Quotulatiousness

March 8, 2024

A fresh look at the PUA “bible”

Filed under: Books, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In UnHerd, Kat Rosenfield considers the original pick-up artist bible, The Game by Neil Strauss, in light of more than a decade of changes in how moderns approach relationships with the opposite sex:

A decade letter, I’m struck by the astonishing prescriptiveness of this line: the notion that any sexual encounter preceded by flirtation, negotiation, or indeed any assessment of a suitor’s desirability should be understood as “less-than-ideal” — and that any man who seeks to make himself desirable to an as-yet-uncertain woman is doing something inherently sleazy. Granted, the anti-Game backlash began in the form of reasonable scrutiny of controversial seduction techniques like “negging” (a slightly backhanded compliment deployed for the sake of flirtation).

But since then it has morphed into something much stranger: the idea that anything a man does to impress a woman, from basic grooming to speaking in complete sentences, should be viewed with suspicion. Behind this is the same low-trust mindset that leads women to treat every date as a hunt for the red flags that reveal her suitor as a secret monster. If he compliments you? That’s lovebombing, which means he’s an abuser. If he doesn’t compliment you, that’s withholding, which also means he’s an abuser. Other alleged “red flags” include oversharing, undersharing, paying for the date, not paying for the date, being too eager, being five minutes late, and drinking water — or worse, drinking water through a straw.

Today, the turn against pick-up artistry can be understood at least in part as a reaction against some of its more prominent contemporary practitioners, including men such as Andrew Tate, who makes Mystery look like a catch by comparison. But it is also no doubt an outgrowth of a culture in which male sexuality has effectively been characterised as inherently predatory, while female sexuality is seen as virtually non-existent. The question that seduction manuals once aimed to answer — “how do I, a shy young man, successfully and confidently approach women?” — is now, in itself, a red flag, one likely to provoke anything from squawking indignation to abject horror to bystanders wondering if they ought to call the police. That you are even thinking of approaching women just goes to show what a troglodyte you really are. What do women want? The contemporary answer appears to be: to be left alone, forever, until they die — or to meet someone in a safe and sanitised way, via dating app … although even that option is increasingly positioned as inherently dangerous.

Meanwhile, I was surprised upon revisiting The Game to realise that the strategies contained within the book are not just useful but mostly in keeping with more traditional dating and courtship advice, from “peacocking” (wearing something eye-catching or unusual that can act as a conversation starter), to passing “shit tests” (responding with humour and confidence when a woman teases you). Even the much-derided negging wasn’t originally designed with the goal of insulting or belittling women, but rather to teach men how to talk to them without fawning and drooling all over the place. In the end, the message of The Game is more or less identical to the one in popular women’s dating guides, like The Rules or He’s Just Not That Into You: that confidence is sexy, and naked desperation is a turnoff.

And while this may just be a function of one too many viewings of the BBC’s Pride & Prejudice (featuring Mr Darcy, a man in possession of £50,000 a year and an absolutely legendary negging game), I wonder if the aim of seduction guides is, paradoxically, to restore our confidence in the tension, the mystery, and the playfulness of courtship in the age of the casual hookup. Even as we rightly rejoice in the fact that society no longer stigmatises women for desiring and pursuing sex, there is surely still something to be said for subtlety — and just because we aren’t consigned to the role of the passive damsel, dropping a handkerchief on the ground in the hope that the right man will pick it up, that doesn’t mean every woman wants to be horny on main. It’s not just that announcing your desire through a megaphone can seem uncouth; it’s also a lot less exciting than the dance of lingering glances, double entendres, and simmering chemistry that characterises a mutually-desired seduction in the making. Certain people might deride this brand of sexual encounter as “less-than-ideal” for its political incorrectness, but it’s wildly popular — in novels, in films, and in the fantasies of individual women — for a reason.

Meanwhile, the contemporary dating landscape is one in which the sheer fun of dating, courtship, and, yes, falling into bed together has been largely back-burnered in favour of something at once formal and immensely self-serious. In a world of handwringing over sexual consent — in which a man just talking to a woman at a coffeeshop can trigger an emergency response protocol — the stakes of sex itself come to seem unimaginably high, a breakneck gamble where one wrong move will result in a lifetime of trauma (or, if you’re a guy, a lifetime on a list of shitty men). Add to this the proliferation of dating apps, which makes the entire romantic enterprise feel more like a job search than a playground, and the whole thing begins to seem not just fraught but inherently adversarial — a negotiation between two parties whose interests are completely at odds, who cannot trust each other, and where there’s a very real risk of terrible and irreparable harm.

March 2, 2024

Get your new election narratives! Hot off the press!

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

Chris Bray isn’t impressed with two new political books hitting the bookstores at the moment:

It’s an election year, so get ready. Two astonishingly dullwitted books arrived in bookstores this week, on the same day, as their dreadful authors hit the airwaves to promote them. One was White Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, about the breathtaking stupidity and backwardness of rural whites, who are destroying America. Taking care to be subtle, the publisher gave the book a cover that features a pick-up truck with an American flag and a Trump sign, leaving out only the weird kid with the banjo and the dude who shouts, “Squeal, boy! Squeal like a pig!”

