Friday, December 22, 2017

Reader comment Dec. 8 (True Crime)

モナリザのTRUE CRIMECRIME、ハラハラしながら読みました。愛国心から大変なものを盗んでしまった犯人の苦悩と葛藤まで勝手に想像してしまいました。新婚旅行でルーブル美術館にも行きましたが、モナリザの周りは予想外に混雑してなかったので、展示されていたのはダミーだったに違いないと思っています。モナリザには盗難に備えてダミーがいくつもあるということですし。絵画に限らず、盗んでみたらニセモノだった、みたいな事例もTRUE CRIMEで取り上げてほしいです。脱獄の記事がインパクト強すぎてすっかりTRUE CRIMEのファンになってしまいました。（茨城県、後藤由喜夫、会社員）

Tuesday, November 14, 2017

11月10日:外国から旅行に来た人が病院を探すためのアプリができる

外国から旅行に来た人が病院を探すためのアプリができる

旅行などで日本に来る外国人が増えています。外国人がスマートフォンで簡単に病院を探すことができる無料のアプリができました。病気やけがをした外国人のために活動をしている団体が作りました。

このアプリは英語と中国語で使うことができます。そして、外国人が来たときの準備をしている近くの病院を地図で知らせます。今、病院が開いている時間かどうかもわかります。外国人の中には、日本語の看板を読むことができないため病院の前に着いてもわからない人がいます。このアプリは外国語と日本語が一緒に書いてあるので、看板を見て比べることができます。

団体によると、外国から旅行に来た人が病院に行く手伝いをする無料のアプリができたのは初めてです。このアプリは今月２７日から使うことができます。

New Words:

1. 無料 : 料金のいらないこと。ただ。

2. 活動 : 元気よく動いたり、働いたりすること。

3. 団体 :
・大勢の人の集まり。
・同じ目的を持った人々の集まり。

4. 看板 :
・人目につく所に、店の名前や商品の名前などを書いて、出しておくもの。
・見せかけ。

Monday, November 6, 2017

[11月02日 16時40分] ソニーが新しい犬の形のロボット「ａｉｂｏ」を発表

ソニーが新しい犬の形のロボット「ａｉｂｏ」を発表

ソニーは１９９９年、犬の形をした「ＡＩＢＯ」というロボットを作りました。ＡＩＢＯは値段が２５万円ぐらいで、全部で１５万台売れました。しかし、会社の経営が悪くなったため、２００６年に生産をやめました。

ソニーの平井一夫社長は、新しい犬の形のロボットを来年１月１１日から売ると発表しました。新しいロボットの名前は、アルファベットの小文字で「ａｉｂｏ」です。

ａｉｂｏの目はスマートフォンやテレビの画面に使う「有機ＥＬパネル」でできていて、気持ちを表すことができます。そして、２０以上のセンサーを使って人や部屋の様子を調べて、体を動かしたり歩いたりします。

ａｉｂｏには、自分で考えるコンピューターのＡＩが入っていて、人と話したことなどを勉強して覚えます。値段は１９万８０００円です。

平井社長は「ソニーが持っているロボットとセンサーの技術にＡＩを足して、これからも新しい物を作っていきたいです」と話しました。

New Words:
1. ロボット :
   ・電気や磁気の力で動く人形。人造人間。
   ・工場などで人間に代わって、作業する機械。
   ・（いつも）人の言いなりになって動く人。
2. 発表 : 多くの人に広く知らせること。
3. 売れ :
   ・品物が買われる。
   ・広く知られる。
4. 経営 : 事業をやっていくこと。
5. アルファベット : ローマ字を、 A ・ B ・ C …というふうに Z まで順に並べたもの。２６文字ある。
6. 小文字 :
   ・小さな字。
   ・ローマ字や英語などで使う小さな文字。「 a ・ b ・ c 」など。
7. 画面 : 映画やテレビが映っている部分。
8. 表す : 気持ちや考えなどを、ことばや表情に出したり、絵や音楽などにしたりする。
9. センサー : 光や音、温度などに反応して、電気的な信号を送る装置。
10. 様子 :
   ・ありさま。状態。
   ・姿。身なり。
   ・そぶり。気配。
   ・わけ。事情。
11. 動かし :
   ・動くようにする。
   ・位置を変える。
   ・感動させる。

Monday, October 23, 2017

The White Minstrel Show

The White-Minstrel Show

by Kevin D. Williamson October 20, 2017 4:00 AM

@kevinNR

‘Acting white’ for white people

Ice-T never received an Academy Award, which makes sense inasmuch as his movies have been for the most part crap. But as an actor, you have to give the man credit: Along with other gangster rappers such as Ice Cube, he turned in such a convincing performance — amplifying negative stereotypes about black men and selling white people their own Reagan-era racial panic back to them in a highly stylized form — that people still, to this day, believe he was the guy he played on stage. One social-media critic accused him of hypocrisy for having recorded the infamous song “Cop Killer” before going on to a very lucrative career playing a police officer on television. Ice-T gave the man an honest answer: “It’s both acting, homie.”

Acting, indeed.

Pretty good acting, too, across the board in the rap world. Consider the strange evolution of Tupac Shakur, who went from the quiet, effeminate young man seen in this interview — a former acting and ballet student at the Baltimore School for the Arts apparently pointed like a rocket at a career in musical theater — to the “Thug Life” antihero persona that made him famous in a remarkably short period of time. He played tough-guy Roland Bishop in Juice and basically stayed in character for the rest of his public life. As with Ice-T, many of his fans assumed the stage persona was the real man. There’s a whole weird little racial dynamic in there waiting for some doctoral student to sort it out. Nobody expects Anthony Hopkins to eat a census worker.

A theater critic can’t really begrudge a performer for making a living, and Ice-T put on a great show. I do wonder how much damage those performers did by reinforcing and glamorizing criminal stereotypes of black men. And I do mean that I wonder — I do not know. Maybe the act is more obvious if you are the sort of person who is being dramatized or caricatured. (I experience something like that when I hear modern country songs on the radio, all that cheerful alcoholism and casual adultery and ridiculous good-ol’-boy posturing.) It would be weird to describe black men as “acting black,” but whatever they were up to was the opposite of “acting white.”

