about Gore's alleged shouting once the RNC put the claim in play. On CNN’s Capital Gang, Margaret Carlson called Gore a "flailing, shouting person." On that same show, Al Hunt and Robert Novak also complained that Gore had "shouted" when he delivered his speech.

"The shouting is terrible," Novak declared. But then, by time of the weekend shows, pundits were widely complaining about the way Gore allegedly shouted and yelled as he made his announcement—a complaint which is stunningly hard to sustain if a person simply views the tape of the rather tepid speech.

On The McLaughlin Group, the Chicago Tribune’s James Warren called the speech "a little bit screechy, a little bit loud;" he compared Gore to a "Baptist minister on amphetamines." Two days later, the Collins column appeared. In the next campaign, Candidate Dean was widely mugged for his own shouting, which seemed to have been electronically enhanced.

To what extent are female candidate treated differently by voters? With impressive talent arising from female pols in the Democratic Party, it's a very important question—but the New York Times tends to run on narrative all the way down.

On its front page, it will tend to blame the press corps' conduct on voters. It will mug and clown and gambol and play, and it will hand you Pure Script.

"Man [sic] is the rational animal," Aristotle is said to have said. In fact, we humans are the plainly sub-rational animal which routinely runs on the rocket fuel of novelized tribal script.

Such script is the typical meat of the Times, our laziest, dumbest newspaper. In fairness to Aristotle, he'd never read the New York Times and possibly couldn't imagine its lazy, script-driven work.

Tomorrow: This second front-page report

Try to believe that a journalist said it: Here is Astor, with a remarkable post on journalistic method:

"Speaking of men, I don't quote any of them in my latest article, an in-depth look at the double standards women running for president face"

These journalistic kids today! And no, we aren't making this up.

HARARI'S DISSENT: Obama, Gates praise major best-seller!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12, 2019

"Rational animal, my asp," Israeli professor declares: Have we the humans, at least in the west, been seeing ourselves from afar?

We ask that question for a reason. Aristotle, our first great logician, is widely said to have told us this:

"Man [sic] is the rational animal."

Everyone says that he said it! But anyone who watches cable news, or reads our nation's major newspapers, knows that any such claim would seem to be wrong on its face, at least as the famous claim is commonly understood.

Are we humans essentially rational? In the most common meaning of the term, is rationality our distinguishing characteristic?

We'd have to say that the answer is no. Indeed, it's widely understood that figures like Darwin and Freud began to undermine the idea that we humans are fundamentally "rational" in the most obvious sense.

Years later, "cable news" came along, determined to eliminate any last doubts. Does anyone think they're gazing on rational conduct when they review the work of the modern American press?

The sheer stupidity of the American discourse seems to make the basic point clear. We humans have our sensible moments, especially on the personal level, and our technology largely works as designed. But should we be viewed as "the rational animal?"

First great logician, please!

What did Aristotle actually mean by the famous old bromide at issue? We can't exactly answer that, and it doesn't matter that much for our purposes this year.

We're here to suggest that we "rational animals" need a better way of understanding ourselves. And sure enough! As if to offer an alternate portrait, along came Professor Harari with his best-selling big book.

We refer to Yuval Noah Harari, whose widely-praised book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, has been on the world's best-seller lists for several years now. In its present incarnation, it tops the New York Times Paperback Nonfiction chart, even now, after 38 weeks on the list.

In its American paperback edition, the book is blurbed by Barack Obama on the back—and by Bill Gates on the front! Gates has called it one of his ten favorite books.

That should settle any questions about the best-seller's value and worth. By way of background, the leading authority on Harari and his book thumbnails him like this:

Yuval Noah Harari (born 24 February 1976) is an Israeli historian and a tenured professor in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of the international bestsellers Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (2016), and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (2018). His writings examine free will, consciousness, and intelligence.

Harari's early publications are concerned with what he describes as the "cognitive revolution" occurring roughly 50,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens supplanted the rival Neanderthals, developed language skills and structured societies, and ascended as apex predators...

We've highlighted the only part of Harai's book with which we'll be concerned. Meanwhile, what are "apex predators," since that's what our own floundering species is said to have become?

Inquiring minds might want to find out! You can click this link for a bit of background, but no, it doesn't sound good.

In the first two chapters of his book, Harari describes the way our own species, Homo sapiens, took control of the planet. And it wasn't just the Neanderthals who were "supplanted" by our ancestors in a global movement which started roughly 70,000 years ago.

At that time, there were a half dozen human species in the world, not just us and them. It wasn't just the Neanderthals. All those species were driven to extinction by the advance of our own species out of Africa at that time.

Why did our species succeed to the extent that the other species went into extinction? According to Professor Harari, it didn't happen because of our "rational" conduct.

According to Professor Harari, it happened because, due to chance mutations, our ancestors had developed the ability to "gossip," along with the ability to promulgate and advance compelling group "fictions."

In Professor Harari's account, these new abilities allowed our ancestors to drive the Neanderthals, and the other human groups, into the literal and figurative sea. Near the end of his opening chapter, he offers this unflattering picture of the way this may have occurred:

HARARI (page 17): Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin color, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would ancient Sapiens have been more tolerant towards an entirely different human species? It may well be that when Sapiens encountered Neanderthals, the result was the first and most significant ethnic-cleansing campaign in history.

According to Professor Harari, it wasn't our rational essence which led to our control of the planet. It was our new-found skill with gossip and fiction, mixed perhaps with our lack of tolerance for those who aren't like us.

Harari even compares what happened to an "ethnic cleansing." Based on the professor's wider account, a person could even imagine that, in these ancient encounters, the more rational animals lost!

Is Professor Harari actually right in his various claims and conjectures? Tomorrow, when we resume, we'll see what the experts have said.

For today, we'll only say this. Anyone who has read the New York Times, with today'front page as a case in point, will know that we aren't "the rational animal" in any definitive sense. Is it time to develop a clearer idea of who and what we are?

If so, Harari's book gives us a way to slide away from the famous old claim in which we see ourselves as the wondrously "rational animal." The gentleman has a new attitude, and presents a new gestalt.

We may not need a new attitude, but we clearly need a new paradigmatic understanding of who and what we are. Here within our own failing nation, our discourse has run on gossip and group fiction for decades now.

In Harari's portrait, those traits have been present all along. They may start to define what we are, as seen on cable news each night and all through the upper-end press.