And then there’s the wonderfully nuanced title Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, by Obama-era US Attorney Barbara McQuade, who is now a law school professor after being asked to resign by Orange Hitler — though apparently a law school professor who is unfamiliar with the text of the 6th Amendment, thinking it exists to confer a right upon the public to have people put on trial right away.

[…]

The cover of McQuade’s book is somehow more obnoxious than the cover of White Rage:

See, it’s a giant clenched fist rising out of Middle America. Get it? Get it? It may take a moment.

These books: If, one day, by some bizarre chain of weird accidents, these are the only remnants of our civilization, no one will have the slightest idea what actually happened while we were alive. They’re miscategorized fiction. Every paragraph is full of obtuse faked reality; if you hold it up to the real world, it doesn’t even sort of match. Go click on the Amazon preview for McQuade’s book, if you’d like to see this for yourself […]

Onward: “Much of the American right glamorizes assault weapons, based on the absurd claim that the Second Amendment protects not only the right to bear arms but also the right to overthrow our government.”

My goodness, where would anyone get the claim that a founding-era American document meant to describe citizens as having a right to overthrow their government?

The Declaration of Independence, the literal founding statement of the nation that gave McQuade a government job:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government … But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Thomas Jefferson thought Americans had a right to “throw off” their government; Barbara McQuade finds it an “absurd claim”. Which one do you think understood the topic?

February 27, 2024

QotD: The role of the scholar

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

The first Great Commandment of scholarship is be honest; everything else is commentary. All the standards and methods that scholars have developed over the ages can be reduced to “be honest”.

Of course, fraudulent scholars have always existed, but it seems to me — not that I’ve conducted a study of the matter — that clear dishonesty by leading scholars no longer elicits widespread condemnation and no longer discredits the guilty parties to the extent that it used to. The Nancy MacLean affair [her book Democracy in Chains (2017) was an extended character assassination of Nobel Prize winning economist James M. Buchanan] is clear-cut. Thomas Piketty’s work is either blatantly dishonest or spectacularly incompetent. And many other examples might be adduced. Ideology, it seems, has overwhelmed scholars in the humanities and social sciences to an unprecedented degree.

Scholars should be seeking the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, however much they appreciate that this objective can never be attained fully. They are obliged to strive. If they clearly are not trying, indeed, are twisting and turning in the ideological wind above all, real scholars should drum them out of their professions as unworthy of recognition by genuine scholars.

Bob Higgs, Facebook, 2019-08-28.

February 25, 2024

Who Killed Canadian History?

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Education, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I was not aware that it has been a full twenty-five years since J.L. Granatstein published his polemical Who Killed Canadian History?:

In that work, Granatstein asserts that the rationale for the history taught in Canadian schools was political, not historical. And sexism and racism were being taught, not history.

In the postmodern era, the priority of vast areas of history teaching and historiography, and Granatstein is far from the only academic who noticed this, transitioned from evidence and facts, to morals and emotions. Western oppression became the source of historiographical obsession. And the practice, which has shaped Western historiography since at least the turn of the twentieth century, of injecting moral judgements adjacent to facts and timelines, became entrenched.

This has happened because important areas of historiography, and historical pedagogy, have been subsumed into social sciences. My 9 and 11 year old children do not have a history class. What they learn about history, which isn’t much, is in a class called “social studies”. My son, who is in grade 6, and who was never previously taught anything about the Holocaust, is learning about Nazis Germany’s persecution of the Jews in the most obscure way. His introduction to the Holocaust included a lesson pertaining to the MS St. Louis, a passenger ship carrying 907 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution that was refused entry into Canada in 1939.

The ship’s Jewish passengers were safely returned to four European countries, but tragically 254 were later killed in the Holocaust. A terrible outcome. Indeed, one of the rare dark stains on Canada’s otherwise quite exemplary record of offering sanctuary to refugees. But if Canadians at the time had known that refusing entry to the MS St. Louis would result in the cold-blooded murder of 254 innocent people, would they have allowed entry? A question not raised in my son’s class.

As well, what Canadians knew or didn’t know about the genocidal ambitions of the Nazis did not come up in my son’s classroom discussions. Indeed, that would be too complex and nuanced for 12 year old’s. They also did not discuss conditions in Canada at the time that may have played a role in the consequential decision to turn away the MS St. Louis. Nor did they mention the Evian Conference, which occurred the year prior to the MS St. Louis‘ ill-fated arrival to Canada.

The Evian Conference of 1938 was held in the French resort town of Évian-les-Bains. There were 32 participating nations, including Canada, who were “to seek, by international agreement, avenues for an orderly resettlement of (Jewish) refugees from Germany and Austria”. Shockingly, at the close of the talks, none of the nations involved had offered to accept any Jewish refugees.

From the London Spectator (1938):

    If the Conference has not been a complete failure, it has achieved little to boast about, all the States sympathizing and none desiring to admit refugees. Even the United States, as prime mover, offers no more than the quota.

My son did not come away from his class with an impression that Canada was not alone in its reluctance to accept refugees. This, and other such lessons, seem as if they are designed to implant a sense of revulsion over Canada’s past failures, instead of patriotism over its achievements and victories. What a disservice to young Canadian learners.

