Cuz, bridging be a beeyatch.

Danielle Allen- a MacAruthur Genius and Harvard Professor- whose parents bonded across a Racial divide, thinks 'bridging ties', that link people who come from different social spaces, are more important than 'bonding ties' between people who have something in common- like a baby. 

She says- 'Since the 1970s, scholars have been aware that “bridging ties” are especially powerful for generating knowledge transmission; more recently, scholars have argued convincingly that teams and communities that, first, emphasize bridging ties and, second, successfully learn how to communicate across their differences outperform more homogenous teams and communities with regard to the development and deployment of knowledge.'

Every clause of every sentence in the above is obvious nonsense.

1) Since the '70's scholars in shite subjects, more especially at Ivy League, haven't been aware of anything, least of all their own ignorance and stupidity. Mark Granovetter did write a much cited paper- 'the strength of weak ties'- in 1969 and it has been very widely cited. Indeed, he was mentioned in connection with an Econ Nobel. But then Social Networks get pruned by purely Economic forces.

2) 'Knowledge transmission'? What is that exactly? Knowledge is created and destroyed. Where any two create or destroy Knowledge together, a bond- something approaching a vinculum juris- not a bridge is created. Memes may get transmitted just as germs are transmitted. Not so Knowledge. Knowledge involves justifiable trust. It isn't just hearsay. It must pass a due diligence test. This means it uses up scarce resources. Trust is costly. The highest degree of trust involves zero-knowledge proofs. This is something we don't have even with respect to ourselves and the reason we might subscribe to some system of askesis so as to establish ourselves in Truth.

3) No scholar in a shite subject has every argued anything convincingly even to fellow shite scholars- which is why their subject is shite. Availability cascades are a different matter. No team or community ever started off by emphasising bridging ties. If it did, that's all it would do. Teams and communities are held together by the bond of co-creation- stuff like making babies, or money, or pushing forward a scientific research program. Communication can be entirely phatic- everybody high fiving & fist bumping each other. A community characterised by phatic communication might appear to be great at bridging but every, oh so affable!, fist bumping member of it may view every other with dark suspicion and thus bonds may never be created. Communications can be 'cheap talk'. It characterises a pooling equilibrium trapped in a Prisoner's dilemma. 'Costly signals' make for separating equilibria which feature complexity gradients and permit higher levels of organisation. They may also feature far less phatic communication- or indeed no communication at all save through some abstract nexus. A guy in Tokyo may collaborate with a guy in Toronto on a mathematical or programming project without ever meeting or speaking the same language. What is important is that interchange at a given complexity level is reliable, cheap, and convergent to a zero-knowledge proof protocol. Essentially, if we can get confidence regarding the rationality and competence of a counter-party, we don't need to socialise with them to monitor their willingness or ability to keep their side of the bargain. Information from this type of reliable source is knowledge. Anything else is just chit-chat and doesn't alter our behaviour or episteme.

4) No heterogeneous team or community outperforms one which is homogeneous with respect to which ever costly signal gives rise to the needful, complexity gradient based, separating equilibrium. Math has progressed by leaps and bounds because shitheads like me are screened out. Whatever shite subject Allen professes has degenerated calamitously because its screening mechanism is adversely selective. At one time, Classicists would have called foul on a Nussbaum's tolmema. Bad philology attracted the wrath of good philologists. That time has passed because philology took a wrong turn with Buckhardt and, devoting itself to sedulous mendacity, became the purveyor of ignoble but modish lies.

Like her father, William Barclay Allen, the anti affirmative action African American Political Scientist who, bizarrely, believes that the US Constitution granted full citizenship to Blacks ab ovo, Danielle Allen gushes like a school girl over the Declaration of Independence- which rendered void Dumore's Emancipation Proclamation and condemned her paternal ancestors' to slavery- but has some waspish, but utterly misguided, observations, fatal to the amour propre of her own bien pensant class.

This quote from the Guardian captures this contrarian aspect of hers-

Robert Putnam, in 'Bowling Alone: 'The Collapse and Revival of American Community', argued that the US's stock of "social capital" – informal social connectedness and formal civic engagement – had fallen to dangerously low levels. Americans, said Putnam, were far less likely to be members of community organisations, clubs or associations in the 1990s than they were in the 1950s. He argued the causes of this decline were commuting, compulsive television-viewing and 1960s counter culture. Allen says the reason for the decline was more prosaic. In 1987, the US supreme court ruled that 26 of 32 clubs studied by Putnam were illegal because women were barred from membership.

