Cocksure

 

"The trouble with the world is the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt."

--Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell

That quote has been on the banner of this blog since its inception and it kept welling up in my brain as I read "The Man Who Broke Capitalism," by David Gelles about Jack Welch, the longtime CEO of General Electric.

Jack Welch

Jack Welch was a small man from a small town, Peabody Massachusetts, who studied chemistry in college and rose to be the CEO of what was at the time the most important company in the world.

He was a man certain of his own greatness and firm in his convictions and he thought he knew what the rest of the 20th century was going to look like.

Welch came to power in the days when Ronald Reagan was decrying welfare queens and Reagan was saying it was once again alright to be rich, and when Milton Friedman was winning a Nobel Prize in economics for saying the only duty of a CEO and of any company is to make money for its shareholders. He was saying this when people were talking about "socially responsible investing" such as not investing in apartheid South Africa and they were protesting outside Dow Chemical for making napalm which was immolating Vietnamese children.

Profits for Dow Chemical 

Friedman was not the first to say stuff like this: George Bernard Shaw's Undershaft said much the same thing in "Major Barbara" and his point was your only moral duty in life is to not be poor and so he made munitions and explosives and wealth came his way. Of course, Undershaft shared his wealth with his workers and the community was richly supported by the profits from his deadly products; the rich living high on the death and destruction of the poor nations.

Milton Friedman

But Friedman said it so assuredly he got the Nobel prize. He said government had no business interfering with business under any circumstances, should never regulate business, which is always wrong and harmful to society.

I haven't read any of Friedman's books or articles, but I know all I need to know about him from a half hour interview I listened to in which the interviewer asked him about the FDA: Didn't we need to have the FDA to control the pharmaceutical industry? Nonsense! thundered Friedman. But what about all those potentially harmful drugs? The bad products will be discovered and the companies who make them will face liability suits and bankruptcy so the market will discipline them. No problem. Let the market play out. Let the stallions of commerce infuse the economy with energy.

Of course Professor Friedman was not asked about the two most telling examples of where his argument fails: 

1/ Thalidomide and 2/ Mad Cow Disease. 

Thalidomide was that drug pregnant women in England were given to control nausea and they gave birth to thousands of children who had no arms or legs before it was realized Thalidomide was teratogenic. The justice of the liability courts and the marketplace would have been cold comfort to those limbless children or to their parents.

And then there is Mad Cow Disease, caused by a prion which cannot be baked, cooked or barbecued out of the cow and when ingested by human beings takes 20 years to surface as sudden profound dementia and bed ridden immobility unto death. How does the liability court or the marketplace catch up with something like that 20 years later?

So the professor didn't have a clue. He was cocksure but stupid and wrong. The easiest thing for an absolutist to be is consistent. Consistent, but wrong.

Jack Welch decided manufacturing in America was doomed. Spending money on R&D and workers' wages is a loser's game. The easy money is in finance, credit cards and banking. You don't need to make scientific or engineering breakthroughs for that--you just print cash.

Get rid of all those workers. Cut your least productive workers--the lower 10% each year until you have no workforce, just computers issuing credit cards.

How, exactly you define "least productive" is another thing.

Suppose you had a superlative football team, wins championships every year, sort of the New York Yankees of the 1950's, the standard by which you measure all others, sort of like the General Electric of the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's. But then you cut the least important 10% of your players after each season. What does that get you? The Washington Redskins. Or the Commanders. Or something.

But Jack Welch was a captain of industry, sure of himself, cocksure. 

He knew that the biggest drag on his company was all those lazy, entitled workers who were terminally complacent, just showed up at work to sit around and drink coffee. Sort of like welfare queens, but not living off the government, but off GE. 

Arthur T. Demoulas: A CEO for All Seasons

Contrast this with Arthur T. Demoulas, who fought off his cousins who wanted to sell out the family grocery store chain for a big pay day, vulture capitalism which would have carved up and destroyed hundreds of stores and thousands of jobs. His battle is documented in the documentary "Food Fight," and his basic article of faith was that Market Basket was not simply about who could make the most money and keep the biggest share of it. To him, this family business was about the customer and making food available at a good price, the workers and their families and communities from which they came and lastly, about making enough profit to keep the venture healthy and going, but not necessarily growing. Was Demoulas wrong, sentimental, soft headed or simply virtuous and right--that companies do not have to be simple feeding troughs for stockholders but can serve multiple purposes at once?

