Jo

Those of us who like math are usually very good at it, and really like it; but liking math is rarer than it is here. We have wars less, but we fund R&D more because our cultures usually valorize SCIENCE!. The end result is that in most areas our tech is behind yours, but in some areas we’re ahead. For example, we do have a colony on the Moon, even though we never had a Space Race, but we haven’t figured out nuclear energy. 

(...We did spare some war criminals to work on our space program, just like you did. We’re big on clemency, and we’re big on extracting resources, so. Most of us are actually pretty proud of it: we frame it as taking people who were making the world worse, and using them to make the world better.)

Your American politics are so boring. We have the Morningstars, who believe that action is ethically different from inaction, and so argue to abolish taxes; the Mordecais, who say that no one has the right to own a means of production; the Aaronids, who say that the only correct laws were revealed in Midian by the national god of Israel; the Hobbesians, who say that the state should have ultimate power; the Sons of Matthew, who say that there should be certain rules that citizens can break but the state can’t; the Gilwells, who are a lot like what you would call virtue ethicists, but who tend to see loyalty and compassion as the highest virtues; the Terminals, who actively worship the abstract concept of Good and change their positions on every issue the moment one of them wins a partywide ethical argument over the other; the Tomatoes (a derogatory name they reclaimed) who believe in both the value of hard work and the inherent compensation due thereof; the Trionfis, who say that true understanding of Good is outside human reach, and as a result make all decisions by lot; the Aesthetes, who believe that art is the highest end of anything and everyone (including humanity); the Advocates of Doom, who believe that humanity should be sterilized (exactly how consensual this process should be varies between members); and of course the Paulites, the Johannines, the Papists, the Marcans, and the Lucans. A lot of the policy proposals, and the moral feelings, are here in America, but everyone here is so unprincipled, and your system is only democratic in that the totally uneducated public elect politicians in line with their own unexamined prejudices! 

You guys also have really weird history. In my world, burning books or modifying records is generally seen as a crime on par with rape or slavery. Even in countries (most of them in the past) where the king had almost absolute power, an attempt to corrupt records kept by the priesthood or a noble family would often be met by rebellion. Today, every civilized country has its own dedicated department of history and archiving, and the Priests of Truth who join the Order of Historiography are protected by international treaty just like the Red Crystal. (Similar to your Geneva Conventions, violating the provisions of the Universal Treaty of Minimum Ethics is generally met with, for example, being publicly executed even if you’ve surrendered. We do make the executions quick and painless, though, to provide an incentive for surrender.) Even regular citizens who keep diaries are asked to bequeath them to the libraries under a hundred-year seal. 

I think part of it is due to your weird dislike for rules. In my world, one of the war criminals whose death sentence got commuted in exchange for lifetime servitude came up with this way to classify human psychology. He said that for reasons unknown there is a group of traits that tend to increase or decrease with each other in degree between humans. Every human exists at a point on this gradient. (Later this was demonstrated thoroughly to be a dramatic oversimplification, but this is just the basic idea.) People who are far along this spectrum are essentially what we would consider unnervingly human: they might have an obsession with rules, or with ordinary hand movements, or find annoying lights and textures to be overwhelmingly so. People who are far behind on this spectrum are what we had to name after the discoverer, since we didn’t already have a word for them. Such people see no problem with breaking rules all the time, make strange hand movements and have unusual tics, have a strange fixation with eye contact, and may have odd sensory preferences. Interestingly, many of them are savants, in that they often have an extraordinary ability to recognize faces and read from facial expressions and bodily mannerisms what people are thinking. (They’re also really good at memorizing people’s names.) They also tend to have strong willpower, which is hypothesized to be a sort of compensation for the fact that they aren’t guaranteed to do something just because it’s on the schedule. I think that most people on Earth have that condition. It makes me a bit more of a fish out of water, as one might guess.