Of course, this is nonsense. The Rotarians and Kiwanis and so on needed to become more family friendly and provide a space for couples to bring their kids because the middle class was increasingly dual-income and featured shared domestic chores and child care. Also they needed to offer recreational drugs and not be as boring as fuck.

Allen has a different take. She believes that the term 'Social Scientist' is not an oxymoron. In the same Guardian article she says

"Putnam has a huge influence on public policy in Europe and the US. But he made an error of significant proportions."

Putnam had zero influence because he was American and a Professor of a shite subject. Allen too is American and a Professor of a shite subject. What impression did Putnam's work leave upon her? The answer is, Putnam left the impression on her that Putnam was talking shite. Shite doesn't influence anyone. It puts them off. Mutatis mutandis, the same thing can be said of her own work. Why? Coz she is a Professor of a shite subject.

Even worse, four years later, Putnam claimed US studies showed trust and co-operation fell as communities became less homogeneous. This led to the idea, propagated in the UK by Demos's David Goodhart and universities minister David Willetts, that there is a limit to how much diversity a welfare state can tolerate – and ultimately translated into calls for a cap on immigration.

Urm...caps on immigration were put in before I was born to stop people like me coming in and stinking up the place with our curries and popadoms. Goodhart and Willetts had a but ephemeral salience. Like Putnam, they influenced nothing and have faded from even bien pensant horizons.

Allen says those who have raised questions over the consequences of immigration – including Miliband – "have missed a step". She says there is no trade-off between diversity and community, it is about people learning to "bridge" cultures. "Diversity plus social competence at bridging relationships leads to far more effective problem-solving. Therapists help us get better at our bonding relationships. Who helps us get better at bridging relationships?"

Graciella Chichilnisky's work shows that if preference diversity is too great, there will be no gains from trade, or indeed communication. But the bar for communication can be pretty low. Pidgin will do fine for most economic and epistemic exchanges and, in any case, will turn into a full fledged Creole within a generation.
What does 'social competence' mean? Nothing very much if you aren't trusted. A morose misanthrope who communicates by means of grunts may yet be trusted and thus can run a roaring trade whereas a hail fellow well met type fails to make an impact as an arbitrageur.
What matters is whether a bond expressible as a vinculum juris arises from observed conduct. No amount of 'bridging', which doesn't terminate in such a bond, can retain salience.

Bridges, we have all learnt, are only important because trolls live under them. Brexit and Trump's apotheosis show that all those wonderful bridges Allen and Obama and Milliband were so busy building went nowhere but did shelter the trolls who have put their Twitterer in Chief in the White House.

The more bridging relationships in a society, the more that society appears democratic, egalitarian and "connected", Allen believes. The opposite happens when small cliques hoard contacts, access to information and, ultimately, power. No society is perfectly connected, she says, and, in the UK class divides are far greater than in the US, where race segments society.

A bridge doesn't just shelter trolls, it also can be used to exact tolls. Coordination games arise where Preference diversity fulfils a 'Goldilocks condition' such that there are gains from trade. Dis-coordination games- e.g. when Allen's Mummy and Daddy got married and raised a family- arise where preferences change and become univocal with respect to at least one thing- like making sure baby gets the bestest start in life. Not all babies. Just ours coz she sure is the bestest baby ever. Discoordination games generate arbitrage opportunities- cultural 'market makers', including pedagogues- who thereby garner a rent and talk each other up like they have some fundamental significance or ontological privilege.

Allen's ideas of connecting people to policy lie behind Obama's success and should be emulated by Miliband's party, she argues. She points out that Obama is slowly morphing his re-election campaign into a non-profit group – Organising for Action – that will build public support through community-organising for the president's policies, including gun control and an overhaul of immigration laws.

This is hilarious stuff. Obama's success had to do with putting a Nigger in the White House so as to scare Wall Street straight. White voters thought he'd go ape-shit on the Bankers. But, no drama Obama- Allen tells us- was busy doing something else- 'Organising for Action' without actually acting at all. Consider Obamacare. It is badly drafted legislation- though admittedly an unforeseen event, the death of Sen. Kennedy- threw a spanner in the works. Still, the fact is it did not create a vocal pressure group able to lock in the program. Rather, much of it remained vulnerable to a stroke of the presidential pen. Arguably, never before has a 'policy wonk' purposely designed Legislation which binds successors so little.