There’s a certain kind of conservative who loves to talk about “acting white,” i.e., about the legendary social sanction purportedly applied to African Americans who try too hard in school or who speak in an English that is too standard or who have interests and aspirations other than the ones that black people are stereotypically supposed to have. (“Acting white” isn’t a complaint exclusive to African Americans. My friend Jay Nordlinger relates a wonderful story about the American Indian educator Ben Chavis, who once was accused by a sister of “acting white.” His reply: “‘Acting white’ is not enough. I’m acting Jewish. Or maybe Chinese.”) Oh, how we love to knowingly tut-tut about “acting white,” with the obvious implication that black Americans corporately would be a good deal better off if they would do a little more acting white. That sort of thing is not entirely unique to conservatives, of course: Nine-tenths of all social criticism involving the problems of the American underclass consists of nice college graduates and policy professionals of many races and religions wondering aloud why they can’t be more like us, which is why so much social policy is oriented toward trying to get more poor people to go to college, irrespective of whether they want to do so or believe they would benefit from it.

Conservatives have a weakness for that “acting white” business because we are intellectually invested in emphasizing the self-inflicted problems of black America, for rhetorical and political reasons that are too obvious to require much elaboration. It’s a phenomenon that may or may not be exaggerated. John McWhorter argues that it is a real problem, and makes a pretty good case. So did President Barack Obama, who called on the nation to “eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.” I am not sure that a white man from Lubbock, Texas, has a great deal to add to President Obama’s argument there.

But I do have something to say about the subject of white people acting white.

We rarely used to put it in racial terms, unless we were talking about Eminem or the Cash-Me-Ousside Girl or some other white person who has embraced (or affected) some part of black popular culture. With the Trump-era emergence of a more self-conscious form of white-identity politics — especially white working-class identity politics — the racial language comes to the surface more often than it used to. But we still rarely hear complaints about “acting un-white.” Instead, we hear complaints about “elitism.”

The parallels to the “acting white” phenomenon in black culture are fairly obvious: When aspiration takes the form of explicit or implicit cultural identification, however partial, with some hated or resented outside group that occupies a notionally superior social position, then “authenticity” is to be found in socially regressive manners, mores, and habits. It is purely reactionary.

The results are quite strange. Republicans, once the party of the upwardly mobile with a remarkable reflex for comforting the comfortable, have written off entire sections of the country — including the bits where most of the people live — as “un-American.” Silicon Valley and California at large, New York City and the hated Acela corridor, and, to some extent, large American cities categorically are sneered at and detested. There is some ordinary partisanship in that, inasmuch as the Democrats tend to dominate the big cities and the coastal metropolitan aggregations, but it isn’t just that. Conservatives are cheering for the failure of California and slightly nonplussed that New York City still refuses to regress into being an unlivable hellhole in spite of the best efforts of its batty Sandinista mayor. Not long ago, to be a conservative on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the most ordinary thing in the world. Now that address would be a source of suspicion. God help you if you should ever attend a cocktail party in Georgetown, the favorite dumb trope of conservative talk-radio hosts.

We’ve gone from William F. Buckley Jr. to the gentlemen from Duck Dynasty. Why?

American authenticity, from the acting-even-whiter point of view, is not to be found in any of the great contemporary American business success stories, or in intellectual life, or in the great cultural institutions, but in the suburban-to-rural environs in which the white underclass largely makes its home — the world John Mellencamp sang about but understandably declined to live in.

Shake your head at rap music all you like: When’s the last time you heard a popular country song about finishing up your master’s in engineering at MIT?

White people acting white have embraced the ethic of the white underclass, which is distinct from the white working class, which has the distinguishing feature of regular gainful employment. The manners of the white underclass are Trump’s — vulgar, aggressive, boastful, selfish, promiscuous, consumerist. The white working class has a very different ethic. Its members are, in the main, churchgoing, financially prudent, and married, and their manners are formal to the point of icy politeness. You’ll recognize the style if you’ve ever been around it: It’s “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am,” but it is the formality of soldiers and police officers — correct and polite, but not in the least bit deferential. It is a formality adopted not to acknowledge the superiority of social betters but to assert the equality of the speaker — equal to any person or situation, perfectly republican manners. It is the general social respect rooted in genuine self-respect.

Its opposite is the sneering, leveling, drag-’em-all-down-into-the-mud anti-”elitism” of contemporary right-wing populism. Self-respect says: “I’m an American citizen, and I can walk into any room, talk to any president, prince, or potentate, because I can rise to any occasion.” Populist anti-elitism says the opposite: “I can be rude enough and denigrating enough to drag anybody down to my level.” Trump’s rhetoric — ridiculous and demeaning schoolyard nicknames, boasting about money, etc. — has always been about reducing. Trump doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to duke it out with even the modest wits at the New York Times, hence it’s “the failing New York Times.” Never mind that the New York Times isn’t actually failing and that any number of Trump-related businesses have failed so thoroughly that they’ve gone into bankruptcy; the truth doesn’t matter to the argument any more than it matters whether the fifth-grade bully actually has an actionable claim on some poor kid’s lunch money. It would never even occur to the low-minded to identify with anybody other than the bully. That’s what all that ridiculous stuff about “winning” was all about in the campaign. It is might-makes-right, i.e., the politics of chimpanzee troupes, prison yards, kindergartens, and other primitive environments. That is where the underclass ethic thrives — and how “smart people” came to be a term of abuse.

This involves, inevitably, a good deal of fakery.

The man at the center of all this atavistic redneck revanchism is a pampered billionaire real-estate heir from New York City, and it has been something to watch the multi-millionaire populist pundits in Manhattan doing their best impersonations of beer-drinkin’ regular guys from the sticks. I assume Sean Hannity picked up his purported love for country music in the sawdust-floored honky-tonks of . . . Long Island.

As a purely aesthetic enterprise, none of this clears my poor-white-trash cultural radar. I’m reminded of those so-called dive bars in Manhattan that spend $150,000 to make a pricey spot in Midtown look like a Brooklyn kid’s idea of a low-rent roadside bar in Texas. (There’s one that even has Lubbock license plates on the wall. I wonder where they got them — is there some kind of mail-order dive-bar starter kit that comes with taxidermy, Texas license plates, and a few cases of Lone Star? Maybe via Amazon Prime?) The same crap is there — because the same crap is everywhere — but the arrangement isn’t quite right.