Tomorrow: Experts v. Gates and Obama

This weekend we had the killing of pigs!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2019

Our pundits love a stampede: This weekend we had, not the naming of parts, but the killing of pigs.

The children of the mainstream press like no other pastime so much. Everyone gets to attack the same target, and they all get to say the same things!

In Saturday's Washington Post, Monica Hesse wrote an essay on the killing of pigs which was dazzling in its serial lack of logic. But then, she had plenty of company in that morning's Washington Post.

The next day, Donna Edwards chimed in. This morning, up jumped Fred Hiatt.

We'll be looking at some of these essays over the next few days. As always, all the children all agreed that all the pigs had to go. This is the way they've played it for decades:

In accord with Hard Pundit Law, they all agree that the pig must go. Their only assignment is to keep ratcheting up the language. We'll be looking at some of these essays, and at the work of a couple of people who broke every rule in the book, offering words of dissent. (Is McWhorter allowed to say this?)

All in all, the children were sure, over the weekend, that the new racist pigs had to go. Then the Post took a survey of black Virginians, and black Virginians seemed to say, by a margin of 21 points, that they wanted the pigs to stay!

(Given the small sample of black respondents, the margin of error was ten percent. Not that anyone in the press corps could explain margin of error!)

Tomorrow, we'll start to sift this batch of essays. For today, we recommend one short letter which appeared in Saturday's Post.

The letter writer skipped the stampede. Instead, she pushed alternate facts:

LETTER TO THE WASHINGTON POST (2/9/19): I think the Feb. 7 editorial was mistaken to ask for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s (D) resignation. Mr. Northam worked to expand Medicaid and to make abortion accessible to more women, thus helping poor women escape poverty. He won by a wide margin. A few far-right fanatics should not be allowed to overturn an election.

B— D—, McLean, Va.

The writer makes a common mistake. She assumes that the attacks on Northam are coming from "the far right." Thanks to propaganda and codes of silence, we liberals do this every time!

That said, the writer cites Northam's actions, while in office, on Medicaid and abortion rights. How often have you seen our "journalists" consider the adult behavior of the people currently being pursued—the adult conduct in which they engaged while they were serving in office?

We'll guess you haven't seen that much! Our journalists like discussing behavior at parties when people were 19 years old. Our journalists have good health care themselves and, dating back to Mary McGrory's astounding column about the weird clothing of Candidate Gore, they don't seem to give a flying felafel if other people don't.

"Man [sic] is the rational animal," Aristotle is said to have said. In his portrait of the Arkansas lynch mob, Twain painted a somewhat different portrait of our self-impressed kind.

Our upscale pundits have been running in packs for quite a few decades now. They're mainly concerned with teenage behavior at costume parties and with the question of who [BLEEP]ed whom, though only once, back in 2006.

They also enjoy inventing quotes and disappearing facts.

In fairness to Aristotle, he'd never seen "cable news." Nor had he read the Washington Post. He hadn't observed the clownishly post-rational conduct to which we're all exposed.

Tomorrow: Whatever your judgment about the pols may be, the Post should be embarrassed

THE ARISTOTLE'S ERROR FILE: Digest of reports!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2019

Starting tomorrow, Harari's dissent: Is man [sic] really the rational animal?

So Aristotle, our first great logician, is widely said to have said.

It isn't entirely clear what the gentleman meant by the statement which gets translated that way. But as his famous statement is commonly taken, is his statement true? Or are we "seeing ourselves from afar" when we define our own species that way?

Just how "rational" are we humans in our basic essence? We'll be exploring that question all year, including all this week.

Before long, we'll even examine the ways our brightest thinkers get led astray "when doing philosophy." After two decades of wasted time, we'll let the later Wittgenstein's jumbled but deeply instructive work help us examine that question.

Our failing nation's upper-end journalists like to discuss wardrobe, body language, "shtupping" and hair. Our elite logicians are asleep in the woods and lack the skills to help us.

How "rational" are we in the end? Last week, we considered the bromide which is now widely described as "Aristotle's error:"

Tuesday, February 5: Rational animals on the prowl! The Times frisks Roger's Stone's clothes.

Wednesday, February 6: Rational animals just wanna have fun! Waldman gets it right.

Thursday, February 7: Blind to a blindingly obvious point! The rational critter in action.

Friday, February 8: Badly in need of a whole new gestalt! Our own tribe's non-rational actors.

Are we humans defined by our rational ways? Starting tomorrow, right here at this site, Professor Harari's dissent!

Markey defers to Ocasio-Cortez!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2019

In praise of talent—and gumption: Talent is always in short supply. Also in short supply?

Gumption.

We've been thrilled by the talent, but also by the remarkable gumption, of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Yesterday, we were appreciative of the way Senator Markey deferred to her in the public roll-out of the Green New Deal proposal.

Good for Markey, and good for Ocasio-Cortez, whose gumption has been inspiring. It isn't every day that this combination comes along. We'll only wave this one caution flag—celebrity can do vast harm.

We were glad to see Markey behave as he did. Gumption must be served!

(Mateo, on Halloween evening, in Jim Sheridan's 2003 film, In America: "When luck comes knocking at your door, you can't turn it away.")

ARISTOTLE'S ERROR: Badly in need of a new gestalt!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2019

Our own non-rational actors: We well recall our own first exposure to the wonders of Aristotle, the western world's first great logician.

It was the fall of 1965. We were sitting in Lowell Lecture Hall, enrolled in Humanities 5, Harvard's "Introduction to Everyone" course.

Five hundred youngsters sat in 500 seats, scribbling 500 sets of notes. We wondered why they didn't just mimeograph the lecture and pass the darn thing out.

We also took the price of tuition and multiplied by 500. Decades later, the historian Michael Dolan described the rumination which took place even as the late Rogers Albritton lectured:

DOLAN (2/17/95): Scratching lecture notes in huge hall after huge hall, he counted the house and multiplied by the tuition to see how well Harvard was doing. Harvard was doing well.

Where was all that money going? Inquiring minds wanted to know!

We'll admit that, as it turned out, we never reviewed our lecture notes when that first semester ended. We'll further admit that, to this very day, we have no idea why you'd take a bunch of college freshmen and makes them listen to hour-long lectures about what Aristotle wrote.

Is is true that Aristotle's "philosophy," if we want to presume that there is such a critter, "continues to be central to the contemporary philosophical discussion?" (For background, see yesterday's report.)