This is the other side of drafting legislation- you need to identify a constituency willing and able to defend the proposed gain. Obama was a superb communicator. He may well have had organisational talents to match. But, the impression he left was of a certain cerebral aloofness, an Olympian fatalism. He had said 'We can' and he meant other Americans had to exercise their own volition. He did not say 'I will'. Thus 'organising for action' appeared diffuse and focused on wedge issues. It was not, as people had expected, a grass roots movement aimed at defending affordable healthcare and other such vital concerns of ordinary Americans.

Embedding this into a party lessens the possibility of politicians talking about community politics in opposition, but practicing technocratic politics in power. "The idea is having lots of local conversations and bringing people's stories to the table when policy is formed. [Organising for Action] is probably what Obama will lead after he leaves the White House."

 So, with hindsight, Allen didn't understand what was happening in the White House under a President she was quite close to. She talked high minded piffle back then. What is she doing now?

The answer is she's jumping belatedly on a Black Lives matter type bandwagon except she is doing it in the perverse manner of her father. Thus, she tells the story of her cousin who, incarcerated at the age of 15, thrived in Jail- finding love, a vocation as a fire fighter, and also getting a GED- but was shot by that same lover three years after being released. The boy had been safer in jail and what's more had known it even at the age of 15. Why? He wasn't very good at shooting people. He was robbing a middle aged man at gun point when the geezer grabbed his gun and shot him in the neck. On Allen's account, it seems the kid immediately realised that the Crips would kill him, as a potential informant, unless he got sent away for a good long stretch which is why he spontaneously confessed to two other crimes in which gang members might have been involved.

If he'd got 25 years under three strikes, he'd be alive today. Indeed, he might have developed into a better writer than Allen.

Allen has a different view- one based on meta-metaphoricity. She takes a figure of speech for a literal fact and erects another figure of speech, also to be taken as a literal fact, on the basis of it.

“To fight back against the War on Drugs,” Allen writes, “the drug gangs who took the business seriously established their own system of deterrence. In short, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, you’re shot immediately. In the knee first. You try to buck again? Then maybe you’re killed. Or maybe someone you love is killed.”

The 'war on drugs' was just a figure of speech, like Nixon's 'the war on cancer'. Breaking Bad fused these two metaphors in an artistic way. What Allen is doing, by contrast, is sophomoric sophistry. Gangs kill people so as to control territory and make money. They do this even in countries where there is no 'War on Drugs'. The Crips and the Bloods predate the 1970 Drug Control Act.

A certain section of African American males had better health and educational outcomes, not to mention lower mortality, if they were incarcerated. Other African Americans voted for longer sentences for such males- though, showing superior rationality, they were less likely to favor the 'Three strikes' proposition, support for which had been fuelled by a horrible case involving a white child rapist and killer.
 No one, not Obama, not Allen, put a better choice on the menu for African Americans. In the case of Obama, we may say that there was a concurrency or McKelvey chaos type problem. Allen is simply naive.

This isn't to say Allen is not a good and virtuous woman- though she writes badly.
She genuinely did a lot of 'bridging' for her cuz- getting him an apartment, a job and a library card- when he came out but that bridging failed because it wasn't a bond. Similarly, her academic work bridges a shite type of Classical studies with saying stupid things about the Constitution and contemporary politics. This creates gains for gesture politics' despicable trade in Academic availability cascades- and as such would happen anyway- but it binds nothing together because nothing unique, no 'apoorvata', is created thereby. Babies- or even the possibility of babies- bind people of the most diverse sort together. Books, too, can serve the same end. Not Allen's books. They testify to nothing but the inutility of a Genius (even if only a MacArthur Genius) dedicating itself to shite studies.

Allen has a curious theory about why her cousin was incarcerated for so long at such a young age.

California’s legislators had given up on the idea of rehabilitation in prison, even for juveniles. This is a point that critics of the penal system make all the time. Here is what they don’t say: legislators had also given up on retribution. Anger drives retribution. When the punishment fits the crime, retribution is achieved, and anger is sated; it softens. This is what makes it anger, not hatred, a distinction recognized by philosophers all the way back to antiquity. Retribution limits how much punishment you can impose.

Anger doesn't soften. If feeds on itself. The guy who gets angry with his wife for burning the roast and who gets away with slapping her will, one day, kick her head in for over-buttering the toast. The victim of road rage will testify that 'retribution' has nothing to do with the quantum of 'punishment' meted out.
No philosopher in antiquity or modern times has ever suggested that anger should be linked to punishment. Moral indignation- perhaps. Not anger.

