Monogamy and chastity: keys to national prosperity, and more

Why Sexual Morality May be Far More Important than You Ever Thought

Unwin found that when strict prenuptial chastity was abandoned, absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking disappeared within three generations.

But we lost that battle when the Pill was invented. And it will not be turned back, ever. And so here we are: "New York public school rejects student Christian club, OKs LGBT Pride Club"

An Open Letter to Greta Thunberg

You are not a moral leader. But I will tell you what you are.

By DePaul University philosophy Prof. Jason D. Hill

You have stated that you want us to panic, and to act as if our homes are on fire. You insist that rich countries must reduce to zero emissions immediately. In your speeches you attack economic growth and have stated that our current climate crisis is caused by “buying and building things.” You call for climate justice and equity, without addressing the worst polluter on the planet China; the country that is economically annexing much of Africa and Latin America. You dare not lecture Iran about its uranium projects -- because that’s not part of the UN’s agenda, is it?

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And now Virginia is on its way back to solid red:

'The law is the law': Virginia Democrats float prosecution, National Guard deployment if police don't enforce gun control

This will be a major factor in giving Virginia to Trump next November.
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As I have posted before, for the Left violence always underlies their means. Now apparently even Newsweek is catching on.

ANTIFA'S DEADLY YEAR SHOWS THE EXTREMISM ON THE FAR LEFT | OPINION

Tribalism is here to stay

Tribalism is the basic self-organization of the human species and will not be overcome until the eschaton. Judaism has not done it. Christianity has not done it. Islam has not done it. No political ideology has done it.

The truth? It cannot be done.

Slavery and abortion - what's the diff?

What's the difference in the arguments offered today supporting abortion and the arguments used to support slavery until 1861?

None really: "Arguments for Abortion Mimic the Arguments for Slavery Before the Civil War."

Both the arguments for slavery in the 1800s and the arguments for abortion rely on a central claim: that a human being is less than human. The dehumanization of black people relied on pseudoscientific claims that they were inferior. The dehumanization of unborn babies relies on claims that they are "just a clump of cells" or part of a woman's body. In both cases, a growing movement of moral clarity demands that the dehumanized be granted a fundamental right long denied them: freedom and life. (Note: I am not saying abortion and slavery are the same, only that the arguments for them are similar.)

Read the whole thing.

In his debates with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln said, "If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong." Slavery was the brutal exploitation of one class of human beings by another. Abortion is the actual destruction of one class of human beings by another. But that's different, we are told, because abortion is medical care.

Wokescolds, tribal victimhood identities, and class enemies

The Return of Ancient Prejudices, by Victor Davis Hanson, surveying the political and social landscape:

What is behind the rebirth of these old prejudices? In short, new, evolving prejudices.

First, America seemingly no longer believes in striving to achieve a gender-blind, racially and religiously mixed society, but instead is becoming a nation in which tribal identity trumps all other considerations.

Second, such tribal identities are not considered to be equal. Doctrinaire identity politics is predicated on distancing itself from white males, Christians and other groups who traditionally have achieved professional success and therefore enjoyed inordinate “privilege.”

Third, purported victims insist that they themselves cannot be victimizers. So, they are freer to discriminate and stereotype to advance their careers or political interests on the basis of anything they find antithetical to their own ideologies. ...

And what fuels the return of American bias is the new idea that citizens can disparage or discriminate against other groups if they claim victim status and do so for purportedly noble purposes.

And what might those "noble purposes" be? IMO, they call come down to dependency on the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of "class enemies."

Beria was Stalin's chief of internal security. He said quite simply that anyone could be arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced without knowing anything about him or her except their Communist class identity. This idea is waxing strong in America today:

One of the echoes of Marxism that continues to reverberate today is the idea that truth resides in class (or sex or race or erotic orientation). Truth is not something to be established by rational inquiry, but depends on the perspective of the speaker. In the multicultural universe, a person’s perspective is “valued” (a favorite word) according to class. Feminists, blacks, environmentalists and homosexuals have a greater claim to truth because they are “oppressed.” 

Favored classes have the virtue of having "revolutionary truth" ascribed to them, while unfavored classes have no redeeming virtue within or redemption without.

Party members signed death warrants for “enemies of the people” knowing that the accused were innocent, but believing in the correctness of the charges. In the 1930s,collective guilt justified murdering millions of Russian peasants. As cited by Robert Conquest in The Harvest of Sorrow (p. 143), the state’s view of this class was, “not one of them was guilty of anything; but they belonged to a class that was guilty of everything.” 

As, for example, Caucasians and the concept of "while privilege." Inveighing charges against class enemies is the "noble purpose" behind the nearly-countless victimization hoaxes being perpetrated today. But the hoaxes continue - Jussie Smollett's arrest and potential prosecution do not signal the end. Why? Because, as Quillette explains,

[I]f you don’t follow conservative media, you may not have a sense of how often stories of hate crimes turn out to be false or a sense of what the false cases tend to look like.

Even fairly incompetent hoaxes might therefore succeed, which brings us to our second point: Hate crime hoaxes aren’t hard to pull off.

Especially with a compliant mainline media and Left-wing political establishment that wants the hoaxers' claims to be true.

No segment of American society is off limits for striking against class enemies. Recently, the Southern Baptist Church was stricken with details of child sexual abuse and assault made public, committed by some church workers and some pastors. That such acts deserve investigation and punishment surely needs no justification. But according to Stephanie Krehbiel, there is a class of church member who simply needs to be quiet, namely men. All men. Because an individual Baptist man may have abused or assaulted no one and so be personally innocent of anything -- except being a member of a class that is guilty of everything.

I covered earlier that we are seeing the the birth and growth of a new kind of social dynamic that never existed before: the victimhood culture. It never existed before because its birth and growth depend on social media and its enabling of instant tribal grouping across and without regard to bloodlines.

As Quillette explains,

... the third thing to know is that hate crime hoaxes thrive in a culture of victimhood. We use the term victimhood culture to refer to a new moral framework that differs from the older cultures of honor and dignity. Honor culture refers to a morality that revolves around physical bravery. In honor cultures one’s reputation is important, and it might be necessary to engage in violence to protect it. In the dignity cultures that replaced honor cultures, morality more often revolves around the idea that people have equal moral worth. Insults and slights don’t lower one’s status as they do in honor cultures, and people can ignore many minor offenses and go to the police and courts for more serious ones. Victimhood culture, which is in its most extreme form among campus activists, is different from both honor and dignity cultures. Its morality revolves around a narrative of oppression and victimhood, with victimhood acting as new kind of moral status, much like honor was a kind of moral status in many traditional societies.

