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Violence
In the Journal of Criminal Justice, Andrew T. Krajewsi, Richard B. Felson, and Mark T. Berg ask “When is Violence Honorable?” It’s well known that honor cultures breed violence, but they don’t view all violence as equally honorable and so could be expected to increase some kinds more than others. Based on interviews with inmates they find guys who are more into honor are more likely to attack other guys, but not necessarily more likely to hit women.
Note you get different flavors of honor culture in different societies, so the results might not generalize to all of them. See, for instance, Mark Cooney’s work on family honor violence: “Death by Family,” “Family Honor and Social Time,” and Execution by Family. Middle Eastern family honor is a bit different than Western individualistic honor.
Speaking of violence in cultures different from mine: Mungo Manic has a video on “How Aboriginal Australians Waged War.”
A few years ago, I did a post on fragging — assassinating a superior officer with a grenade — among US forces in Vietnam. I just recently learned that Confederate general Braxton Bragg was the target of a primitive fragging attempt with an artillery shell.
Regarding genocide, Ben Landau-Taylor asks “Why Do Victims of Massacres Go Quietly to Their Deaths?” It’s a good question. He gives examples of Jews during the Holocaust waiting in long lines for their turn to go up to the mass grave and be shot. I also recall Dan Carlin mentioning something similar with massacres carried out by the Mongol army, like when one Mongol told a group of captives to wait while he went to fetch his sword so he could kill them. And in his book Violence: A Microsociological Theory, Randall Collins writes of the paralysis that affects the defeated side after a military route, with the frozen defeated mercilessly slaughtered in what he calls a forward panic.
Sociology
Professor of sociology and criminal justice Brendan Dooley reviews Bradley Campbell’s How to Think Better about Social Justice: Why Good Sociology Matters. He describes it as “a tough love attempt to make sociology a dismal science again through cogently accounting for all the ways in which its professional praxis has not served it well.”
As a reminder, I interviewed Campbell on the book. Which reminds me that I haven’t done a podcast interview in a while. I’ve got a couple requests out, but drop me a line if you’d like to talk.
Homeschooling
I recently ordered Catherine Ross’s Shapes in Math, Science, and Nature and was pleasantly surprised with the richness of the content (there’s stuff you can do for different age/grade levels) and how much my kids were interested in it (especially the craft activities). I lost track of who turned me onto this, but it was probably Ivana Greco.
On math education, I took notice of two long-form posts on X. Anatoly Vorobey talks about his experience tutoring in math.
Instead of giving problems and going away, we're sitting together, and I try to do this daily or almost daily. I'm generating simple and routine problems that should be straightforward to solve, and TK (The Kid) attempts to solve them right away. When she errs, I correct her immediately, in a maximally non-judgmental and constructive way as best I can. I continue firing off problems from different areas of math & programming ("interleaved learning") and try to come back and reinforce things after correction ("spaced repetition"). For now, I'm doing the variety bit and the spaced repetition bit manually, but I may switch to drawing plans or writing a simple program to help me manage the planning. I just started with this a few weeks ago, but lots of things feel better about this way of tutoring (which in learning theory jargon is more or less Direct Instruction as far as I can see). I can see where there are gaps in fundamentals, and we are reinforcing them.
Math Academy’s Justin Skycak responds with his own lengthy post. One line that jumped out to me:
Word problems would need to be a separate topic that the student gets repetitions on….The vast majority of students need to be taught this stuff explicitly and it takes lots of repetitions spaced out over time before it becomes a natural reflex (kind of like muscle memory).
Teaching my own son, I was surprised to realize that a lot of what my mind now lumps together as the same thing is actually a group of separate skills, each of which must be learned independently. Solving 5+4= is a different skill then solving the fill-in-the-blank 5+__ = 9 is different than the word problem “Jimmy has 5 melons, Donnie has 4 melons, how many melons are there?”
Conversations
At Experimental History, Adam Mastroianni asks “Do Conversations End When People Want Them To?” In one survey he finds the answer is mostly “no,” though people are split between whether their last conversation went on too long or not long enough. He followed up with an experiment that paired volunteers for a conversation in a lab: “52% wanted it to end sooner, and 31% wanted it to keep going.”