Why is Allen making such a ridiculous claim? She has  previously told us that half of males in her cousin's cohort, in the County in which he lived, were linked to gangs. They had higher mortality on the streets than in jail. Those lower down the food chain were simply taken out of circulation and warehoused because nothing could be done for them and they could do nothing for themselves. On occasion, it was parents or loved ones who reported these adolescents to the police. No doubt, drugs played a part in dis-inhibiting in-group violence. Certainly, drugs were the a currency but extortion and prostitution and theft and so on also featured. Allen's cousin was arrested for carjacking. That is why he was tried as an adult.

The legislators who voted to try as adults sixteen-year-olds, and then fourteen-year-olds, were not interested in retribution. They had become deterrence theorists.

This is nonsense. A legislator who poses as a 'theorist' won't get re-elected. Folksy is the way to go.

In any case, nobody thought that 15 year olds like Allen's cousin could be deterred from anything. They could only be taken out of circulation till they had passed what Tacitus calls 'Youth's dangerous years'. Nor did anyone feel any rage against these kids. They simply had to be taken off the streets for their own good and be warehoused somewhere where they didn't have access to guns.

Reading Allen's article, we get a picture of a kid with no impulse control. If he had shot his victim, rather than let his victim get hold of the gun and shoot him, he would have gotten better at shooting people and thrived as a gangster, till drugs or a bullet ended his career.

It is true that California's 'three strike rule' was intended as a deterrent. One consequence was that gangsters recruited kids to do the shooting. It is also true that a good lawyer could have got Allen's young cousin a much better deal. But, the boy himself didn't want bail. He felt safer in jail. Perhaps  his mother  wanted him off the streets till he'd matured a little more. She thought he'd get 7 years which might come down with good behavior. He got almost double that. We can't say that was too long. Had it been even longer, he'd be alive.

Allen thinks legislators 'design' sentencing policy in the manner of wonkish Social Engineers. Perhaps they do so in Scandinavia. But California? In the Nineties? Are you kidding me?

They were designing sentences not for people but for a thing: the aggregate level of crime. They wanted to reduce that level, regardless of what constituted justice for any individual involved. The target of Michael’s sentence was not a bright fifteen-year-old boy with a mild proclivity for theft but the thousands of carjackings that occurred in Los Angeles. Deterrence dehumanizes.  It directs at the individual the full hatred that society understandably has for an aggregate phenomenon. But no individual should bear that kind of responsibility.

This is nonsense. If Allen's cousin had been involved in the 'parastate'- i.e. a proper Drug gang- he'd have had a good lawyer. If his family had believed his only problem was 'a mild proclivity for theft' , rather than a habit of armed robbery, they would have done a lot more to keep him out of jail.
His Mum certainly didn't hate him. She wasn't concerned with 'the aggregate level of crime'. She just wanted him locked up somewhere he couldn't get hold of a gun and, in concordance with his 'mild proclivity for theft', try jacking some dude who grabs his gun and shoots him in the neck with it.


Allen has a different explanation. Apparently, her family- for some reason- believes in 'retribution'. They don't beat the shit out of a kid who steals as their grandparents would have done, they expect the State to do 'rehabilitation' for them. Why? Apparently, because they believed American jails were lovely little places where kids don't get sodomized.

“How could it have happened?” is the question everyone asks. Where were the lawyers? What did your family do? I think back to the stolen radio. Michael came from a family who believed that if you did something wrong you admitted it, you fixed it, and you suffered the consequences. Michael was guilty of the attempted carjacking; he was going to have to suffer the consequences. Our family trusted in the fairness of the criminal-justice system. At each turn, we learned too late that this system was no longer what we thought it was, that its grip was mercilessly tightening, that our son would be but one among many millions soon lost in its vise.

Wow! The kid's uncle was Prof. William Barclay Allen-  Chairman of the American Committee on Civil Rights in Reagan's final term. Even if this proves he is an idiot, his sister had no degree and thus must have been relatively sensible. She made a rational decision. The kid had higher life expectancy in jail. Indeed, had he gone to trial and got 25 years- he'd be alive today. True, if trans-gender maniacs with a 'mild proclivity' for shooting their boyfriends had been kept out of male prisons, then, too, Allen's cuz wouldn't have ended up with a bullet in his head. Still, it will be difficult to persuade us that these two wonderful young people- one of whom kept cutting the other who, however, could knock the other out with a punch- with 'mild proclivities' towards gun related crime shouldn't be simply warehoused somewhere where they couldn't shoot each other. Their world may well have been a Dantesque Inferno, but ours is less so without them in it.

