Quotulatiousness

March 31, 2018

More on “Hellgate”

Filed under: Religion — Tags: — Nicholas @ 16:35

Ann Althouse is still puzzled by the recent accidental-on-purpose revelation by the Pope that there is no hell:

I’m reading “Does Hell Exist? And Did the Pope Give an Answer?” (NYT). I’ve been writing about the reported news that the Pope said Hell does not exist, and I keep hearing that the Vatican has attempted to squelch the news, but I continue to believe the Pope said it. One reason I believe it is that Hell is such an implausible notion that I think an intelligent person, such as Pope Francis, is unlikely to believe it, though he might choose to keep quiet on the subject and not rock the boat the Vatican seems not to want rocked. Upon this not rocking of the boat, I will build my church. And the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, because there is no hell, but let’s tell them there is, because it will scare the wits out of them.

I don’t give a damn (not that there’s any such thing) what “The Vatican” thinks, but I do care what Pope Francis said in his conversation with his friend, the 93-year-old Eugenio Scalfari. Scalfari is — as the NYT puts it — “an atheist, left-wing and anticlerical giant of Italian journalism.” Scalfari has no audio recording or even jotted-down notes to back up his statement that Francis said, “A hell doesn’t exist.”

[…]

The Pope is deliberately choosing and using Eugenio Scalfari. There’s something complex happening there, and a flat denial that the Pope said there is no Hell is at least as much of a simplification as the Scalfari report that he said it. So you can believe what you want.

I think the Pope likes talking with Scalfari so he can get some good back and forth and so he can get his ideas out to the world filtered through this slightly but not completely unreliable narrator. There is deniability, and there is also the leakage of the good news (that there is no hell).

But it’s hard to admit that the Church has propounded a frightening, painful lie for so long, harder than apologizing for the 150,000 indigenous children who “were separated from their families and forced to attend the schools between the 1880s and the final closure in 1996, often suffering physical, sexual and psychological abuse.”

Pope Francis won’t do that. He has a different approach — he talks to the atheist, left-wing and anticlerical giant of Italian journalism who doesn’t take notes but spins out the story in that impressionistic Italian style that sophisticated readers understand.

If anybody could be described as Machiavellian, it’d surely be Machiavelli, right?

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Paul Meany tries to rescue the reputation of Niccolò Machiavelli:

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

If you have ever studied Shakespeare, you might have heard your teacher use the word “Machiavellian” to describe amoral characters such as Iago from Othello or Edmund from King Lear. “Machiavellian” denotes a person or action that disregards morality and is wholly self-serving. The origin of the word derives from the famous Florentine politician and writer Niccoló Machiavelli.

[…]

Published posthumously, The Prince left Machiavelli with an infamous reputation as an amoral, atheistic, and cynical writer. In 1559, the Catholic Church put Machiavelli’s works on the Index of Prohibited Books. In the play The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe, written in 1589, Machiavelli appears in the prologue, boldly exclaiming, “I count religion but a childish toy, and hold there is no sin but ignorance.”

Machiavelli came to be associated with an Elizabethan term, “Old Nick,” used to denote the devil. There is a subject of modern psychology, known as the “dark triad,” which focuses on three malevolent personality traits: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism.

However, this deeply negative image of Machiavelli did not always exist. In the 17th and 18th centuries, a more positive view of Machiavelli emerged, with authors such as the Republican James Harrington referring to Machiavelli as “the prince of politicians.” During the Italian Renaissance, humanist Giovanni Battista Busini fondly described Machiavelli as “a most extraordinary lover of liberty.”

This praise might seem confusing; after all, the word “Machiavellian” denotes someone who is cunning and unscrupulous. How could a man so devious and pragmatic be called a lover of liberty? The answer lies with Machiavelli’s other book, known as Discourses on Livy, which presents a very different image of his political beliefs.

