Derb Goes Postal On the Immigration Bill

John Derbyshire has gone postal here on the Senate immigration bill. Here's an excerpt:

The stupidity and rottenness of CIRA is really beyond the ability of a single human mind to encompass it.

And for Republicans, the most shocking, most shameful thing of all, is that this act to vastly swell the number of future Democratic voters, to bring about "the greatest expansion of the welfare state in 35 years" (Robert Rector), to kick working-class Americans in the teeth, to render meaningless the very concepts of our nation and our citizenship — in fact, to shove U.S. citizens off the sidewalk so that foreigners can be awarded special privilieges not available to us — this appalling monstrosity was cheered through by a Republican Senate at the urging of a Republican president. For shame, for shame, for shame.

I will not vote for any politician who helped pass this bill; I will not vote for any politician who says so much as a word in its favor — make that a syllable — and I will not even vote for any politician who agrees to go into conference on this horror. How big are Capitol Hill garbage bins? That's the only place this heap of dreck belongs.

John, tell us how you really feel.

RTWT (read the whole thing). I can't say I disagree.

Indispensable

This Memorial Day essay by van der Leun.

I don't often say, "I wish I'd written that." I often say it about vdL's work. I'll say it about this piece.

Go Figure--Literally?

Last night at the family table I observed that I was grateful for having been able to "make an appearance" at a distant courthouse by telephone, thus avoiding Southern California's notorious freeway traffic.

The ever-vigilant Nancy asked if I had transmitted a video image.

When I allowed as how I hadn't, she said "Then you didn't appear." I pondered this animadversion and concurred that I had an audience, but hadn't made an appearance.

The conversation went on from there. It brought to mind my children, told, at age four or so to "Get in the car," informing me "It's not a car, it's a van."

At my chorus rehearsal, by some strange coincidence, this allergy to metaphor continued. When asked to move "down" the row, I replied, "I can't, but I'll move left."

What was in the water yesterday, I can't say, but these vignettes call to mind the linguist George Lakoff, lately faddishly popular in Dem circles for his idea of "reframing" issues to make them evoke more favorable associations (substitute, say, "economic refugee" for "illegal alien" to focus on need instead of transgression). If you "comprehend" (grasp) this, go to the "head" of the class. If you don't "get" what I'm saying, you are probably "dumb" or a "dimwit." Und so weiter ("and so further").

Whatever one thinks of George's politics (not much, in my case), Lakoff's work on metaphor in daily life makes a lot more sense. The concepts that permeate our speech are mostly metaphors, often about the body. From the "rise and fall" of empires to the "firm footing" upon which our economic (from Greek oikos) policy rests, to my "recalling" last night's conversation, our speech is rife with bodily metaphor.

As my father used to point out, "literally" means "figuratively": "She was so angry, she literally exploded." "Literally" means to the letter. "Figuratively" doesn't mean "to the number," but "in the manner of an image."

Although we use the metaphors in our vocabulary automatically, they are not completely "dead." Even used unthinkingly, they retain a certain strange force. In a certain way, we do think of a political campaign as a "race" and a lawsuit as a war in which can end in "victory" or "defeat." We do think of marriage as bondage ("tying the knot," "ball and chain") or a merger of identities ("one flesh"), our lifetimes as a day ("in the late afternoon of my life," "rage, rage against the dying of the light"), and our experiences as journeys ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of death," "wandering away from the subject").

This derivation of our speech and thought from bodily experience, and its expansion beyond the body to intellectual life in general, once we notice it, illustrates how deeply we are both carnal and spiritual creatures. We can't really speak or think without reference to our bodily experience, but we constantly go beyond the merely corporeal to a wider world of concepts loosed from their bodily moorings.

This ubiquity of metaphor is important in the interpretation of texts. Their literal meaning is often only the start of the analysis. Is the story of Job a true one, or the setting for a dialogue on good, evil and theodicy, climaxing in a poetic evocation of the power and incomprehensibility of God? When Jesus says he brings not peace but a sword, he does not physically hand a sword to his followers, nor can we be certain that he is advocating killing or warfare in the literal sense. Rather than physical bloodletting, more likely He is referring to some kind of radical separation between those who choose one path and another.