This cherry-picked event from history, which doesn’t really deal with the Holocaust, but assumes kids will appreciate related events that occurred over the backdrop of the Holocaust, is doubly misleading in that it presents Canada as a racist country hostile to refugees, before establishing that the opposite was (and is) overwhelmingly true throughout the arc of Canadian history up to the present.

It’s not even clear if my son took away from the lesson that Hitler was the far bigger villain, compared to his “racist colonial” country of Canada.

Clearly, Canada eventually let in Jewish people, and people from all ethnicities. We became the world’s first multiculturalism, and our large cities are among the most cosmopolitan and multicultural places in the world. This needs to be established first for young learners of Canada’s story. Clearly established, before one starts teaching the exceptions to the rule. But my son is getting some weird blend of oddities presented as introductory material to larger subjects which hold historical conclusions opposite to the ones the cherry-picked exceptions portray. It only makes sense that these exceptional events are selected deliberately for political, not educational, reasons.

Twenty-five years ago, Granatstein wrote of Canadian schools,

    The material taught stressed the existence of anti-Aboriginal, anti-Metis, and anti-Asian racism, as well as male sexism and discrimination against women, as if these issues were and always had been the primary identifying characteristics of Canada … The history taught is that of the grievers among us, the present-day crusaders against public policy or discrimination. The history omitted is that of the Canadian nation and people.

Who Killed Canadian History? also criticized the teacher-curated practice whereby early exposure to Canadian history is random and discontinuous concerning time periods and individuals, and “without much regard for chronology”. Exactly what I have been experiencing with my kids, decades after Granatstein identified the problem.

Canadian publishing “has been decimated since Ottawa took an active interest in it and while federal policies haven’t been the whole problem, they’ve been vigorous contributors”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte contrasts the wholesome intentions of the Canadian federal government on cultural issues with the gruesome reality over which they’ve presided:

Even James Moore, [Liberal cabinet minister Melanie] Joly’s Conservative predecessor in the heritage department, applauded her initiative as good and necessary, although he warned it wouldn’t be easy. Moore had wanted to do the job himself, but his boss, Stephen Harper, didn’t want to waste political capital on fights with the arts community. He told Moore his job in the heritage department was to sit on the lid.

Joly got off to a promising start, only to have her entire initiative scuppered by a rump of reactionary Quebec cultural commentators outraged at her willingness to deal with a global platform like Netflix without imposing on it the same Canadian content rules that Ottawa has traditionally applied to radio and television networks. Liberal governments live and die by their support in Quebec and can’t afford to be offside with its cultural community. Joly was shuffled down the hall to the ministry of tourism.

She has been succeeded by four Liberal heritage ministers in five years: Pablo Rodriquez, Steven Guilbeault, Pablo Rodriguez II, and Pascale St-Onge. Each has been from Quebec and each has been paid upwards of $250,000 a year to do nothing but sit on the lid.

The system remains broken. We’ve discussed many times here how federal support was supposed to foster a Canadian-owned book publishing sector yet led instead to one in which Canadian-owned publishers represent less than 5 percent of book sales in Canada. The industry has been decimated since Ottawa took an active interest in it and while federal policies haven’t been the whole problem, they’ve been vigorous contributors.

Canada’s flagship cultural institution, the CBC, is floundering. It spends the biggest chunk of its budget on its English-language television service, which has seen its share of prime-time viewing drop from 7.6 percent to 4.4 percent since 2018. In other words, CBC TV has dropped almost 40 percent of its audience since the Trudeau government topped up its budget by $150 million back in the Joly era. If Pierre Poilievre gets elected and is serious about doing the CBC harm, as he’s threatened since winning the Conservative leadership two years ago, his best move would be to give it another $150 million.

The Canadian magazine industry is kaput. Despite prodigious spending to prop up legacy newspaper companies, the number of jobs in Canadian journalism continues to plummet. The Canadian feature film industry has been moribund for the last decade. Private broadcast radio and television are in decline. There are more jobs in Canadian film and TV, but only because our cheap dollar and generous public subsidies have convinced US and international creators to outsource production work up here. It’s certainly not because we’re producing good Canadian shows.

[…]

When the Trudeau government was elected in 2015, it posed as a saviour of the arts after years of Harper’s neglect and budget cuts. It did spend on arts and culture during the pandemic — it spent on everything during the pandemic — but it will be leaving the cultural sector in worse shape than it found it, presuming the Trudeau Liberals are voted out in 2025. By the government’s own projections, Heritage Canada will spend $1.5 billion in 2025-26, exactly what it spent in Harper’s last year, when the population of Canada was 10 percent smaller than it is now.

That might have been enough money if the Liberals had cleaned up the system. Instead, they’ve passed legislation that promises more breakage than ever. Rather than accept Joly’s challenge and update arts-and-culture funding and regulations for the twenty-first century, the Trudeau government did the opposite. Cheered on by the regressive lobby in Quebec, it passed an online news act (C-18) and an online streaming act (C-11) that apply old-fashioned protectionist policies to the whole damn Internet.