[…]

The stark differences between Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy and The Prince come from the nature of the aims of each book. The Prince aims to refine the conduct of a single prince, while Discourses on Livy offers guidance for the entire citizen body. The Prince was written to address a unique political opportunity that quickly evaporated, whereas Discourses on Livy was written to articulate the principles required by republics that sought longevity, liberty, and prosperity.

To this day, there still remains a huge debate over the intricacies and contradictions that characterize Machiavelli’s writings. Machiavelli was an extremely nuanced and original thinker whose reputation should not exclusively be that of an evil schemer. He argued for a republic whose liberty is safeguarded by the common person, in which free, unhindered debate provides the best course of action, and where compromises between opposing groups create harmony. Discourses on Livy reveals another side of Machiavelli, a man committed to the ideals of freedom through the means of representative government.

Firing the 30-pounder rifled Parrott cannon at Fort Pulaski, GA

Filed under: History, Military, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Stagecoacher
Published on 21 Jun 2015

June 13, 2015. I silenced portions of the video because of wind noise. The actual report was much louder than it sounds in the video. My digital camera could not capture a sound that loud. http://jimjanke.com

QotD: Workshops and how to avoid them

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Education, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Kingsley Amis, a man whom, for reasons neither interesting nor publishable, I did not much admire, once said that the word “workshop” summed up all that was wrong with the modern world. He was right, and his comment was both shrewd and prescient. Courses, conferences, away-days, workshops, team-building weekends – they’re all part of the same pathology, and they’ve spread like bacteria on agar gel.

With a regularity bordering on the boring, from many sources, I receive flyers offering me courses to improve myself. I am far from supposing that I cannot improve or be improved, but most of these courses seem more designed to relieve me of money than anything else. They come with pictures of the course leaders (or trainers), happy and smiling and, to my eyes at least, deeply crooked.

A learned journal to which I subscribe always arrives with invitations to courses and conferences. Some, naturally, are of interest: those given by people who are acknowledged experts in their field, and who will provide a convenient digest of the latest research in it. But a high proportion of them are about what one might call para-work: activity that has nothing, or something only very tangential, to do with the ostensible aims of one’s profession.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Workshops and why you must avoid them”, The Social Affairs Unit, 2009-11-18.

March 30, 2018

New Firefox extension to reduce Facebook‘s default tracking

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

If you use Firefox as your primary browser, you might be interested in a new Firefox extension that limits how Facebook tracks your activity:

Mozilla Firefox has a new extension to prevent Facebook from tracking your online habits.

Capitalizing on the fears surrounding Facebook privacy, Mozilla has designed the “Facebook Container,” a Firefox add-on that blocks Facebook from tracking users when they click on ads or links that take them off the site.

Facebook currently uses a program called Pixel to collect information on how users engage with the site. When users click on links, they visit external sites but are still logged in to Facebook‘s platform. These outside sites will contain “share” or “like” buttons, and when users engage with these functions, this activity is connected to their Facebook identity. That’s how Facebook is able to fine-tune its advertisements to its users. While this is a well-known practice, many aren’t aware that their behaviors outside the core function of Facebook are tracked.

But when people using Facebook Container click a link on Facebook, it loads in a seperate blue tab that isolates users’ activities from the core site. In these blue tabs, users will not be logged into Facebook, which prevents further data collection. Users do have the option to continue to use the “share” and “like” buttons, but Mozilla notes that these activities may still be tracked. The extension doesn’t prevent data collection, but it offers users more control over their privacy.

It may only be a token toward reclaiming a tiny bit of your online privacy, but even tokens can be valuable in the aggregate.

Having served its purpose for two thousand years, the Pope now says there is no Hell

Filed under: Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Who said that Holy Week was a slow news week? Michael W. Chapman (via Ann Althouse) reports on the latest revelation from the head of the Catholic Church:

In another interview with his longtime atheist friend, Eugenio Scalfari, Pope Francis claims that Hell does not exist and that condemned souls just “disappear.” This is a denial of the 2,000-year-old teaching of the Catholic Church about the reality of Hell and the eternal existence of the soul.