The ease of some kind of interpretation, and the difficulty of choosing one, is no doubt one reason for the multiplicity of Protestant sects. One alternative to free interpretation is reliance upon a tradition of interpretation, which then takes on an importance equal to that of the text itself. That is the view of Eastern Orthodoxy in the Christian world, and of rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis, indeed, tell the story that there was an oral revelation at Sinai that was not commited to writing, passed on by generations of its custodians, that explains how the written text is to be interpreted and applied.

Even supposed constitutional originalists like Justice Scalia pay close attention to over 200 years of constitutional interpretation. Although, for example, it is not at all obvious that one should derive constitutional doctrines, like the application of parts of the Bill of Rights to the states, from the literal text of the Fourteenth Amendment, it's equally unlikely that even nine originalists on the Supreme Court would return to the pure text and start the analysis over.

Meanwhile, when the Mother Superior sings "Climb every mountain, ford every stream, follow every rainbow, till you find your dream," I won't be responding by asking her for a set of pitons and a topographic map.

NOTE: Sorry guys, no hyperlinks today. Maybe I'll add some later. Remember, you can Google anything!

UPDATE: The reference to Greek oikos as the origin of "economy" would be sheer pedantic preening, but for the omitted fact that "oikos" means "house." "Economics" is then something like "the laws of maintaining a [farm]house."

My Two DaVinci Cents

(Interruption to deal with impudent terrier). My 14-year-old and I went to see The DaVinci Code on Sunday.
The film was entertaining, to be sure, but slow in spots and hardly brilliant.

The story is rich in cryptographic arcana, which do not translate well to the screen. Explanations are required, both of the various codes and mindgames, and of the rather implausible twists and turns of the plot. Tom Hanks is rather wooden, and Ian McKellar, as many have said, chews the scenery, albeit with aplomb.

The quality of the film is not the center of the controversy, of course. This turns on the book's conceit--that the Vatican has hidden for centuries the truth that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen and has descendants, protected by a secret society, the Priory of Sion, to which Leonardo and Sir Isaac Newton, for starters, belonged.

Orthodox Christians have reacted strongly to these accusations, some with horror, and some seeing it as an opportunity to preach the orthodox gospel to a backsliding civilization. The Catholic order, Opus Dei, accused of fascism and unfairly depicted as conspiring zealots and perverts, has probably the most legitimate grievance.

On the historical front, the orthodox Christians win. The plot is contrived and full of historical howlers, such as the false claim that the Council of Nicaea, under the aegis of Constantine, established the canon of the New Testament, which was largely fixed centuries before. Or that Gnosticism, which in fact disdained the material creation and the body, was somehow a proto-feminist version of Christianity that the patriarchy suppressed.

The hooey in the plot is unlikely to shake any Christian's faith. There are so many easier ways to do that--20 minutes watching Pat Robertson, a review of the sexual abuse rampant in the Catholic clergy (as well as others), a look at scientific inaccuracies in the Bible (my favorite is Jacob's trick with the herd, based on the discredited notion of prenatal influence). It's interesting that Christians seem more concerned over a novel and a movie than over so much else in our society on the level of conduct rather than a novel and a flick, such as, for example, the widespread acceptance of gambling, the decline of family life, the sexualization of childhood, and the loss of nerve by those who should be defending the culture.

The DaVinci Code is a sideshow, a symptom of the decline of Christianity, confirming the aphorism that people who lose their faith do not believe in nothing, but will believe in anything. That, my friends, not this particular trifle from Ron Howard, is the problem.

Infectious Homosexuality?

A comment I made over at Dr. Serani's blog has given rise to quite a few responses.

Dr. Serani was reporting on research that suggested possible genetic factors in human homosexual orientation. I questioned the genetic hypothesis on natural selection grounds--a gene that promoted homosexual behavior would tend to be eliminated from the population because such behavior doesn't favor reproductive success.

(An exception would be a case where the positive effect of a partial expression of a gene balanced the negative effect of the complete expression, a condition known as "adaptive polymorphism.")

It's much more plausible that a strong homosexual orientation is the result of some kind of infectious agent, such as a virus. The idea is not original with me, but was presented in a paper by Paul Ewald and Gregory Cochran, which Steve Sailer reproduced on his blog. Here's an excerpt:

Phenomena that strongly reduce the evolutionary fitness of their bearers cannot be maintained by strictly genetic causation at frequencies far above the rates at which they could be generated by mutation. The fitness costs of male homosexuality place it in this category. Perhaps more importantly, each of the hypotheses that have been put forward to explain male homosexuality have critical flaws that, if not sufficient to cause their outright rejection, are sufficient to severely weaken them. A full consideration of these issues is beyond the scope of this essay, but we briefly summarize the most salient points below.