That assertion can be true only if some such "contemporary discussion" exists! We'll continue exploring such ponderables, even returning to that lecture hall and its inhabitants and its environs, as this new year seems to move along.

The year will run beneath an award-winning banner: "Aristotle's error." Yesterday, additional evidence of the logician's famous error did in fact swim into view. We'll start with yesterday's post by Zak Cheney-Rice, a youngish writer at New York magazine whom we've never met.

Cheney-Rice was discussing the same New York Times report to which we ourselves linked in yesterday's report. We thought of Nestor's statement to Diomedes when Cheney-Rice discussed Mayor de Blasio's attempts to "integrate" New York City's eight high-powered high schools.

CHENEY-RICE (2/7/19): Bill de Blasio’s efforts to integrate New York City’s specialized public high schools are in limbo at the moment, pending legal challenges and resistance from parents of current students. The New York Times took the opportunity on Wednesday to publish a series of interviews with Asian-American alumni regarding the mayor’s hotly debated proposals.

One response in particular stands out: that of Soo Kim, who graduated Stuyvesant High School in 1993, attended Princeton University, and is now president of Stuyvesant’s alumni association. Kim opposes the mayor’s plan—which includes a more inclusive admissions process that I will describe in greater detail later—but his take on the conversation about race and segregation that surrounds it is also worth a closer look.

“How is this possible, that people are saying we’re segregated, we’re Jim Crow,” Kim told the Times. “These words are too harsh. It makes me feel like I’m a bad person.”

This is a striking and revelatory assessment of what’s happening.

Cheny-Rice proceeded to scold Soo Kim. We'll pose a couple of questions:

Are New York City's public schools actually "segregated" at the present time? Are New York City's eight high-powered, "specialized" high schools "segregated?"

Borrowing from a previous president, it all depends on what the meaning of "segregated" is! That said, new definitions of this heavily fraught historical term—new definitions which have been churned by a generation of our own tribe's propagandists—are deeply pleasing, at this time, within our own liberal tribe.

The new definitions provide lots of heat but offer much less light. Meanwhile, Cheney-Rice again slid past the obvious question about de Blasio's plan for those eight high-powered high schools:

If lots more kids would be able to benefit from high-powered high school instruction, why doesn't New York City create additional high-powered seats at an array of high-powered high schools, including the eight which exist?

Rather than ask this obvious question, our tribe likes to locate the racists. As we do, we never present the data shown below. These data define the modern version of "the problem we all live with:"

Average scores, Grade 8 math, 2017 Naep
New York City Public Schools
White students: 290.71
Black students: 255.63
Hispanic students: 263.56
Asian-American students: 306.03

For all Naep data, start here.

Applying a standard, very rough rule of thumb, the achievement gaps defined by those data are horrendous, vast. That said, liberal intellectuals of the present day will also have standard ways to explain that state of affairs, built from the kinds of data our intellectuals can explore from the comfort of their Westwood offices or from their nearby homes.

We love the fighting and the name-calling; we rarely offer full ranges of facts. Can Aristotle's formulation about "rational animals," at least as it's widely understood, possibly explain this behavior by our own self-impressed, war-like tribe?

Our modern self-impressed liberal tribe loves to hunt the racists! For ourselves, we think of what noble Nestor so thoughtfully said, as caught on tape by Homer:

"...but you reach no useful end."

How might those gruesome achievement gaps get closed in New York? In New York magazine, simply put, that question doesn't arise.

Aristotle's error came to mind a second time when we read Catherine Rampell's new column in the Washington Post. Let's think about something Rampell explicitly says, and about something which gets omitted.

Rampell's column deals with the per capita cost of American health care. More specifically, she discusses the per capita cost of America health care "among Medicare beneficiaries," or perhaps among "the elderly" in general, though that term goes undefined.

On line, though not in print editions, the column contains a graphic which sets the cost of "per-capita health care spending for the elderly" at $18,555 in 2015.

(Full disclosure! That figure is said to have been "adjusted to 2010 dollars using the gross domestic product deflator." In this situation, we don't understand that statement. Then again, neither does anyone else reading the Washington Post.)

At any rate, we're given a figure for health care spending on "the elderly" here in the U.S. Here are the figures we didn't get—the figures we will never get in the Washington Post:

Per-capita health care spending for the elderly, 2015
United States: $18,555
France: —
Germany: —
United Kingdom: —
Canada: —
Australia: —
Japan: —

Simply put, you'll never see the comparable figures from those roughly comparable nations. Dearest darlings, use your heads! In this most rational of all possible worlds, it simply isn't done!

The amazingly high rate of health care spending in the U.S. affects a wide array of major policy matters. But major newspapers like the Post will never show you the amazing international data which define the "the problem we all live [and die] with" in this crucial area.

Simply put, it isn't done—and Rachel and Lawrence and all the hacks agree that they mustn't tell you. Would "rational animals" function this way? Or is Aristotle's famous statement, as understood, possibly an error?

The sheer stupidity of our public discourse has been astounding for decades now. We began planning this site in the fall of 1997 because we couldn't take it any more.

From that day to this, the rational animals within our upper-end "mainstream press corps" have focused on wardrobe, hair styles and body language, and of course on who BLEEPed whom back in 2006. Within our own pseudo-liberal tribe, we focus on chasing the racists all over town while ignoring the groaning problems low-income children, and their parents, are all required to live with.

Lounging in their quarters in Westwood, our academics redefine highly-charged terms, the better to posture with. For ourselves, we're glad that Nestor, the seasoned charioteer, isn't around to see this.

Since roughly forever, we humans, at least in the western world, have told ourselves that we were made in God's image and that we're rational animals. Darwin said this wasn't quite right. In his own way, the later Wittgenstein said goodbye to all this too.

Which part of no don't our journalists and our elite logicians understand? However you choose to answer that, it's time for a new paradigm.

Next week, we'll move from Aristotle's historic error to what Professor Harari has said. And no, you won't have to take any notes. You can push CTRL and P. You can just print it on out!

Next week: "Man [sic] is the rational animal?" Harari says no to all that!

ARISTOTLE'S ERROR: Blind to a blindingly obvious point!

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2019

The rational critter in action: By standard reckoning, Aristotle was the western world's greatest logician until Godel came along.

It's Aristotle who is said to have said that "man [sic] is the rational animal." We proceed to a street-fighting question:

To what extent was his successor, Godel, wed to "rational" conduct?