In Welch's eyes, he owed nothing to GE workers but the last paycheck. His only obligation was to the share holders. He bought out other companies and the first thing he did when he acquired them was to fire as many people as possible. Workers are not an asset; they are overhead. 

I've know some workers who don't want to work, but most workers I know actually care about doing a good job. But Mr. Welch knew better. So he made war on complacency and on his own workforce. He became the spider wasp of American industry: hollowed out his own company from within.

But he was cocksure. 

Me, I'm full of doubt. So what does that make me?

Why Lia Thomas Matters

 

"But it was also the result of careful planning by national conservative organizations to harness the emotion around gender politics. With gender norms shifting and a sharp rise in the number of young people identifying as transgender, conservative groups spotted an opening in a debate that was gaining attention."

--The New York Times 

The story of the University of Pennsylvania swimmer, Lia Thomas, matters because the way her story has been used for political purposes. It is both important and instructive.

Of course, all ethical analysis should begin with the establishment of fact, and legal analysis typically begins this way, but political analysis does not care about fact, only perception of fact.

The swimmer known as Lia Thomas began her collegiate swimming career swimming on the Penn men's team, but then underwent some sort of gender transition therapy and began competing as a woman, where she was among the top women swimmers.

I've spent about as much time as I have patience for googling around the internet, trying to tease out some critical facts, unsuccessfully:

#1/ What, exactly, did Lia Thomas have done to herself?

I said, "some sort of transformation" because the details of what was done are nowhere I can find.

 From photos of her in her tank suit, it appears she has no testicles or penis, so I'm tentatively concluding she had an orchiectomy (removal of her testes) and resection of her penis. She also likely received estrogen and possibly other hormones to reduce her testosterone levels, likely cyproterone (which blocks testosterone binding to androgen receptors on cells), spironolactone (which also blocks androgen binding to cells and which has a slightly estrogen like structure) and estradiol patches to "feminize" cells. 

All men produce hormones which have a feminizing effect (e.g. stimulating breast cells), e.g. estrogen, and all men also produce male hormones, which reduce feminizing effects and cause "androgenization" meaning male effects, like beard growth and muscle growth and increased muscle strength. 

All women do this as well. The make both sets of hormones, androgens (male) and estrogens (female). The difference between most men and women is men tend to produce a lot more male hormone (e.g. testosterone) than female hormone (e.g. estradiol) and women do just the opposite.

Give a normal man a lot more estrogen and he'll tend to grow breasts. Give a normal woman a lot more androgen and she'll tend to grow a moustache and beard.

From her photographs, it looks like Lia Thomas no longer has male external genitalia. From NCAA rules, it seems likely she has taken enough estrogen and/or cyproterone and/or spironolactone to reduce her testosterone levels to some level enough to satisfy NCAA rules to allow her to compete as a female.

But much of this is inference. Just you try finding the details online.

I suppose this is all confidential medical information, but when you assert your rights to swim as woman, one might argue you have to provide enough information to justify your new identity. 

#2/ What happened to Lia Thomas when she entered the swimming pool as a newly minted woman? 

That is, what happened to her success rates as a woman, as opposed to her success as a man?

The short answer is that although she was marginally slower in the water, she was, compared to women, now at the top of the heap. 

Before her transition, she was only modestly successful male swimmer ranking 554th in the 200 meter freestyle, 65th in the 500 event, but as a woman she was 5th in the 200 event, and 1st in the 500 meter.

Her times for those events worsened slightly after her transition, presumably owing to the effects of lowering her testosterone levels, but small differences in times in elite competition work out to large differences in rankings. 

In sports like track and swimming, we have objective, numeric measures of performance, so we can look at the winning times--the world records for women, and compare them to those of men.  Undeniably, men swim and run faster at the elite levels. An elite woman may beat a less than elite male, but an elite male beats most elite women.

There are a thousand male runners who run faster than the women's world record holder in virtually any track event.