Something like a hate crime hoax would make no sense in an honor culture. You might falsely accuse someone of insulting you so that you have a chance to display your honor, but you’d be trying to get them to engage in a duel or some other kind of fight. You’d be trying to demonstrate strength, to show you can handle your conflicts on your own. The last thing you’d want to do is claim to be a victim in need of help. Hate crime hoaxes make a little more sense in a dignity culture. Hate crimes are offenses against dignity, and perhaps you’d have something to gain by falsely claiming victimhood. But in a moral world less focused on praising victims and demonizing the privileged, the benefits are lesser and skepticism is greater.

It is in a victimhood culture that hate crime hoaxes are most attractive.

As I wrote before,

Victimhood culture is literally childish. It is a dynamic that resides at elementary-grade level, although, as the professors explain, college students today are far more adept and energetic in it than small kids.

 A better explanation of how the child-students in college today practice this is given by Rod Dreher in "Life Among The Wokescolds," in which he recounts what a college professor-friend related.

In one of my classes yesterday we were talking about current events, and a student mentioned that the soldier in the famous Times Square kissing photo had died. “Yes,” I said. “Too bad. Such a beautiful image, and such a moment of joy.” One of my least favorite students, a smug know-it-all in the back row, piped up. “You actually like that photo?” she said. “Well, yeah,” I replied, a bit taken aback. “That’s an iconic image of a moment of unbridled joy.”

“And do you think she consented to that kiss?” she said icily. “No, no she did not. That is a photo of an assault. That man should have gone to jail.”

Now, this happens with some regularity in classes these days. I don’t use Twitter, but I’m familiar with the term “wokescold,” and it’s incredibly accurate. Most of my students are just pure scolds. They’re deeply puritanical (though they have no idea who the Puritans were, given their virtually nonexistent awareness of history). ...

It seems to me that totalitarianism is not arriving in the U.S. via the stern face of Big Brother staring down from the screen. It’s coming from the college student who says we shouldn’t view a photo of pure, untrammeled joy. And the thing is that they can’t see that joy, not just because they’re puritans, but because they have no historical consciousness. They have no sense of what so many Americans sacrificed in the years leading up to that famous kiss because they never really learned it. ... 

... We are crazy if we don’t think for one second that the things we consider good and just today will be denounced as oppressive in 30 years. To say that we shouldn’t look at an image that shows the joy of having just defeated the f’ing Nazis is just insanity.

My students are generally pleasant, but they’re never any fun. Where’s the joy in their lives? They live to denounce. It’s like having 25 Robespierres around you three times a week. They’re always on the lookout for something to be outraged about. 

 I'd love to have some fine ending, full of hope and promise. But I do not. As Notre Dame Prof. Patrick Daneen wrote,

Our students’ ignorance is not a failing of the educational system – it is its crowning achievement. Efforts by several generations of philosophers and reformers and public policy experts — whom our students (and most of us) know nothing about — have combined to produce a generation of know-nothings. The pervasive ignorance of our students is not a mere accident or unfortunate but correctible outcome, if only we hire better teachers or tweak the reading lists in high school. It is the consequence of a civilizational commitment to civilizational suicide. The end of history for our students signals the End of History for the West.

Hard to put a happy face on that. Want to watch the perpetual infantilism of our children in action? The consider no more than Democratic California Sen. Dianne Feinstein's visit by elementary school kids and adults where she encountered wokescolds of all ages.


Update: Commentary: Politicized Schools Are Radically Transforming Our Nation. Well, as Prof. Daneen said, that's what the education establishment considers its most important goal.

"Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!"

We have long known and studied dignity cultures and honor-shame cultures. Now sociology professors Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning say there has emerged a new kind of social-interaction dynamic: victimhood culture, kicking off with an incident at Oberlin University.

The Oberlin student [who took offense at an email] took a different approach: After initially emailing the student who offended her, she decided to publicly air the encounter that provoked her and their subsequent exchange in the community at large, hoping to provoke sympathy and antagonism toward the emailer by advertising her status as an aggrieved party.   

 But she was met from the original emailer with even more strident claims that she had victimized him even more. And it went downhill from there - "There is no end to conflict in a victimhood culture."

What's distinguishes this culture from honor-shame or dignity cultures? The professors explain:

It isn’t honor culture.

“Honorable people are sensitive to insult, and so they would understand that microaggressions, even if unintentional, are severe offenses that demand a serious response,” they write. “But honor cultures value unilateral aggression and disparage appeals for help. Public complaints that advertise or even exaggerate one’s own victimization and need for sympathy would be anathema to a person of honor.”

But neither is it dignity culture:

“Members of a dignity culture, on the other hand, would see no shame in appealing to third parties, but they would not approve of such appeals for minor and merely verbal offenses. Instead they would likely counsel either confronting the offender directly to discuss the issue, or better yet, ignoring the remarks altogether.”

The culture on display on many college and university campuses, by way of contrast, is “characterized by concern with status and sensitivity to slight combined with a heavy reliance on third parties. People are intolerant of insults, even if unintentional, and react by bringing them to the attention of authorities or to the public at large. Domination is the main form of deviance, and victimization a way of attracting sympathy, so rather than emphasize either their strength or inner worth, the aggrieved emphasize their oppression and social marginalization.”

It is, they say, “a victimhood culture.”

Read the whole thing, "The Rise of Victimhood Culture" in The Atlantic.

Now I have two responses. The first is that victimhood culture is literally childish. It is a dynamic that resides at elementary-grade level, although, as the professors explain, college students today are far more adept and energetic in it than small kids. It is taking personal disagreements or conflicts to well, this level.


Remember one of the first rules of economics: That which is subsidized increases. When posting one's latest "I'm being repressed!" event across social media or public forums become routine, it will become rewarding. Posters become affirmed in their grievances and over time (not a long time!) want that affirmation again and again. So their level of "I'm offended" get lower and lower, their sprint to public revelation becomes quicker and sooner, and their claims of harm become ever-more insistent and exaggerated.