Sex is ridiculous here. You people consider cuddling to be a sex act always and only when at least one of the participants is male, half the population refuses to date members of the same sex(!), romantic relationships are automatically prioritized over friendships(!!), and you guys romanticize not clearly communicating that you want sex(!!!). What in heaven’s name went wrong with your culture?!

Also, I get that you guys have your prejudices - we have lots of prejudices too, we’re only human - but for some reason a bunch of you think that trying to overcome them is evil? Just because you think that being principled is evil? I still don’t understand that. Like, sure, it’s one thing to oppose principles, but why on Humus do you have elected officials who openly admit on tv that just because you legalize same-sex marriage under the Equal Protection Clause doesn’t mean that you are therefore obligated to legalize polygamous marriage?!

The United States also has what we would consider to be appallingly and dangerously vague customs of speech, but I get that it’s a totally valid adaptation to the near-universal Asperger’s here. On Evelynworld, we have a special hand gesture to use when you’re flirting, and a certain designated movement to do when you’re being sarcastic, and all sorts of tenses to make it clear how counterfactual a world you’re talking about, and a kind of snapping motion you make to communicate that you want advice versus simple commiseration; and everyone has a piece of jewelry they wear to communicate how much and under what circumstances they lie (and all of that stuff has equivalents for the blind and/or limbless). You guys can just wing it. Though I strongly suspect that you are worse off for your reluctance to ask personal questions.

The US Constitution allows federal employees (in certain circumstances) to heed Jesus' alleged proclamation that you shouldn't make per-se promises. Did Jesus actually believe this?

In Matthew, Jesus says that a religious doctrine says "'You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.'" (Mt 5:33 NRSV; Ruden has "'you are not to violate your oath: you are to fulfill your oaths to the lord.'"). By the looks of it, that doctrine implies that oaths are okay, but you shouldn't break them.

Jesus, in Matthew, then goes on to say that He disagrees with that doctrine, or at least wants to add to it: "But I say to you, Do not swear at all, either by heaven, for it is by the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is his footstool, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great King." By the looks of it, that statement probably implies that you should not swear by anything that is in God's direct and immediate domain, because God owns it and His ownership includes the right to swear by it. I don't think this statement alone totally rules out all swearing, because He says either by heaven or by the earth, or by Jerusalem; presumably swearing by, eg, pincushions is not prohibited by this statement alone.

Jesus, in Matthew, then goes on to say "And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make one hair white or black." In context, probably this means that you can't even swear on things that are theoretically yours more than God's ⁽¹⁾ if they will not actually enforce your commitment. (The Oxford Annotated Bible, Fifth Edition, says that the head is also under God's domain, so it's the same as swearing by the heavens; Dr Vermes suggests that you're swearing by your life, which I'll grant is definitely enforceable provided only that there's some mechanism to determine the objective veracity of your failure or success in keeping your word.)

Jesus, in Matthew, then goes on to say "Let your word be 'Yes, Yes' or 'No, No'; anything more than this comes from the evil one." (or "from evil."). This seems refreshingly straightforward…but of course it is not necessarily what it seems.

Franklin Pierce would have it that affirming something is fine (eg, "Yes, to be clear, I reiterate my statement") but placing a kind of affirmation as inherently superior to ordinary statements is a no-no; when you say "I'll do it" then you should do it 100% of the time, so there's no reason that adding the word "I swear" should change the substantive content of your statement. Cf. Philo, Decalogue 84, cited in Vermes The Authentic Gospel of Jesus 5.34; or the Essenians described by Josephus in War 2:135, cited ibid. This is what James believes; see Jm 5:12.

However, you could alternatively say that Jesus will allow you to say "I'll do it" when you're 80% sure you'll do it, and "I'll really really do it" when you're 99% sure you'll do it; He'll totally allow you to verbally communicate varying levels of commitment; the only swearing He prohibits is agreeing to a compulsion which you do not actually have the power to compel to compel you; like, if I say "And if I'm lying, may God infect the burn on my hand!" then I am attempting to subpoena God, which I do not have the power to do, whereas if I say "I really really guarantee this" then I am legitimately alleging especial certainty.