Human homosexuality can be traced back at least several thousand years. A substantially genetic cause could not be maintained over this time because of the great fitness costs that homosexuality imposes, unless there is some compensating benefit. But no evidence for a compensating benefit exists. Inclusive fitness benefits, for example, seem insufficient to overcome the reduction in reproduction, because male homosexuals do not channel their resources into the well-being of kin at an increased level. One could try to rescue the genetic causation hypothesis by arguing that reproductive effects of homosexuality have changed substantially in recent generations, with homosexual men having had just as many offspring as heterosexual men in previous centuries. This possibility seems unlikely from what is known about modern homosexual behavior, but it could be investigated empirically from historical records. A primarily genetic basis, however, is negated by the low monozygotic twin concordance, which is about 20 percent. Accordingly, the allele that purportedly conferred homosexual orientation has not stood up to independent testing .

Another hypothesis is that male homosexuality results from novel sociocultural influences, but the attraction to reproductive partners of a reproductively feasible sex seems so critical to evolutionary fitness that one would expect these attractions to be strongly buffered against social effects that could generate a preference for exclusive sexual relations with members of the same sex. The occurrence of exclusive male/male sexual preferences in sheep shows that cultural "powers of suggestion" are not necessary to generate the phenomenon. (Sheep do not watch television, read newspapers, or discuss alternatives lifestyles.) A brief consideration of ungulate and human infections should be sufficient to counter the natural inclination to dismiss the phenomena in sheep as irrelevant to humans; many important human infectious agents, such as HIV, herpes viruses, the measles virus, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, borna disease virus, and prions, have related pathogens in sheep or other ungulates that have similar effects.

In contrast with difficulties of noninfectious explanations of homosexuality, the hypothesis of infectious causation does not incorporate critical logical flaws or contradictions of fundamental biological principles. Indeed, anecdotal reports indicate that changes in human sexual orientation have occurred following changes in the limbic area due to trauma or infection One possible route would be sexual, whereby homosexual behavior could facilitate spread because of the larger numbers of
partners homosexual males may have on average, relative to heterosexual males. Alternatively, transmission could be partly or entirely by one or more nonsexual routes, and homosexual orientation be a side effect of the infection that is unrelated to transmission.

Although this hypothesis of infectious causation may generate a negative knee-jerk response, such responses are not reliable indicators of the validity of scientific hypotheses. The critical weaknesses of the alternative hypotheses draw attention to the need for rigorous testing of any hypothesis that has a sound theoretical basis, even if we find the hypothesis disturbing and disorienting. The presence of the phenomenon in sheep allows for experimental tests.

Although the Ewald/Cochran hypothesis remains unproven, it certainly seems plausible on the surface.

In making this point, I am neither adopting nor rejecting any moral or policy view of homosexual conduct or orientation. That's a different subject for a different day, although the issue of causation is not entirely irrelevant to debate on these questions. Many homosexual advocates emphasize what they claim is the fixed nature of the orientation, no doubt hoping that a genetic cause would make homosexuality more like race, an inherent characteristic for which people should not be penalized.

Nor am I trying to bring the negative connotations of "infection" to bear on the question.

Other commenters have tried to be clever by asking about the causes of heterosexuality. From the point of natural selection, of course, that's a non-question. Heterosexuals breed, homosexuals much less so.

Investigation will tend to confirm or negate this hypothesis, regardless of its policy consequences. Nor should such investigations be discouraged because some people might not like the results.

As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.

(Proverbs 26: 11)

Roy Nagin has been reelected Mayor of New Orleans.

Look at this picture. No further comment necessary.

Mold In the Fridge of History

A lot of conservative bloggers make a habit of attending and reporting on left-wing rallies and parades.

Here, The Age of Hooper posts video of a "Hands Off Cuba and Venezuela" affair in DC. The folks at this particular rally are particularly creepy and stereotypical: harridans with bullhorns, senile hippies, black race hustlers without followers.