This comes on top of the Liberals transforming major cultural entities, including the CBC and our main granting bodies, The Canada Council and the Canada Book Fund, into Quebec vote-farming operations. The CBC spends $99.5 per capita on its French-language services (there are 8.2 million Franco-Canadians) and $38 per capita on Canadians who speak English as the first official language. The Canada Council spends $16 per capita in Quebec; it spends $10.50 per capita in the rest of Canada. The Canada Book Fund distributes $2 per capita in Quebec compared to $.50 per capita in the rest of the country. Even if one believes that a minority language is due more consideration than a majority language, these numbers are ridiculous. They’re not supporting a language group; they’re protecting the Liberal party.

February 21, 2024

QotD: Mid-century London

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

Two of the novels were by, respectively, Nigel Balchin and R. C. Hutchinson, writers well regarded in their time but now mostly forgotten, while the third was by Ivy Compton-Burnett, who still has her admirers. They were quite different authors, but each had an unmistakable quality of unreconstructed English national identity, such as no writer about London — where two of the novels are set — or anywhere else in the country could now convey.

It is not that foreigners could not be found in 1949 London, which was then still a port city of some importance. In Hutchinson’s book, Elephant and Castle, set largely in the East End, one of the main characters is half-Italian, and foreigners of various nationalities have walk-on parts. But they in no way affect the strongly English character of the city. Today’s London, by contrast, seems more like a dormitory for an ever-fluctuating population than a home; even much of its physical fabric has been completely denationalized by modernist architecture of a sub-Dubai quality. It is not a melting pot, for little is left to melt into; a better culinary metaphor might be a stir-fry, the ingredients remaining unblended — though, with luck, compatible.

Theodore Dalrymple, “What Seventy Years Have Wrought”, New English Review, 2019-10-26.

February 19, 2024

The End of Race Politics by Coleman Hughes

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Given how far race relations in the United States (and in Canada) have disintegrated since 2009, it’s almost surprising to find someone taking up arms against the race preferences and active discrimination being implemented by governments, organizations, and companies across North America, but Coleman Hughes’ first book does exactly that:

… almost as soon as the 1964 breakthrough in overcoming racial classifications took hold, it was abandoned. In a perverse echo of the past, sanctioned preferential treatment for blacks slowly began to replace sanctioned preferential treatment for whites. Set-asides, quotas, affirmative action all proliferated, all rooted in the old, crude racial classifications. The notion that affirmative action was a temporary adjustment, to be retired in a couple of decades at most, gradually disappeared. In fact, it was extended to every other racial or sexual minority and to women. Even as women and many blacks and other minorities triumphed in the economy and mainstream culture, they were nonetheless deemed eternal victims of pervasive misogyny and racism.

The more tangible the success for women and minorities, the more abstract the notion of “systemic oppression” became. Critical race theorists argued that color-blindness itself was a form of racism; and that all white people, consciously or unconsciously, could not help but be perpetuators of racial hate, whether they intended to or not. That’s how we arrived at a moment when Jon Stewart decided he’d tackle the subject of racial inequality in America by hosting a show called “The Problem With White People”, and when “The 1619 Project” actually argued that the American Revolution was not driven by a desire to be free from Britain but to retain slavery, which Britain threatened.

The poignancy of Coleman Hughes’ new book, The End of Race Politics, lies therefore in the tenacity of his faith in the spirit of 1964. “Color-blindness” is not the best description of this, because of course we continue to see others’ race, just as we will always see someone’s sex. No, as Hughes explains: “To advocate colorblindness is to endorse an ethical principle: we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and private lives”.

That’s a principle the vast majority of Americans, black and white and everything else, support. It was the core principle for Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King Jr, and Bayard Rustin. “If I have advocated the cause of the colored people, it is not because I am a negro, but because I am a man,” insisted Douglass. Henry Highland Garnet — the first African-American to speak in Congress after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment — even apologized for speaking of various different races, “when in fact there is but one race, as there was but one Adam”.

Fast forward to 2015, when the University of California called the phrase “There is only one race, the human race” a “micro-aggression”; or 2020, when the phrase “All Lives Matter” was deemed evidence of “anti-blackness”. The 21st Century, the brief era of color-blindness behind us, reached back to the 19th to insist that race defines us at our core, can never be overcome, and marks us all either an oppressor or a victim. The left, including the Democratic Party, has now adopted this worldview, along with a legal regime to actively discriminate against some races and not others: “equity”. That’s why Hughes cuts to the chase and calls these reactionaries in progressive clothing “neoracists”. They are. What else would one call them?

They are race-obsessed. They view any human interaction as a racial power-struggle, and compound it with any number of further “intersectional” power-struggles. They do not see two unique individuals with unique life experiences interacting in a free society. They see group identity as determinative everywhere; and therefore want to intervene everywhere, to discriminate against whites and successful non-whites in favor of unsuccessful non-whites. Individual rights? They come second to group identity.

[…]

One in five “black” Americans are immigrants or descended from them, Hughes observes. Only 30 percent of Asian-Americans think of themselves as “Asian” at all, rather as a member of a specific group — like Korean or Indian. Within the Asian box, you also have huge diversity: “In 2015, 72 percent of Indians over 25 had at least a bachelors degree. yet only 9 percent of Bhutanese did.” Ditto “Hispanic”. Any formula that conflates Cubans with Mexicans and Colombians is absurd. And don’t get me started on the LGBTQIA+ bullshit.