Ultimately, Allen herself stopped 'bridging' with her cuz because, it turned out, he had an actual bond with a crazy trangender ex-con who, from the sound of things, was pressurising him to put the bite on his rich, bien pensant, relative. But, underneath the Ivy League veneer, it turned out Allen had shrewd instincts. The following could have been written by a young V.S Naipaul

He had found an apartment, he told me, and was ready to put down a deposit. Could I come and see it? The place was on the fourth floor of a vintage Craftsman-style building overlooking the 101 freeway. It was big and spacious, with gleaming wood floors. As I wound through the rooms, Michael began telling me about how he and Bree wanted to move in.
I had no idea he was still seeing Bree, let alone making plans to move in together. My face must have conveyed surprise, though I tried not to react too strongly. (Learning how to suppress visible emotion is an occupational demand of being a dean.) I told him that I wanted to know what the job situation was. Had he lined up a new gig? What did Bree do—did she have a job? Our voices echoed in the empty apartment. Michael leaned against a windowsill, the sky and the freeway shining behind him.
There was something shamefaced in him as he answered. No, he didn’t have a job. Bree was into hair styling, but, no, she didn’t have one, either. What, exactly, were they thinking? Michael didn’t have much of an answer. Plainly, the plan involved taking advantage of me to some degree.
In that moment, I encountered a different Michael from the one I knew. I saw something calculating, something I’d never seen before. I didn’t ask to talk to Bree, who I’d come to realize was the woman in the gold Mercedes crawling past our homecoming party. All I was able to say was that I couldn’t possibly pay the deposit—plus some number of months’ rent, plus co-sign a lease—when neither of them had a job.
Michael’s face tensed. He said he understood.
This was the day I understood that the idea that I could stand my baby cousin up on his own two feet was a fantasy; it had always had too much of me in it. From this point on, Michael ceased confiding in me. Our phone conversations never burrowed below the surface. I no longer knew how to help.

So, there was never a real bond here- just some amateur bridging of a bien pensant sort which was abandoned once the realization dawned that the thing could be written off as experience- and, if an appropriate bandwagon chanced to trundle by, written down as a type of 'literature' whose worth is not related to anything alethic or aesthetic but which is measured by academic citations of an article, ironically, titled 'The Life of a South Central Statistic'.

What is wrong with Danielle Allen?

What was wrong with her father?

Why is this woman writing- 'Michael ceased confiding in me' when we know he never confided in her?

Why does she blame the 'Drug Wars' and the 'parastate' for her cuz's conviction for carjacking? She herself tells us he only got into drugs a couple of years after his release when he had street cred as 'Big Mike' and had better impulse control and so could be trusted with a consignment.

Why does she speak of anger and retribution when nobody in the Nineties felt any anger towards these kids and their own families wanted them put away in a place they couldn't get hold of guns?

The last question is easily answered. Allen's thesis was on ancient Athenian penal practices or some such thing. It was worthless, but then the Academy had already turned to shit in that respect so no great blame attaches to her.

Allen says of the ancient Athenians-

With rare exceptions, cases of punishment in Athens were directed at resolving a problem that had arisen between two people and that were identified when someone said he was angry.

 This is silly. Wrongdoing was punished. In certain cases, the Ecclessia was urged to feel outrage at the wrongdoing in the same way that a modern prosecutor, or Judge pronouncing sentence, articulates a Civic duty to condemn specific actions as abhorrent and greatly to be condemned.

Take the case of Euthyphro. He is going to Court to charge his father with the murder of a slave. Why? Is he angry at his Dad? No. He is doing what is right. The Court will probably levy a small fine and this will purge the family's guilt and restore their ritual purity and respectable status in their community. Most court cases are of this type but they don't get recorded because they lack drama. Allen has been misled into talking worthless shite by a textual availability cascade.

Anger was so central to the Athenian experience of wrong-doing and punishment that courtroom litigants could describe laws as having been established for the purpose of establishing what levels of anger were appropriate for various acts of wrong-doing.

