When we visited Vienna/Wien in 2015, it coincided with diplomatic talks about Syria, at the Hotel Imperial. These were the first talks Iran deigned to attend, so the atmosphere was quite hopeful that progress could be made.
We were in the hotelâs CafĂŠ Imperial when I overheard that line from the distinguished gentleman above, presumably in one delegation or another. If you recognize the image, itâs because yes, this is the source for one of my banners.
I like looking at data. One thing I like is trends of names over time. Why? Because if youâre writing something, it makes sense the name of your character should match their age.
I like the Babynames.com site. It shows trends since 1910. (Though be careful. Enter names in the gray field right by the graph, not the darker one higher up the page â that way youâll get results.) Hereâs an example, using Jennifer, made famous for this kind of thing by the book Beyond Jennifer and Jason.
All right, but thatâs not the only source. What about Social Securityâs web site? (Go down to the âPopularity of a Nameâ box, and fill it in.) Theyâre using actual birth records as they come in.
The Social Security site shows a decline, just like Baby Names⌠but itâs much less sharp. Whatâs going on?
I had to think a while, and squint at the graphs, but I figured it out. In 1985, when the Social Security site tells us Jennifer was the 5th most popular name, the US birth rate (yes, itâs there, although not on the easiest site) was 15.461 births per 1000 people. In 2021, the most recent year listed, Jennifer was the 493rd most popular name, and the birth rate fell to 12.001 per thousand people â a drop of 22.4%.
Why is this important? Well, the Babynames chart is showing how many kids get a name. The Social Security chart shows the rank of the name among all others.
So while Jennifer was becoming less popular among names, people were having fewer babies in the first place.
Double-whammy. And thatâs why the graph looks so much more spiky.
Yes, probably few people care. But it was a fun puzzle for me.
I already knew that ssa.gov, the site for Social Security, wonât let you sign in from an iPad. It doesnât tell you thatâs the problem â you get an error message saying there are âtechnical difficultiesâ â but thatâs what happens.
ttp.cbp.dhs.gov â the site for the Trusted Traveler Program, which includes things like Global Entry â lets you sign in just fine.
irs.gov lets you sign in. Or so I thought. You can look at your account. You can make payments. But set up a payment program to pay your taxes on a monthly schedule? âTechnical difficultiesâ again.
Fortunately I have a Windows 11 laptop in here, so I could do what I needed to do. But the trial and error to find out what is allowed, and what isnât (especially since they wonât just, you know, tell me) may drive me mad someday. (Statler! Waldorf! Stop that snickering about âsomeday.â)
It looks like Iâve deleted the original of this post. Iâm going to try to reconstruct it.
I was very surprised to find out the main way opponents win sumo bouts isnât by pinning, as in Greco-Roman wrestling. While that can happen, much more frequently someone pushes their opponent out of the ring.
What occurred to me was that often, in disputes today (especially political), we see the same thing â not persuasion by merit, but tarring oneâs adversary with beliefs âall reasonable peopleâ must abhor. Famously, portraying someone as a Nazi is known to work, even though in recent years that runs afoul of Godwinâs Law. Sexism, racism, socialism (at least in the US), communism⌠all of these accusations are meant to shortcut real argument (ââŚa connected series of statements, intended to establish a definite proposition.â), and just throw the other person outside the ring.
I am aware of the irony that in writing this, and explaining what I mean if I characterize someoneâs speech as a âsumo move,â I am recursively doing the very same thing. But sometimes, thatâs how it goes.
EDITED TO ADD: My wife Ulrika, a former graduate student of philosophy, notes the following. I think itâs worth adding.
Except that it is neither recursive nor ironic to point out a sumo move.
What a true sumo move (and it isn’t argumentation, it’s propaganda — re-setting the Overton window so that a particular subject won’t be subject to argument in the first place) does is leverage social pressure and people’s sense of decency/shame to make an entire subject unavailable for discussion by casting that subject as taboo in some way. Sumo moves attack the character of anyone who broaches the subject, thus kick the entire topic outside the ring.
Conversely, observing that a sumo move has been used does nothing to prevent the topic it’s applied to from being discussed. Noting a sumo move is meta-analytic. It talks about the way that a subject is being discussed and, rightly, moves the discussion back to the actual subject, rather than the character, motives, and mental state of the people discussing it. Now, it may be true that an honest broker may experience some shame once they admit to themselves that they have been using an illicit tactic, but eliciting shame isn’t the point of pointing out a sumo move. It absolutely is the point of using one.
