Quotulatiousness

May 15, 2019

1984 – Dystopias and Apocalypses – Extra Sci Fi

Filed under: Books, Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Extra Credits
Published on 14 May 2019

What makes 1984 still relevant to modern readers is that it serves as a warning against fascism in all its possible forms. George Orwell’s service fighting in the Spanish Civil War led him to see that the heart of totalitarianism is about xenophobia and nationalism no matter which kind of government it came from.

The idea that Orwell presents us in 1984 is that people subtle enough and brutal enough can take the undirected dissatisfaction and anger of a society and point it at whatever they will, using us to damn ourselves.

“Our” intellectuals and how they got that way

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Over at Rotten Chestnuts, Severian says we should blame the eggheads:

Because its goals were impossible, The Revolution didn’t go as planned. For every two self-deluded fools who thought the Soviet Union was a new civilization, there were five who knew exactly what the Communists were about. Bomb-throwing anarchists had terrorized European cities for years before 1917, and Red atrocities during the Civil War were no secret. It was obvious to anyone who cared to look, then, that horrors like the White Sea Canal were features, not bugs, of Communism.

If you’ve read your Festinger, you know what happened next. The True Believers searched frantically for any “explanation” that wouldn’t invalidate their precious Marxism, and Antonio Gramsci gave it to them. Though he didn’t coin the term “false consciousness” (Georgy Lukacs did), Gramsci weaponized it. The reason the Bolsheviks are forced to do all that awful stuff — which we don’t admit they actually did! — is that The People lack the proper revolutionary consciousness. They still believe in stuff like “God,” “free speech,” “not getting starved to death while the Party fatcats drive around in limos,” etc.

And where do they get this “false consciousness,” comrades? Why, it’s the same place the Western proles get theirs, which is also why the Western proles haven’t joined The Revolution (yet!), in fulfillment of the scriptures. Gramsci called the false consciousness installation process “hegemony.” There are a zillion unread academic tomes covering all the nuances, but the basic idea is simple enough: The ruling class controls the institutions; the institutions transmit culture; therefore, the culture takes ruling class values for granted.*

The solution, therefore, is as simple as the diagnosis: Capture the institutions, change the culture.

I trust y’all see where this is going. The best conspiracy theories are the ones that are actually true, and this one is. You want a grand conspiracy to destroy Western Civ? Here it is, laid out as openly as Marxist prose can express it, in excruciating detail. If anything, I’m being unfair to Antonio Gramsci. He put it all together in true kommissar style, but these ideas were everywhere on the Left in the early 20th century. In America, for instance, Progressives like John Dewey had been maneuvering to get control of elementary schools since the late 19th century. Progressives just looooove putting their hands on children. Have you noticed?

Every single insane, culture-destroying, gulag-enabling idea the Left has had in the last 200 years, starting with Karl Marx’s sub-Hegelian flatulence itself, can be traced directly back to some fucking egghead. I’ll repeat that: DIRECTLY. You can find their works, and quote them, because this stuff is in every syllabus of every Humanities class of every college in the Western world. The prose is opaque as only PoMo prose can be, but the main ideas are easy enough to decipher….

…I wrote “ideas,” but there’s really only one “idea.” Since The Revolution obviously ain’t gonna happen — it seems even Leftists can acknowledge one tiny aspect of reality, if you give ’em twelve decades and 100 million bodies — the Left’s entire program, top to bottom, stem to stern, is shit-flinging nihilism. Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go — not because it’s Western, but because it’s Civilization.

Mussolini and D’Annunzio On The Rise – Allies in Crisis Over Italy I THE GREAT WAR April 1919

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published on 14 May 2019

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Italy joined World War 1 in 1915 after it had been promised territorial gains in the Treaty of London. Now that the Central Powers had been defeated, the Italian government and the Italians themselves expected that their contribution would be honored at the Paris Peace Conference. But France, Great Britain and the US had other plans and so the Italian government was caught between the new realities at Paris and the nationalists at home.

» SOURCES
Gerwarth, Robert. The Vanquished. Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923 (Penguin, 2017).

Leonhard, Jörn. Der überforderte Frieden. Versailles und die Welt 1918-1923 (CH Beck, 2018)

Macmillan, Margaret. The Peacemakers: Six Months that Changed the World (London: John Murray, 2001).

Report: Disorders Inquiry Committee 1919-1920 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, India: 1920)

Sullivan, “Vittoria Mutilata” in 1914-1918 online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online…

Thompson, Mark. The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915-1919 (London: Faber, 2008).