⁽²⁾

Dr Vermes suggests that the Matthew passage is against swearing by God because if you for whatever reason fail to follow through then you've just committed sacrilege; I don't think the passage can really back that interpretation, but he's probably right anyway!

(I'll put in a paragraph on what the New Interpreter's Bible says about this at some point.)

So what are we to make of this?

Let's assume that the Matthean Evangelist wrote this down word-for-word, and Jesus actually said all this in exactly this phrasing. It seems pretty clear that Jesus thinks we shouldn't guarantee our promises via enforcement mechanisms that probably won't actually function in the event of our default; in other words, don't swear by something that won't actually enforce your oath. It looks like Jesus is okay with guaranteeing something by saying "Yes definitely I super for sure guarantee it." What's really ambiguous is what Jesus thinks of backing up your guarantee with a functioning enforcement mechanism; you would assume that Jesus is okay with contracts enforceable by law, for example, and yet He does technically say that anything ⁽³⁾ more than "Yes, definitely" is the product OF SATAN!!! But in context, that kinda comes out of nowhere! Jesus explains why you should swear by (a) God, (b) the earth, (c) your head, or (e) Jerusalem, and then apparently also states flatly that you can't swear by (fghijklmnop...) anything else either, for unspecified reasons? Maybe Jesus is saying that you shouldn't use supernatural means to show the veracity of something, but using enforcement mechanisms to penalize proven breaches is okay?

What if the Matthean Evangelist got a couple details wrong? We don't know what his source was for this; it's not in Mark or Luke, probably not in Q. The author of James was at least partially working off Matthew, so who knows if he's got a good source on his interpretation. The sheer oddness of Jesus changing gears vis-a-vis certain backings for (a) oaths, versus (b) all backed oaths, might imply that the Matthean Evangelist or one of his sources did indeed screw up the reporting a bit…but let's face it, weird over-the-top condemnations out of nowhere are pretty darn in-character for Jesus.

Certainly if you believe that the entire standard-canonical New Testament is the literally true Word of God, then you definitely must believe that James is right in saying that you should never swear any oath, whether or not you're purporting any enforceability.

In conclusion, if you think that the Matthean Evangelist is reporting more or less accurately on the Word of God, then don't swear by something if you can't realistically guarantee its popping in to enforce your swearing. (That's just good sense anyway.) This category includes God, because you do not have the power to subpoena God. (Also just good sense.) You can swear oaths which are special extra-sure guarantees, at least if you're not purporting to back them up with anything besides your honesty. (This is also just practical; I want to distinguish between "Ho hum, I'm off to the post office" and "I swear to you that I will go to the post office, come heck or high water, no matter what".) If you want to play it extra safe, don't swear oaths that have any enforcement mechanisms at all (highly impractical! how am I supposed to enter into any legally enforceable contract, such as buying an orange? well, if our whole society decided to go with this interpretation, we could figure something out; look at how well Orthodox communities manage that sort of thing), though maybe you can get away with simply avoiding oaths whose intact status is determined by supernatural means (which is just good sense anyway).

I don't see any problem, Christ-wise or practical, with saying "I solemnly swear to faithfully execute the office" provided that you do in fact intend to faithfully execute the office and think it highly likely that you will; however, if you believe that James is literally true, then it would indeed be a sin.

Right, so, something you occasionally see people do in reaction to the atheist commie libby transes is say "My pronouns are 'His Majesty'."

What's the problem with that?

Some libbies shrug and say, "Sure thing, Your Majesty; no skin off my nose if I call you that." Because really, who cares. But I say that doesn't go far enough.