In short, victimhood culture is not about justice or peacemaking or conflict resolution. Quite the opposite: it is about domination and conflict creation and lengthening the fight, all the better to be affirmed. Victimhood culture is at bottom selfish, self-centered and ultimately self-defeating.

My second response is that victimhood culture is very specifically contrary to the teachings of Christ, so anyone who thinks him/herself a Christian who engages in it very seriously needs to get a new understanding.

Let me start with a referral to my essay of how Jesus rebutted the honor-shame dynamic that was firmly entrenched in first-century Judea, "How Jesus invented individual liberty."

Then how to get even with others the right way.

More urgently than ever, this is what we must teach our children.

Honor-Shame dynamics enter the STEMs

I have posted before of how the Left's social dynamic, its basic way of relationships with other persons, is one of honor-shame. Honor-shame is the basic dynamic that human beings evolved with and is still found in Arab and other cultures around the world. 

The Middle East Quarterly explains the essence of the honor/shame culture:

[I[n traditional Arab society ... a distinction is made between two kinds of honor: sharaf and ‘ird. Sharaf relates to the honor of a social unit, such as the Arab tribe or family, as well as individuals, and it can fluctuate up or down. A failure by an individual to follow what is defined as adequate moral conduct weakens the social status of the family or tribal unit. On the other hand, the family's sharaf may be increased by model behavior such as hospitality, generosity, courage in battle, etc. In sum, sharaf translates roughly as the Western concept of "dignity."

Honor, then, is what is granted by the community, by the social units of society. Likewise, shame or disgrace is also so given. The psychologist who used the nom de blog of Dr. Sanity explained in Shame, the Arab Psyche, and Islam, that in Arab cultures, the principal concern over conduct is not that which is guilty or innocent, but that which brings honor or shame.

[W]hat other people believe has a far more powerful impact on behavior than even what the individual believes. [T]he desire to preserve honor and avoid shame to the exclusion of all else is one of the primary foundations of the culture. This desire has the side-effect of giving the individual carte blanche to engage in wrong-doing as long as no-one knows about it, or knows he is involved

In contrast, she says, the West has a Guilt/Innocence culture. "The guilt culture is typically and primarily concerned with truth, justice, and the preservation of individual rights."

Now we come to this, which I present as another exhibit in my premise: "Profs say female STEM grades don’t reflect ‘perceived effort’."

Four professors from Otterbein University argue in a recent academic journal article that "grading practices" may be at least partly responsible for the lack of women in STEM fields.

Based on surveys of 828 STEM students, the professors conclude that female students believe they work harder than their male classmates for similar grades, indicating that "women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

 [The] Otterbein University professors suggest that women may be averse to STEM fields because they feel they work harder than male students without earning higher grades.

After conducting a study of 828 students in STEM classes, the professors discovered that while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades, which “indicates that women's higher perceived effort levels are not rewarded."

"Science educators could redistribute grades more akin to non-STEM disciplines to increase STEM retention."    Tweet This

"This, in turn, returns us to questions of grading practices,” the professors write. “Does a course grade primarily reward conceptual understanding and problem-solving ability, or does it primarily reward hard work, reflected in course attendance, submission of assignments on time, etc., or some mixture of the two?”

Let's consider this sentence fragment: "... while women felt they put more effort into their classes than men, they received approximately equivalent grades... "

This is literally a Marxist view, the labor theory of value. The women worked harder, so they should get better grades. That the women may not have worked better seems not to have crossed their minds.

In my college days, my friends were envious that I rarely typed (as in, with a typewriter; I am a fossil) a draft of my term papers. I just sat down, banged the keys for awhile, and voila! A term paper came forth, for which my usual grade was an A. My buddies, meanwhile, would labor over draft after draft before going final, and maybe they got an A and maybe they didn't.

I was simply a better writer than they were; it just came naturally to me. But I could labor hours over math assignments and still not finish them, while my friends had long finished theirs and were out dancing with the cheerleaders. However, the professors apparently think that effort counts more than results, even in engineering, and for term papers I should have received only a C or so, and my friends an A because they worked harder than I did, and the reverse for math, right?

Labor is in itself valueless. Example: I hire a local young man to cut my grass and edge the walks and driveway. It's his business. He arrives with a large riding mower and knocks out my half-acre of green in probably not more than 15 minutes, maybe 20; I have never timed him. Now, I could buy a lawn mower, although not one as expensive as his, and I could cut my own grass. But it would take me much longer and require more effort from me than it does from him.

But would my yard be better maintained or look nicer just because I worked harder at it than he did?

But that is not even the real point of the professors' study. The real key point is this: "women felt they put more effort" than the men. How would they know? They can't know. The whole thing is not really about what actually happened, it's about how they felt about what happened. This is foolish, of course, and indicates another step down the road of what I have maintained for many years: led by the Left, America is adopting an honor-shame social ordering and dynamic.

Think of it this way -- these women students feel shamed by their perception of their inferior academic performance. The answer is not to work harder or smarter. It is to recover their honor. And that means that grading must be preferentially curved to do that:

Citing research by Kevin Rask, now a professor at Colorado College, they propose that “science educators could redistribute grades more akin to non-STEM disciplines to increase STEM retention.” 

Yeah, the bridge you will be driving across the chasm a 10 years from now will have been designed by an engineer who was literally given a pass in order to keep her "motivated." Good luck with that.

Update: As someone commented elsewhere, "Grades should reflect knowledge and ability, not effort. I don't want my brake system designed by somebody who's degree is basically a participation trophy."

Confederate monuments: So what? Now What?

Part one of a series on this topic

So what? Now what?

One of the bishops of The United Methodist Church has told of his son’s soccer coach. If one of his players made an outstanding play and then unduly celebrated, the coach would rejoin, “So what? Now what?”

Meaning, now that you’ve done that, what do you do next?

Workers remove a monument dedicated to the Confederate Women of Maryland
early Wednesday, after it was taken down in Baltimore.
Photo by Jerry Jackson / The Baltimore Sun via AP

In his book The Martian Chronicles, written in the height of the Jim Crow era, Ray Bradbury tells of a day on earth when all the black people board rockets that they’ve had built in secret. They are going to move to Mars. The white people don’t find out until liftoff day. The main character is a white man named Teece. He watches the stream of people heading toward the launch site with dismay and impotence, cursing at them and dismissing them in turns. And then (profanity snipped),

Far down the empty street a bicycle came.