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Modern architecture as a generations-long art crime spree

Filed under: Architecture, Britain, Europe, France, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theodore Dalrymple is clearly quite a fan of Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism by James Stevens Curl, as this is at least the third review of the book I’ve seen by him (and you can probably tell I agree with much of his viewpoint that I’m blogging it yet again…)

In a recent debate in Prospect magazine on the question of whether modern architecture has ruined British towns and cities, Professor James Stevens Curl, one of Britain’s most ­distinguished architectural historians, wrote as his opening salvo:

    Visitors to these islands who have eyes to see will observe that there is hardly a town or city that has not had its streets — and skyline — wrecked by insensitive, crude, post-1945 additions which ignore established geometries, ­urban grain, scale, materials, and ­emphases.

This is so self-evidently true that I find it hard to understand how anyone could deny it, but modern architects and hangers-on such as architectural journalists do deny it, like war criminals who, for ­obvious reasons, continue to deny their crimes in the face of overwhelming evidence.

This is true not only of Britain but of many, perhaps most, other countries that have or had any towns or cities to ruin. Anyone who rides into the center of Paris from Charles de Gaulle Airport, for example, will be appalled at the modernist visual hell that scours his eyes as he goes.

Nor is this visual hell the consequence of the need to build cheaply. Where money is no object, contemporary architects, like the sleep of reason in Goya’s etching, bring forth monsters. The Tour Montparnasse (said to be the most hated building in Paris), the Centre Pompidou, the Opéra Bastille, the Musée du quai Branly, the new Philharmonie, do not owe their preternatural ugliness to lack of funds, but rather to the incapacity, one might say the ferocious unwillingness, of architects to build anything beautiful, and to their determination to leave their mark on the city as a dog leaves its mark on a tree.

Professor Curl’s magnum opus is both scholarly and polemical. He has been observing the onward march of modernism and its effects for sixty years and is justifiably outraged by it. British architects have managed to reverse the terms of the anarchist Bakunin’s dictum that the urge to destroy is also a creative urge: Their urge to create is also a destructive urge. I could give many concrete examples (no pun intended).

Philharmonie at the Parc de la Villette, Paris.
Photo by Zairon via Wikimedia Commons.

Curl knows that he is arguing not against an aesthetic, but against an ironclad ideology. The architectural Leninists have been determined so to indoctrinate the public that they hope and expect a generation will grow up knowing nothing but modernism, and therefore will be unable to judge it. (All judgment is comparative, as Doctor Johnson said.) In Paris recently, I saw an advertisement on the Métro (a few days before the fire in Notre-Dame) to the effect that Paris would not be Paris without the Centre Pompidou — which, of course, has a good claim to be the ugliest building in the world. In the face of such an advertisement promoted by the cultural elite, what ordinary person would dare demur?

Centre Georges-Pompidou (no, this isn’t an under construction image … it’s from 2017 and the construction was technically complete in 1977)
Gerd Eichmann photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Could anyone imagine a worldwide outpouring of genuine and heartfelt grief, such as that which greeted the burning of Notre-Dame de Paris, if any building of the last seventy years burnt down? Indeed, the destruction of many would be a cause almost for rejoicing. Modernist buildings will never age as Notre-Dame aged; they will merely deteriorate, and usually do deteriorate even before completion.

Jade of the Maya

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

Lindybeige
Published on 10 Apr 2019

Guatemala – another video from my trip there, this time looking at the jade in the local museum, plus obsidian, idols, and 1970s fashion tips.

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QotD: Women competing against other women

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are women out there who still see dressing to please a man as some sort of Stockholm syndrome thing — participating in your own (flouncy, spaghetti-strapped) subjugation. So, it’s possible that those advising you “Don’t change for a man!” are just trying to help you be a modern and empowered woman. Of course, one could argue that actually being a modern and empowered woman means you don’t have to dress like you’re hoping to get a call to clean out a sewer line.

Maybe those in your advice coven really do believe they’re acting in your best interest. Maybe. Social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Jean Twenge report that it’s widely believed that men drive the “cultural suppression of female sexuality” — which could include shaming women for how they dress. However, in reviewing the research, they make a persuasive case that it’s primarily women (often without awareness of their motives) who work to “stifle each other’s sexuality.”

This is right in keeping with research on female competition. While men fight openly — “Bring it! I will ruin you!” — women take a sneakier approach. As female competition researcher Tracy Vaillancourt explains it, women fight for their interests using “indirect aggression,” like gossip, mean looks, disparaging remarks, and other underhanded tactics to “reduce the mate value of a rival.” Underhanded tactics? You know — like suggesting you’re selling out womankind if you wear a skirt or winged eyeliner.

Amy Alkon, “Casual Coroner”, The Science Advice Goddess, 2016-09-20.

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