Quotulatiousness

May 7, 2018

DicKtionary – J is for Junk – Ching Shih

Filed under: China, History, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

TimeGhost History
Published on 6 May 2018

J is for Junk, boat of the Chinese,
For trade and for pleasure, they sailed the blue seas
Some junks were pirates, that ain’t a good thing,
And the queen of them all, was one Madame Ching

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“Playing Pied Piper for a lost generation of lefty-baiting edgelords has given an ambitious academic incentive to embrace his inner troll”

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the June issue of Reason, Matt Welch looks at the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and notes that he’s not “the second coming”:

“If you think tough men are dangerous,” University of Toronto psychologist and overnight YouTube superstar Jordan Peterson writes in his new book, “wait until you see what weak men are capable of.” It’s a warning shot for would-be social engineers trying to defang maleness and for Peterson’s startlingly large audience of young dudes teetering on the edge of nihilism. Perhaps it is also a subconscious caution to the author himself.

January 2018 was the month Jordan Peterson went from unknown to inescapable. The two reasons for that were a Channel 4 News (U.K.) exchange that went viral after an increasingly hostile and flustered female interviewer failed to hang an unflappable Peterson as a misogynist, and then the appearance one week later of his 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Random House Canada), which immediately shot up bestseller lists throughout the English-speaking world. “He has skyrocketed from relative obscurity to international celebrity in a couple of weeks,” Psychology Today noted with wonder.

As befits a lecturer fixated on the “tightrope” between chaos and order, good and evil, yin and yang, “the Jordan Peterson moment” (so christened by New York Times columnist David Brooks) has produced an almost perfectly polarized response. Celeb psychologist Jonathan Haidt called Peterson “one of the few fearless professors”; Houman Barekat in the L.A. Review of Books deemed him a peddler of “toxic masculinity” and “reactionary chauvinism.” He is “the most important and influential Canadian thinker since Marshall McLuhan” (Camille Paglia), or an “an intellectual fraud who uses a lot of words to say almost nothing” (Nathan J. Robinson).

What is indisputable — and what makes the Peterson pop phenomenon more interesting than the quality of his work — is the way it has galvanized a generation of wayward young men, including many who have clustered around the “alt-right.” The numbers are staggering, and vaulting upward by the minute: As of early April, there were 49 million views of his YouTube videos, 1,008,000 subscribers to his channel (plus 584,000 Twitter and 256,000 Facebook followers), and, most impressively, an estimated $90,000 a month donated to his account on the crowdfunding site Patreon. By Peterson’s own reckoning, the solid majority of his sold-out audiences on the lecture circuit are males between the ages of 20 and 35; their gratitude for his “grow the hell up” message has moved the man to tears on several public occasions.

Peterson self-identifies as a classical liberal, frequently retweets content from the Cato Institute, and forthrightly criticizes the alt-right for playing the “collectivist game” of identity politics. Yet he’s a lightning rod among libertarians too. I first became aware of the psychologist last fall when his name came up serially at a private gathering of libertarian activists anxious about the real and perceived overlap between their world and the reactionary right. One participant counseled keeping Peterson at arm’s length, lest “we end up with another cult-leader libertarian.” Taking the opposite view at the website Being Libertarian was Adam Barsouk, who argued that “Peterson is able to do something no libertarian commentator before him could: he can argue that a freer, less coddled way of life is not just ethical, but also adaptive, better for humanity as a whole.”

Peterson’s popularity has demonstrated the happy fact that you can reach illiberal ears with a message that contains some classical liberal content. But he has gotten there not via persuasive argument about intellectual ideas but through the top-down, teacher-student, authoritarian exhortations of self-help. Playing Pied Piper for a lost generation of lefty-baiting edgelords has given an ambitious academic incentive to embrace his inner troll.

The Empire of Mali – The Cracks Begin to Show – Extra History – #4

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

Extra Credits
Published on 5 May 2018

After Mansa Musa’s death, the rivers of gold started drying up, and bitterness snaked out from the fringes of the vast Mali Empire. Wars were coming…
EDIT: 7:45 says 1930s. Our scripts have this written down as the 1370s. 🙂

Study: climate change skeptics behave in a more environmentally friendly manner than believers

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

In common with some similar observed phenomena, people who like to signal their climate change beliefs are actually less likely to act in environmentally beneficial ways than declared climate skeptics. At Pacific Standard, Tom Jacobs details the findings of a recent study:

Do our behaviors really reflect our beliefs? New research suggests that, when it comes to climate change, the answer is no. And that goes for both skeptics and believers.

Participants in a year-long study who doubted the scientific consensus on the issue “opposed policy solutions,” but at the same time, they “were most likely to report engaging in individual-level, pro-environmental behaviors,” writes a research team led by University of Michigan psychologist Michael Hall.

Conversely, those who expressed the greatest belief in, and concern about, the warming environment “were most supportive of government climate policies, but least likely to report individual-level actions.”