“I’ll be [snip]. Teece, here comes your Silly now.”

The bicycle pulled up before the porch, a seventeen-year-old colored boy on it, all arms and feet and long legs and round watermelon head. He looked up at Samuel Teece and smiled.

“So you got a guilty conscience and came back,” said Teece.

“No, sir, I just brought the bicycle.”

“What’s wrong, couldn’t get it on the rocket?”

“That wasn’t it, sir.”

“Don’t tell me what it was! Get off, you’re not goin’ to steal my property!” He gave the boy a push. The bicycle fell. “Get inside and start cleaning the brass.” …

“You still standin’ there!” Teece glared.

“Mr. Teece, you don’t mind I take the day off,” he said apologetically.

“And tomorrow and day after tomorrow and the day after the day after that,” said Teece.

“I’m afraid so, sir.” “We got to leave now, Mr. Teece.”

Teece laughed. “You got one named Swing Low, and another named Sweet Chariot?”

The car started up. “Good-by, Mr. Teece.”

“You got one named Roll Dem Bones?”

“Good-by, mister!”

“And another called Over Jordan! Ha! Well, tote that rocket, boy, lift that rocket, boy, go on, get blown up, see if I care!”

The car churned off into the dust. The boy rose and cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted one last time at Teece: “Mr. Teece, Mr. Teece, what you goin’ to do nights from now on? What you goin’ to do nights, Mr. Teece?”

Silence. The car faded down the road. It was gone. “What in [snip] did he mean?” mused Teece.

“What am I goin’ to do nights?”

He watched the dust settle, and it suddenly came to him.

He remembered nights when men drove to his house, their knees sticking up sharp and their shotguns sticking up sharper, like a carful of cranes under the night trees of summer, their eyes mean. Honking the horn and him slamming his door, a gun in his hand, laughing to himself, his heart racing like a ten-year-old’s, driving off down the summer-night road, a ring of hemp rope coiled on the car floor, fresh shell boxes making every man’s coat look bunchy. How many nights over the years, how many nights of the wind rushing in the car, flopping their hair over their mean eyes, roaring, as they picked a tree, a good strong tree, and rapped on a shanty door!

“So that’s what the [snip] meant?” Teece leaped out into the sunlight. “Come back, you [snip]! What am I goin’ to do nights? Why, that lousy, insolent son of a . . .”

It was a good question. He sickened and was empty. Yes. What will we do nights? he thought. Now they’re gone, what? He was absolutely empty and numb.

Bradbury’s story continues, but the question remains: “Now they’re gone, what?”

Let us suppose every public statue or monument to the Confederacy is removed as fast as their opponents want. “So what? Now what?” Who exactly will be better off? Black unemployment will be unchanged. The risk of horrific war with North Korea will not be lowered. The near-total breakdown of civility in our political life will not be improved. The inability, indeed, unwillingness, of the parties in Washington to come together to govern well will not increase. Obamacare will continue to fail and there will continue to be nothing on the docket to replace or repair it. Al Qaeda will still attempt to carry out the attacks it recently promised against mass-transportation means in the United States.

Now they're gone, what? What difference will it make, exactly?

It may be answered that deleting the monuments is a worthy thing in its own right. It may be that an “afterward” plan is not necessary to do a thing inherently good and desirable in itself. The presence of such statues and monuments has a meaning much diminished now from what their erectors intended. Black Americans, still living with the after-effects of 200 years or so of slavery in America, are constantly reminded by the monuments’ continuing presence that their status as Americans remains somewhat provisional as long as those statues remain.

In this I will not argue contrary. Practically none of the statuary concerned dates to just after the Civil War. Almost all were erected from the 1890s – 1940s, most completed well before World War II. The main objective in them was to comfort and reassure aging Civil War veterans (of both South and North) that their sacrifices were real, they were remembered, but they were not going to determine the future of a United States. In their day, the monuments served as implements of peaceful reconciliation – and it took decades of time and veterans’ old age before even that could occur.

Of course, no Civil War veterans are alive today and even Boomers like me are five generations removed from their Civil War ancestors. I had lineal ancestors who fought on both sides. A multi-great uncle of the CSA’s 11^th Tennessee was KIA at Stones River and another g3-uncle of the 45^th Pennsylvania lost both his legs at Chancellorsville. Another of my g2-grandfathers has the distinction of being the only American POW in history ever to be broken out of POW camp by his wife, a woman who personally brained a Union soldier who attempted to rape her in her Nashville home.

So, for me there is a personal connection, at least of sorts, to the War and to its monuments today. It is not a strong one. The great majority of Americans today, descended from immigrants arriving after the Civil War, have no personal connection to the War or to the monuments that memorialize it.

But black men, women and children in the country do have a personal connection to the war because they continue to live now with its consequences and legacies, regardless of whether they are descended from persons living in either North or South before or during the war.

Perhaps, though, with both whites and black people more emotionally distant from both the War and its aftermath, we can assess both the war and its memorials with some dispassion – although higher passion seem to be the order of the day now.

First, let us dispense with all the “Lost Cause” nonsense Southern apologists invented after the war.

There are some hard truths about the CSA. I am a Nashville native and grew up here. My family's roots in Middle Tenn. go back to just after the Revolutionary War. I have mentioned my ancestral-family members who fought (and some died) for the CSA on both my mom's and dad's side (also for the Union on my dad's). Alexander Stephens, vice president of the CSA, was my wife's great-great grandfather's brother.

I take no back seat to anyone for Southern heritage and upbringing.

Like probably most native Southerners of my generation, I was raised being taught that the real reasons for the Southern states' secession was to preserve states’ rights and that the northern economic lobby was choking the South's economy with high tariffs on Southern goods.

Slavery? Well, it was in the mix somewhere, but slavery was not the real reason for secession.

It is a lie, pure and simple.

The states’ rights and tariffs arguments are entirely absent from Southern apologia until after the Civil War. In 1860 and before, no one in the South was using those topics to justify secession. Furthermore, in 1860 federal tariffs on Southern goods were lower than they had been since 1816. 

