Quotulatiousness

March 28, 2023

WEIRD World – basing all our “assumptions about human nature on psych lab experiments starring American undergraduates”

Filed under: Books, Government, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jane Psmith reviews The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich:

Until 2002, diplomats at the United Nations didn’t have to pay their parking tickets. Double-parking, blocking a fire hydrant, blocking a driveway, blocking an entire midtown Manhattan street — it didn’t matter; when you have diplomatic plates, they let you do it. In the five years before State Department policy changed in November 2002, UN diplomats racked up a whopping 150,000 unpaid parking tickets worth $18 million in fines. (Among other things, the new policy allowed the city to have 110% of the amount due deducted from the US foreign aid budget to the offending diplomats’ country. Can you believe they never actually did it? Lame.) Anyway, I hope you’re not going to be surprised when I say that the tickets weren’t distributed evenly: the nine members of Kuwait’s UN mission averaged almost 250 unpaid tickets apiece per year (followed by Egypt, Chad, Sudan, Bulgaria, and Mozambique, each between 100 and 150; the rest of the top ten were Albania, Angola, Senegal, and Pakistan). The UK, Canada, Australia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway had none at all. The rest of the rankings are more or less what you’d expect: for example, Italy averaged three times as many unpaid tickets per diplomat as France and fifteen times as many as Germany.

What did the countries with the fewest unpaid parking tickets have in common? Well, they generally scored low on various country corruption indexes, but that’s just another way of saying something about their culture. And the important thing about their culture is that these countries are WEIRD: western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. But they’re also, in the grand scheme of human history, weird: their inhabitants think differently, behave differently, and value different things than most humans. Among other things, WEIRD people are individualistic, nonconformist, and analytical. They — okay, fine, we — are particularly hard-working, exhibit low time preference, prefer impersonal rules we apply universally, and elevate abstract principles over contextual and relationship-based standards of behavior. In other words, WEIRD people (as Joseph Henrich and his colleagues pointed out in the influential 2010 paper where they coined the phrase) are outliers on almost every measure of human behavior. Wouldn’t it be silly for an entire academic discipline (and therefore an entire society ideologically committed to Trusting The Experts) to base all its assumptions about human nature on psych lab experiments starring American undergraduates? That would give us a wildly distorted picture of what humans are generally like! We might even do something really dumb like assume that the social and political structures that work in WEIRD countries — impersonal markets, constitutional government, democratic politics — can be transplanted wholesale somewhere else to produce the same peace and prosperity we enjoy.

Ever since he pointed out the weirdness of the WEIRD, Henrich has been trying to explain how we got this way. His argument really begins in his 2015 The Secret of Our Success, which I reviewed here and won’t rehash. If you find yourself skeptical that material circumstances can drive the development of culture and psychology (unfortunately the term “cultural Marxism” is already taken), you should start there. Here I’m going to summarize the rest of Henrich’s argument fairly briefly: first, because I don’t find it entirely convincing (more on that below), and second, because I’m less interested in how we got WEIRD than in whether we’re staying WEIRD. The forces that Henrich cites as critical to the forging of WEIRD psychology are no longer present, and many of the core presuppositions of WEIRD culture are no longer taken for granted, which raises some thought-provoking questions. But first, the summary.

Henrich argues that the critical event setting the West on the path to Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic was the early medieval western Church’s ban on cousin marriage. That might seem a little odd, but bear in mind that most of the humans who’ve ever lived have been enmeshed in incredibly dense kin networks that dictate obligations, responsibilities, and privileges: your identity is given from birth, based simply on your role as a node in an interdependent network. When societies grow beyond the scale of a family, it’s by metaphorically extending and intensifying these kinship bonds (go read our review of The Ancient City for more on this). These kinship networks perpetuate themselves through marriage, and particularly through marriage to relatives, whether blood or in-laws, to strengthen existing connections. Familial or tribal identities come first, before even the claims of universal religions, as when Wali Khan, a Pakistani politician, phrased his personal allegiances as “I have been a Pashtun for six thousand years, a Muslim for thirteen hundred years, and a Pakistani for twenty-five.” You could imagine Edwin of Northumbria or Childeric saying something pretty similar.

