Quotulatiousness

May 27, 2021

“Are you an ally of an all-powerful white supremacist, colonialist apartheid regime led by baby-killing oppressors, the likes of whose evil the world has never seen?”

Filed under: History, Media, Middle East, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Why, yes. Yes I am, Barbara Kay. And you should be too:

Nobody with eyes to see can press on with the myth that this is a political conflict. The anti-Semitism that lurks behind obsessive Israel-bashing can no longer be credibly passed off as “criticism of Israel”. It’s not about Israel and never was. It’s about those maddening Jews. Wherever they are, they make trouble. What is it with their stubborn insistence on their right to live and flourish in their homeland, when they know they are not wanted there?

Never mind the historical facts surrounding Jews’ indigenous rights, or the painstaking legal journey to national sovereignty (along with other newly minted Middle Eastern countries like Iraq and Syria, both of which have appalling human rights records, but never have their right to exist questioned). Treaties and international law are too dull, nuanced and complex. They take time and effort to understand. It’s very taxing for the brain. Narrative, though, takes no time at all to absorb. Stories of good and evil are simple, unnuanced and satisfyingly emotive.

If you attend to the myth-mongering on social media, it seems your choice is stark. Are you an ally of an all-powerful white supremacist, colonialist apartheid regime led by baby-killing oppressors, the likes of whose evil the world has never seen? Or are you a decent, compassionate human being, committed to social justice and ready to lend your support to those infamous Zionist monsters’ powerless, oppressed, racialized victims, who are languishing in their open-air prisons?

It’s a tough choice for progressive Jews. Before 1967, living with oneself as a Jew was easy. Socialist Israel was little David then and the massed hostile Arab states were Goliath. Even Bernie Sanders enjoyed his time on a kibbutz in 1963. (Mind you, that particular kibbutz, Sha’ar Ha’amakim, was so far left, one of its members was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.)

Then those upstart Jews dared to win a war against incredible odds and had the chutzpah to take back territory that had been stolen from them in the 1948 War of Independence. The pivot from victim to victor, from powerlessness to power, was the kiss of death for their support from the left.

Joinery for Knock-Down Workbenches

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 26 May 2021

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Charles Darwin “was 19th century euro upper class. It’d be stranger if he WASN’T ‘problematic’ by today’s standards”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Robert Wright argues that Charles Darwin is not guilty of the most recent set of sins alleged in an editorial in the journal Science:

Charles Darwin, circa 1874.
Photo by Leonard Darwin via Wikipedia Commons.

The author of the Science piece (which ran under the heading “editorial”) was Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at Princeton. He contended that Darwin’s 1871 book The Descent of Man “offers a racist and sexist view of humanity” and is “often problematic, prejudiced, and injurious”. So students who are taught that Darwin was a great scientist “should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience”.

There are things about this essay I like. For example: I understood it, which distinguishes it from many things written by contemporary anthropologists. Also, it’s hard to argue with its claim that Darwin said things about race and gender that would get a guy canceled today. (As one person put it on Twitter, Darwin, “was 19th century euro upper class. It’d be stranger if he WASN’T ‘problematic’ by today’s standards”.)

Still, Fuentes does seem to have gotten one important thing about Darwin wrong. And in the process he demonstrated a kind of confusion I consider so pernicious that I’ve decided to add it to my list of “existential psychological threats”, along with such cognitive biases as attribution error and confirmation bias (“existential” in the sense of grave threats to Planet Earth, a subject pondered often in this newsletter).

Here’s the confusion: In reading Darwin, Fuentes fails to distinguish between an explanation of something and a justification of something.

I want to emphasize that, though Fuentes seems to be on the left, this conflation of explanation and justification is common on both sides of the political spectrum. If you suggest that some terrorist act committed in America was a response to America’s bombing of majority-Muslim countries, someone on the right may respond to this attempt to explain why the terrorism happened by saying, “Oh, so you’re justifying the slaughter of Americans? You’re excusing the terrorists?”