This is true, of course in other sports: Chris Everett was asked in a TV interview about what would happen if she played Roger Federer in a championship match, and she laughed, "I wouldn't last too long!" she said. The power and velocity of his serve alone would be annihilating, she said, not to mention his ground strokes and quickness. 

Girls do reasonably well in wrestling, until the boys hit puberty.

There is little doubt there are hormonally (testosterone) driven differences in performance between males and female athletes, which, I presume is one reason we separate male from female competitors. 

This is the same reason we have weight classes in wrestling and age group swimming and boxing is divided into weight classes. What would be the fun of watching a heavy weight boxer against a welter weight? We want to see like vs. like; we want a competitive match. How much fun would it be to watch LeBron James play in a high school basketball game?

Lia Thomas went through puberty as a male, did not do the transition until age 18 or 19, and has the bone structure, heart size, muscle bulk of a fully developed male as a result. While she may have lost some muscle bulk and strength, she had that formative experience of forming a body under the influence of male hormone levels and only some of this is reversible. Hand and foot size, tracheal depth, brow ridges, carrying angles, all sorts of musculoskeletal effects of male hormones persist, although they may be somewhat ameliorated by hormone therapy. This has always vexed transgender clinics: while you can feminize former men, you cannot undo the changes wrought by male puberty entirely, so shoulders, hands, feet, face, voice all shaped, built by testosterone remain stubbornly intact.

Should female athletes face defeat by Lia Thomas now?

Show most people photos of Lia Thomas and the answer becomes not simply intellectual, based on numbers, but there is a gut check answer.

This athlete may consider herself a woman. The NCAA may define her as a woman, but the average citizen cannot buy this person as a woman who should be competing with women who went through female puberty.

This is what makes so effective the taunt: "What is a woman? Republicans know the answer. Democrats do not!" 

Where does this leave Democrats who defend Lia Thomas and others like her participating as a woman? 

The simple answer is they look "woke," which is to say, unreasonable, trapped in a device of their own creation, to be consistent they have to say, "Yes, she is a woman and should compete as a woman," but what anyone with "common sense" would say, is, "Well, she may be a woman now, but she hasn't always been and she was a man long enough to exclude her from competing as a woman."

Consider this brain exercise for a moment, suppose there were a thriving women's wrestling program. Would a trans woman (formerly a man) be allowed to participate? What harm could she wreak on her opponents? There is women's lacrosse and even rugby: what would happen if you had former men competing in these contact sports?

The fact is, liberals try to be consistent even at the extremes of cases and extreme cases, famously,  make bad law.

An abortion at 11 weeks is still an abortion, but an "abortion" at 36 weeks looks a lot like infanticide to a lot of citizens, and Democrats should realize this and stop trying to be consistent and start saying, "Well, it's complicated." This is what happens at the extremes. When you take the extreme example of a baby headed down the birth canal and you say, "Is it okay to meet that head with a scalpel?" the pro abortion person has to say "yes" to be consistent, if all that matters is the mother's choice, or "women's health." But thirty seconds away, is a baby most people would accept as a fully formed human being, and that baby has rights. So it's not "just about women's health."

We are talking about an estimated 1.3 million people in this country who identify at any given time as transgender--the number is undoubtedly fluid and likely inaccurate, but it's the current New York Times estimate, and that comes out to roughly 0.4% of the population of a country with 330 million. 

Nobody, all Democrats ought to agree, should be harassed, demeaned, shamed or otherwise abused because of their sexuality, their sexual preferences or their own identification as to gender. But that doesn't mean we would allow a transgender to rob a grocery store. That doesn't mean we exempt transgender folks from all rules. 

At some point, Democrats can be all for protecting the rights of transgenders without allowing for extreme behavior which strikes a reasonably well informed citizen as unreasonable.

Gadansk, Poland

Reincarnating the Monster Life

 Belief is what we substitute for hard won, scientific knowledge. When we do not have enough information, we use belief as a place holder, until we know more.

So, until man discovered micro organisms, we believed in evil humors, or the universe being out of balance or hexes or whatever to explain illness. Then we discovered bacteria, and then viruses. Cancer was caused by unhealthy habits, until we discovered genes played a major role.

Then there are the social beliefs, which new knowledge hardly touches. 