Then, beginning in the 4th century, the western Church began to forbid marriages to relatives or in-laws, the kinship networks began to wither away, and alternative social technologies evolved to take their place. In place of the cousin-marriers’ strong tight bonds, conformity, deference to traditional authority, and orientation toward the collective, you get unmoored individuals who have to (or get to, depending on your vantage point) create their own mutually beneficial relationships with strangers. This promotes a psychological emphasis on personal attributes and achievements, greater personal independence, and the development of universalist social norms. Intensive kinship creates a strong in-group/out-group distinction (there’s kin and there’s not-kin): people from societies with strong kinship bonds, for instance, are dramatically more willing to lie for a friend on the witness stand. WEIRD people are almost never willing to do that, and would be horrified to even be asked. Similarly, in societies with intensive kinship norms, you’d be considered immoral and irresponsible if you didn’t use a position of power and influence to benefit your family or tribe; WEIRD people call that nepotism or corruption and think it’s wrong.

The Rise of the US Army Air Forces

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 27 Mar 2023

The United States Army Air Force, USAAF, is the most powerful air force in the world. Alongside the Royal Air Force, it is winning the air war against the Luftwaffe. But things weren’t always like this. At the outbreak of war, the USAAF could not hold a candle to its allies or enemies. How have the Americans managed to turn things around?
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Computers and music, from 1961 to 2001

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

Ted Gioia explains the deep history behind the scene in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey where H.A.L. sings a song:

Not many people could afford an IBM 7094 computer back in the early 1960s — a typical installation cost $3 million. That’s the equivalent of around $20 million in purchasing power today. Over the course of the decade, fewer than 300 were built.

You didn’t get much computing power for that hefty price tag, at least by current-day standards. But if you wanted a machine that did complex or rapid math, you had few other options. The 7094 could handle 250,000 additions or subtractions in just one second. A whole room of accountants couldn’t keep up with it.

But addition and subtraction aren’t very sexy. So someone got the bright idea of teaching the IBM 7094 to sing. That’s why John L. Kelly Jr., Carol Lockbaum, and Lou Gerstman of Bell Labs, in Murray Hill, New Jersey, began working in 1961 on this pioneering computer music project.

Digital music wasn’t an entirely new development, even in those distant days, but singing presented completely different challenges, requiring breakthroughs in speech synthesis. But Bell Labs — then the in-house research arm of AT&T (it’s now part of Nokia) — had more expertise in that area than any other organization in the world.

The Bell Labs team needed a song for their experiment. They decided on “Daisy Bell” — also known as “Bicycle Built for Two” — composed by British tunesmith Harry Dacre in 1892.

The idea for the song came to Dacre when he visited the US and found, to his surprise, that the customs officials had imposed a tariff on his bicycle. A friend quipped that he was lucky it wasn’t a bicycle with two seats, or the duty might have been double. The end result was Dacre’s most successful song ever.

[…]

Even back in the early 1960s, this tune didn’t have much hipness potential. But at least the melody was simple, well-known, and no longer protected by copyright. (That said, I would love to watch a jury in 1961 debate computer music rights.)

For the instrumental parts of the song, the Bell Labs team relied on contributions from Max Matthews, who had created a breakthrough sound-generating program called MUSIC back in 1957. In those ancient analog days, he had hooked up his violin to an IBM 704, and was thus the first performer in history to transfer live music to a computer for synthesis and playback.

Miles Davis – “Concierto de Aranjuez: Adagio”

Filed under: Europe, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Miles Davis
Published 23 Mar 2021

“Concierto de Aranjuez: Adagio” by Miles Davis
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QotD: In praise of aristocracy and monarchy

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

Mr. McDonnell, deputy leader of the British Labour Party, which for the time being is in opposition, recently objected to the presence of hereditary peers in the “upper” house of Britain’s Parliament, using the crude and vulgar language typical of populist politicians anxious to demonstrate their identity with the people or the masses. (It is strange, by the way, how rarely leftists who are in favor of confiscatory economic policies are condemned as populist, when they appeal mainly to envy, spite, and resentment, those most delightful of all human emotions.)

Speaking for myself — the only person for whom I am fully entitled to speak — I would rather be ruled (at least in the modern world) by the Duke of Northumberland than by Mr. McDonnell; and this is for perfectly rational reasons and not, as might be supposed, from any feeling of nostalgia for a world we have lost.

Unlike Mr. McDonnell, the Duke of Northumberland does not feel that he has to make the world anew, all within his lifetime — or rather within his political lifetime, a period that is even shorter. He knows that the world did not begin with him and will not end with him. As the latest scion of an ancient dynasty going back centuries, he is but the temporary guardian of what he has inherited, which he has a duty to pass on. Moreover, as someone whose privileges are inherited, he knows that his power (such as it is) is fragile in the modern world. He must exercise it with care, discretion, and consideration.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Appeal of Inherited Power”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-07-29.