Godel was so defiantly rational that he believed that "numbers and circles had a perfect, timeless existence independent of the human mind," whatever that could possibly mean. We're quoting a New Yorker essay by Jim Holt, a high-ranking science writer whose work is routinely said to be wondrously rational, clear.

According to Holt, Godel also struggled with the question of how we could possibly know that 2 plus 2 equals 4. He then proceeded, later in life, to starve himself to death. So the rational conduct tends to go at the top of our species' order.

Concerning Aristotle himself, the leading authority on his thinking is currently telling us this:

Aristotle (384–322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher and scientist born in the city of Stagira, Chalkidiki, Greece. Along with Plato, he is considered the "Father of Western Philosophy." Aristotle provided a complex and harmonious synthesis of the various existing philosophies prior to him, including those of Socrates and Plato, and it was above all from his teachings that the West inherited its fundamental intellectual lexicon, as well as problems and methods of inquiry. As a result, his philosophy has exerted a unique influence on almost every form of knowledge in the West and it continues to be central to the contemporary philosophical discussion.

Little is known about his life...

Little is known about his life? We'll suggest that even less is known about our world when we act as if there's such a critter as a "contemporary philosophical discussion." Unless, of course, we refer to such musings as these:

HART (2010): Perhaps more generally a quantifier is a second-level function whose value at an (n + 1)-ary first-level concept is an n-ary concept, unless n is zero, in which case its value is a truth value, an object. In that case, quantifiers would be second-level functions sometimes having first-level concepts as values and sometimes objects as values. When the value of a first-level concept at an object is truth, Frege says the object falls under the concept. Perhaps the concept:falls-under is a binary second-level concept whose first argument is an object and whose second is a first-level concept. In that case, second-level concepts could also have arguments of different levels.

That was Professor Hart in his well-received and presumably competent 2010 book, The Evolution of Logic. Absent Aristotle's efforts, would we ever have gotten that far?

For what it's worth, our elite logicians never appear to help our journalists straighten out their failing everyday logic. Dearest darlings, use your heads! It simply isn't done!

That means we're left to the pitiful work of our upper-end professional journalists, who are mainly focused on compelling matters of wardrobe, body language, sexual congress and hair.

How rational are these rational animals, the ones found in our press corps? This morning, the New York Times leads its "National" section with this pointless, vapid account of Nancy Pelosi's recent body language.

Swollen by a large photograph and by a ton of pointless filler, the nonsense eats something like two-thirds of that page. Anyone who thinks the Times is anything but vapid propaganda need only read this pointless twaddle—this morning's most prominent report in the "National" section.

What happens when this newspaper does attempt to discuss a substantive policy matter? Consider this morning's news report about admission procedures at New York City's most selective public high schools.

The topic has become a favorite hobby-horse at the Times. This morning's report, by Eliza Shapiro, consumes the entire first page of the paper's "New York" section.

Al always, we get a lot more heat than light. As she starts, Shapiro defines the problem, which without question is real:

SHAPIRO (2/7/19): Mayor Bill de Blasio’s proposal to overhaul admissions for New York City’s elite high schools has proved highly divisive, leaving some Asian-American students feeling that they are being pitted against their black and Hispanic neighbors.

His idea has also made the city a national focal point in the debate over race, class and fairness in education.

If his plan—which would scrap the admissions exam and instead reserve seats at the eight specialized high schools for the top students at every city middle school—is approved by the Legislature, the selective schools’ racial makeup would change practically overnight.

Offers to Asian-American students would fall by about half, according to a recent report, but would increase fivefold for black students.

As Shapiro notes, de Blasio's proposal would change the "racial" makeup of the student bodies at these eight "specialized" high schools. Indeed, the proposal would change those demographics a great deal.

As she continued, Shapiro described the problem de Blasio's proposal intends to address. Whatever the cause of these numbers may be, the numbers here are startling:

SHAPIRO (continuing directly): Last year, only 10 percent of the students in the city’s specialized high schools were black and Hispanic, though nearly 70 percent of the school system as a whole is black and Hispanic.

And of 900 incoming freshman admitted to Stuyvesant—the most competitive of the schools—in 2018, only 10 were black. “There is not a single Asian-American I have spoken with who doesn’t think it’s a problem,” said John Liu, a Bronx High School of Science graduate and New York state senator.

Though Mr. de Blasio’s proposal has sparked intense opposition from some Asian-American groups, interviews with eight alumni from four of the schools show that Asian-Americans are torn about the plan, and are grappling with the big questions it raises about how elite schools should select students in New York City and the rest of the country.

It's startling to see how few black and Hispanic kids are currently attending these high-powered schools. De Blasio's plan would instantly change that.

"Offers to Asian-American students would fall by about half," Shapiro suggests. A whole lot of Asian kids would be turned away in the future, replaced by their black and Hispanic peers.

Shapiro goes on to report the views of eight Asian-American graduates of these high-powered schools. Four of them favor de Blasio's plan. The other four seem to have mixed views.

This is a very important policy matter involving a very important part of American life. Might we go ahead and identify the dog which failed to bark today? The dog which never barks?

De Blasio's plan is based on a basic premise. He says a lot more black and Hispanic kids could benefit from attending these high-powered schools.

He says they'd be able to do the work. He says they deserve the chance.

Without any question, one part of that assessment is right. If kids are able to do challenging work, that's the kind of work they should encounter at school. If capable kids are being denied the chance to attend such challenging high schools, that represents a failure on the part of the New York City Public Schools.

That said, here comes the dog that didn't bark at any point in this morning's report. At no point in this full-page report does anyone ask the obvious question:

If there are lots of kids in New York City who can do such challenging work, why doesn't the city open additional high-powered high schools? Beyond that, why doesn't the city add classrooms and seats to the eight "specialized schools" it already has?

These are the world's most obvious questions, but Timesfolk like Shapiro blow past them every time. In this morning's report, Shapiro doesn't raised this obvious question herself. Neither do any of the eight people whose interviews she reports.

This basic, blindingly obvious question has been raised by Gotham education-watchers, but the New York Times would jump off a bridge before it raised this point. Instead, the Times pleasures us "liberals" with heated discussions in which different "racial" groups are pitted against one another. Along the way, we liberals line up to start taking names as we announce Where The Racists Are.