Rubbish! They were saying that some acts are more outrageous than others.  But, we can substitute the word 'repugnant' for 'outrage' with equal justice. In certain highly dramatic cases, disgust can turn to anger. If some mentally challenged paraplegic loser behaves like Harvey Weinstein, we feel disgust but not anger because the fellow did not have the wherewithal to do any damage. We feel disgusted with Weinstein but also anger because he could and should have acted otherwise.

Allen is talking bollocks about ancient Athenians because she thinks we know nothing and care nothing for them

Demosthenes writes: “Observe that the laws treat the wrong-doer who acts intentionally and with hubris as deserving greater anger and punishment; this is reasonable because while the injured party everywhere deserves support, the law does not ordain that the anger against the wrongdoer should always be the same” . Anger was thus assumed to be not only the source of particular punishments but also at the root of law itself.  Athenians accordingly felt relatively little uncertainty or unease about why (that is, in response to what causes) they punished: they acted in response to anger.

Anger was not at the root of the law for the Athenians. Solon was not an angry man- he was a poet. Thumos- which is 'spiritedness' and corresponds to Sanskrit 'rajas'- does also mean a healthy type of indignation that is protective of honourable conduct and fair dealing. Orge is another type of anger- what in Sanskrit we call manyu- which is dark and brooding and poisonous to the commonweal. Neither term can be translated simply as 'Anger' because English owes most to the Bible which views anger that is provoked (parogismos) in a wholly negative way.

Allen describes the type of punishment Socrates would have been meted out had he not had wealthy friends who could pay a lot of money for the privilege of taking hemlock.

'the convict was (probably) fastened to a board with iron collars around wrists, ankles, and neck, and the collar around the neck was tightened to strangle the wrongdoer.'

This was wonderfully humane because no blood was shed and anyway people only got convicted if someone else was angry with them.

When it came time to punish, the Athenians acted out of anger and to cure anger, but this does not mean that they acted in anger. Rather, they interposed an extensive institutional system between the moment when an angry victim pointed to a wrong-doer and the infliction of punishment. The purpose of this system was to allow the citizens to convert a moment of private anger into a public decision crafted with a view to curing the community through a restoration of peace.

So that's what happened to Socrates. Some guy got angry with him and so he was sentenced to death- not out of anger- but to extirpate wrath from the body politic. Oddly, this does not seem to have worked at all. Socrates's friends were angry at what happened to him. Peace was not restored. Faction and counter-faction flourished.

What Allen is saying is terribly foolish- viz. that ancient Athenians thought anger could be soothed by crucifying some guy who made some other guy angry. This is the sort of thing some worthless, publicity hungry, Anthropologist might say about some remote Amazonian tribe. The Athenians themselves satirised 'snowflake' type indignation or 'ressentiment' based prosecutions. Aristophanes satirises the elderly jury-man who can't wait to get to court to cast a black ball against some blameless defendant.  Allen must know this. But she has a paper to write and she is a Professor of a shite subject, so her task is to promulgate the most obviously and ludicrously false thesis anyone can imagine. Her cuz, by contrast, was truthful. He confessed his crimes and did his time. Yes he was killed. But he was killed by his lover. He had thumos but not orge and, by his death, outlives both, for his readers, in some sunny fields of asphodel where no Fear is, nor Hate, nor privation of the Spirit.  And that is Justice.

The root of sin is lust and the desire to satisfy that lust. . . . Lust only creates wanting and wanting creates greed and greed burns Flesh. It is lust that causes us to believe we have to have something at all cost. This is my suffering, this is my hell. 24 hours all night. There is no day. My soul in its entirety is in darkness.

There are those who await to fulfill their destiny. I see in them a sincere and apologetic heart for their ill misdeeds. They are the one who will change the world positively or positively change someone’s world. Hell cannot hold the latter of the two opposites but in time will only spit them back out into society to do what is right. The hell that I live in cannot hold Dante. Hell can test and try one’s self but it cannot hold Dante and it will not hold me. In the Inferno, the dead are trapped forever. Surely, the biggest and most important difference in the Inferno and my hell called prison, is that I have a way out.

Danielle complains that the preacher at her cuz's funeral descended into 'an anti-Semitic rant about moneylenders and lawyers'. Dante, famously, was kinder  on the sodomites- like Bruno Latini- than the usurers. Jews, of course, were just fucked. Perhaps, Allen's cuz- whose beloved was transitioning, saw a particular 'crime against nature' being reversed by surgery and took this as an outward and visible sign of a Grace which, if it prevails not against wrath in this World, yet descends never entirely in vain.