Pope Francis in a meeting with President Christina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina in the Casa Rosada.
Attribution: Casa Rosada (Argentina Presidency of the Nation), via Wikimedia Commons

The interview between Scalfari and the Pope was published March 28, 2018 in La Repubblica. The relevant section on Hell was translated by the highly respected web log, Rorate Caeli.

The interview is headlined, “The Pope: It is an honor to be called revolutionary.” (Il Papa: “È un onore essere chiamato rivoluzionario.”)

Scalfari says to the Pope, “Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will disappear in a certain moment and that God, still out of his creative force, will create new species. You have never spoken to me about the souls who died in sin and will go to hell to suffer it for eternity. You have however spoken to me of good souls, admitted to the contemplation of God. But what about bad souls? Where are they punished?”

Pope Francis says, “They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”

The post was later updated with a note from the Vatican:

“The Holy Father Francis recently received the founder of the newspaper La Repubblica in a private meeting on the occasion of Easter, without however giving him any interviews. What is reported by the author in today’s article [in La Repubblica] is the result of his reconstruction, in which the textual words pronounced by the Pope are not quoted. No quotation of the aforementioned article must therefore be considered as a faithful transcription of the words of the Holy Father.”

So either Scalfari misunderstood what his old friend was saying, or he’s just been thrown under a holy bus. I have no god in this fight, but it’s interesting either way.

Havildar Bhanbhagta Gurung’s Knife Wielding WWII Assault

Filed under: Asia, History, Japan, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Today I Found Out
Published on 19 Feb 2018

In this video:

In March of 2008, the world lost one of the most fearless soldiers to have served during WWII; a man who single-handedly cleared five heavily fortified positions with nothing more than a knife, a few grenades, a rock, and a complete disregard for the bullets flying around him the whole time. This is the story of Bhanbhagta Gurung.

QotD: “Progressive” eugenicists

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Although their ethics were appalling, “Progressive” eugenicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries at least got their economic analysis correct: they understood that forcibly raising employers’ cost of employing certain kinds of labor would reduce the quantity of that labor that is employed. This correct economic understanding was at the foundation of these “Progressives’” support for minimum wages; these “Progressives” explicitly wanted to keep people that they regarded as ‘undesirable’ from working.

I say (and believe) that these “Progressives’” ethics were appalling. Yet I’m quite sure that they did not see themselves as monsters. They surely believed themselves to be enlightened, humane, and highly ethical. They believed that they worked for a larger cause – “social reform” – and saw eugenics, minimum wages, and other uses of state force as progressive means of improving humankind through social engineering. One lesson here is that people convinced that they have a mission to improve society by helping forcibly to re-arrange that society so that it conforms to some pre-conceived image are dangerous brutes (if ones that wear suits) whose brutality is hidden from them by their consciously held good intentions and masked from their contemporaries, ironically, by the grand scale (‘society’) upon which they propose to implement their schemes. (If Bill pokes a gun at his neighbor Betty and threatens to shoot Betty if she pays any of her workers less than $7.25 per hour, Bill is rightly recognized as a brute who belongs in prison. Yet if Bill persuades a uniformed and well-armed gang to threaten to shoot, not just Betty, but everyone in the state who employs workers at wages lower than $7.25 per hour, Bill is celebrated as a humane social reformer who belongs in public office. It’s damn bizarre.)

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the day…”, Café Hayek, 2016-07-16.

March 29, 2018

The Forgotten Foundations Part 1 – The History of Sci Fi – Extra Sci Fi – #4

Filed under: Books, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Extra Credits
Published on 27 Mar 2018

This week, we explore the obscure authors from the turn of the 20th century whose weird and wacky stories impacted our modern-day sci fi consciousness and inspired works from authors like H.P. Lovecraft and Terry Pratchett.

Update: Fixed broken link. No idea why YouTube changed it.