The populist Right’s abandonment of principle has been accompanied by a repudiation of good taste, achievement, education, refinement, and manners — all of which are abominated as signs of effete “elitism.” During the Clinton years, Virtue Inc. was the top-performing share in the Republican political stock exchange. Fortunes were made, books were sold by the ton, and homilies were delivered. The same people today are celebrating Donald Trump — not in spite of his being a dishonest, crude serial adulterer but because of it. His dishonesty, the quondam cardinals of Virtue Inc. assure us, is simply the mark of a savvy businessman, his vulgarity the badge of his genuineness and lack of “political correctness,” and his pitiless abuse of his several wives and children the mark of a genuine “alpha male.” No less a virtue entrepreneur than Bill Bennett dismissed those who pointed out Trump’s endless lies and habitual betrayals as suffering from “moral superiority,” from people on “high horses,” and said that Trump simply is “a guy who says some things awkwardly, indecorously, infelicitously.”

Thus did the author of The Book of Virtues embrace the author of “Grab ‘Em By the P***y.”

We need a Moynihan Report for conservative broadcasters.

The problem, in Bennett’s telling (and that of many other conservatives), isn’t that Trump is a morally defective reprobate but that he is aesthetically displeasing to overly refined “elitists.” That is a pretty common line of argument — and an intellectual cop-out — but set that aside for the moment. Let’s pretend that Bennett et al. are correct and this is simply a matter of manners. Are we now to celebrate vulgarity as a virtue? Are we to embrace crassness? Are we supposed to pretend that a casino-cum-strip-joint is a civilizational contribution up there with Notre-Dame, that the Trump Taj Mahal trumps the Taj Mahal? Are we supposed to snigger at people who ask that question? Are we supposed to abandon our traditional defense of standards to mimic Trump’s bucket-of-KFC-and-gold-plated-toilet routine?

Ludwig von Mises was as clear-eyed a social critic as he was an economist, and he noted something peculiar about the anti-Semitism of the Nazi era: In the past, minority groups were despised for their purported vices — white American racists considered African Americans lazy and mentally deficient, the English thought the Irish drank too much to be trusted to rule their own country, everybody thought the Gypsies were put on this Earth to spread disease and thievery. But the Jews were hated by the Nazis for their virtues: They were too intelligent, too clever, too good at business, too cosmopolitan, too committed to their own distinctness, too rich, too influential, too thrifty.

Our billionaire-ensorcelled anti-elitists take much the same tack: Anybody with a prestigious job, a good income, an education at a selective university, and no oxy overdoses in the immediate family — and anybody who prefers hearing the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center to watching football on television — just doesn’t know what life is like in “the real America” or for the “real men” who live there. No, the “real America,” in this telling, is little more than a series of dead factory towns, dying farms, pill mills — and, above all, victims. There, too, white people acting white echo elements of hip-hop culture, which presents powerful and violent icons of masculinity as hapless victims of American society.

The “alpha male” posturing, the valorizing of underclass dysfunction, the rejection of “elite” tastes and manners — right-wing populism in the age of Trump is a lot like Bruce Springsteen’s act, once acidly (and perfectly) described as a “white minstrel show.”

I wonder if Bill Bennett can tap-dance.

Race is part of this, as it is part of many things in America, but it is easy to make too much of it, too. The white underclass may suffer from “acting white,” but what poor people in general suffer from is acting poor, i.e., repeating the mistakes and habits that left them (or their parents and grandparents, in many cases) in poverty or near-poverty to begin with.

The more you know about that world, the less sympathetic you’ll be to it. What the Trump-style would-be tribunes of the plebs most have in common with self-appointed progressive advocates for the poor is ignorance of the actual subject matter. It weren’t the scheming Chinaman what stole ol’ Bubba’s job down Bovina, ‘cause ol’ Bubba didn’t really have him a job to steal. And it isn’t capitalism that made rural Appalachia or small-town Texas what it is. Well-heeled children of privilege such as Elizabeth Bruenig condescend to speak on behalf of people and communities about whom they know practically nothing — people who have not, let’s remember, asked the well-scrubbed sons and daughters of the ruling class to speak on their behalf. When they were asked, they chose Donald Trump by a very large margin, but then the poor make poor choices all the time — that’s part of why they’re poor. The Left is convinced of Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? thesis, that the poor and struggling in the conservative and rural parts of the country are just too besotted with Jesus talk and homosexual panic to understand what actually is at stake, and who therefore — the famous phrase — “vote against their own economic interests.” Progressives preach about — and to — people with whom they have no real connection, and do so in ways that would embarrass them to death if it were a racial line rather than a class line they were crossing in such a state of pristine ignorance. They are the mirror image of white conservatives who wonder why poor black people in the Bronx can’t just “act white” and get with the program.

If I might be permitted to address the would-be benefactors of the white underclass from the southerly side of the class line: Ain’t nobody asked you to speak for us.

Of course there are external forces, economic and otherwise, that act on poor people and poor communities, and one of the intellectual failings of conservative social critics is our tendency to take those into considerably greater account in the case of struggling rural and small-town whites than in the case of struggling urban blacks. “Get off welfare and get a job!” has been replaced by solicitous talk about “globalization.” Likewise, the reaction to the crack-cocaine plague of the 1980s and 1990s was very different from the reaction to the opioid epidemic of the moment, in part because of who is involved — or perceived to be involved. And this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a rash of deaths from opioid overdoses. As Dr. Peter DeBlieux of University Medical Center in New Orleans put it, heroin addiction was, for a long time, treated in the same way AIDS was in its early days: as a problem for deviants. Nobody cared about AIDS when it was a problem for prostitutes, drug addicts, and those with excessively adventurous sex lives. The previous big epidemic of heroin overdoses involved largely non-white drug users. The current fentanyl-driven heroin episode and the growth of prescription-killer abuse involve more white users and more middle-class users.

But there are internal forces as well. People really do make decisions, and, whether they intend it or not, they contribute to the sometimes difficult conditions in which those decisions have to be made.

Consider the case of how I became homeless.