The woke also have a staggeringly crude understanding of power. Economic power? No doubt many whites have a huge edge in accumulated wealth in America; but the cultural power of African-Americans is global in reach and far outweighs the cultural clout of, say, white evangelicals or conservatives at home. Political power? Blacks, who are about 14 percent of population, are represented proportionally in the House — covering 29 states — and can claim the last two-term president, the current vice president, the House minority leader, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the mayors of the four most populous cities last year, and more than a fifth of SCOTUS.

For the neoracists, all racial disparities are entirely explained by “systemic racism”. But this obviously obscures the complexity of American society. “Culture” is a loaded and complex term, but it sure matters. A child with two engaged parents in the home has far more chances to succeed than a kid who barely sees his dad. Now look at the difference between family structure among many Asian-American groups and that of black Americans. And how can one blame “white supremacy” for the constant murderous mayhem of urban black spaces? Only by removing from young black men any concept of their own agency and humanity.

February 18, 2024

Indigo’s very bad third quarter may not be all bad news

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte discusses Indigo’s latest earnings report and points out a few things that may indicate better things to come if the firm continues its “refocus” on bookselling as its primary line of business:

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

Indigo Books & Music last week reported its third quarter financial results, covering the months of October to December 2023. Because retailers make most of their money in advance of the holiday season, Indigo’s third quarter is its most important quarter — the one that makes or breaks the year. It wasn’t good.

Revenue for the three-month period was $371 million compared to $423 million in the same period last year. Net income for the quarter was $10 million compared to $34.3 million in the prior year. Given that the company had already lost more than $40 million in the first two quarters of the year and that its fourth quarter is traditionally soft, Indigo is looking at another annus horribilis come its March 31 year end.

After every quarter, Indigo’s CEO and CFO discuss the company’s results and take questions from shareholders on a conference call. I tuned in to this quarter’s call to hear company founder Heather Reisman, recently returned as CEO, admit that it was a “challenging” time for the business. She attributed the poor performance to the ongoing repercussions of last winter’s ransomware attack, overbuys of the wrong kind of general merchandise (non-book items such as dildos, blankets, and cheeseboards), and “the premature launch of our new e-commerce platform”.

Amid all the ugly results, I heard a few things that might strike anyone interested in the Canadian book publishing industry as positive.

You’ll remember that Heather spent a few months in the doghouse last summer after announcing a terrible fiscal 2023. She retired and then un-retired in September and, on her return, pledged to take SHuSH‘s advice, clear her shelves of the dildos and cheeseboards that represent half of Indigo’s business, and recommit to selling books. I wasn’t sure if she meant it or just wanted the business community to know she was up on SHuSH. Apparently she meant it.

On the call, she spoke at length of her “transformation plan” to “connect meaningfully with book lovers”. She apparently spent the autumn shrinking her general merchandise inventory — much of the poor financial performance was due to unloading it at steep discounts. In fact, if you back out the aggressive discounting of unwanted crap, Indigo’s recent holiday season hit a slightly higher level of profitability than the prior year. Heather meanwhile reinvested in book inventory, “consistent with our long-term brand mission to inspire reading”.

I was heartened by this, more so when it emerged on the call that there are sound business reasons for recommitting to books. The printed word turned out to be Indigo’s most resilient retail channel last year. It was down only 8 percent. General merchandise was down 18.5 percent. Heather thinks general merchandise was hit especially hard because the guy she’d hired to run the place in her absence didn’t have the right assortment in stores at Christmas. That may be true, but 18.5 percent is still a big drop.

The 8 percent decline in books looks okay in relation to the rest of Canada’s retail economy. Canadian Tire just announced its results from the last quarter of 2023 and revenue was down 17 percent across the board. That suggests books more than held their own in a weak environment.

It seems reasonable to expect that if Indigo follows through on Heather’s promise and refocuses its brand and its marketing efforts and its in-store experience on books and reading, the business has a future. It will take time, as she repeatedly reminded listeners on the call. There’s still a canopy bed in the middle of the company’s flagship bookstore in Ottawa.

February 17, 2024

Apparently Confucius “had a based libertarian streak”

Filed under: Books, China, Europe, Food, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

N.S. Lyons points out some very helpful advice from Confucius that pretty much every western government would benefit from heeding:

I was watching a bit of recent footage of some peasants in revolt, as they are at the moment basically everywhere across the West, and was suddenly struck by the recollection that I’d definitely read a wise saying about the general situation somewhere on a fortune cookie. No, wait, I realized, this time it must actually have been from Master Confucius himself! So I went digging through my copy of the Analects …

Lo and behold, right there in Book 12, Chapter 7, is this straightforward lesson:

    A disciple asks Confucius what, fundamentally, it takes to govern a state without it collapsing.

    Confucius says: “Simply make sure there is enough armaments, enough food, and that you have the trust of the common people.” (足食，足兵，民信之矣.)

    “If sacrificing one of these three things becomes unavoidable, which would you give up first?” the disciple asks. (必不得已而去，於斯三者何先?)