The Democrats in Congress, dominated by Southern Democrats, wrote and passed the tariff laws in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s, and kept reducing rates, so that the 1857 rates were down to about 15%. ... The South had almost no complaints... . [Link]

It was the Southern politicians who had actually attacked the concept of federalism and state rights when, some years before the Civil War, some non-slave states defied the Fugitive Slave Act and declared that when slaves were brought into those states by the masters, they could be declared legally manumitted by state law. Southern politicians fought that tooth and nail and applauded the Dred Scott decision of the US Supreme Court, which denied Dred Scott, a black man, the right to sue for his freedom in US courts even if he resided in a free state. (Seven of the Supreme Court's judges in the case had been appointed by pro-slavery presidents from the South. Five of the seven were from slave-holding families.)

Nor was the North's industrial power significant at all in the secessionists' decisions (although it may be argued that it should have been). In 1860, Southern goods accounted for 75 percent of all American exports' dollar value ("King Cotton" being the main export) and the market value of the slaves across the South was greater than the entire Net Asset Value of the combined industrial base of the North.

The North's industrial revolution had begun in the 1840s, but was hardly in full speed in 1860. The war great accelerated it, leaving the North economically ascendant afterward, but before the war the South was the dominant economic section of the country (and it was economically wrecked by 1865).

Why did the Southern states secede? To protect slavery, period.

Read the 11 seceded states' actual acts of secession, beginning with South Carolina's, and you will see that slavery was the sole reason for secession. South Carolina's act makes this very unambiguous: protection of slavery was the only topic presented as driving secession. Same with Mississippi. And the others.

There were four sections of S.C.'s secession act. The opening section claims and justifies the right of the state to secede in the first place. Then:

The next section asserts that the government of the United States and of states within that government had failed to uphold their obligations to South Carolina. The specific issue stated was the refusal of some states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and clauses in the U.S. Constitution protecting slavery and the federal government's perceived role in attempting to abolish slavery. 

 The next section states that while these problems had existed for twenty-five years, the situation had recently become unacceptable due to the election of a President (this was Abraham Lincoln although he is not mentioned by name) who was planning to outlaw slavery. The declaration states the primary reasoning behind South Carolina's declaring of secession from the Union, which is described as: 

... increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the Institution of Slavery ...

Then  the final section was simply the declaration of secession. There are no issues presented to justify secession except slavery. Note the contempt of "states right" in the secession act, in its denunciation of "... the refusal of some states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act... ." The other 10 seceded states' enactments are not significantly different.

The Confederate States of America was founded to do one thing only: to preserve the power of one class of people to literally own as chattel property another class of people. There is no other reason the CSA existed.

That would be bad enough on its own. But it's worse. David Goldman, an economist (Ph.D., London School of Economics), has some facts and thoughts (read the whole essay):

Southern slaveholders were rapists. We know this because only 73% of the DNA of African-Americans is African; the rest is Caucasian with a small fraction of Native American. Most of the admixture of DNA, a McGill University study concludes, occurred before the Civil War, that is, when slaveholders and their white employees could use female slaves at will. Keep that in mind the next time Foghorn Leghorn sounds off about the honor of Southern womanhood. To own slaves is wicked; to rape female slaves and sell one's children by them is disgusting in the extreme. Yet that is what the Old South did, and the DNA evidence proves it.

That is the "heritage" that CSA flag defenders are really defending; I hope, truly, that most of them do not know that.

Southerners must not defend the indefensible

To defend the Confederate States of America is to side with the abjectly, morally indefensible. To use the CSA's battle flag or national colors as a symbol of Southern pride should be deeply, deeoffensive to modern Southerners, who are the most racially harmonious people in the nation (by no means has the year of Jubilee arrived, but jeepers, just compare to practically any Union-states- heritage city).

Have Southerners nothing to display as an emblem of regional heritage and pride but the flag of a irredeemably corrupt and thankfully temporary regime?

God save us.

Endnotes: 

1. You can read all of Bradbury's chapter here. Be advised that there is rough language and that the book, written in 1950, envisions no change in race relations between 1950 and the year of its setting, 2003. But then, the narrative is not really about 2003 or Mars at all. 

 2. The number of Southerners who display the Confederate flag in any way is vanishingly small. So why we are letting this particular issue practically control the national public agenda sort of escapes me. That we have a president who practices public buffoonery, and a media apparatus that long ago went full ideologue, does not help matters. 

Next installment: "The issue isn't the issue." "The myth of 'noble Lincolnism'."

The Coming New Dark Ages: Millennials say why they are fragile

Millennial Offers the True Reason Her Generation is So Fragile

In a recent op-ed for Detroit News, millennial Kaylee McGhee offered an insightful explanation of her own:  

“Millennials are in a constant contest to one-up each other in showing tolerance, and when anyone or anything stands in their way, they collapse into temper tantrums.   

And the truth is, none of us should be surprised. My generation is a symptom of the society past generations have built — one characterized by immediate gratification, the breakdown of a moral code and the victim mentality. It’s the wreckage of past generations’ experiments with post-modern liberalism, and millennials are trying to wade through it.  

Millennials are desperately searching for answers to questions they’re afraid to ask. And because our predecessors failed to defend the moral code that once provided clarity, my generation replaced it with the morality of political correctness. The result is the snowflake-ification of a generation.” 

Millennials Value Tolerance Over Freedom

Pew Research Center, reports 40 percent of millennials believe government should be able to prevent people from saying offensive things to minority groups. A devout individual objecting to taking photos at a same-sex wedding could qualify for being offensive to a minority group. Thus, Millennials either keep quiet to be perceived as “tolerant” or supposedly fight for equality.

And politically conservative Millennials tend to fold like a tent rather than defend their beliefs:

Conservative Millennials have a tendency to discard their religious values to appease culture, like on the issue of abortion. In politics, conservatives consistently concede to culture’s vocal opposition to pro-life policies. ... millennials have a tendency to keep the peace with secular culture as its values seep into academic institutions and the workplace. Standing with the religious baker or florist objecting to an action to preserve their conscience may result in social ostracism.

All of which seems to me that this generation is relapsing into being ruled by honor-shame dynamics, in which the inner compass of conscience, objective moral codes and universal values are diminished - in fact altogether discarded. Instead, wholly subjective assessments reign supreme.