I wasn’t homeless in the sense of sleeping in the park — most of the people we’re talking about when we’re talking about homelessness aren’t. The people who are sleeping on the streets are mainly addicts and people with other severe mental-health issues. I was homeless in the way the Department of Health and Human Services means: in “an unstable or non-permanent situation . . . forced to stay with a series of friends and/or extended family members.” (As a matter of policy, these two kinds of homelessness should not be conflated, which they intentionally are by those who wish for political reasons to pretend that our mental-health crisis is an economic problem.) Like many underclass families, mine lived very much paycheck-to-paycheck, and was always one setback away from economic catastrophe. That came when my mother, who for various reasons had a weakened immune system, got scratched by her poodle, Pepe, and nearly lost her right arm to the subsequent infection. A long hospitalization combined with fairly radical surgery and a series of skin grafts left her right arm and hand partially paralyzed, a serious problem for a woman who typed for a living. (She’d later learn to type well over 100 words per minute with only partial use of her right hand; she was a Rachmaninoff of the IBM Selectric.) I am sure that there were severe financial stresses associated with her illness, but I ended up being shuffled around between various neighbors — strangers to me — for mainly non-economic reasons. My parents had two houses between them, but at that time had just gone through a very ugly divorce. My mother was living with a mentally disturbed alcoholic who’d had a hard time in Vietnam (and well before that, I am certain; his grandfather had once shot him in the ass with a load of rock-salt for making unauthorized use of a watermelon from the family farm) and it was decided that it would be unsafe to leave children alone in his care, which it certainly would have been. He was very precise, in funny ways, and would stack his Coors Lite cans in perfect silver pyramids until he ran out of beer, at which point he would start drinking shots of Mexican vanilla, which is about 70 proof. Lubbock was a dry city then, and buying more booze would have meant a trip past the city limits, hence the resort to baking ingredients and, occasionally, to mouthwash. I am afraid the old realtors’ trick of filling the house with the aroma of baked cookies has the opposite of the desired effect on me.

Our mortgage then was $285 a month, which was a little less than my father paid in child support, so housing was, in effect, paid for. And thus I found myself in the strange position of being temporarily without a home while rotating between neighbors within sight, about 60 feet away, of the paid-up house to which I could not safely return. I was in kindergarten at the time.

Capitalism didn’t do that, and neither did illegal immigrants or Chinese competition to the Texas Instruments factory on the other side of town. Culture didn’t do it, either, and neither did poverty: We had enough money to secure comfortable housing in a nice neighborhood with good schools. In the last years of her life, my mother asked me to help her sort out some financial issues, and I was shocked to learn how much money she and her fourth and final husband were earning: They’d both ended their careers as government employees, and had pretty decent pensions and excellent health benefits. They were, in fact, making about as much in retirement in Lubbock as I was making editing newspapers in Philadelphia. Of course they were almost dead broke — their bingo and cigarette outlays alone were crushing, and they’d bought a Cadillac and paid for it with a credit card.

They didn’t suffer from bad luck or lack of opportunity. Bad decisions and basic human failure put them where they were. But that is from the political point of view an unsatisfactory answer, because it does not provide us with an external party (preferably a non-voting party) to blame. It was not the case that everything that was wrong with the lives of the people I grew up with was the result of their own choices, but neither was it the case that they were only leaves on the wind.

Of course, they were anti-elitists before it was fashionable, FDR Democrats who grew into Buchananism and Perotism before those became Trumpism. It might never have occurred to them to imitate the habits of people who had gone farther and done better in life than they had, even though they had the experience of seeing people who came from the exact same conditions as they did — or, in some cases, from far worse circumstances — build happy, prosperous, stable, productive lives. My mother despised the college professors for whom she worked in her last job, who were unfailingly kind and generous to her, because they were unfailingly kind and generous to her, which she understood (as she understood many things) as condescension. Hers was a world of strict tribal hierarchy: She would, for example, enact petty cruelties on waitresses and grocery-store clerks and other people in service positions, taking advantage of the fact that she had momentary social inferiors, and she must have been confused that the professors and deans did not behave that way toward her. In fact, they did the opposite, entrusting her with work far beyond her modest formal credentials or the official duties of her position. Class is funny in a small-ish town: The father of a school friend of mine became the dean of her college and her boss, and she spoke of the family as though they inhabited some faraway realm when in reality they lived three blocks north and two blocks east. That she herself could have had a life more like theirs, or that her children might yet, never occurred to her — it was sour grapes raised to a state of psychosis.

Feeding such people the lie that their problems are mainly external in origin — that they are the victims of scheming elites, immigrants, black welfare malingerers, superabundantly fecund Mexicans, capitalism with Chinese characteristics, Walmart, Wall Street, their neighbors — is the political equivalent of selling them heroin. (And I have no doubt that it is mostly done for the same reason.) It is an analgesic that is unhealthy even in small doses and disabling or lethal in large ones. The opposite message — that life is hard and unfair, that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear responsibility for your actions — is what conservatism used to offer, before it became a white-minstrel show. It is a sad spectacle, but I do have some hope that the current degraded state of the conservative movement will not last forever.

The thing about eternals truths is, they’re eternal.

Friday, September 22, 2017

Black Liberty Matters, by Jacob T. Levy

September 20, 2017

Black Liberty Matters

by Jacob T. Levy

Originally published at: https://niskanencenter.org/blog/black-liberty-matters/

September 20, 2017

“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

This was Samuel Johnson’s bitter rhetorical question about the American revolution, and the conflict it identifies has never been far from the surface of American political and intellectual life. Compared with the societies of 18th and 19th century Europe, the United States was unusually obsessed with the idea of liberty and unusually economically dependent on slave labor. Sometimes Americans like to tell ourselves that the revolutionary idea of liberty is what finally made abolition possible two generations later, but that sidesteps the paradox that the U.S. was one of the last countries to abolish slavery, and did so only after a decades-long expansion.

The great historical sociologist Orlando Patterson provided an important answer to Johnson’s question in his landmark study Freedom in the Making of Western Culture. Across the centuries, from ancient Greece to modern America, “people came to value freedom, to construct it as a powerful shared vision of life, as a result of their experience of, and response to, slavery or its recombinant form, serfdom, in their roles as masters, slaves, and nonslaves.” It is precisely in slave societies, confronted with the reality of slavery, that people most acutely perceive the importance of freedom, most clearly articulate defenses of it, and most passionately demand it. Sometimes it is slaves or ex-slaves who do so. But often it is masters. Understanding all too well how they rule over other human beings, they identify being ruled like that as the great social evil, and they fiercely refuse to be subjected to it. Slaveowners and their neighbors can see what unfreedom is like, and they resist it for themselves. This is only partly because they come to identify their freedom as their freedom to own and rule slaves, and are desperate to protect their status as masters. In a more general way, they become very sensitive to anyone proposing to treat them as they treat slaves.