The most interesting thing is that there were many cases where each partner was in agreement, with both thinking it too short or both thinking it too long. Mastroianni writes:
Maybe that’s because a conversation is like a ride down the highway: you’re really only supposed to exit at certain times. But the exits themselves are pretty spread out, so you’re probably not going to be on top of one at the exact moment you start feeling ready to leave. Technically, you can get off the highway between exits, but you might have to drive through some bushes or crash through a wall—that’s what it feels like to, say, leave in the middle of someone’s story. So instead, you wait until the next exit comes (and you end up as a “too long”), or you get off before you really want to (and you end up as a “too short”).
He was also surprised how much participants seemed to like conservations with strangers even when from the outside they appeared extremely dull and awkward. People who seemed to be struggling to come up with something to say would go on for 45 minutes and later giving high ratings of enjoyment and low ratings of awkwardness.
I think a lot of us bookish types drastically underestimate the sociability of the average person. In fact, we might underestimate our own sociability. I find that smalltalk is like exercise, in that even if I don’t want to do it beforehand, I tend to feel better afterward. But I’m less inclined to be disciplined about making time for conversation than I am about making time for exercise.
Note that I’m not counting committee meetings as conversation, though I think people more socially starved than myself actually like these as well.
Fertility
Perhaps more sociability in general would lead to more babies. The US fertility rate hit a new low of 1.6 last year.
Andrew Glover in Quillette talks about the amazing lack of institutional concern with the baby bust:
This contrasts starkly with how we have responded to other long-term threats. Climate change, for example, is discussed at every level of governance, from local councils to global treaties. It has dedicated agencies, major funding streams, and entire industries devoted to mitigating its effects. Climate concerns occupy a central place in media, politics, and academia. Fertility decline, by comparison, has attracted little sustained attention and few institutions dedicate any time or money at all to solving it.
Some of the issue, he notes, is that in elite circles, pronatalism is icky — associated with nationalists, religious traditionalists, and other low status outgroups.
Ironically, an attempt to prevent pregnancies might have accidentally discovered the solution: One study reports that when Australian girls were made to care for simulated babies as a way to scare them out of having real ones, they were more likely to get pregnant. (h/t Randall Parker)
It’s almost like there’s some sort of instinct that gets tickled by caring for a baby.
Given the baby bust, we should probably have some more research on how changing demography affects kinship systems. What does it look like when people born 20 years apart have drastically different numbers of siblings and cousins?
There’s some good news for South Korea, which has the rock bottom birth rate of .78: Births unexpectedly surged in the first quarter of the year. It correlates with a recent increase in marriages: “In 2024, the country saw a 14.8 percent on-year increase in the number of marriages, with more than 220,000 couples tying the knot.”
Which is occurring in spite of our next topic.
Gender and Moral Culture in Korea
Richard Hanania examines some peculiarities of the feminist and anti-feminist discourse in Korea. He finds it especially odd that anti-feminists are looking for feminist dog-whistles about men having small penises:
This is not a fringe view in Korea. The Wikipedia page on the conspiracy lists dozens of controversies in which celebrities, corporations, and government agencies have issued apologies or explanations for supposedly mocking men’s small penises, spanning from 2021 to late 2024.
He finds it weird because a man trying to convince others that he’s found a hidden message mocking small penises would seem to be opening himself up to the accusation that he is super insecure over his own.
He connects this to another feature of Korean anti-feminism: Rather than emphasizing differences between men and women, it calls for greater similarities — for instance, for compulsive military service to be extended to women as well as men.
He then speculates on reasons that the feminist vs. antifeminist phenomenon looks different in Korea than elsewhere. Options include lack of masculine role models, high cultural homogeneity, and too much globalization.
Hanania suggests Korean men are more prone to victimhood culture. I’ve previously written on potential for the rise of victimhood culture in Korea, mostly with reference to the antibullying movement. I concluded the gender divide seemed more conducive to forming a collective victim identity, though I didn’t emphasize men’s victimization claims.
Regarding Hanania’s point about masculine virtues and role models: The examples of manliness he gives (samurai, vikings) are examples from honor culture, which thrives in places where state power is weak and fragmented. China and Korea have long had extensive bureaucratic states that selected elites with extensive schooling and examinations. And as little brother to China — who bore the brunt of steppe invaders — Korea had little role for high-ranking tough guys. Even the mighty Yi Sun Sin got sidelined in court politics.
I talk about such things in my post “Moral Cultures: East Asian Edition Part 1.”