    “The weapons,” Confucius replies. (去兵.)

    “If two things?” the disciple asks. (必不得已而去，於斯二者何先?)

    “The food,” Confucius says, because while even death is a part of life “without the trust of the people, a state cannot stand.” (去食. 自古皆有死，民無信不立.)

What is most notable to me from this little dialogue from almost 2,500 years ago is how much, in comparison, our political leaders, in their hubris and absorption in grand projects (and graft), seem to have forgotten the very basics.

Indeed it strikes me that they already failed on maintaining enough armaments (at least in Europe, though even America now seems to be struggling to produce the most basic munitions). More broadly speaking, they can no long provide security for citizens or defend their own borders.

And now they’ve suddenly got the wise idea of going after the food too, which is a plan that will surely work out great.

QotD: Lessons for today from the decline of the Western Roman Empire

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Europe, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What lessons can we draw from this book [The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak] for today? There are many, but I will leave you with one. Reading about the Roman client state system gave me an uncomfortably familiar feeling. Can we think of another empire that outsources governance to vestigial polities that pretend to be sovereign, and even get called “allies”, but are actually clients? An easy example is the Warsaw Pact. A more controversial one is present-day America and her dependencies. Consider Canada: a normie friend of mine once remarked that Canada pretended to be an independent country, but that if the present world were translated into a computer strategy game its territory would be shaded in the same color as America’s. Indeed, Canada’s sovereignty is exceedingly virtual — it exists only so long as it isn’t tested, just like the sovereignty of a Roman client. Canada is self-governing and self-administering, it passes its own laws and collects its own taxes. But if its foreign policy objectives ever diverged one micrometer from America’s, then Canada would cease to exist. Seriously, imagine Canada offering to host a Chinese or Russian military base and what would immediately occur. There is a real sense in which America rules the land that we know as “Canada”, but has outsourced governance to local elites in a highly federalized structure.

Luttwak has a charmingly racist bit about how some client states have the IQ and sophistication to understand the true nature of the arrangement, while others are too dumb or barbaric to remember who’s boss without having their faces regularly rubbed in it. In the Roman case, the former camp contained the various Hellenistic kingdoms in Asia Minor and the Levant, who didn’t need legionaries standing around and supervising them, because they could imagine the existence of those legionaries and what they would do to them if provoked. The latter camp included many of the Germanic tribes, who tended to forget their place if the legions weren’t garrisoned within eyeshot, and even then would rise up in fruitless rebellion every couple of generations. We can make this marginally less racist by positing something more like a spectrum of how tolerable the client arrangement was, and consequently a spectrum of how coercive it had to be. The Greeks were relatively compatible culturally with the Romans, and the warrior spirit of their ancestors had been sufficiently sanded down that they didn’t mind being told what to do. The Germans were more foreign, and also retained the barbarian’s yearning for freedom, so a careful eye had to be kept on them.

A true cynic might think that there was something similar going on with America’s imperial dependencies … sorry, with America’s “allies”. There are no American garrisons in Canada, because the Canadians are culturally-compatible, and also because they’ve been thoroughly cowed and do not dream of an independent national destiny. But look overseas, for instance at some of our Middle Eastern “allies”, and you will see a situation more analogous to the Germanic tribes. What a coincidence that these same “allies” host a much heavier American military presence! Even here, however, the situation isn’t strictly coercive, and insofar as it is, the coercion is mostly outsourced to local elites. Those elites, in turn, can mostly be handled with carrots: the imperial power subsidizes their trade and security arrangements, not to mention keeps them in charge of their respective countries! The Romans commonly rewarded loyal clients with citizenship and a cushy sinecure for a job well done. It would be rude of us to do otherwise.

Maybe this was already obvious to everyone else, but reading the “rules-based international order”1 as a concealed hegemon/client system feels a bit like having the skeleton key to understanding current events. Like why do European countries so often act in ways contrary to their own economic or geopolitical self-interest, but consonant with America’s interest? How do the political and business elites of these countries maintain such an impressive unified front in the face of popular discontent? Why do the rulers of all these very different countries have seemingly identical tastes, worldviews, and mannerisms? What is the meaning of “populism,” and why do people treat it like it’s a single, consistent thing, despite the fact that “populist” parties in different countries often seek diametrically opposite policies?

Just pretend, imagine with me, that these European “allies” are client kingdoms. They are permitted a certain amount of latitude, but when the chips are down they do not have an independent foreign policy. Their ruling classes are client rulers that administer certain territories, and there is tacit agreement with the imperial overlord on what they may and may not do. Over time, the client rulers identify less and less with their countrymen, more and more with their counterparts in other client states, and most of all with the distant metropole, whose social approval they desperately desire. The “populists” are simply the anti-imperial party, in whatever country. The thing the “populists” have in common is a desire to be free of the suffocating imperial embrace,2 but they all have a thousand different stupid ideas about what to do with that freedom. This includes the “populists” in the United States itself, by the way. The American Empire is called that because it started here, but it has long-since burst free of the host in which it incubated, and the rot of our own political institutions can be understood as our transformation into the biggest client kingdom of them all.