The Freedom of the Masters and the Rhetoric of Liberty

These intellectual and cultural paradoxes in antebellum America survived abolition, and in mutated form survive to this day. The language of freedom in American political discourse has very often been appropriated for the defense of white supremacy. We have often heard the loudest yelps for liberty among those trying to protect the terror and apartheid states of the Jim Crow south, the quasi-serfdom of sharecropping, segregated schools, miscegenation laws, and the suppression of black votes. Particular types of freedom or particular strategies for limiting governmental power—freedom of association, religious liberty, federalism, bicameralism, and so on—all came to be identified at one point or another primarily as ways to prevent the federal government from breaking the power of white rule, just as before the war the protection of private property rights had so often been identified primarily with the protection of slaveowners’ supposed property in other human beings.

None of this means that liberty is not a worthwhile, and true, ideal.

Like Adam Smith, I believe that we often engage in real moral learning by negative example. We learn the value of mercy and kindness through witnessing or understanding cruelty. We learn about justice by being exposed to gross injustice. Patterson’s theory of how we learn about liberty doesn’t mean that we don’t thereby genuinely learn something important. But this history does mean that the public language of liberty in American politics is often not to be trusted. Not to put too fine a point on it, those who proclaim their commitment to freedom have all too often assessed threats to freedom as if those facing African-Americans don’t count —as if black liberty does not matter.

Treating Black Liberty Like it Doesn’t Matter Distorts the Picture of American Freedom

This exclusion of African-Americans from the calculus of American freedom extends far beyond the questions that most obviously connect to the legacy of Jim Crow, such as voting rights, and far beyond the borders of the old Confederacy.

The way we think about American freedom over time, or in comparison to the rest of the world, ought to be deeply structured by the rise of mass incarceration in the last three decades. It’s not—not in triumphalist narratives about revitalized market liberalism since the late 1970s or since 1989, not in comparative rankings and indices of freedom around the world, and certainly not in the unshakeable American public language that the United States is the freest nation on earth. At the level of gross political generalization, it’s common to encounter the idea that European and Canadian social democracies have chosen to make equality a priority, whereas the U.S. is committed to liberty. The distinctive policing and carceral practices of the American state, the ways that the U.S. is extraordinarily unfree, are nowhere to be seen in the comparison.

That is not to say that people who talk about freedom in American politics have nothing to say about the crises of mass incarceration and of violent, invasive, and militarized policing. American libertarians have always rejected the drug war that contributed so much to these crises. And libertarians have been happy enough to note the disproportionate impact of the drug war on African-Americans and Hispanics. But we have too often treated this as a rhetorical bonus on top of a pre-existing objection to the drug war.

Prisoners returning from forced labor, Louisiana State Penitentiary, 2011.

What has been much too rare is an understanding of racism as a cause of the drug war and of mass incarceration. Nixon aide John Erhlichman was belatedly explicit about this. After the civil rights movement, the Nixon administration couldn’t openly admit that it aimed to subject African-Americans to greater policing and control or to mobilize white voters by fear of blacks. The crackdown on hard drugs provided the needed fig leaf. As has so often been true, racism was a cause of the expansion of American state power, a cause of unfreedom. The centuries-old appropriation of the language of liberty by the defenders of white supremacy obscures this, over and over again.

This brings me to two recent and awkwardly-connected controversies within, and about, American libertarianism.

Nancy MacLean Missed the Story on Libertarianism’s Race Problem

The more prominent is the debate about Nancy MacLean’s book on James Buchanan, the Nobel Prize-winning economist and a founder of public choice theory. In Democracy in Chains, MacLean alleges that Buchanan was significantly inspired by the Confederate nostalgia of the Southern Agrarian school, and that his creation of the original ideas and institutions of public choice theory was very much tied up with Virginian resistance to Brown v Board and the civil rights movement. She treats Buchanan as the architect of a decades-long conspiratorial strategy to advance a political agenda that was both anti-democratic and compatible with (indeed possibly supportive of) the maintenance of Jim Crow. I did not know Buchanan and am not much influenced by public choice theory, but those who did and those who are have dealt devastating blows to the credibility of this story. See these two essays co-authored by Crooked Timber’s Harry Farrell and my Niskanen colleague Steven Teles. See also this review essay by my Bleeding Hearts Libertarian co-blogger Steven Horwitz in The Cato Journal and this one by another co-blogger, Michael Munger, in The Independent Review. I will not try to add to these critiques, which I find entirely persuasive about Democracy in Chains’ details and core claims alike.

But part of what is so strange about Democracy in Chains is its choice of targets. The claims MacLean makes are untrue about Buchanan. But the history of the postwar libertarian movement is rich with moments of flirtation or outright entanglement with the defenders of white supremacy. This is most conspicuous today in the explicit sympathy for the Confederacy in some quarters, a problem I’ve written about before. There’d be no trouble writing a better book than MacLean’s about the dark history of libertarian politics that ran from Murray Rothbard’s support for Strom Thurmond’s presidential campaign to Lew Rockwell’s celebration to the beating of Rodney King to the racism that went out under Ron Paul’s name in his newsletters in the 1980s and 90s to the case of then-aide to Rand Paul Jack Hunter. The generalized distrust of institutions that can be part of anti-statism easily falls back on the fantasy of a unified pre-political national people, and that populist nationalism in America is almost definitionally white populist nationalism.

The particular fascination with Abraham Lincoln’s (genuine but far from unique) violations of civil liberties, the celebration of secession, the insistence on discussing the Civil Rights Act primarily in terms of freedom of association (as if white supremacy in the Jim Crow south were just a private taste that some people indulged), and an interest in freedom of speech that focuses disproportionately on the freedom to indulge in racially-charged “political incorrectness” could all figure in such a book. Rothbard was a decisive figure in the development of organized libertarianism, and the Pauls are hardly minor characters in libertarian and quasi-libertarian politics. I suspect they were less appealing to MacLean because Buchanan was close to Charles and David Koch for decades after Rothbard and his circle went to ideological war against them, and the Kochs were the exciting target for her to try to implicate.