Jon Miltimore, whence the first link, responded to Ms. McGhee that her op-ed,

... relates to the thesis of Alasdair MacIntyre’s seminal philosophical work After Virtue. In the book, the Notre Dame professor posits the theory that the Aristotelian moral framework that had existed in the West for over two thousand years was essentially destroyed during the Enlightenment, and efforts to unify it with a coherent Enlightenment philosophy failed, though philosophers failed to realize this.   

The result was that man still largely practiced and observed traditional moral values for generations, but did so largely lacking any understanding of the ideas that underpinned these values. MacIntyre, whose book was published in 1981 (the dawn of the Millennial Generation), concluded with an argument suggesting that man, almost entirely unbeknownst to him, had entered a dark age in which moral clarity and consensus were virtually impossible.

I have written about this quite a bit. What follows is an excerpt from my post, "Honor, shame, the Middle East and the American left."

The psychologist who uses the nom de blog of Dr. Sanity explained in Shame, the Arab Psyche, and Islam, that in Arab cultures, the principal concern over conduct is not that which is guilty or innocent, but that which brings honor or shame.

[W]hat other people believe has a far more powerful impact on behavior than even what the individual believes. [T]he desire to preserve honor and avoid shame to the exclusion of all else is one of the primary foundations of the culture. This desire has the side-effect of giving the individual carte blanche to engage in wrong-doing as long as no-one knows about it, or knows he is involved.

In contrast, she says, the West has a Guilt/Innocence culture. "The guilt culture is typically and primarily concerned with truth, justice, and the preservation of individual rights."

She illustrates the great difference between the two cultures by this matrix:

The key: if your principal concern is your standing in your community and what others think about you rather than your own inherent sense of conscience and personal sense of worth, then you are operating on a honor/shame model.

And that seems to be the social dynamic at work among the Millennials. If so, if Alasdair McIntyre is correct, we are indeed entering a new Dark Ages.

The best rock album ever and why

Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is IMO the best rock album of the whole 60s-70s era. It has some tight competition, mainly the two Beatles albums Abbey Road and Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band.

As much as I really like the Beatles, today that's all that their music does for me - evoke likability and enjoyment. But none of the songs, much less whole albums, make me think about the human condition and what it means and about my place personally. DSOTM does. Here it is, "Live at Wembley," the full album.



I would call attention to two factors that still impress highly even after 40-plus years. One is the remarkable engineering of the tracks that leads them seamlessly one to another. But this was not their rock invention. In fact, the first credit for that innovation belongs to Sgt. Pepper's. Nonetheless, it is simply stunning here because in Pepper's the technique basically only provides a lead-in from one song to a different one that is thematically unrelated.

However, in DSOTM there is thematic unity from the first note to the last. This makes the album more of a concert than a rock performance, although it excels at that, too. The instrumentals are extended and compelling. The vocals are matched almost as a counterpoint to the instruments at one place, as a complement at another.

It is the fourth track, "Time," that pushes the album into the number one spot for me. When the album was released in 1973 I was graduating from high school. Now I am 44 years on, in my early sixties, and "Time" hits me harder now than ever:

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way
Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today
And then one day you find ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun
So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
Racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
Every year is getting shorter never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I'd something more to say 

Home
Home again
I like to be here
When I can
When I come home
Cold and tired
It's good to warm my bones
Beside the fire
Far away
Across the field
Tolling on the iron bell
Calls the faithful to their knees
To hear the softly spoken magic spell

Trust me, young people, when you get to my age, this song will put you into a highly reflective and self-evaluating mode.

Photo link.

They just want to watch it burn

How do you handle a wolf in sheep's clothing? Charisma magazine examines the question from the viewpoint of pastoral ministry.

Fairly recently I dealt with a wolf in sheep's clothing issue that was complicated and difficult. It amazes me that as I have talked with others I've learned that many people have gone through this kind of thing in the body of Christ, yet few people are talking about it. I think often we've all found ourselves experiencing the gash of a wolf, and because we genuinely want to think the best of the other people, we turn the other cheek. We think forgiveness means you keep staying vulnerable and rarely speak up.

Forgiveness doesn't mean allowing yourself to continue to be chewed on and devoured. Matthew 7:15 tells us to be aware that there are wolves in sheep's clothing seeking to devour the sheep. We also know from Scripture in the last days false prophets and these wolves will increase. People often have this misguided notion that these wolves will be obvious to recognize and would never dare set foot in church or on a platform. That's not true. There are wolves lurking in pews, sadly sometimes behind pulpits and out in the business arena. It's more common than people realize. This is not meant to make anyone fearful or paranoid, but it is meant to wake you up and teach you how to deal with these situations.

Anyone who is an adult and worked in the church, in business or in charitable organizations for a few years or more already knows that wolves are there. That has been true since, oh, 10,000 BC. But, as Charisma's writer indicates, wolves seem more numerous than ever. And Prof. Anthony Esolen of Providence College in Rhode Island, agrees. He writes of the Leftist dominance among student bodies at his and almost every other college in America.

... college students, a majority of them female, demand to be protected from ideas and utterances that somehow, as they claim, deny their very existence or would cast doubt upon what they claim are their incontestable experiences as members of some historically underprivileged group. Their critics laugh at them and say that such students, “snowflakes,” want to lock our colleges into an orthodoxy that is unenlightened and medieval. These critics are wrong in their diagnosis and inaccurate in their criticism.

It is also something of a mistake to point at the students and laugh at them for being weaklings. The students hold the hammer, and they know it. ... But in our world of inversions, power is granted to people who claim that they have no power and who resent the greatness of their own forebears. They do not seek “safety.” They seek to destroy. The strong man is bound and gagged, and the pistol is pointed at his head — the seat of reason itself. [boldface added]

"They seek to destroy." There are times I cannot understand the destructive actions of others in any way that makes sense. But this comes close:



There is a destructiveness at loose in our world, our country, our communities, our associations and even our homes that cannot be explained adequately by excluding the spiritual dimensions at play.