Religion
At The Free Press, a piece on “How Intellectuals Found God” by Peter Savodnik. It profiles a half dozen formerly irreligious or antireligious figures who’ve either found faith or at least decided it’s basically a good thing. Richard Dawkins, though, is as vehemently opposed as ever, and even regrets those “cultural Christian” comments he made a few years ago.
A few cases doesn’t make a trend. There’s some sign the decline of Christianity in the US has levelled off for the time being, but still about 44% of Gen Z identify as having no religion at all.
HistoryExtra goes over the antiquity of the near-Eastern flood narrative. The Jews weren’t the only people to have a story of a Great Flood that wipes out everything except for one man charged with saving animals to repopulate the Earth. You might already know a similar flood account crops up in The Epic of Gilgamesh. The oldest written version is “the Atra-Hasis Epic, a myth composed in the Old Babylonian period (c. 1900–1600 BCE).” Both predate the earliest written versions of the Bible.
Christian Bible scholar John Walton acknowledges the ubiquity of the flood narrative, but for him it’s not reason to doubt scripture — it’s cultural context for interpreting it. What in the Genesis version would have been revelation to a people already familiar with the basic flood narrative?
In Walton’s view, scripture is divinely inspired but always delivered into a particular cultural context. For example, Israelite cosmology was something they already had (and mostly shared with neighboring civilizations) and so the creation in Genesis isn’t informing them about cosmology as such, but informing them that God gave order and purpose to this [world-as-you-currently-understand-it].
Also, he figures the Garden of Eden was a sacred grove.
Interestingly, one also gets flood stories from cultures far removed from ancient Mesopotamia, such as among plains Indians in North America. They might be real memories of the massive glacial melt around 10,000 years ago.
Music
The only music recommendations that matter are the ones from the friends you had when you were in your late teens and early 20s, when your tastes gel for life. But just in case any of you already share mine:
Tool fans might not be aware of this video of the band performing “You Lied” live during their 1998 tour (around the time they recorded Salival). Their rendition is a cover of a song by bassist Justin Chancellor’s former band Peach. Here is the original.
Lesser known is Tool’s cover of Peach’s “Spasm.” The original version is here.
More recently, Tool played a set in the UK to open for Black Sabbath’s farewell show, just two weeks before Ozzy Osborne passed. Their set included a cover of Sabbath’s “Hand of Doom.”
Ozzy’s passing made it one of the best-timed farewell concerts ever, and gives a lot of resonance to Sabbath’s last ever performance of “Mama I’m Coming Home.” Ozzy is in a throne because health problems left him unable to stand, but his voice holds up pretty well.
It was never their most famous song, but I’ve long had a soft spot for Sabbath’s Lovecraft-inspired “Behind the Wall of Sleep.”
On unusual covers: Here’s a cello cover of Tool’s “Lateralus.” And I’ve long loved this cover of their “46&2 “by the youngsters at the O’Keefe Music Foundation.
The Foundation turns out good music videos. Here’s a clever 80s pairing with appropriate costumes and setting: “Power of Love,” by Huey Lewis and the News, and “Walk Like An Egyptian” by the Bangles.
It’s only my second favorite “Walk Like an Egyptian” cover, though, after the one by Joe Queer and the Nobody’s. For other punk/ska takes on 80’s songs, see “Boys of Summer” by the Ataris and “Take on Me” by Reel Big Fish.
If you want 90’s music, here’s the O’Keefe kids doing Blur’s Song#2.
80’s covers were nostalgic when I was in college, though it pains me to realize that we’re now further from these than they were from the originals. Do college kids now have this kind of thing for 2015 music? Or did cultural trends really freeze around the time iPhones blew up? Or maybe is it too fragmented to tell?
Ghost of Links Past
I can’t believe I’ve been doing this schtick for three years. My links roundup from last July was one of my highly viewed posts, and covered such things as Brazilian cults, drone warfare, the films of Don Knotts, ancient history, and the antics of comic writer Mike Baron.
The July before that featured weird science about germs, the Curse of the Fire Horse, UFO conspiracy grifts, social mobility research, the incapacitation effect of prisons, the Marian reforms of the Roman military, and the logic of index investing.
It’s like a box of chocolates, folks, you never know what you’re going to get. Go ahead and subscribe — unless you’re a man with a small penis. You can also leave a one-time tip at this Stripe link or with Paypal.
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