Why doesn't the mayor create a whole range of additional high-powered seats, perhaps at additional high-powered high schools? Why does he pretend that Moses descended from the mountain with a tablet telling us how many such seats are allowed?

These are the world''s most obvious questions, but you'll never see such questions raised in the New York Times. The rational animals at that paper seem to live by script alone—by scripts which track tribal preference. At present, our tribe loves demographic fights. We pursue them to the ends of the earth. They let us pretend that we're moral.

For the record, it isn't just the New York Times which stumbles ahead in this manner. Back in December, New York magazine's Zak Cheney-Rice wrote a long essay on this same topic.

Go ahead—examine his work! See if you can find any place where the obvious question was allowed to intrude on the pleasure of shouting and yelling about the evils of "segregation," a pleasing term which makes our tribe feel like we fight the good fights.

Why doesn't the city create additional seats at additional high-powered high schools? It's the world's most obvious question, but despite our species' alleged rational nature, the question goes unasked The question lies in a pit somewhere, buried next to the basic health care data you'll never see in the Times. (For background, see yesterday's report.)

That said, rational animals at the Times were eager to report today on Pelosi's thrilling body language. And as serious questions go unasked, our elite logicians will slumber and snore, raising another obvious question:

Man [sic] is the rational animal? Is it possible that Aristotle may perhaps have committed an error, at least in the way his famous words are commonly understood?

Tomorrow: In search of a new paradigm

ARISTOTLE'S ERROR: Rational animals just wanna have fun!

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2019

Waldman gets it right: For all his greatness, Aristotle can be said to have made the occasional error.

We've noted one error is the past; this involves the great logician's attempt to describe the basic components of matter. As we've noted in the past, the leading authority on Aristotle's physics describes his effort as follows:

Five elements
In his On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle related each of the four elements proposed earlier by Empedocles, Earth, Water, Air, and Fire, to two of the four sensible qualities, hot, cold, wet, and dry. In the Empedoclean scheme, all matter was made of the four elements, in differing proportions. Aristotle's scheme added the heavenly Aether, the divine substance of the heavenly spheres, stars and planets.

Is all matter composed of five elements? Do wet and dry come into it? Most modern high school physics teachers would say this theory was wrong.

In fairness, it's hardly Aristotle's "fault" that his theory may have been wrong. He lived hundreds of years ago, before the age of erudition which leaves the modern cable viewer so brilliantly well-informed.

He and his contemporaries were pretty much starting from scratch. Errors occurred along the way, possibly including a possible error concerning the nature of man [sic].

What are we humans essentially like? Aristotle is widely said to have said the following:

"Man [sic] is the rational animal."

That's what he's said to have said.

In fairness, because Aristotle knew no English, this statement exists in translation. In part for that reason, no one knows exactly what he may have meant by his actual, foreign language statement—but at least as conventionally understood, this statement would seem to be flawed.

In fairness, Aristotle had never seen the New York Times. For that reason, he had no way to know how odd his assessment might seem to us in our modern age.

Beyond that, he'd never seen a "cable news" program, not even Dateline: White House. Getting a bit more specific, he'd never seen how sad it is when modern man [sic] pretends or even attempts to discuss important matters of public policy.

As we all know, the modern journalist is programmed to discuss matters of wardrobe, body language, sexual congress and hair. Who [BLEEP]ed whom in 2006? It's a key part of their focus!

That said, a "rational" animal, in the conventional sense, would presumably be able to fashion the occasional discussion of major issues in health care, public schools, tax policy or even the building of walls. For those of us who have seen the modern press corps struggle with such tasks, the insufficiency of Aristotle's assessment may seem tragicomically clear.

Are modern journos "the rational animal?" How about the zillions of academics, especially the elite logicians, who slumber, doze and prattle on as our journalists publicly flail?

We'd have to say that these vaunted groups raise the possibility that Aristotle may have reached his translated assessment in error. Just consider the recent column by the Washington Post's Paul Waldman.

Don't get us wrong! Waldman's column didn't appear in the hard-copy Post. Presumably, that's because the gentleman did something that's never done in any discussion of health care.

Dear God and all the angels and saints! Breaking every rule of pseudo-journalistic decorum, Waldman included a very basic set of data in his column.

These data appeared much later in his column that we would have recommended. But good lord! In a virtual break for the territories, Waldman included the remarkable basic information which will always get deep-sixed by the modern rational animal.

Good lord! Waldman included the graphic which you can view at this Peterson-Kaiser site. The graphic shows annual per capita health care spending. It includes such data as these:

Health care spending, per person, 2017
United States: $10,224
Germany: $5728
France: $4902
Canada: $4826
Japan: $4717
Australia: $4543
United Kingdom: $4246

Among those roughly comparable, largish nations, only Germany spends even half as much as the U.S. spends on a per capita basis! France, Canada, Japan, the U.K.? They all spend less than half!

That may be the most remarkable data set we've ever seen. As we've explained a million times, a remarkable number of major policy problems are lodged in that remarkable figure for spending within the U.S.

And yet, this data set is essentially never seen in the New York Times or the Washington Post. It's never seen, and never discussed, on "cable news," where multimillionaire corporate-trained clowns entertain us with entertaining tales about the horror of Spiro T. Agnew's lunch money.

Waldman's publication of those data represents a remarkable break from modern press tradition. In our view, Waldman buried the lede, pushing these data very far down in a rather lengthy column.

But the fact that these data appeared at all is a fairly astonishing fact. As a general matter, modern press practice is deeply committed to the avoidance of information in general, and the presentation of this data set is virtually forbidden by law.

We can speculate about the reasons why these data never appear. For the record, even the modern journalist isn't so dumb as to miss their obvious, wide-ranging significance.

That said, there can be no real debate concerning one basic point. The way journalistic life forms approach such matters makes Aristotle's famous assessment, at least as understood, begin to look like an error.

In fairness, Aristotle had never seen the way these life forms pursue their tasks. Future Anthropologists Huddled in Caves (TM) tell us that the great logician cringes whenever he visits the New York Times from his spot on Olympus.

As regular readers already know, those "future anthropologists" increasingly serve as our most reliable sources. We'll be drawing on their privileged if tragic perspective throughout the course of the year as our award-winning exegesis of "Aristotle's error" unfolds.

As we noted yesterday, Princeton grads like Vanessa Friedman likes to discuss the meaning of the wardrobe selections of well-known public lunatics. As a general matter, these rationals care about wardrobe, sex lives, invented quotations and the shapes people form from their hair.