March 27, 2023

The vicious – not virtuous – circle of green

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson thinks that our societal pursuit of green technology will be the undoing of everything we have built:

Some of us have been saying this for a very long time: green will bring down the world. Green creates a vicious circle, a term you may remember from Economics 101. It is when the serpent eats itself, no wealth is created and collapse results. That is what we are doing with ESG, with carbon taxes, with the forced adoption of unreliable vertiginously expensive green energy. It has skewed every single market. No one is investing in sound enterprise, and anything once sound is a Jenga tower, unstable, rotting from within. This. This is what threatens to bring down the world.

Green is built on subsidies. And not just government subsidy. Every mutual fund, every hedge fund, every multinational and every local or national corporation has a green monster within preventing innovative investments, sucking profits and growth. Every local, regional and state government leaks millions to green morons promising to “bring sustainable prosperity”. The only prosperity is theirs. They fiddle around in lakes and watercourses, producing “studies”, all of which are hysterical and exaggerated. They muck around in forests, buying as much as possible, shut them down, never visit again, leaving them to desertify. They buy farms and ranches, leaving them to rot. They are termites, eating us alive.

These outfits have burrowed into every level of government and every ministry. They are purely extractive. They do not produce anything of value. They leech. They move in and out of government. When in government, they identify sources of funds to plunder once out of government. In 2015, I did a cross-ministry analysis of just how much money these folks take from the government annually. It is in the hundreds of billions in the US alone. From private foundations they take more billions. All this money is used to shut down economic activity.

[…]

Here is the nasty little secret that lies at the heart of environmentalism. It has been long captured by plutocrats and WEFers, who use it to take resources once thought to belong to the people, to everyone, to use in order to innovate and develop. This freedom and access, and only this was the source of prosperity in the United States. It powered the entire world. It made America the beacon, the lighthouse of the world. It produced strong healthy brilliant young people who performed one feat of innovation, athleticism, and creation after another. All those kids today are working on ever more vicious ways to surveil, control and supress via AI.

And the interior is being cleared of people, businesses, farms, ranches, working forests, mines, and oil and gas installations.

In pursuit of 2030 goals, Biden’s agents are busily acquiring hundreds of millions of acres from private owners, from state and regional land banks, which they will then lock down. Many ranchers, including the heroic Wayne Hage, believe that government is taking that land to use as collateral for its massive debt to the Bank for International Settlements. The only people who will be able to use those resources are multinationals who pay a fee to government and to the BIS to pay down the loans. No citizens will be able to access those resources to make money for themselves, to build families and businesses and towns and cities. The environmental movement has, within 40 years, returned us to serfdom, where we eat what we are told to eat, go where we are told to go, take whatever medicine they want to give us, and eventually, fight when we are told to fight.

The environmental movement is so evil, it has twisted ethical standards to the point where we are able to kill each other with impunity. Their PR is so strong, so invasive, that every school child now believes there are too many people (this is nonsense), and population must be drastically drawn down (a genocide unrivalled in history). Every adult secretly fears this is true. This appalling lie has created a culture of death. What are the effects of this thinking, that life is no longer sacred, but a threat?

Why Russia Lost the Polish-Soviet War

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

The Great War
Published 24 Mar 2023
The Polish-Soviet War was one of the most important conflicts in the aftermath of the First World War when Eastern Europe was in flux. Both the Polish and the Bolshevik Army had the advantage numerous times and at the Battle of Warsaw is looked like the Bolsheviks would carry the revolution into Western Europe.
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The war against fertility

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray:

The effacement of women’s bodies is changing from a cultural signal to a battlefield maneuver. The acceleration of the presence of men as dominant participants in women’s sports, the growing intensity of casually monstrous blue zone attacks on families and parenting, the emergence of drag queens — men playacting as women, burlesque cartoons about sexual identity — as The Most Important Symbol Ever (and something children should definitely see) …

… and now this:

That’s footage from a Let Women Speak event in Auckland, New Zealand, where women arguing that “women” are “adult human females” were physically attacked by a mob of “transwomen” — by men — and their allies. It’s very progressive when men dressed as women silence women and hurt them. More here, also linked above.