As an American, I believe strongly (relative to much of the world) in egalitarianism. Because of this, in my writing, I do not refer to people by their rank-titles unless it is to introduce them. I will say "Justice Scalia said the following", but for the rest of the paragraph he is 'Mr Scalia'. (Heck, I'm often inclined to refer to 'Mr Mountbatten-Windsor' and 'Mr Shakespeare'.) However, that is only when I am referring to them. When I am speaking to them, I will address them by their title for the sake of politeness. I will say (this is a made-up example) "Doctor Súileabhánach takes a dim view of Lord Steyn's reasoning in Chester v Afshar: Ms Súileabhánach alleges that Mr Steyn's citation of Fairchild is illegitimate", but when I am speaking to her I will say "But Doctor Súileabhánach, what about the precedent of Boland?". For the same reason  –  namely, politeness  –  I will refer to people by the pronouns they request. I may not believe that someone is a female per se, but I'll still refer to them as 'she'. I don't believe the Pope is any holier than (say) a particularly learned vicar in Essex, but I'll still refer to him as 'His Holiness'. It's just being polite.

Furthermore, because I believe strongly in egalitarianism, I don't think any royal pronouns are more valid than any others! What right does Mr Mountbatten-Windsor have to be 'His Majesty' just because he was born to certain parents? What right does that architecture student at St Johns have to be 'Her Serene Highness' while I'm 'they' because she was born to Astrid and I was born to Ingrid? (Compare how the lefty senator from Vermont said that he appreciates his constituents, to whom he is their servant, referring to and addressing him as his forename alone.)

Now, the obvious conclusion is to say "By gosh, nobody has a right to use royal pronouns! Hereditary aristocracy is dumb and bad and so if I ever meet the King I'm calling him 'Mr Mountbatten-Windsor'." (Presumably life peers would still be entitled to their, er, titles.) But that wouldn't be polite, now, would it. 

So: nobody is more entitled to royal pronouns than anyone else is. As such, everyone has an equal right to royal pronouns. Thus, if someone requests royal pronouns, then not only is it polite to accede, but they have as much of a right to it as Elizabeth II did.

"But royal pronouns are a fake societal construct that people only incorporate into their 'identity' because it affects how they're perceived by themselves and others!" Buddy have I got some news for you about gender.

One could argue that, sure, everyone has an equal moral right (if not legal right) to royal pronouns, but what about 'His Holiness', 'Her Honor', 'His Excellency', and other titles that refer to earned position rather than mere birth? Surely those should be reserved for persons who have actually had those titles conferred upon them, with perhaps a further restriction that blatant incompetence and corruption doesn't count? Sure, okay. I'm just here about royal titles. Probably there should also be an exception for misleading uses of 'His Supreme Highness' or other things that denote actual governmental power…though by the same token one should put in scare quotes such titles for powerless monarchs-in-name-only like Charles III.

Confusingly (yet perhaps correctly), we use the phrase "good writer" to mean two different things. More than two, actually, but I will here enumerate two.

The first is skill at putting words together to make prose. That kind of good writer writes sentences which: are easy to read, use beautiful words, have excellent rhythm, or whatever. This kind of good writer includes people who are great at explaining complicated scientific things, and people who write beautiful poems about nice orchards. (Probably it also includes people who are very good at writing persuasively.) Regardless of how good or accurate you think their books are overall, this category includes writers like Sam Harris, CS Lewis, Richard Feynman, and Vladimir Nabokov. This is often referred to as being a good stylist. (It is also often referred to as being a good prose stylist, but I think that this distinction is the same with poetry as with prose.)

The second is skill at coming up with fictional stories. That kind of good writer produces: rich characterization, incredibly original settings, narratives that make us look at our world differently, or whatever. (Probably it also includes people who are very good at investigative journalism, or at ordinary journalism, since that involves sculpting a coherent narrative – even though the narrative happens to be true; so maybe this skill is just skill at coming up with stories, whether or not they be fictional.) Regardless of how good you think they are at being a good stylist, this category includes writers like JRR Tolkien, Harper Lee, and Bram Stoker.

Shakespeare is generally regarded as being both of the two.

The weird thing is, those two categories are pretty different! Isaac Asimov is a great writer, but nobody on God's green Earth thinks he's a great stylist. Most people think that Emily Brontë is good at words, but the plot in Wuthering Heights leaves something to be desired. Yet few people would say that Isaac Asimov or Emily Brontë aren't good writers.