These rationals care about nothing else. Is it possible that Aristotle has been caught in another error?

Tomorrow: Our own tribe's brightest players

ARISTOTLE'S ERROR: Rational animals on the prowl!

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2019

Top paper frisks Roger Stone's clothes: It was Saturday morning, February 2. At the tippity-top of American journalism, the rational animals were on the prowl again.

One day later, the New York Times would present this hard-hitting expose concerning the sources of Donald Trump's fan. (It would be featured in Monday's Spotlight feature as one of the day's most-read "stories.")

On Sunday, the Times would examine Trump's tan. On Saturday, though, the rationals were deeply concerned with the meaning of clothes.

In print editions, the report appeared on the first page of the newspaper's National section. On line, the insightful report still carries a triple headline:

ON THE RUNWAY
Roger Stone’s Costume Drama
The political operative has been modeling a primer on how to dress for court.

Trump's tan would be frogmarched the following day. On this day, Vanessa Friedman was pulling the curtain back from an ongoing "costume drama."

Friedman is her famous newspaper's "fashion director and chief fashion critic." In her previous post, she was the fashion editor of the Financial Times.

She'd prepped at The Chapin School and Exeter before moving on to Princeton (class of 1989), but don't let those famous names fool you. In a profile of Friedman in the wonderfully monikored Surface Magazine, she described the wacky, Kerouackian spirit of her early post-college years:

PERROTTET (3/8/16): To hear Friedman tell it, the road to her current status as the thinking person’s fashion critic was less a conscious decision—she had no formal design or journalistic training—than a series of happy accidents. “I wasn’t into fashion when I was young,” she recalls. “I liked looking at Vogue, but fashion was never a big part of my life. I certainly never thought of it as a career.” After graduating from Princeton, she lived in her native New York, working on the bottom rungs of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. In 1996, newly married at age 28, she suggested to her husband that they move to Britain, not as a career step but as a spur-of-the-moment adventure: “One day I said, ‘Shouldn’t we go live in London?’ He said, ‘Sure.’ And so we did!”

The key words there may have been the first five: "To hear Friedman tell it."

Was it true? Had the happy-go-lucky couple, at least one of whom had no journalistic training, pulled up stakes and decamped for swingin' England as a "spur-of-the-moment adventure?"

We can't exactly answer your question, but according to the New York Times' report about the couple's wedding, Friedman's husband, then 32, was "an associate in the emerging markets investment banking group at the Chase Investment Bank in London" even as vows were spoken.

Based upon that bit of reporting, the devil-may-care adventure had taken the happy-go-lucky couple to the very city where the husband seemed to be employed. According to that same wedding report, the bridegroom's father was "the owner of Twenty-First Century Investments, a financial management company in Toronto." Friedman's father was "a senior partner in Debevoise & Plimpton, the New York law firm."

Not that there was anything wrong with it! We include these biographical shards to offer a sense of the part of the world from which would emerge the lazy, silly, low-IQ musings which adorned the first page of the Times' National section on Saturday morning last.

The rational animals were at it again as Friedman's report unfolded! In fairness, Friedman may be an excellent source of worthless opinion concerning the world of high fashion. The problem begins when the fatuous creatures from whom she emerged start turning fashion, hairdos and invented quotations into the raw material of a failing nation's "political" news.

(And sexual congress, of course!)

So it was as this fatuous creature typed her sub-rational thoughts. In fairness, we can't blame Friedman alone for what happened; a team of editors stood behind her, gents and ladies alike. But as she typed, "the thinking person's fashion critic" started by sharing these thoughts:

FRIEDMAN (2/2/19): Roger J. Stone Jr. set foot on the stage—sorry, the floor of the federal court in Washington—on Friday for his scheduling hearing in a somber pinstriped ocean-dark suit, matching dark tie, pristine white shirt and muted pocket handkerchief, bringing to a temporary close the latest installment of what may become one of the most-watched spinoffs of the reality show known as “The Trump Administration.”

It was a veritable replay of what Mr. Stone, the political operative and former Trump adviser, chose to wear for his earlier court appearance, on Tuesday (a single-breasted three-button navy suit, pure white shirt with a Windsor collar, white pocket handkerchief and marine blue knit tie).

That itself was a more formal version of the navy polo shirt with white polo pony and dark jeans Mr. Stone had worn last Friday, when he was arrested on seven counts of obstruction, witness tampering and making false statements. He appeared after the indictment with both arms raised in a Nixonian victory sign.

Important! On the first page of the New York Times' National section, we learned what Roger Stone, a lifelong hustler and lunatic, had chosen to wear to federal court on two recent occasions.

Through some under-explained species of logic, we also learned that "a single-breasted three-button navy suit, pure white shirt with a Windsor collar, white pocket handkerchief and marine blue knit tie" is just "a more formal version of the navy polo shirt with white polo pony and dark jeans" Stone had worn when he was arrested. You can puzzle that out on your own.

On Sunday. we'd have the crafting of tans. On this day, the naming of parts was restricted to matters of wardrobe. And why should any Times subscriber give a hoot about felonious foofaw like this? As she continued, the happy-go-lucky Princeton ex-pat shared some post-rational logic:

FRIEDMAN (continuing directly): Why do such costumes matter?

Because Mr. Stone has long treated—and referred to—his wardrobe as exactly that: a key part of the theater of his life in politics.

Why should readers give a flying felafel concerning what Stone chose to wear to court? Why do his costumes matter?

It matters because Stone says it matters, the ranking post-journalist said. With that, she began to blather again, in a high-profile "news report:"

FRIEDMAN (continuing directly): This is, after all, a man who wore full morning dress to the 2017 inauguration; who is famous for his penchant for bespoke double-breasted suits from Savile Row or Alan Flusser (a tailor known for his master-of-the-universe clients); who once joked that he had more shoes than Imelda Marcos; and who called himself a “showman” in his 2018 book, “Stone’s Rules: How to Win at Politics, Business, and Style.” Someone who believes fully in the power of clothing as communications tool, and is comfortable admitting it. Crowing about it, even.

And because in court, defendants generally don’t talk. Their lawyers, their demeanor and their clothes talk for them. Given that Judge Amy Berman Jackson is still considering a gag order preventing Mr. Stone (who spent his time between hearings giving news conferences and making appearances) from discussing his case publicly, it’s possible that at some point he won’t be able to speak out of court either. Which puts an even greater burden on what he wears to start emoting in his place.