The fact that I’m often on the receiving end of this kind of question may be one reason I’ve come to see this conflation — let’s call it the “explain/excuse conflation” — as something whose extinction would be a wonderful thing. But there’s another reason: I believe this conflation is a genuine impediment to solving some of the world’s biggest problems. If people get shouted down every time they start a sentence with, “I think the reason bad thing X happened is …” then we’ll have trouble understanding enough about bad things to reduce their frequency.

Here’s the assertion by Fuentes that, so far as I can tell, is flat-out wrong. After (accurately) writing that Darwin “asserted evolutionary differences between races,” he adds: “He went beyond simple racial rankings, offering justification of empire and colonialism, and genocide, through ‘survival of the fittest.'”

H/T to Colby Cosh for the link.

History Summarized: Ancient China

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 28 Dec 2018

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And after that we’ll defeat the Huns! Join Blue on a trek through the early centuries of Chinese History, from legendary foundations to the Shang and Zhou dynasties, past the Warring States Period, and into the Han dynasty — if you get to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, you’ve gone too far.

Further reading: China: A History by John Keay

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QotD: Billy Clinter and the Philosophers Stoned

Filed under: Books, Government, Humour, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s hard to imagine now, but just a few years ago [author J.K.] Rodham was financially dependent on the government, living in dreary public housing in an obscure part of Little Rock, and separated from her husband for a few hours while he was over at his brother’s testing the new hot tub with a couple of cocktail waitresses. It was then that the soon to be world-famous author came up with her incredible plot: the story of an adolescent with magical powers who saves the world from the dark forces.

The result was Billy Clinter and the Philosophers Stoned, in which young Billy attends a party at Oxford and discovers his amazing ability to smoke but not inhale. With that first fantastic adventure of the shy misunderstood boy blessed — and burdened — with the awesome power to feel your pain with just one touch, young Billy Clinter became the world’s most popular schoolboy.

Then came Billy Clinter and the Gusset of Fire, in which the vast right-wing conspiracy led by the sinister Lord Newt and Doleful Bob plant a hogtail disguised as a house elf in his hotel room in Little Hangleton. The elf tricks Billy into revealing his pocket sneakoscope and she glimpses its remarkable distinguishing characteristics, the strange lightning bolt along the side that signals the tremendous potency of his Slytherin Beaubaton. After this narrow escape, the young wizard gets into yet more scrapes in Billy Clinter and the Prisoner of Azkansas, in which Rodham tells the story of how young Billy and his much brainier friend, Hillary Granger, finally escape the hideous swamp of Azkansas after being trapped there for far longer than Hillary had expected to be.

But in the fourth volume events take a grim turn, as the careless schoolboy becomes aware that Professor Starr has in his laboratory a magic dress that could destroy all his and Hillary’s plans. In Billy Clinter and the Chamber of Semen, Billy realises that he splinched while he was apparating, which had never happened before. This is all the fault of Moaning Monica, the intern who haunts the anteroom at Housewhites and has the rare power of Parcelmouth, the ability to look into the eye of the Basilisk, the world’s smallest snake, without being petrified. Is she a Niffler or a Death Eater? Billy cannot be sure. He looks to Housewhites’ giant shambling groundskeeper Reno to protect him, but she’s busy raining down fire on strange cults. As the book ends, their old friend Albus Bumblegore fails to become Headmaster of Housewhites after insufficient chads are found in his sorting hat.

With each new adventure, critics have predicted that the eternal schoolboy has run his course. But he keeps coming back. None the less, there were strange rumours this time that J.K. Rodham was preparing to kill off the most popular character. It’s been known for a while that she sees the series’ future depending more on the much brainier though somewhat unlikeable Hillary Granger and the four female ghosts who write all her words.

Mark Steyn, “Splinching while you’re apparating”, The [Un]documented Mark Steyn, 2014.

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