Such destructiveness always starts with or quickly moves to destructive speech. Usually (but not always) a huge dose of hypocrisy is involved as the "destructor" (to borrow a word from Ghostbusters) almost always conceals her or his slander or libel behind claims of only wanting a higher good. But in fact, their actual desire is self-oriented, selfish and significantly narcissistic: they frequently act as if they have been aggrieved or wounded and are in such psychological, emotional or spiritual pain that others rush to comfort. But the others are being played and only a few ever figure it out.

Understand that demands from destructive persons cannot ever be satisfied. For their real goal is not an actual solution to the putative issue, for as the old SDS slogan explains, "This issue isn't the issue." The real goal, very cleverly concealed behind aggrieved tones of voice and claims of how moral/spiritual/right minded/self-denying/unselfish (the list goes on an on) they are is always the same: "I must get my way, all the time."

But that's not the heart of the issue, either. These persons simply must have an enemy, someone or some group who opposes them. For the "my way" that destructors must get is inextricably linked to triumph over an opponent. That's why anyone who does not agree or assent to their demands is a target: the issue is not the demands, but the opposition.

Every issue is personal for destructors. It is not possible to hold a reasonable, contrary position. To resist a destructor's demand is not mere disagreement. It is to oppose the ordering of the world itself in some sense.

"The issue isn't the issue." Demands are only a pretense to evoke the fight. The fight itself is the goal. It is the only goal. Destructors never consider any issue closed for which they do not achieve total victory. They die in every ditch. Every fight is to the death because their very concept of self is woven into it.

His days of asking are all gone, his fight goes on and on and on. But he thinks that the fight is worth it all. So he strikes like thunderball.

Title song to the movie, Thunderball, referring to character Emilio Largo of Spectre

To yield to a destructor's demands is only to evoke others, more sternly expressed and more unreasonable than before.

Esolen continues with the impact this has on education. It wrecks it.

In such a world, it is insufficient to say that higher education suffers. Except in the most technical of disciplines, and perhaps even in those, the very possibility of higher education comes to an abrupt halt. If a professor must negotiate an emotional and verbal and political mine field before he opens his mouth, then he is no professor any longer. He is a servile functionary, no matter his title and no matter how well he is paid. He instructs his students not in freedom but in his own servility. That many of the students demand this servility of him and of themselves makes their capitulation all the worse.

This state of affairs is not confined to academia. You can substitute titles of any other leadership position for "professor" and it still makes sense:

• If a police chief must negotiate an emotional and verbal and political mine field before he opens his mouth, then he is no police chief any longer. He is a servile functionary ... . 
• If a department head must negotiate an emotional and verbal and political mine field before he opens his mouth, then he is no department head any longer. He is a servile functionary ... .
• If a pastor must negotiate an emotional and verbal and political mine field before he opens his mouth, then he is no pastor any longer. He is a servile functionary ... .

Here is the hardest part for targets to understand: Destructors are absolute masters in assessing within any organization two things essential for their success:

1. Whom the general membership considers expendable.
There's an old gamblers' saying, "at a poker table if you can't figure out who the patsy is, that means it's you." The corollary here is that to be targeted by a destructor means you are considered expendable by the general group, no matter your own official standing within the group. This is true about two-thirds of the time for your first targeting (which is often a trial run), but if there a second then it is absolutely true.

2. Who their own allies will be.
Destructors spend enormous time building alliances and coalitions among other discontented people. The old saying that "misery loves company" is true but incomplete. Misery does not merely love company, misery requires company. Destructors and any other merely unhappy person must have their discontent, anger or grievances validated by others. These persons are absolute experts at finding one another, and they do.

If you ever find yourself contending with a destructor a second or subsequent time, there are no positive potential outcomes. You will not be contending with one person or even a few, but an entire network that will support the destructor behind the scenes, and a few overtly. They understand that a small minority organized and oriented toward a common will almost always prevail against the vast majority caught by surprise, unprepared to resist. Furthermore, the majority, outside the fray, tends to think that the putative issue is the issue and is mostly accurate in thinking it trivial in itself. They don't see what the fuss is all about and just want the whole thing to go away. Some, but not many, see what is really happening but will not be willing to become targets themselves.

So when you are targeted, you will be alone and isolated. No one will be your ally, although you will get occasional expressions of sympathy. So what to do? Not much, I'm afraid:

1. Maintain your position but understand that the destructor will do his/her best to destroy your reputation as long as you oppose. And the destructor network is already leagues ahead of any defense you can mount.

2. Or just capitulate quickly enough, every time, so that there is no fight to be had with you and the destructor turns her/his attention to someone else. But of course, this almost always requires you to surrender some kind of authority that is rightfully yours. A destructor fights to gain power, so s/he does not target anyone of a lower or equivalent status or authority.

Either way, however, your time in the organization is coming to an end. The countdown clock starts when a destructor starts explaining why s/he is considering leaving the organization (always widely publicized and with as much woeful aggrievement as possible). If the destructor does depart, s/he will have poisoned the atmosphere and slandered your reputation enough so that your effectiveness in the association is permanently damaged. So understand that once a destructor starts threatening to go elsewhere, your time in the organization is coming to an end. The question is not whether you will leave (actually, you'll finally be told to leave by the larger organization), it is whether the destructor precedes you. But even if s/he doesn't, you will still leave.

There is such a thing as "creative destruction." But destructors don't know it. They set fires not to clear the way for something better, more useful or more beautiful. They just want to watch it burn.

End note: this helps explain: 'Everyday Sadists' Are More Common Than You Think

So does this: "Social Justice Syndrome: ‘Rising Tide of Personality Disorders Among Millennials’"

Maybe the best war movie ever made is Russian

I thought about posting this on Memorial Day weekend but the fact that White Tiger is a Russian (post-Soviet, 2012) movie made me reconsider.

IMDB.com summarizes it thus:

Great Patriotic War, early 1940s. After barely surviving a battle with a mysterious, ghostly-white Tiger tank, Red Army Sergeant Ivan Naydenov becomes obsessed with its destruction.

Which is true as far as it goes, but this is not just a duello movie of two single-focused, even near-fanatic tank crews gunning for one another. It's not a land-borne version of The Enemy Below. White Tiger is a penetrating inquiry into war and the human condition. The German tank and the Russian protagonist are archetypes not just of soldiers anywhere, but of fallen humanity itself.

Fortunately, you can watch the whole movie, subtitled in English, right here. It seems its copyright does not extend to the United States.