None of what I’ve said above is meant to be a value judgment. I think many people resist the notion that America is an empire because empires are “bad” and we’re obviously the good guys. But others, including myself not too long ago, resist it because we have an overly-simplistic notion of what an empire looks like, especially what it looks like from the inside. Empires exist on a spectrum — America’s subjects certainly have more ability to act independently than Rome’s did. But many empires also go to some lengths to conceal their true nature. Around the time of the birth of Christ, the official story in many of the lands ruled by Rome was that Rome was merely their largest trading partner and a staunch military ally. Some of them might even have believed it.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire by Edward Luttwak”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-11-13.

February 16, 2024

“Someone implying that being blocked on Twitter is somehow a violation of their free speech is the fastest way you can tell people you don’t understand free speech”

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

Andrew Doyle likes being able to block other users from polluting his social media experience, and explains that “free speech” does not grant anyone a guaranteed audience:

How do we argue with those who are incapable of argumentation? This is a question I’ve been grappling with for some time. If your child is demanding sweets before dinner, screaming like a banshee and committing various acts of domestic vandalism, you have few options. You might attempt to initiate a debate, outlining the pros and cons of ingesting unhealthy food in advance of a nutritious meal, but this strategy will invariably fail. In the end, you’ll just have to tell the little brat to shut up and do what he’s told. Or, better still, avoid having children in the first place.

Many of us will have experienced something similar on Twitter (or X, if you insist). Something about the platform has the effect of curdling the sweetest Dr Jekylls into the most repugnant of Mr Hydes. And when someone just bleats insults, or mischaracterises your views, or generally cannot engage in good faith, the best thing to do is to block them. You don’t owe anyone your time and attention, and you’ll only drive yourself insane trying to reason with the unreasonable. Most clever adages end up being attributed to Mark Twain whether he wrote them or not, and this one is no exception: “Never wrestle with a pig; you just get dirty and the pig enjoys it”.

One of the best things about withdrawing from Twitter is that I am no longer bombarded by complaints that my blocking people on the platform proves that my commitment to free speech is inauthentic. The typical tactic is to screenshot the cover of my book Free Speech and Why It Matters as a kind of “gotcha” to illustrate my hypocrisy. And while I am grateful for the publicity, it does get rather tedious having to explain this most common and basic of misapprehensions. The podcaster Stephen Knight put it rather succinctly: “Someone implying that being blocked on Twitter is somehow a violation of their free speech is the fastest way you can tell people you don’t understand free speech”. Instead of smugly posting images of my book, perhaps they ought to read it instead.

In a surreal twist, my blocking habits on Twitter recently made the news. Just after Christmas, an article by Pierra Willix was published in the Metro with the headline: “Confusion as GB News presenter who champions ‘free speech’ blocks critics”. In truth, I have never blocked anyone for polite criticism; I welcome it. And while it goes without saying that nobody expects factual accuracy from the Metro, we should be concerned that an individual who aspires to make a living in journalism does not appear to understand the concept of free speech.

Willix has fallen for what Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay have called “the fallacy of demanding to be heard“. They make the point that just as freedom of religion incorporates freedom from religion, the right to speak and listen also entails the right not to speak and listen. If you’ve ever received an unwelcome phone call and hung up, you have not impeded on the caller’s rights. If you choose not to read my books, I cannot claim to have been censored. If you block someone on social media, all it means is that you’re not interested in what they’ve got to say. I’ve been blocked by hundreds of people online and, although this clearly reflects poorly on their taste and judgement, my freedom of speech remains intact.

February 12, 2024

Find Me The Votes

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

Elizabeth Nickson has a giggle while reading through Find Me The Votes by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, which presents the other side of the narrative about Bad Orange Man trying to steal the election in Georgia in 2020:

I admit I giggled all the way through the research of this, breaking out in helpless laughter by the end, hoping that I wasn’t going completely mad. First it was the book, Find Me The Votes, written by Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman, about the Crazed Crackers who think the Georgia election was stolen and the Noble Black Woman who was putting things to right.

I persisted in calling the book in my head, The Ballad of Fani Willis, and kept waiting for the melody and lyrics, but I am not a musician and only the title came. Annoyingly, on repeat.

Isikoff, most remembered for writing for Newsweek when it was respectable, and others when they were respectable, is now head of Yahoo News, and has gone completely bonkers with Trump Derangement Syndrome. His associate in This Noble Task wrote, I believe, the first third which was all about the Noble Black Woman and her Noble Career and her Noble Father who was an entirely nice and not-murderous-at-all Black Panther, and how she felt that the massive uptick in violent crime in Atlanta should not take precedence over fighting the Crazed Crackers whose Awful Leader was Donald Trump. Fani gets the full-on-dripping-sentimentality treatment invented by Bill Clinton, her nobility and hard work, and wonderfulness and Godliness percolates all the way through it. I love how complete atheists like Isikoff like to work the God angle thinking that evangelicals will fall under his dark spell. Yeah, it just makes you look sleazy, buddy.

Willis thought her RICO case was her ticket to the Big Show. The White House. The First Noble Black Woman President of the United States of America. Apparently the Georgia Senate gathered the same and charged her with 23 Articles of Impeachment, mostly having to do with using said RICO case for her political career, not to mention paying the inexperienced, still-married, lover-lover $625,000 over 18 months. Charged with “the misuse of her office for political gains rather than the pursuit of justice”, this really needs a western ballad, with a zydeco vibe.