But there are ways to neglect black liberty that are subtler than the white nationalism of the Confederatistas. Think about the different ways that market liberals and libertarians talk about “welfare” from how they talk about other kinds of government redistribution. There’s no talk of the culture of dependence among farmers, although they receive far more government aid per capita than do the urban poor. Libertarians absolutely and clearly oppose corporate welfare, but they don’t do so in the paternalistic language that corporate welfare recipients are morally hurt by being on the dole. The white welfare state of the 1930s-60s that channeled government support for, e.g., housing, urban development, and higher education through segregated institutions has a way of disappearing from the historical memory; the degrees earned and homes bought get remembered as hard work contributing to the American dream. But too many libertarians and their market-oriented allies among postwar conservatives treated the more racially inclusive welfare state of the 1960s and 70s as different in kind. White recipients of housing subsidies hadn’t been imagined to become dependent, non-autonomous, or unfree. When the FHA was insisting that neighborhoods be segregated in order to be eligible for mortgage or building subsidies, it contributed a great deal to the racial wealth gap that persists to this day. No free-marketeers of the era felt the need to engage in brave, politically incorrect inquiries into the lower intelligence of new white homeowners that might explain their long-term dependence. But once the imagined typical welfare recipient was a black mother, welfare became a matter not just of economic or constitutional concern but of moral panic about parasites, fraud, and the long-term collapse of self-reliance.

The Language of Liberty and the Rise of the Alt-Right

Returning for a moment to the overt white nationalists allows us to also think about the other recent dispute about libertarian politics: the embarrassingly large number of people associated with the racist alt-right who once identified as libertarians, or (even worse) still do. Some of this is just the inevitable sociology of the fringe. Those who join smaller political movements tend to come to think that mainstream sources of information and ideology aren’t to be trusted. They tend to be unmoored from a society’s dominant values and intellectual positions. And so, as they change their mind about things (and most people do, from time to time), they’re disproportionately likely to end up attached to other fringe movements. That’s just a selection effect about what kind of people join fringe movements, and it doesn’t say anything about the content of either movement’s ideas.

But it seems pretty plausible to me that there’s something more to be said. The capture of the language of freedom by the defenders of white supremacy and the Confederacy is a major fact about American political language and its history, and there’s a small but vocal group of self-identified libertarians who participate in it and perpetuate it. The racialization of the discourse around redistribution, such that people who think of themselves as committed to small government in general have a special visceral reaction against what they call “welfare” that doesn’t extend to the far larger redistributive activities of the state, is a major fact about more recent American political language. And the conviction that freedom of speech is mostly threatened by “political correctness” in American life, that saying racist things is a brave stand against censorship, that calling what someone else says “racist” is pretty much like censoring them—these are important facts about American political discourse today. Organized libertarianism partakes of all of these. I have argued elsewhere that American libertarianism’s dependence on Lockean traditions brings with it the fantasy of a unified pre-political people that might reclaim its liberty from distrusted governing institutions. And in the American political tradition, that kind of holist populist nationalism has always been white nationalism.

Re-imagining Libertarian Politics as if Black Liberty Matters

Now, libertarian, individualist, and market-liberal ideas, concepts, slogans, and advocates aren’t alone in having a history that is entangled with white supremacy. Hardly any set of social ideas in American intellectual history lacks such an entanglement. This is as true of the technocratic progressivism associated with the racist Woodrow Wilson as it is of the populist democracy associated with the racist Andrew Jackson. If federalism is tainted by Jim Crow, so is centralization by the Fugitive Slave Act and the white welfare state of the 1930s onward, among other things. (We can, of course, say something similar about the state and federal governments’ histories of crimes against Indians.) A particularly silly move made by some of MacLean’s defenders recently has been the insistence that constitutional restraints on racist majorities don’t count as counter-majoritarian or limits on democracy, as if “democracy” could only refer to some ideal state of affairs innocent of a history of herrenvolk democracy. The early American republic, and especially the Jacksonian republic, was at once much more democratic than any European state of the same era and much more racist, and these were not unrelated. A hierarchical society with countless small social gradations can treat racial subordination as continuous with many other kinds of subordination. A levelled hierarchy among whites sharpens the distinction at the edges of that category; a social hill is replaced by a social plateau that ends in cliffs. The expanding rights and proud equal dignity of lower-class whites came to consist precisely in their equal claim to whiteness; this became a foundational fact of American democratic equality. There’s no good reason to sever “democracy” or “progressivism” from their complicated genealogies while tying “federalism” or “freedom of association” to theirs.

As a scholar, I’m interested in all these histories. As an advocate, I have to be especially interested in the history of classical and market liberalism. I don’t want the convincing intellectual victory over Democracy in Chains to fool us into thinking that there’s no problem. I don’t want the forceful, true, statement that libertarian principles are incompatible with white supremacy to fool us into overlooking a morally compromised history and sociological and psychological patterns about how those principles turn into general political discourse.

Reimagining libertarian politics in light of the truth that black liberty matters will take a lot of intellectual and moral work. And this task, reorienting a set of ideas and ideals in light of a morally compromised history, of understanding what lessons need to be learned from it, of separating the arguments for liberty from the yelps, is insiders’ work. No one else is going to do it for us.

—

Jacob T. Levy is Tomlinson Professor of Political Theory and Director of the Yan P. Lin Centre for the Study of Freedom and Global Orders in the Ancient and Modern Worlds at McGill University; author of Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom and scholarly articles including, most recently,”Contra Politanism“; a blogger at Bleeding Heart Libertarians; and a Niskanen Center Senior Fellow and Advisory Board Member.

Friday, September 8, 2017

New: Glossika learning guide (from docx)

How You Can

Achieve

tiluency

like Polyglots

Most people start learning foreign languages by learning to read the alphabet first. Some of the world's greatest polyglots rarely do this because they know there is a better way. The reason for this is because there is a big disconnect between the spoken word and the written word. Experienced language learners understand this.

You may be thinking, "I'm not a polyglot." If I don't learn the alphabet then how am I supposed to pronounce this language?

I'll show you how. Anybody can become an accomplished language learner, in much less time than you think. But you do need to adjust your approach.