In the opening paragraph of this post, you may have thought that one of the things I mentioned was different than the other things — that the blue state assault on families and parenting isn’t specifically gendered, and is equally an assault on the role of mothers and fathers. And it is. But.

It seems to me that the very very strange thing breaking out all over the world — or all over the Anglosphere, because I don’t see Nigeria and Peru and Singapore going all-in on transgendered everything — is loaded with subtext about a febrile loathing for fertility. In policy, we’re incentivizing childlessness, and disincentivizing childbearing. Birthrates are declining sharply, and were declining even before the mRNA injections, while blue state governments work on laws that tell would-be parents their children can vanish from their custody on political pretexts. Who has the future children while the state says that hey, nice family you have there, be a shame if something were to happen to it?

I suspect the reason so much hate and rage is being directed at women is that their bodies can produce babies, which means that the hate and rage is being directed at the future. Peachy Keenan, who’s all over this stuff in multiple forums, wrote recently about Hicklibs on Parade, describing “how deeply the postmodern, anti-human gender ideology has penetrated into what we used to call ‘middle America'”:

    In Plano, Texas last fall, an “all-ages” drag brunch attracted some unwanted attention from people who thought they lived in a conservative state. At the brunch — which was held at Ebb & Flow, an eatery in an upscale strip mall — a buffoonish man in a dress wearing cat ears sings, “My p*ssy good, p*ssy sweet, p*ssy good enough to eat”, while flashing his underwear.

    In the video from the event, a four-year old girl stares in shock as the “drag” performer twerks and grinds for the ladies in attendance.

    The people in the crowd watching this man systematically strip away a little girl’s innocence look like nice friendly Texans; plump grandmas and families and the types you’d run into at the local Costco. They are not hipsters; they are not edgy. They look normal!

    This is what makes all of this so striking. These slightly downmarket Texan and Midwestern prairie home companion women have, historically, been the only thing holding this rickety old country together.

Frommer Pistolen-MG Model 1917: A Crazy Villar Perosa Copy

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 23 Nov 2022

After encountering Italian Villar Perosa machine pistols in the field, Austro-Hungarian troops requested a similar weapon. The project was given to FÉG to work on, and the result was the Pistolen-MG Model 1917: a pair of Frommer Stop pistols with long barrels and 25-round magazines, redesigned to fire from the open bolt, mounted to an adorably tiny tripod and spade grips.

Only a few dozen of these were made for testing, and they were not accepted for military service. Many thanks to Joschi Schuy for giving me access to film that fantastic surviving example for you!
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QotD: Homo electronicus and the problem of instant communications

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

There are lots of problems with instant communications, and they really need a whole post (or series, or book) to themselves, but one is particularly relevant here. As discussed above, it’s not the technology itself, it’s the application. The internet, like TV, is one of those gadgets that are almost impossible not to use. If it’s there, you’re going to log on – it takes serious, frustrating effort not to. Try it!

One obvious consequence of this is that it turns the whole world into a giant hen party. Karen has always been with us, probably with equal prevalence. But as late as the mid-1990s, she’d have to confine her scolding to PTA meetings and places like that. But now everyone has the Internet, and social media’s a thing, and it’s just sitting there, compelling you to use it. Woman’s natural role as the guardian of the tribe’s mores becomes Karen-ism on crack.

Severian, “Recent Evolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-28.

March 26, 2023

Plandemic? Manufactured crisis? Mass formation psychosis?

Filed under: Britain, China, Government, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Conservative Woman, James Delingpole lets his skeptic flag fly:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Tell me about your personal experiences of Covid 19. Actually, wait, don’t. I think I may have heard it already, about a million times. You lost all sense of smell or taste – and just how weird was that? It floored you for days. It gave you a funny dry cough, the dryness and ticklishness of which was unprecedented in your entire coughing career. You’ve had flu a couple of times and, boy, when you’ve got real flu do you know it. But this definitely wasn’t flu. It was so completely different from anything you’ve ever known, why you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it had been bioengineered in a lab with all manner of spike proteins and gain-of-function additives, perhaps even up to and including fragments of the Aids virus …

Yeah, right. Forgive me for treading on the sacred, personal domain of your lived experience. But might I cautiously suggest that none of what you went through necessarily validates lab-leak theory. Rather what it may demonstrate is the power of susceptibility, brainwashing and an overactive imagination. You lived – we all did – through a two-year period in which health-suffering anecdotes became valuable currency. Whereas in the years before the “pandemic”, no one had been much interested in the gory details of your nasty cold, suddenly everyone wanted to compare notes to see whether they’d had it as bad as you – or, preferably, for the sake of oneupmanship, even worse. This in turn created a self-reinforcing mechanism of Covid panic escalation: the more everyone talked about it, the more inconvertible the “pandemic” became.