Sorry, I didn’t have time to recycle — I was busy watching a documentary about the crumbling Antarctic ice shelf.

The study, published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, followed more than 400 Americans for a full year. On seven occasions — roughly once every eight weeks — participants revealed their climate change beliefs, and their level of support for policies such as gasoline taxes and fuel economy standards.

They also noted how frequently they engaged in four environmentally friendly behaviors: recycling, using public transportation, buying “green” products, and using reusable shopping bags.

The researchers found participants broke down into three groups, which they labeled “skeptical,” “cautiously worried,” and “highly concerned.” While policy preferences of group members tracked with their beliefs, their behaviors largely did not: Skeptics reported using public transportation, buying eco-friendly products, and using reusable bags more often than those in the other two categories.

The Chinese Civil War – Blood for Unity l HISTORY OF CHINA

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

IT’S HISTORY
Published on 5 Sep 2015

After the fall of the Qing dynasty China fell apart and both, forces loyal to Chiang Kai-shek’s National Kuomintang Party and as Mao Zedong’s Communist Party of China, fought to rule the country. This bloody struggle would ultimately result in the Chinese Civil War. It would take more than 22 years but would come to a halt during the 2nd Sino-Japanese War. After Japan’s defeat, Mao’s troops grew strong quickly and soon after they were able to force Chiang Kai-shek and his followers out of China. They sought refuge in Taiwan. Shortly after, Mao Zedong called out the People’s Republic of China. Learn all about the Chinese Civil War in this episode of Battlefields with Indy Neidell.

QotD: Running for the presidency

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the most difficult problems for a journalist covering a presidential campaign is getting to know the candidates well enough to make confident judgments about them, because it is just about impossible for a journalist to establish a personal relationship with any candidate who has already made the big leap from “long shot” to “serious contender.” The problem becomes more and more serious as the stakes get higher, and by the time a candidate has survived enough primaries to convince himself and his staff that they will all be eating their lunches in the White House Mess for the next four years, he is long past the point of having either the time or the inclination to treat any journalist who doesn’t already know him personally as anything but just another face in the campaign “press corps.”

There are many complex theories about the progressive stages of a presidential campaign, but for the moment let’s say there are three: Stage One is the period between the decision to run for president and the morning after the New Hampshire primary when the field is still crowded, the staff organizations are still loose and relaxed, and most candidates are still hungry for all the help they can get – especially media exposure, so they can get their names in the Gallup Poll; Stage Two is the “winnowing out,” the separating of the sheep from the goats, when the two or three survivors of the early primaries begin looking like long-distance runners with a realistic shot at the party nomination; and Stage Three begins whenever the national media, the public opinion polls and Mayor Daley of Chicago decide that a candidate has picked up enough irreversible momentum to begin looking like at least a probable nominee, and a possible next president.

This three-stage breakdown is not rooted in any special wisdom or scientific analysis, but it fits both the 1972 and 1976 Democratic campaigns well enough to make the point that any journalist who doesn’t get a pretty firm personal fix on a candidate while he’s still in Stage One might just as well go with his or her instincts all the way to Election Day in November, because once a candidate gets to Stage Two his whole lifestyle changes drastically.

At that point he becomes a public figure, a serious contender, and the demands on his time and energy begin escalating to the level of madness. He wakes up every morning to face a split-second, 18-hour-a-day schedule of meetings, airports, speeches, press conferences, motorcades and handshaking. Instead of rambling, off-the-cuff talks over a drink or two with reporters from small-town newspapers, he is suddenly flying all over the country in his own chartered jet full of syndicated columnists and network TV stars……. Cameras and microphones follow him everywhere he goes, and instead of pleading long and earnestly for the support of 15 amateur political activists gathered in some English professor’s living room in Keene, New Hampshire, he is reading the same cliché-riddled speech – often three or four times in a single day – to vast auditoriums full of people who either laugh or applaud at all the wrong times and who may or may not be supporters……. And all the fat cats, labor leaders and big-time pols who couldn’t find the time to return his phone calls when he was desperately looking for help a few months ago are now ringing his phone off the hook within minutes after his arrival in whatever Boston, Miami or Milwaukee hotel his managers have booked him into that night. But they are not calling to offer their help and support, they just want to make sure he understands that they don’t plan to help or support anybody else, until they get to know him a little better.

It is a very mean game that these high-rolling, coldhearted hustlers play. The president of the United States may no longer be “the most powerful man in the world,” but he is still close enough to be sure that nobody else in the world is going to cross him by accident. And anybody who starts looking like he might get his hands on that kind of power had better get comfortable, right from the start, with the certain knowledge that he is going to have to lean on some very mean and merciless people just to get himself elected.

Hunter S. Thompson, “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’76: Third-rate romance, low-rent rendezvous — hanging with Ted Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and a bottle of Wild Turkey”, Rolling Stone, 1976-06-03.

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