Cool

tiact

1. Less than half the people who have learned to speak Mandarin Chinese fluently have learned the writing system. They can hold a conversation with friends and family in Chinese even without knowing how to read and write. This is possible for any language you'd like to learn.

2. There are 6900 languages in the world, of which only

200 or so national languages have standard writing systems. All other languages are never written; only spoken.

Writing systems are more tied to culture than to the actual languages they represent. In other words, if we represent the sounds of the language accurately, we can save you a lot of time trying to figure out a new writing system.

If so much of the world speaks languages that are not written, and yet interact with their neighbors in another unwritten language, and they manage this without textbooks, vocabulary lists, tests, then how do they do it?

Think about your own community. How about the children who haven't started going to school yet. Do they speak your language fluently? Have they learned how to read and write yet? Do they know anything about grammar and spelling? Probably not. Are they able to express themselves and create new sentences anytime they want? Probably yes! How can they be fluent without knowing these things?

We can learn like children. Exposure develops familiarity. Learning like children doesn't mean abandoning textbooks entirely. So let me show you what you need to break through to fluency.

How to Measure Progress with Reps

Learning a language like a polyglot means that you spend very little time on basic things: what is a noun, what is a verb, what is an adjective, and so on. Nouns are things. Verbs are actions. Adjectives describe things. And these parts of speech change in most languages. Polyglots know this and they don't worry about it. They just start practicing.

Let's visit a gym. What are you most likely to see people doing there? Besides jogging, probably li[ing weights. All those machines laying around look a bit confusing and intimidating. But for those working out, there's an order in which they use them, there's a specific number of li[s they do, and there's a specific amount of rest time between each exercise.

The weightli[er knows there are machines for the arms, the legs, the back and so on. Much like the polyglot, they don't really worry about the details, they just start working out.

The typical weightli[er at the gym will do several sets, with each set made up of repetitions, or "reps". Each rep has a specific amount of weight.

tiluency Requires This Many Reps

Think about this scenario: if I were to give you a daily workout schedule on these machines every day for the next few months, and you were to do a total of 60,000 reps, what do you think you'd look like at the end of that training? You'd probably look like a completely diﬀerent person. You'll be

in shape, you'll be fit, and you'll both look and feel great. If I were to challenge you to any athletic endeavour, you'd be very confident and handle it without a problem.

We've found that the same holds true with language: you need to do lots of reps. Those reps need to be done in a specific order for best results. You'll get better results spending your time on reps rather than on memorization.

You'll start to feel the eﬀects of fluency coming on when you hit 30,000 reps. You'll be confidently using the language at around 60,000 reps. And we recommend to keep pushing until you've done 90,000 reps.

Using an easy-to-follow system, it's not hard to go through 500 sentences per day. At that rate, you'll get through 60,000 reps in 120 days, which is 4 months. That's about a semester in university. And most students coming out of language classes have barely done 5000 reps, less than 10% of your progress. It's no wonder they won't feel fluent and they'll certainly be wondering how you did it. Yet, you’ll know the secret to success.

What about Grammar and Pronunciation?

All of this will fall in place as long as you focus on your full sentence reps. For one thing, grammar is already built into place in full sentences. You'll be learning the most frequent grammar forms as native speakers speak. And that's the exposure we give you.

Pronunciation is very much like a muscle. The more you practice and use it, the better it gets. Don't expect results in one day. It takes time. Learn to hear what you sound like and adjust the way you sound.

It's better not to worry about mistakes in grammar or pronunciation and just to keep practicing. The more practice you do, the less you'll have to worry about.

What We Know from Polyglots

Polyglots approach language learning knowing they can acquire a language in a short period of time. So they tend to seek out the most eﬀective methodologies to help them achieve this. There's no need to waste time on ineﬀective textbooks, rote memorization, or language classes that focus on grammar. Polyglots know that the writing system can both be an asset and a liability, and in the beginning, it's better to get speaking quickly, then later couple those skills with the writing system to acquire vocabulary at a much quicker rate. Learning the writing system in this way saves lots of time and prevents major pronunciation errors.

The founder of Glossika, Michael Campbell, is a polyglot. But he's unlike most polyglots you may have heard of such as: Richard Simcott, Vladimir Skultety, Luca Lampariello, Benny Lewis, Steve Kaufmann, Olly Richards. What makes Michael diﬀerent from them?

Not only has Michael acquired many unwritten languages, he's also acquired languages from a half dozen language families. He's much more similar to polyglot Stuart Jay Raj in this respect.

In a video produced by accomplished polyglot, Vladimir, he stated that Chinese was the hardest language he had ever learned, a statement he made clear that has nothing to do with the writing whatsoever. This was because all of his European languages felt like variations or dialects of each other. He hadn't been truly challenged with a real "foreign" language until he learned Chinese. Michael Campbell, on the other hand, feels that Chinese was one of the easiest languages to learn and now speaks four Chinese languages and another handful of aboriginal Austronesian languages. But his reasons are slightly diﬀerent than Vladimir’s.

Michael Campbell has been invited to speak at conferences, has appeared on television and radio, and has done many press interviews in Chinese.

Between 2001 and 2010, Michael Campbell tested and developed his methods while he lead the way for more than 10,000 students to fluency: average language learners like yourself. He now welcomes you to join the hundreds of thousands of people he has had the pleasure to influence and guide since then.

Today, the Glossika method is known worldwide and ranks among the highest performing programs and hailed by many as "Pimsleur on Steroids”. John McWhorter, professor of linguistics at Columbia University, recommended Glossika in his TED talk “4 Reasons to Learn a New Language”. Glossika is now used in universities worldwide in the USA, UK, Russia, Japan, Taiwan, China, New Zealand, including members of staﬀ at MIT. It is used by government oﬃcials and those training for diplomatic roles.

Comparisons with Leading Products

1. Hours of Audio

In a single package, Glossika provides you with over 120 hours of audio spoken by native speakers. Compare this with Assimil's 3.3 hours, Living Languages 6 hours, Pimsleur's 75 hours (for its few largest courses).

Hours of Audio

120

Assimil Pimsleur Glossika

2. Vocabulary

Glossika builds a vocabulary of 3500 words, approximately the same as Assimil and 5x more than Pimsleur.

3. Content

Glossika contains 3000 conversational sentences, many of which are question & answer mini-dialogues. Far more than any other course on the market.