Meanwhile, in the real world, hard evidence – as opposed to anecdotal evidence – for this “pandemic” remained stubbornly non-existent. The clincher for me was a landmark article published in January 2021 by Simon Elmer at his website Architects For Social Housing. It was titled “Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics: Manufacturing the Crisis”.

In it Elmer asked the question every journalist should have asked but which almost none did: is this “pandemic” really as serious as all the experts, and government ministers and media outlets and medics are telling us it is? The answer was a very obvious No. As the Office for National Statistics data cited by Elmer clearly showed, 2020 – Year Zero for supposedly the biggest public health threat since “Spanish Flu” a century earlier – was one of the milder years for death in the lives of most people.

Let’s be clear about this point, because something you often hear people on the sceptical side of the argument say is, “Of course, no one is suggesting that Covid didn’t cause a horrific number of deaths.” But that’s exactly what they should be suggesting: because it’s true. Elmer was quoting the Age Standardised Mortality statistics for England and Wales dating back to 1941. What these show is that in every year up to and including 2008, more people died per head of population than in the deadly Covid outbreak year of 2020. Of the previous 79 years, 2020 had the 12th lowest mortality rate.

Covid, in other words, was a pandemic of the imagination, of anecdote, of emotion rather than of measured ill-health and death. Yet even now, when I draw someone’s attention to that ONS data, I find that the most common response I get is one of denial. That is, when presented with the clearest, most untainted (this was before ONS got politicised and began cooking the books), impossible-to-refute evidence that there was NO Covid pandemic in 2020, most people, even intelligent ones, still choose to go with their feelings rather with the hard data.

This natural tendency many of us have to choose emotive narratives over cool evidence makes us ripe for exploitation by the cynical and unscrupulous. We saw this during the pandemic when the majority fell for the exciting but mendacious story that they were living through a new Great Plague, and that only by observing bizarre rituals – putting strips of cloth over one’s face, dancing round one another in supermarkets, injecting unknown substances into one’s body – could one hope to save oneself and granny. And we’re seeing it now, in a slightly different variant, in which lots of people – even many who ought to know better – are falling for some similarly thrilling but erroneous nonsense about lab-leaked viruses.

It’s such a sexy story that I fell for it myself. In those early days when all the papers were still dutifully trotting out World Health Organisation-approved propaganda about pangolins and bats and the apparently notorious wet market (whatever the hell that is) in Wuhan, I was already well ahead of the game. I knew, I just knew, as all the edgy, fearless seekers of truth did that it was a lab leak wot done it. If you knew where to dig, there was a clear evidence trail to support it.

We edgy, fearless truth seekers knew all the names and facts. Dodgy Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance was in it up to the neck; so too, obviously, was the loathsomely chipper and smugly deceitful Anthony Fauci. We knew that all this crazy, Frankenvirus research had initially been conducted in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but had been outsourced to China after President Obama changed the regulations and it became too much of a hot potato for US-based labs. And let’s not forget Ukraine – all those secret bio-research labs run on behalf of the US Deep State, but then exposed as the Russians unhelpfully overran territory such as Mariupol.

Germany Invades Hungary – WW2 – Week 239 – March 25, 1944

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, India, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 25 Mar 2023

Germany occupies Hungary this week to prevent any possible Hungarian defection from the war, the Soviets continue pushing back the Axis in Ukraine, pressing them ever more toward Romania, the Japanese advance on Imphal and Kohima continues, but Allied attacks in Italy and Japanese ones on Bougainville come to their ends.
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Newspeak 2023

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

Andrew Sullivan on how our language keeps changing, top-down, whether we want it or not, from 9/11 through to tomorrow:

It was during the war in Iraq that Orwell’s insistence on clear language first came roaring back. This time, the newspeak was coming from the neocon right. We heard the term “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe what any sane person would instantly call “torture”. Or “extraordinary rendition” — which meant kidnapping in order to torture. There was “environmental manipulation” — freezing naked human beings to near-death and back again. All the terms followed Orwell’s rules for new words “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them”. All the new terms were opaque and longer than the original.