At the very end is a monologue by Adolf Hitler, speaking to an unidentified man couched in shadows. Despite the identity of the speaker - and the screenplay's words in his mouth are reflective of what Hitler said and thought - the monologue is quite thought provoking, coming as it does following the last view of the Russian tank we see, and why and how we see it.

This is a very serious, compelling work of cinema. I hope you will agree.

Update Dec. 27, 2019: David Goldman posted a fairly savage review of the just-out World War 1 movie, 1917, calling it, "the worst war movie ever." The fault is not in its technical excellence of recreating the trenches and filth of the war, but in the fact that it does not tell a story.

...  the audience views the sequence of events from the perspective of a small dog dragged along on a leash behind them. ...

The camera trails the actors in what Mendes imagines to be “real time” through trenches, battlefields, ruined cities, and assorted disasters. Technically this poses great challenges, but the aesthetic outcome is a canine perspective on human events.

Time is represented as an indifferent sequence of moments, which means practically that every moment commands equal attention. In this nightmarish world there can be no drama, that is, no climax. On the contrary, every occurrence of importance to the thin narrative necessarily becomes an anti-climax.

In reply, I posted, "If you have never seen the Russian war film, "White Tiger," I cannot recommend it strongly enough," with a link here. There followed a collegial exchange:

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  David Goldman Donald Sensing, I watched the "Hitler" interview at the end of the film, and it sounds like an unwholesome Russophilic mysticism: der Traum jedwelchen europaesichen Normalburgers" is to destroy "Russland, diesen wilden und europafremden Kentaur." And the Jews, to be sure. Sounds a bit Duginesque -- it makes me very uncomfortable. Man frage sich, wes Geistes Kind es sei.

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  David Goldman Donald Sensing, a similar point is made about "White Tiger" by James Pearce in a 2018 doctoral dissertation: https://arro.anglia.ac.uk/704511/1/Pearce_2018.pdf

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  Donald Sensing David Goldman Thank you, I will read the dissertation, although I am afraid not very soon. Also, I can certainly see how a Jew would react differently to such a film than a Christian; see for example reactions to The Passion of Christ.
  
  I would never attempt to recount to you the long, deep history of western European anti-Judaism, to say nothing of what took place in eastern. And while I am not so sure that the dream of Jeder normale Europäer hätte den russischen Zentauren vernichten sollen, for sure Hitler had a lot of cooperation from the German people and non-Germans in, um, "resettling" the Jews, at minimum.
  
  With that, I think I will watch that closing interview again with your comments in mind before I read the dissertation.
  
  BTW, my German is VERY rusty, please be kind in reading this comment!
  
  And Happy New Year!

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The dissertation David recommends is, “The Use of History in Putin's Russia,” by James C. Pearce, August 2018. I have scanned only very briefly, but ISTM that Pearce cites this film and a handful of others as Russia's attempt to use the Great Patriotic War to recall Russia's (not the USSR's) glory days as a way of cementing a renewed national identity.

The Putin Agenda is determined to reconcile with the problematic and unusable past.
However, much controversy surrounds its motives and policies concerning an already
problematic period that divides the population and ruling elites alike. There are concerns that ignoring the traumatic episodes of the past will be detrimental to Russia’s development and bring great instability to the present.

Pearce writes that Tiger and some other films "are fictional yet presented as fact."

Not having read through the dissertation, I will not argue otherwise except to note that I doubt Tiger's Russian audience really swallowed that the white Tiger tank was historically genuine or that the movie's Russian hero could literally mind-meld with destroyed T-34s. That the movie does serve such a purpose in Russia as Pearce describes, though, I do not dispute.

That said, Pearce could have cast a wider net. While his dissertation is certainly not a lengthy movie review, some other candidates that might have illustrated his point better are:

• Tanks for Stalin, 2018

• 1940. A prototype of a new cutting edge tank is being taken on a secret mission to Moscow, to Comrade Stalin. Soon the cross-country run turns into a ruthless race.

• Battery Number One, 2018

• The film takes place in August 1944 when Soviet troops are moving through eastern Poland. Under orders to ensure safe passage for the army over a bridge near an abandoned monastery, Lieutenant Egorov and his battalion discover a makeshift orphanage for deaf-mute children hiding in the monastery with their teacher Eve, and are faced with the dilemma of compromising the refugees or executing their orders blindly.

• The Dawns Here Are Quiet, 2015, a four-part TV series

• Based on the eponymous book by Boris Vasilyev, the film is set in Karelia (North-West of Russia, near Finland) in 1941 during WWII. In a beautiful and quiet wilderness far from the front-line there is an anti-aircraft artillery point, where corporal Vaskov is stationed with a group of many young women in training. One of the women while sneaking from camp to visit her young son sees two German paratroopers. Vaskov takes five of the women to stop the two paratroopers, but finds sixteen paratroopers instead, leaving the small group of patriots to engage the enemy in an unequal fight. 

And for good measure, a leap back to World War 1 with 2015's Battalion.

February 1917 revolution has affected mode of life in Russia and changed the course of Great War. Monarch has abdicated. In trenches, were the confrontation with Germans lasts for several years, Bolsheviks are very active with their propaganda. They call for making peace with enemy. Russian officers can actually do nothing without approval of so-called Soldiers Committees. The army is just near the stage of complete degradation. By order of Russian Provisional Government, attempting to strengthen the spirit, the female Death Battalion is established. In charge of the Battalion - Cavalier of St. George Maria Bochkareva. Death Battalion give the lead of courage, fortitude and composure, stiffen the spirit of soldiers and prove, that each of the female hero is worthy of the Warrior Title.

There is an historical nugget in each of these, though perhaps in a way that a McDonald's chicken nugget represents a whole chicken. Though most take place during the USSR era, the character emphasis is on Russians rather than the multiple ethnicities and nationalities that comprised the Soviet empire. These are, as Pearce observes, movies about Russia and Russians at their finest.

Battalion is based on real events nearing the end of Russia's fighting the Kaiser's army, when Russia really did send battalions of female soldiers into battle, where, as the movie suggests somewhat ambiguously, they were slaughtered. (It seems that infantry women cannot successfully fight hand to hand with infantry men after all, which I sort of covered in my post, "The Infantry Woman Shortage."

Thanks to David Goldman for his comments and suggestion!