The march was sponsored by International ANSWER, a creature of the Workers' World Party, which was creepy in the Sixties, when they had a front group called YAWF. No, not "Yet Another Weirdo Fanclub," but "Youth Against War and Fascism."

"Youth" is a word once found in the poems of A.E.Housman, but nowadays is only used by communists and prison bureaus.

In his memoirs, Victor Serge, a Russian revolutionary and later an anti-Stalinist of sorts, describes the milieu of pre-1914 Paris--the same mix of vegetarians, spriritualists, socialists and what-not filled the salons. This food has been sitting in the same refigerator for a century or more--and man, is it moldy!

Exactly

Mark Helprin is a novelist who also writes about politics, and takes a hard line on Islamism and national security.

In this piece, he gets it almost exactly right about the immigration debate.

It's about the basics of sovereignty, and the dangers of a binational state.

Power Point of the Year

The Gettysburg Address, no less.

Trés amusant.

Abe Rosenthal, Olav Ha-Shalom

I see where Abe Rosenthal, once a macher at the New York Times, has died.

He was an opinionated s.o.b., and couldn't write for s**t, but he stood up for what he believed, rather than swarming with the Hive.

In these days when the Gray Lady has become a crack whore, he is missed.

The Rapture Has Been Postponed

This might be an urban legend. Even if I were a Saturday Night Live writer, I'd never have thought this one up:

" A Little Rock woman was killed yesterday after leaping through her moving car's sunroof during an incident best described as a 'mistaken rapture' by dozens of eye-witnesses. Thirteen other people were injured after a twenty car pile-up resulted from people trying to avoid hitting the woman, who was apparently convinced the rapture was occuring when she thought she saw twelve people floating into the air, and then passed a man on the side of the road who she believed was Jesus. "She started screaming 'He's back! He's back!' and climbed out through the sun roof and jumped off the roof of the car." said Everet Williams, husband of 28 year-old Georgeann Williams who was pronounced dead at the scene. I was slowing down but she wouldn't wait until I stopped," Williams said. "She thought the rapture was happening and was convinced that Jesus was gonna lift her up into the sky," he went on to say.

"This is the strangest thing I've seen since I have been on the force," said Paul Mason, first officer on the scene. Madison questioned the man who looked like Jesus and discovered that he was on the way to a costume party, when the tarp covering the bed of his pickup truck came loose and released twelve blow-up sex dolls filled with helium, which then floated into the sky. Ernie Jenkins, 32, of Fort Smith, who has been told several times by his friends he looks like Jesus, pulled over and lifted his arms into the air in frustration saying 'Come back, come back,' just as the Williams car passed him. Mrs. Williams was sure it was Jesus lifting people up into heaven as they drove by Jenkins. When asked for comments about the twelve sex dolls, Jenkins replied 'This is all just too weird for me. I never expected anything like this to happen.'"

From Ben Witherington.

UPDATE: Snopes says it's an urban legend. Someone had time on his hands and a wicked imagination.

The Arithmetic of Mass Deportation

Many who have commented on the immigration issue, including me, have assumed that it's logistically and politically impossible to deport the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country.

I'm not saying that it's a good idea, but for the sake of argument, I did the math. Assuming there are 12 million illegal immigrants and one wanted to deport them over a 3-year period, that would be four million deportations a year, or 333,333 per month. Rounding to 300,000, tht's 10,000 a day. At fifty passengers per bus, that would be 200 busloads per day. Dividing these over 10 border crossings (2 in San Diego, Tecate, Mexicali, Yuma, Douglas, 2 in El Paso, Nuevo Laredo and Brownsville), we average only 20 buses per crossing, or less than one per hour.

If we were to replace some of the buses with airplanes, the burden would be even less.

The cost of people to round up all the deportees, to process them (setting aside the question of legal process and attendant costs and delays), and hold them so they would not melt away once apprehended is another matter, as is the question of whether the media and the political system would be obstacles to such a process.

The physical process of deportation, however, is not impossible.

Obviously, there's no point to it, unless we fence the border and stop releasing arrested illegal aliens on bail, which means new holding facilities. Requiring identification for, or taxing remissions of funds, might also be an effective step.

This hypothetical has assumed that all illegals came through Mexico. Not so. Many are Asian and European and stay by overstaying legal visas. These folks have to be repatriated by plane.

The problem of mass repatriation is not logistical. It's political.