We're sorry, but no—it really can't get dumber. Stone's clothes aren't going to "talk for him" in court unless Judge Jackson is a fool, which, by all accounts, she rather plainly isn't. And his clothes won't talk to us in the wider world unless foppish fiddlers like Friedman and her unnamed editors turn their news pages over to ruminations about where tans come from and about the meaning of Roger Stone's clothes.

As Friedman typed on, she pretended to explain why Stone was making these utterly insignificant wardrobe choices—why he "has suddenly adopted a sartorial stance of relative...understatement."

She explained the whole fandango, but was forced to close her post-journalistic "news report" with a small confession:

FRIEDMAN: [Stone] went so far as to reveal in [a] video that he chose not to wear one of his many made-to-measure double-breasted suits (he is partial to pinstripes and plaid) because they were “a little too wealthy looking and I am dirt poor at this point, having been destroyed financially by a two-year inquisition by Robert Mueller.”

Then he told everyone that the three-button suit he did go for was 30 years old. And while he acknowledged the potential foppish touch of the pocket hankie, he called the one he picked “pedestrian,” perhaps to lessen the effect.

The theory has some merit...

Still, by Friday Mr. Stone seemed to have changed his mind about the single- versus double-breasted idea. Perhaps because he has also admitted that his double-breasted suits are his “armor,” and right now he needs as much of that as he can get.

With that, the news report ended. Having explained the powerful logic of Stone's ideas about single-breasted suits, Friedman revealed, as she closed, that he'd flipped in his second court appearance, choosing to go double-breasted. That said, there was only one actual reason for this post-journalistic "news report:"

The children who work for the Hamptons-based Times like to talk about wardrobe and bald spots, and best of all about sex. They simply don't care about anything else. Those topics define their horizons. This has been clear for decades, and of course it goes undiscussed.

Aristotle is widely said to have said that we humans are "the rational animal." While it isn't entirely clear what the ancient logician actually meant by whatever he actually said, no one who reads the New York Times could fail to encounter the following thought, if only in tortured dreams:

Could Aristotle's assessment, at least as widely understood, have been erroneous in some basic way? Anthropologically speaking, is it possible that we the humans aren't especially "rational" at all? Have we been "seeing ourselves from afar" in some fundamental way?

We'll be exploring such questions all year long. Anyone who reads the Times will understand why such excavations are needed. Also, why such topics will stay undiscussed everywhere else on the dial.

Tomorrow: No inanity left behind

THE FOOLS FOR PARADOX FILE: Digest of reports!

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 2019

New year commences tomorrow: Tomorrow, the new year starts at this site.

Tomorrow, we'll start the process of examining a minor bungle—the minor erroneous characterization increasingly known to future anthropologists huddled in caves as "Aristotle's error."

Is "man" [sic] really "the rational animal" in any ultimate way? We'll sift the evidence with great care—and we'll examine Professor Harari's alternate hypothesis.

We'll explore the conduct of our nation's upper-end journalists. We'll examine the lethargy and the indolence of our "elite logicians," and of other academics to boot.

We'll even get to the advances which can be extracted from the jumbled work of the later Wittgenstein. We'll start that examination with a detailed review of Professor Horwich's claims.

Will this add up to a picture in which our stumbling species, Homo sapiens, is best seen as some sort of"rational animal?" For today, we'll only tell you this:

Below, you see one of the seven "Noteworthy Facts" singled out atop page A3 of this morning's New York Times (available in hard copy only). No, we aren't making this up:

Of Interest
NOTEWORTHY FACTS FROM TODAY'S PAPER

[...]

The National Hockey League player Andy Hebenton, who never missed a game during eight seasons with the New York Rangers, lost seven teeth on the ice in a two-week period in January 1961.

But seriously though, folks. That's one of the seven (7) "noteworthy facts" some editor found to be "of interest" in this morning's paper.

That was one of the day's noteworthy facts! Right below that feature on Page A3, Times readers are treated to this:

The Conversation
FOUR OF THE MOST READ, SHARED AND DISCUSSED POSTS FROM ACROSS NYTIMES.COM

[...]

2. In the Pale of Winter, Trump's Tan Remains A State Secret
Katie Rogers's report on the president's "conspicuously sun-kissed glow"—even in the frigid D.C. winter—was one of Sunday's most-read stories. The official line from the White House is that Mr. Trump's glow is the result of "good genes," said one official. (And, O.K., a little powder, the official added.)

It was one of Sunday's most read "stories!" Rational animals wanted to know!

The New York Times was letting us know about the source of Donald Trump's tan. Elsewhere on this morning's Page A3, the daily Spotlight feature ("Additional reporting and repartee from our journalists") excerpts an interview with two actors. They've been asked to discuss what they remember about their first trips to the Sundance Film Festival.

"It was so exciting," the actor Ed Helms said.

In short, the modern failing New York Times wants to be Look magazine. Tomorrow, our new year will begin with a visit to the Times' recent news report concerning the various things we can learn by observing Roger Stone's wardrobe selections.

Can it really get dumber than this? In these ways, our highest-profile national newspaper tells us who and what we actually are. The silly newspaper is Hamptons-based, and, not unlike the way things work with the wider range of alleged elites, the silly newspaper's worthless mindset is Hamptons all the way down.

Tomorrow, we return to full services here at this site. In our last such week, our ruminations ran under this heading: "Fools for Paradox."

In those "stories," we explored the minds and mindsets of our failing society's "logicians." Our reports went exactly like this:

Tuesday, December 18: Lies and the lying Cretans who told them! The ancient Cretan's tale.

Wednesday, December 19: Should foolishness cause the mind to crash? Silliness all the way down.

Thursday, December 20: "Magical, lucid," the Times review said. Are modern elites even conscious?

Friday, December 21: Lord Russell's paradox drew Godel in—to the land of "abstract objects!"

Tomorrow morning, our new year begins. Question:

Can we moderns, in any serious way, be seen as "the rational animal?"

Lemon talks Russia for the full hour!

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2019

It's all anthropology now: At the start of 2018, we made an historic announcement.

"It's all anthropology now," we charismatically said. Here's what we meant by that statement:

We meant that no sensible person could possibly think, at this point, that anything good will ever come from attempts at analysis or information production.