And then, in the era of “social justice”, the new words began to come from the far left. Words we thought we knew — “queer” for example — were suddenly re-purposed without notice. Gay men and lesbians, with our very distinct experiences, were merged into a non-word, along with transgender people: “LGBT”. That was turned into “LGBTQIA+” — an ever-expanding acronymic abstraction that, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details”.

Orwell’s insight was that these terms are designed to describe things you want to obscure. Hence one of his rules: “Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.” Writing the English that people speak every day is essential for a flourishing democracy.

Which brings me to that old English term “sex change”. Everyone instantly understands it. Which is, of course, precisely the problem. So now we say: “gender-affirming care”. Or take another word we all know: “children” — kids usually up to puberty. Also way too understandable. So “sex changes for children” suddenly becomes “gender-affirming care for minors”. These are the words, again, that are “needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them”.

Or take the term “transgender” itself. Remember when it was “transsexual”? Or when “sex” was first distinguished from “gender” — and then replaced by it? The usual refrain is that “the community” switched the terms, which means to say that a clique of activists decided that gender would be the new paradigm, and include any number of “queer” postmodern identities, while sex — let alone “biological sex” — was to be phased out and, with any luck, forgotten. Now notice how the new word “transgender” has recently changed its meaning yet again, and now includes anyone, including straights, outside traditional gender roles — whatever those are supposed to mean.

Or check out the new poll from the Washington Post yesterday, in which a big majority of transgender people do not consider themselves either a “trans man” or a “trans woman” at all. They prefer “nonbinary” and “gender-nonconforming” — and distance themselves from both sexes. Less than a third physically present as another sex “all the time”. The vast majority have no surgery at all.

Now read Masha Gessen’s recent interview with The New Yorker, and get even more confused. Gessen denies that transness is one thing at all. S/he says it’s a different thing now than it was a decade ago, and that “being transgender in a society that understands that some people are transgender is fundamentally different from being transgender in a society that doesn’t understand”.

S/he says that there are “different ideas about transness within the trans community … probably different trans communities”. S/he denies a “single-true-self narrative” as some kind of anchor for identity. S/he believes that transitioning can be done many times, back and forth: “Some people transition more than once. Some people transition from female to male, and then transition from male to female, and then maybe transition again.”

If gender is entirely a social construct, with no biological character, why do transgender people want hormones — an entirely biological intervention? Because “being trans is not a medical condition, but it marries you for life to the medical system”. Huh? By the end of the interview, you get the feeling that trans is whatever Gessen bloody well wants it to be, and yet at the same time it remains beyond interrogation.

Billy Joel – “The Downeaster Alexa“

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Billy Joel
Published 3 Oct 2009

In 1989, Billy Joel released his album Storm Front, a successful album that hit #1 on the Billboard 200 charts and went quadruple platinum. Watch the official music video for “The Downeaster Alexa“, about the hard lives of Long Island fishermen.
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QotD: Bing Crosby meets the modern jazz musicians

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

The story involves Bing Crosby in the final years of his life. He was invited to sing at an event, probably for a charity or cause, and the host enlisted some young progressive jazz musicians to accompany the famous singer. The band members weren’t impressed by this aging star, who had made his reputation back in the 1920s, and decided to throw Crosby off his game.

When Bing showed up, he greeted them in his typical laidback manner, and told them he would sing some familiar old songs. But when the performance started, these young jazz players threw in every arcane substitute chord change and rhythmic displacement they could think of, further spicing up their accompaniment with Coltrane modal fills and bits of polytonality.

Much to their frustration, nothing they did that evening disrupted Bing in the least. This old, balding pop singer navigated effortlessly through every one of their advanced harmonies, never faltering or showing the slightest degree of discomfort. Even more infuriating, Bing maintained the relaxed and unflappable delivery that was a Crosby trademark. As far as the audience could tell, he was just as happy-go-lucky as ever, and maybe he was — after all, Crosby had learned the ropes as a young man alongside Bix Beiderbecke, who was as unconventional and unpredictable as any musician from the early 20th century.

When the performance was all done, the musicians expected to get chewed out by Crosby backstage. Instead, Bing shook their hands, and thanked them with great warmth. He said how “cool it was to play with these young cats,” and expressed his sincere desire that they might do so again in the future.

Ted Gioia, “Four Perspectives on Bing Crosby”, The Honest Broker, 2022-12-23.

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