4. Writing Systems

Glossika handles hard writing systems with ease: native script plus full transcriptions plus pronunciation guide for every single sentence (with an easy-to-follow series of YouTube Glossika Phonics videos to learn from). Pimsleur, on the other hand, does not provide any text.

5. Unwritten Languages / Regional Dialects

Glossika handles unwritten languages and regional dialects with ease: we transcribe everything so you can both see it and hear it. And again, the phonics are there for every sentence.

Because Glossika solved the problem of unwritten languages, we also deliver languages as they're actually spoken. Most courses on the market

teach literary Persian, literary Armenian, literary tiinnish, and many others. Glossika delivers how the language is actually spoken on the streets, diﬀering greatly from the written word and how most textbooks teach language. Be confident that the language you learn from Glossika will be engaging and easy to communicate with native speakers.

6. Spaced Repetition

Glossika Spaced Repetition (GSR) audio is unlike any other program. Unlike Memrise, Pimsleur, Anki, Duolingo, GSR doesn't just remind you of information when you're about to forget it, which isn't all that great for long-term memories. Instead, GSR is built to work with your sleep patterns and the building of long-term memories. GSR doesn't remind you

-- it builds habits. A[er using GSR, there is no issue of remembering or forgetng, but rather speaking in a way that just feels right, because you do it out of habit. Just like a native speaker.

“exactly the language product t h a t y o u ’ r e l o o k i n g f o r … reasonable and humble approach to language learning… ability to be realis:c and honest about the language learning process…”

Brian Powers

Language Around the Globe

“… highly eﬀec:ve, research g r o u n d e d m e t h o d … i t ’s a treasure trove of high quality dialogue material that you won’t find anywhere else.”

Donovan Nagel

The Mezzofan:

“We highly recommend Glossika for those who want to become beEer (and faster) at making sentences.”

“Glossika audio content tested every corner of my brain... and it reminded me of scores of small things I had learned but forgoEen about t h e I t a l i a n l a n g u a g e . . .

G l o s s i k a c o u l d r e a l l y transform your speaking a b i l i t y i n y o u r t a r g e t language.”

Ellen Jovin Words & Worlds of New York

“ I ’ v e a l w ay s a d v o c a t e d learning vocabulary purely in contextual sentences instead of from lists, and Glossika is the perfect resource for doing just that."

Israel Lai

Rhapsody in Lingo

“. . . y o u a r e a b s o l u t e l y rewarded with a rich body of knowledge, not only about your new language, but about the process of language acquisi:on.”

“Every language has certain grammar paEerns... learn these common grammar paEerns, you have a good grounding in t h e l a n g u a g e . O n c e y o u re co g n i s e t h e s e co m m o n phrases... you can cope easily with many familiar situa:ons you’ll find yourself in. In a nutshell, Glossika gives you all this founda:onal stuﬀ on a plate… which is awesome!”

Olly Richards I'll Teach You a Language

“A course I really like for i n t u i : v e l y i m p r o v i n g my knowledge of the gramma:cal structures and vocabulary of a new language… ”

Conor Clyne

Language Tsar

“So if Pimsleur is the alpha of the audio courses then Glossika is definitely the omega... Never has there been such a direct path to fluency than there is with Glossika.”

Jan van der Aa	Lorenzo Swank
LanguageBoost	Language Learning Library	Best Way to Learn German

“ C o m p r e h e n s i b l e i n p u t method... you will get the feel of how to say something correctly.”

Teddy Nee Nee's Language Blog

“Comprehensive and eﬀec:ve system that delivers speaking a n d l i ste n i n g t ra i n i n g t o fluency.”

David Hagstrom

Talk with my Neighbor

“This method is actually a ninja. It will teach you grammar without teaching you grammar and you won’t even know it’s doing that.”

Polyglod

“… a very solid language learning method that should be in every serious language learner’s toolbox.”

Lingholic

“... your brain can recognise it automa:cally...you will be able to keep up with na:ve speakers when the :me comes... What’s Glossika? In 3 words: scien:fic language learning.”

Dave Hale

tiind tiluency

“Throughout the course are the sorts of sentences that you actually need to use in d a i l y l i fe … I fe e l m o r e confident”

Wannabe Polyglot

“Glossika speeds up this natural	“I highly recommend (the	“I love it! … seriously. What I
process of exposure and allows	lesser known) Glossika.”	love about Glossika is that you
our ears and our ‘mouths’ to		have put into a concentrated
become accustomed to the		pill what I would have done
language… We can now hear		with hundreds of books
the words, recognize paEerns		myself.”
and naturally pick up the
rhythm of the language.”

Simon	John McWhorter	Stuart Jay Raj
Dawn of Truth	TED Talk (4 Reasons to Learn	hyperpolyglot
	a Language)

Join the Global Community of Glossika Users Today!

Below we include a step-by-step guide to selecting your language, and how much time it's going to take you to reach fluency. We can measure the results, and we can deliver those results to you with certainty.

If you're looking for a boost in your career, or a promotion, or a new job in another country, or the opportunity to do business with another country, then where will your fluency be in 3 months from now? 6 months from now?

Do you know for sure? How can you measure your results and how much fluency you have attained?

We've figured this out for you ahead of time here at Glossika, and we're here to help you reach your goal.

The Hardest Language in the World

We believe that all languages are the same. They all have diﬃcult or challenging aspects, but they also have easier aspects.

The hardest language in the world is your first foreign language. Your second and third foreign language won't be as hard anymore. And your success rate will increase. But you can always come back and give your first language a second shot and break through to fluency.

Choose a Language

If your native language is English, and you want to choose the easiest and fastest route to fluency, I recommend any Germanic or Romance language. Some of the easiest languages include Swedish, Norwegian, Afrikaans, Italian, or Spanish. Languages that are a bit more complex include Dutch, German, Danish, tirench, and Portuguese.

If you'd like a challenge, then start with a language outside of your language family. Later if you learn more languages, they appear so much easier. If English is your native language, this would be a non Indo-European language. In Europe and the Middle East there are several you could choose: tiinnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Arabic, and Hebrew. And this would include all languages in East and Southeast Asia and Africa and the Americas.

Choose a Schedule

This largely depends on how much time you have every day and for how many months you can stay dedicated to your goal. Once you order a course, we will deliver you a detailed schedule to follow.