TIL: When an ambassador presents their diplomatic credentials to Japan, they take a horse-drawn carriage to the Imperial Palace. Fiji did that today, in the first horsey ride since it was suspended by reaction to the pandemic.
This is a nighttime photograph, by Nancy Matoba, of the soon-to-open Little Tokyo subway station in LA. Itâs of the above-ground plaza used by the station at 1st & Alameda, the approximate location of where the Atomic Cafe was, and shows the very large mural commemorating it on a stainless steel building that has a staircase and an elevator. (Compare the mural to the elevator doors for size.) The image of the Cafe at night used for the top two-thirds of the mural was made by me; the bottom third is explanatory text. You wonât even need to go underground to the rest of the station to see it. Iâm proud to join the landscape of LA, and humbled to pay tribute to the place and the Matoba family this way.
(All praise and thanks to Nancyâs daughter, Zen Sekizawa, for finding my photo online in the first place, and her tireless efforts seeing this project through with Metro. Zen first mentioned this idea to me in March, 2018, showing how the wheels of government grind slowly, and exceedingly fine.)
And the original image, from my photo portfolio site:
This video is 30 minutes long, but worth it. The text version is here. I first read it long ago, either in Co-Evolution Quarterly, or in one of the editions of the Whole Earth Catalog. I had an idea of establishing a fund at Midland to do something similar over all of campus, but like many of my ideas, nothing came of it.
Lexicon. No real context, just oft cited. Itâs from Trout Fishing in the Reflecting Pool, or The Fireside Watergate. A mass market paperback, Nicholas von Hoffman wrote the text, and Garry Trudeau did single-panel, editorial page style cartoons. One shows senator Sam Ervin saying,
Ah am not beinâ harassinâ towards the witness. Ahm beinâ gruff, and lovable, and yew know it.
The book also has the only drawings I know of Nixon by Trudeau. (Nixon was always shown speaking without being seen, in Doonesbury.)
Iâm going to give you a great example of taking one line out context. Do you remember the single sentence out of this speech that got a lot of play?
(L)ook, if youâve been successful, you didnât get there on your own. You didnât get there on your own. Iâm always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. (Applause.)
If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If youâve got a business — you didnât build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didnât get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.
The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together. There are some things, just like fighting fires, we donât do on our own. I mean, imagine if everybody had their own fire service. That would be a hard way to organize fighting fires.
So we say to ourselves, ever since the founding of this country, you know what, there are some things we do better together. Thatâs how we funded the GI Bill. Thatâs how we created the middle class. Thatâs how we built the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. Thatâs how we invented the Internet. Thatâs how we sent a man to the moon. We rise or fall together as one nation and as one people, and thatâs the reason Iâm running for President — because I still believe in that idea. Youâre not on your own, weâre in this together. (Applause.)
I think Mr. Obama is absolutely right. There have been many things we, as Americans, are very proud of, but weâre blinded by the ideology of every person for themselves.
Iâve been reminded of this speech by Mr. Obama because of this very insightful essay by Umair Haque.
Americans really believe. A certain ideology. Every person for themselves. Society stops at the boundaries of the family, which is about the only form of collective action or public good allowed. Beyond that, sure, maybe there should be public roads and schools, and thatâs about it. I wonât âtake responsibilityâ for that person, because they might be a layabout, a liability, a parasite, who costs me money, and I donât have enough of that to begin with. The strong survive, and the weak perish, and thatâs how we advance as a society.
And yet, in his final paragraphâŚ
The old myths arenât working. Itâs time for a new identity, a new form of self-belief. Hey, if weâre not just rugged, manly individualists, who are we? We could also be the America that saved the world, went to the moon, freed the slaves, and lives up to its ideals. None of those, after all, which shine like a beacon, even in these dark times, to the world and to history and to you and me â democracy, freedom, justice, truth â say anything about âonly the strong survive,â do they?
Itâs something to yearn for, anyway.
(There are other things in Mr. Haqueâs essay having to do with economics, but itâs a diversion from these points. Maybe later.)
I had heard about the efforts of a bunch of libertarians to move to Grafton, NH, and run it on libertarian principles. I never heard how it worked out, though.
Not too well, as it turns out.
If nothing else, theyâve given a great addition to storytelling. Every story sounds better with, âAnd then the bears came.â As a schtick, Iâve already used it once, and I think it works.