Indeed, the confusion can be darned dangerous: we all know that great writers can make false things sound awfully true. John Locke, Ted Kaczynski, and Lord Denning are all excellent prose stylists (and at least two of them I would call downright stupendous).

And even within the same categories, there is lots of division. You know how I mentioned Bram Stoker earlier? He wrote a heck of a compelling story, but it has all kinds of weird internal contradictions and inconsistencies that he didn't intend, including swapping out the cowboy for the protagonist in the final scene and forgetting to change their signature weapon! Paradise Lost is better at having compelling characterization than it is at having a compellingly linear plot. Nate Stevenson is fantastic at writing characters whom the audience emotionally cares about, but he might have no idea how to write a murder mystery. Some writers are fantastic at metre and terrible at rhyme. Some writers are great at describing settings and terrible at describing persons, or vice versa, no matter how brilliantly or terribly those settings or persons were invented.
Lots of religious sages are fantastic at analyzing a body of precepts, reducing them to their constituent principles, synthesizing it into a unified theory, and explaining it in understandable and convincing terms – it just so happens that they're terrible reporters, because they're completely incorrect, because their religion is plain false – so they are highly skilled reporters and also completely incompetent reporters, and we still call them good at reporting.

Now, this elision – stuffing all these different skills into the single phrase of 'good writer' – isn't necessarily entirely factually incorrect, technically. If somebody created a novel, we say he wrote a novel; if the novel is overall a good novel, we say it is a good novel; thus, if someone created an overall good novel, we say he is a good writer. Even if his ability to put words together is crapo.

So it's not inherently bad to say that somebody is a good writer even if their writing isn't good in every single aspect and way. But we have to remember the differences here. It's fine to say "Ted Kazcynski is an excellent writer", only so long as we're darned sure that everyone understands that we don't necessarily mean that his writing is excellent in every way including accuracy. It's fine to say "Isaac Asimov is an excellent writer" provided that it doesn't matter to your audience whether or not his actual prose style is excellent.

(For the record, there's a lot to be said for the stripped-down, minimalistic prose style of Isaac Asimov's average short story; one could argue that it's the most appropriate style for the story he's trying to tell, since it allows the audience to focus entirely on the story without getting distracted by the words used to tell it; just as Beatrice Warde said that the best typography is unnoticed typography, perhaps the best word choice is the unremarkable. If you believe that: whatever, think of some other writer who writes great stories with terrible prose.)

So...does this mean that Stephanie Meyer is a good writer? Well, she successfully attempted to write something that engaged her readers; many skilled writers attempt that, and many fail. So she is extremely good at at least one aspect of good writing. Maybe she averages out to being a good writer.

Title from https://twitter.com/paulgriffini/status/1369608659194544131.

Some essays are written to be long, thoughtful, winding pieces, so you can relax on a Sunday afternoon in your armchair and read the New Yorker: essays with intricate prose and interesting asides and enlivening anecdotes and all sorts of details that bring the story to life; essays which are a pleasure to slowly trace your way through. 

Some essays get to the g-d--n point so you can read what you bleeping want to know and move on with your g-d--n life.

Sometimes the most concise way to write something (without sacrificing understandability or truth or some other desired feature) is to write a long, winding piece that talks about all kinds of things that feel unrelated; on this subject, Paul Graham points out that the Meander river takes the most efficient possible route to the ocean. 

Most of the time, the most concise way to write something is to write a very brief piece with short words and short sentences and few semicolons and possibly even bullet points.

If you write an article about interest rate hikes, and the first two pages are about the decorations in the office of the expert you're interviewing on the subject, that is fine for people who want to spend a relaxing afternoon enjoying The Atlantic. It is incredibly annoying for people who are here just to read the news and be informed citizens.

Strolling into a synagogue eating a ham sandwich (assume that it is an Orthodox synagogue and that you are a Gentile and that you are legally permitted to be on the synagogue's property) is bad and you should not do it, because it is rude and disrespectful, and hurting persons' feelings for your own amusement/convenience in that way isn't justified.