Anthropologically speaking, our species runs on script alone. It's narrative all the way down.

Next week, we expect to kick off the current new year at this award-winning site. We'll be exploring "Aristotle's error" all year long. Last night, Don Lemon got things started.

"Man [sic] is the rational animal?" That's what Aristotle is constantly said to have said. But the industry known as cable news runs on nothing but novelization. And so it was that, at 11 PM, Lemon was seen saying this:

LEMON (1/31/19): I'm Don Lemon. Major developments tonight in the Russia investigation. So, we're devoting this entire hour to an in-depth look at all things Russia.

So cool! Lemon would be devoting the entire hour to All Things Mother Russia. We'd have none of that bullshit about health care or foreign wars or the ways our public schools work.

It was going to be All Things Russia, for the entire hour! Lemon's bosses had based their decision on the "major developments" which had happened that night in the Russia probe.

This was bullroar all the way down. As he continued, Lemon described the major developments which justified the fact that he would devote the whole hour to the entertaining, true crime drama which dominates CNN.

This was Lemon's fuller statement as he kicked off the hour. He listed three developments:

LEMON: I'm Don Lemon. Major developments tonight in the Russia investigation. So, we're devoting this entire hour to an in-depth look at all things Russia.

First, we have our breaking news for you. The president telling the New York Times he never spoke with Roger Stone about WikiLeaks.

According to Mueller's indictment, a senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about what WikiLeaks had on Hillary Clinton. But Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tells me the president insisted the direction did not come from him.

We're also learning that Mueller's team has seized what they call "voluminous and complex evidence" from Roger Stone. This includes several years worth of information collected from Stone's iCloud accounts, e-mail accounts and hard drives.

Also, tonight, CNN has exclusive reporting that Donald Trump, Jr.'s three mysterious phone calls, before and after the now infamous 2016 Trump tower meeting, were not with his father. This is according to new information obtained by Senate investigators showing the blocked calls from between Don Junior and two of his business associates.

President Trump seizing on the news tonight tweeting, "just out, the big deal very mysterious Don Junior telephone calls after the innocent Trump tower meeting that the media and Dems said were made to his father, me, were just conclusively found not to be made to me. They were made to friends and business associates of Don. Really sad."

Didn't credit us with the reporting because that's where it came from, exclusively from CNN. But it's clearly a positive development for the Trump family. But let's not forget that Trump, Jr. did meet with Russians about getting dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Let's discuss now all of this. Shimon Prokupecz, Susan Glasser, Phil Mudd, and Harry Litman, good evening to all of you.

As it turned out, these major developments weren't "major." It would be a stretch to refer to two of them as"developments" at all.

Trump said he never spoke to Stone concerning WikiLeaks? That's right up there with being told that water was running downhill.

Mueller's team has seized what they call "voluminous and complex evidence" from Roger Stone? Until such time as the material is reviewed, that's a complete and total nothingburger too.

As such, two of these "major developments" were barely "developments" at all. Then, as he completed the rule of three, we found Lemon burying the lede!

Uh-oh! As it now seems to have turned out, those famous phone calls by Donald Trump Junior didn't go to his father after all!

For well over a year, cable script-readers have been suggesting and saying that those phone calls had of course gone to Trump Senior. Now it had apparently turned out that those twenty million speculations had all been wrong.

Given the endless insinuations of the past year or so, this actually was a development. As if by law, Lemon sent it to the bottom of the pile, complaining that the president hadn't credited CNN for reporting, after all this time, that its endlessly pleasing speculations had been endlessly false.

(He then threw in the point about Trump Junior receiving the dirt. In the business, this is known as Keeping Script Alive.)

This is the way this stupid game has been played for years. Lemon didn't want to bore us rubes with talk about all those health care proposals. Instead, he wanted to talk about the true crime drama his low-IQ corporate network has been endlessly peddling.

He couldn't come out and tell us that he was peddling true crime drama. So he pretended he had a set of "major developments." He then introduced a quartet of hacks prepared to extend the fraud.

This con game has characterized our "mainstream coverage" forever. In October 1999, Candidate Gore and Candidate Bradley staged an erudite discussion of health care in their first Democratic debate.

In the press room, three hundred journalists hissed, jeered and booed every time Gore spoke. (Three major journalists agreed on this astounding report, which everyone else disappeared.) Then the reporting and the the punditry began.

Over at the Washington Post, Mary McGrory had good health care herself and didn't much care if you did. And so, the glorious Pulitzer winner started her column like this:

MCGRORY (10/31/99): Vice President Albert Gore came to his fateful encounter with newly menacing challenger Bill Bradley carrying heavy baggage. He was wearing an outfit that added to his problems when he stepped onstage at Dartmouth College: a brown suit, a gunmetal blue shirt, a red tie—and black boots.

Was it part of his reinvention strategy? Perhaps it was meant to be a ground-leveling statement—"I am not a well-dressed man." It is hard to imagine that he thought to ingratiate himself with the nation's earliest primary voters by trying to look like someone seeking employment at a country music radio station. Maybe it was the first step in shedding his Prince Albert image.

She never discussed the health care proposals. She kept it up in her November 4 column, complaining about the fact that Gore had dared to hire Naomi Wolf as an adviser. "We're told she was responsible for his distracting new suit, a three-button brown affair that caused much nostalgia for navy-blue serge," the award-winning columnist wrote.

Gore's suit had proven distracting that night. Thanks to Wolf, it had three buttons. Also, the suit had been brown!

This is the way these rational animals have played it since the dawn of this era, when they literally hid in the bushes hoping to catch Gary Hart on the prowl.

This is what they've done for more than three decades. This is what Lemon was doing at the start of last evening's pleasing, pointless hour. Prokupecz, Glasser, Mudd and Litman were all happy to serve as Lemon's enablers.

(Way back when, before the brown suit. Glasser joined Ceci Connolly in a pair of crackpot front-page reports about the allegedly crazy ways Candidate Gore was spending big gobs of Big Money. For two real-time reports from this site, you can just click here.)

Last night, it was Mother Russia for the full hour! This is the product the public is sold as the cable nets rake in the cash thanks to Trump. Health care proposals can walk the plank. We the people aren't "rational" enough to see what these creatures are doing.

Aristotle's famous error hides the truth about the functioning of our floundering species. Is it all anthropology now? We expect to see the new year start at this site at the start of next week.