Google, Facebook, anti-trust laws, and the Network Effect

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Google and Facebook (and other, lesser, social media companies) have a lot of information on you. Lots and lots and lots of information on you. Many people are coming to the conclusion that this is bad, bad news and “something must be done”. Politicians and activists share a tendency to respond to such demands by pushing “something” they already favour as the solution to the popular demand for action. A few days ago, the “something” seemed to be some form of anti-trust action over the social media giants.

In the Continental Telegraph, Tim Worstall explains why an over-the-top anti-trust offensive is likely to leave everyone in a worse state than the status quo:

Which brings us to the tech companies of today:

Big Tech May Be Monopolistic, But It’s Good for Consumers

Quite so, thus no antitrust actions should or need be taken.

At the first level there’s the simple point that Facebook, Google a little less, Microsoft, e-Bay, they benefit from network effects. The more people who use them the more attractive they become to the next user. Meaning that size, in and of itself, creates yet more size. That’s just what we mean by network effects.

In turn that also means that the efficient size of an organisation here is that global monopoly. It isn’t true in most cases because there are diseconomies of scale as well as economies of it, but another way to describe network effects is just that we’re insisting that the -economies outweigh the dis- at scales up to and including 7 billion people.

In that first reading of antitrust that would mean they gain economic power and thus government must step in. In our second reading that’s not enough.

Firstly, the monopolists must exercise that economic power they have. Something not greatly in evidence as just having power doesn’t mean it can be exercised. For when you do try to, say, raise prices can someone come in and try to undercut you? If so you’ve got contestable economic power, or even a contestable monopoly. As an example, think the Chinese and rare earths. They were producing some 97% of the world’s supply. So, they decided to play silly buggers, exercise that power. It took a couple of years but two new mines opened, China’s share of rare earths fell and prices halved, below their original point. People contested that Chinese economic power when China tried to exercise it. China didn’t win either.

If Google tried to raise the price of adverts then business would flow away from them. If Facebook started charging for access then there wouldn’t be a Facebook. They’ve got contestable monopolies.

[…]

Sure, we should keep a wary eye open and if the consumer is being gouged then we could and should do something. But while we’ve got efficient companies, monopolies or not, benefiting consumers then the correct response is to get the hell out of the way.

Unless you’re a politician who simply wants to expand the powers politicians have over society – something which explains most politicians – but then we can tell them to go boil their heads. Only the exercise of economic power to the disbenefit of consumers justifies intervention.

British Schools Explained – Anglophenia Ep 25

Filed under: Britain, Education — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Anglophenia
Published on 5 Mar 2015

How much do you know about the U.K.’s education system? Siobhan Thompson teaches you the basics. Study up!

QotD: The decline of Epicureanism

Filed under: Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The philosophy seems to have continued strong into about the 3rd century AD. Thereafter, it went into decline. By the middle of the 6th century, when the Emperor Justinian closed all the philosophical schools in Athens and dispersed the teachers, Epicureanism appears to have been already dead.

The main traditions of thought during the last few centuries of the ancient world were turned away from the everyday world. There were the neoplationists, with their settled belief in a higher reality that could be approached through a combination of mathematics and magic. There were, of course, the Christians, for whom the world is simply a preparation for the better life that is to come.

As said, relating what people think to what is happening around them is not easy. But the last few centuries of the ancient world were ages of great uncertainty. There were epidemic diseases that swept away multitudes without warning and without apparent cause. There were barbarian raids and civil wars. There was catastrophically overextended government to grind the survivors into helplessness and poverty. In this sort of world, teachings of Epicurus about seeking happiness in this life may have lost their attraction.

In one of his more sensible comments on Epicurus, Plutarch writes:

    As to the vulgar sort… when they lose their children, wives, or friends, they would rather have them be somewhere and still remain, though in misery, than that they should be quite destroyed, dissolved, and reduced to nothing. And they are pleased when they hear it said of a dying person, that he goes away or departs, and such other words as intimate death to be the soul’s remove and not destruction. …. …. And they are discomposed when they hear it said of any one, he is perished, or he is gone or he is no more…. And therefore it is very plain that with the belief of immortality they [the Epicureans] take away the sweetest and greatest hopes the vulgar sort have.