Doing a kiss-in to protest in favor of gay rights is good and you should do it, even though the entire point is to shock, horrify, and disturb people, in a rude and disrespectful way. 

So what's the difference?

I think that the difference is that in the former case, you're doing it just for your own amusement or convenience, whereas in the second case you're doing it to actually accomplish something that makes the larger world a better place. 

Perhaps inconveniently, this would mean that strolling into a synagogue eating a ham sandwich is morally justified if you are genuinely doing it as an act of protest because you really strongly oppose the traditional Mosaic prohibition on eating pork. (If you're doing it just because you like stirring up trouble and offending people  –  and who doesn't enjoy that  –  then you're still an @$$#ole.)

Recently I was lamenting that it's no longer the case that 99% of educated Europeans read and write Latin, making international academic communication way more difficult. But today I found out that, even within the academy, English might actually be more widespread today than Latin was then!

In terms of stuff you can read, you're better off now. It says here that seventy percent of incunabula are in Latin. According to this sample, that percentage is today exceeded by English-language articles in psychology, sociology, probably educational sciences, economics, human geography, political science, and communication and media studies. Possible exceptions include history, archaeology, linguistics (unsurprising), literature (unsurprising), and art. The only definite exception in this sample is law, where English is firmly in the minority. (Some rando claims that ninety-eight percent of science publications are in English, but that can't be right.) 

(Also, about 90% of EU legislation is in English, it's the international language of flight, and it's supposedly spoken by one in seven humans.)

In terms of people you can write to, you're probably better off back then if you only want to talk to academics; I'm assuming that basically every academic back then could read Latin, whereas today not all of them are literate in English. However, if you want to talk to non-academics, you're better off speaking English today than Latin in 1500. European literacy rates around 1500 were abysmal, such that a minority could read at all. And presumably even fewer people could speak Latin. Whereas today, 38% of the EU can have a conversation in English, and I'm assuming all of those people can read it too.

What I haven't found numbers on is the later Renaissance. Perhaps in Shakespearean times, or Georgian times, Latin was more widespread.

If you have arthritis that makes your ankle ache sometimes, and you see someone whose arthritis gives them terrible pain and prevents them from walking at all, it feels appallingly self-centred to point at her and say, "I have the same thing she does." But it's meaningfully true. Treatments, advice, anecdotes, and so forth are going to overlap a ton between you and the wheelchair-user, because you have the same medical condition! If science comes up with a cure, it (by definition) will work on both of you! Because it's the same dang thing! One of you just has a much more severe case than the other.

"And my sensitivities are a fraction of a fraction of what real autistic people suffer," says the psychiatrist, and he's right that others with his condition have it worse than he. (Though this is someone who, at age twenty-five had "ever been on a date in my life, every time I ask someone out I get laughed at, I’m constantly teased and mocked for being a virgin and a nerd whom no one could ever love, starting to develop a serious neurosis about it." He's not suffering as much as the average institutionalized patient, but he's sure suffering a lot!) But that doesn't mean that he doesn't have the condition at all! Degrees, people!

This is without getting into the fuss and kerfuffle regarding whether autism is a bell curve including all humans, and whether it counts as an ailment per se ('But Jo, but Jo! Autism isn't an illness, it's only considered that because society says it is!' That is true of literally all disabilities. Also, "Once you’re trying to chew off your own body parts, I feel like the question 'But is it really a disease or not?' sort of loses its oomph."), and so on. My point is that it's just plain incorrect to say "I have a diagnosable medical condition, but it's much more severe in some other people, therefore I don't have it." And if it's significantly impacted your life (which is the case with the psychiatrist), it's impactfully untrue to say that you don't have it at all. Obviously it's rude as all get out to act like you have it as bad as, eg, someone who needs a straitjacket; but if you're worried about implying that, just say that you don't have it as bad as, eg, someone who needs a straitjacket!