John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina Congressman and eventual Vice President, believed in slavery. He argued no society beyond the primitives ever existed which did not have one group dominating another, and in the North, there were the owners, bosses, capitalists who dominated the slave wage factory workers. Calhoun insisted the white slave owner treated his slaves far more kindly than Northern capitalists treated their workers. Slave owners provided food and shelter and kindness to their workers, whereas in the North all the workers got was wages, which often provided little food or shelter.

Of course, Calhoun neglected to consider the slaves who saw their children sold away from them, the overseers with their whips and guns and the runaway slaves, who "voted with their feet" to escape the kind, gentle slave owners, and who were dragged home in chains by slave catchers. Calhoun's benign images of slavery did not explain the throngs of slaves who followed the union armies as they marched through slave country, slaves who wept with joy at their liberation.

Margaret Mitchell, writing about 90 years later, embraced the "Lost Cause" myth, which said the slaves were far happier and better off enslaved than free, 

"The former slaves were now the lords of creation and, with the aid of the Yankees, the lowest and most ignorant were on top...Thousands of house servants, the highest caste in the slave population, remained with their white folks, doing manual labor which had been beneath them in the old days. Many loyal field hands also refused to avail themselves of the new freedom, but the hoarders of 'trashy free issue niggers' who were causing most of the trouble, were drawn largely from the field-hand class...The least energetic, the least honest and trustworthy, the most vicious and brutish. And now this class, the lowest in the black social order, was making life misery for the South...There they conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do...Packed into squalid cabins, smallpox, typhoid and tuberculosis broke out among them. Accustomed to the care of their mistresses when they were ill in the slave days, they did not know how to nurse themselves or their sick. Relying upon their masters in the old days to care for their aged and their babies, they now had no sense of responsibility for their helpless...Abandoned negro children ran like frightened animals about the town until kind hearted white people took them into their kitchens to raise. Aged country darkies, deserted by their children, bewildered and panic stricken in the bustling town, sat on the curbs and cried to the ladies who passed, "Mistis, please Ma'm, write my old Marster down in Fayette County dat Ah's up hyah. He'll come tek dis old nigger home agin. Fo' Gawd, Ah done got nuff of dis freedom!'"

That passage is from "Gone With The Wind," a novel which was embraced by the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and much of the country in 1936, and while fewer read it than ever saw the sanitized version, the Clark Gable/Vivien Leigh movie, the idea that slaves were happy as slaves lived then, as it does now, in many American minds.

The idea that all men are created equal was laughable to the Southern aristocrat, and that core belief was attacked categorically by the white supremacists of the antebellum South, as it is today by their spiritual descendants in the Dakotas and the Mountain West. 

The mind experiment I have been trying to play out is to put myself in that frame of mind and to try to experience the world seen through those lenses. The average American can do that watching those gorgeous scenes in GWTW, imagining what it would be to dress like those aristocrats, to ride about on horses and court  Scarlet O'Hara.

Similarly, it is possible to imagine seeing the world through the eyes of a Hitler disciple: The world is divided into the dominators and the dominated, and the white, clean limbed, blond Germans had to follow the call of history to dominate the subhuman Slavs, Jews and Gypsies, as the Cromagnon man had to vanquish and extinguish the Neanderthals.

You can almost thrill to those rallies with all those scarlet flags and bold Swastikas, and you can see how one might get swept way.

For some reason, I've had the notion--you might call it a belief--that in this universe we know where most everything seems to be part of a cycle, that once I die, I'd be recycled, perhaps back in time, or perhaps forward, but, in any case, if there is some sort of core justice, if I had been a Mississippi white supremacist, I'd be reborn as a Black woman, or if I had been a Nazi, I'd be reborn as a Jew, but in any case, whatever was true for me in the past, I would be made to live the life of whom I'd most reviled. 

But, in any case, whatever belief I had found most comfortable, would provide the basis for my new life of discomfort. 

Now, we have a movement called, "Parents Rights," which aims to inculcate into all kids in public American schools certain beliefs--for Ron DeSantis, that means we do not teach kids about the dark corners of the American past. Anything we find objectionable about our ancestors is scrubbed out of school curriculum, and the only "facts" provided our children to learn and memorize are those which make us heroes and saints.