In a world where life is uncertain and often unpleasant, there will tend to be an emphasis on some happier supernatural future.

There may be nothing sinister in the loss of virtually the whole body of Epicurean writings. Perhaps they were destroyed by a triumphant Church that had room for Plato and Aristotle but none for a naturalist enemy of all that Christianity proclaimed. But there is no reason to suppose any deliberate act of destruction. Papyrus rolls were by their nature delicate things. They were also far more expensive and therefore scarce in number than modern books. In any European climate, a papyrus roll would last for about a century, and then the glue that held it together would perish. Without careful recopying, a work might easily be lost.

The last centuries of the ancient world were mostly ages of depression. There was a shortage of all the means that had so far kept libraries together. Such means as remained were naturally given to recopying works for which there was an active demand. That means Christian theology, those parts of the pagan philosophies that could be reconciled to Christianity, and the greatest products of the pagan high culture. Since, with the exception of Lucretius — whose work largely survived — the works of Epicurus and his followers were in a style remarkable only for its plainness, it is unreasonable to suppose that librarians, forced to choose what to copy and what to leave to die, would take up the 37 volumes of On Nature and not the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius.

So far as I can tell, whatever works of Epicurus survived were not studied in the Byzantine Empire. In the West, all but his name and whatever is said about him in Cicero vanished for a thousand years.

Sean Gabb, “Epicurus: Father of the Enlightenment”, speaking to the 6/20 Club in London, 2007-09-06.

March 28, 2018

Backs To The Wall – All Eyes On Amiens I THE GREAT WAR Week 192

Filed under: Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 27 Mar 2018

The German Operation Michael continues this week and after some uncertainty, the Germans put their eyes on Amiens. The city is a vital communications and transport hub for the Entente and so Ferdinand Foch decides to mount a defence in front of the city.

Ideological Possession

Filed under: Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robin Koerner offers some information on how to diagnose and treat the widespread scourge of ideological possession:

As someone who has long been writing about the threat posed by this all too prevalent epistemic disease, I am delighted to see the attention that is now being paid to it.

Ideological possession is to healthy political discourse as scientism is to science.

The most important thing to know about diagnosing ideological possession is that you can’t do it by looking at the content of the possessing ideology.

As I have said elsewhere, it’s not the content of your belief that makes you dangerous, it’s the way you believe it.

Any ideology has the potential to be deadly when advanced by those who are so sure of their own knowledge and moral outlook that they would impose it against the protestations of those affected by it. To the ideologically possessed, the imposition can always be justified because “it’s the right thing to do,” “it will start working if we keep at it,” “the complaints are coming from bad people,” and so on. (Yes. The logic is as circular as it seems.)

[…]

To protect oneself from the terrible epistemic disease of ideological possession, epistemic nutrition and exercise are extremely effective.

With respect to the former, the regular consumption of great thinkers like J.S. Mill (“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”), George Orwell (“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”), and Dostoevsky (“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer. Nothing is more difficult than to understand him”) will keep you in good epistemic health. Supplement these basics with a more varied diet of thinkers with whom you disagree on things that matter, and you’ll be in even better shape.

With respect to the latter, a comfortable regime of epistemic exercise — which takes a little time and effort but is immediately rewarding — involves maintaining real friendships with people who have very different assumptions, experiences, and declared moral and political priorities from your own.

The good news is, if you’re chasing Truth hard enough, it is very unlikely that this particular disease will ever catch up with you.

Samuel HaNagid – A Prince of Jews – Extra History

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Extra Credits
Published on 11 Jun 2016

Forced to flee from his home in Cordoba, Samuel HaNagid made a new name for himself in the kingdom of Granada. He picked his allies carefully and rose to the position of vizier, an unheard of honor for a Jew in a Muslim kingdom. His fame as a poet, a leader, and a patron of Judaic studies spread across the Mediterranean.

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