The second part introduced me to Trump Derangement Syndrome, which I mostly have managed to avoid. God in heaven this is awful stuff, purely hate-fueled madness. This part was written by Isikoff and I’d bet a million bucks he was drunk or on edibles all through it. In my opinion. Anyway, he trots out the usual villains and their wild accusations NONE OF WHICH HAVE ANY MERIT WHATSOEVER. THE ELECTION WAS NOT STOLEN. THIS IS ALL RIGHT WING GARBAGE. Even Rudy Guiliani who shut down the Mafia plaguing New York and managed New York through 9/11 is treated with zero respect and a lot of hateful mockery that anyone on the right is not allowed to use because hate, but lefties can express virulent hate all day with impunity.

February 7, 2024

“China is a food-obsessed society”

Filed under: Books, China, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If your initial reaction to the headline is to assume this is because of the amazingly unsettled history of mainland China over the last several hundred years and the totally understandable fear of famines, I’m with you, but we’d both be wrong, as John Psmith explains:

One sunny December morning years ago, Jane and I were on holiday in the South of China. Far from the city, a little temple had been hewn out of a seaside grotto so that it partially flooded when the tide came in. We stood inside and gazed up at a statue of 觀音, “Guan Yin”, the lady to whom the temple was dedicated. Her legend originated in India, where she was known as the bodhisattva Avalokitasvara, but she’d been absorbed and appropriated by Chinese folk religion many centuries ago, and in this statue there was no trace to be found of her South Asian origins. A minute or two into our reverie, a local came over to us and, seeing that we looked out of place, helpfully explained in unaccented English, “This is one of the most important Christian goddesses.”

The Chinese are almost as bad as the Romans were about pilfering the deities of their neighbors, so you really can’t blame them when they occasionally get confused about who they stole them from. As with goddesses, so with food: earlier that day a different helpful local had steered us towards a restaurant specializing in “Western cuisine”. The menu listed steaks “French style”, “German style”, and “Barbecue style”. Soup options included minestrone and borscht, both of them with the surprise addition of prawns. Their pride and joy, however, was their breakfast menu which included roughly seventy different varieties of toast. The chef told me that there were restaurants in Europe and America that did not have so many kinds of toast, and beamed with pride when I nodded gravely. One of the diners, delighted to see real living and breathing Westerners in her local Western restaurant, told me: “The thing I love about this place is that it’s so authentic.”

This “Western” restaurant may sound ridiculous to you, but it’s only as ridiculous as most of the “Chinese” restaurants you’ve encountered in the West. First of all, there’s no such thing as “Chinese” food. China is a country, but it’s the size of a continent, and it boasts a culinary diversity which exceeds that of many actual continents. Second, the dishes you encounter in the average Chinese restaurant over here bear about as much resemblance to real Chinese food as the seventy varieties of toast and the barbecue steaks do to French cuisine. “American Chinese food” is an interesting topic in its own right, and there are some good books about it, but now that I’m through the mandatory throat-clearing you have to do when writing about Chinese cuisine for a Western audience, I’m never going to mention it again.

China is a food-obsessed society. People are always talking about their next meal. People talk about it incessantly. The Chinese equivalent of talking about the weather, a way of making polite chitchat with strangers, is to mention a restaurant that you like, or a meal that you’re looking forward to. A standard way of saying “hello” in Mandarin is “你吃饭了吗?” In Cantonese it’s “你食咗飯未呀?” Both of them literally translate as something like “have you eaten yet?” and produce a natural conversational opening to begin immediately discussing food. Perhaps most uncanny to foreigners, Chinese people will sometimes discuss their next meal while they are in the middle of eating a fancy dinner. Dozens of gorgeous little dishes spread around them, chomping or slurping away at exquisite cuisine, and happily chattering about what they plan to eat tomorrow.

None of this is remotely new. If anything, between the Revolution and the famines, Chinese food culture is actually tamer than it used to be.1 We know this from literary and historical accounts, from archeological evidence (China had fancy restaurants about a thousand years before France did), and from the structure of the language itself. They say the Eskimos have an improbable number of words for snow,2 but the Chinese actually do have a zillion words for obscure cooking techniques. What’s more, many of the words are completely different from region to region, which is hardly surprising since the food itself is bewilderingly different from one side of the country to the other.

How food-obsessed are the Chinese? One of the most priceless artifacts belonging to the imperial family, the one thing the fleeing Nationalists made sure to grab as communist artillery leveled Beijing, now the most highly-valued object in the National Palace Museum in Taipei is … The Meat-Shaped Stone.3 A single piece of jasper carved into a lifelike hunk of luscious pork belly, complete with crispy skin and layers of subcutaneous fat and meat. Feast your eyes upon it.

    1. Ferran Adrià, the legendary chef of El Bulli, once said that Mao was the most consequential figure in the history of cooking because: “[Spain, France, Italy and California] are only competing for the top spot because Mao destroyed the pre-eminence of Chinese cooking by sending China’s chefs to work in the fields and factories. If he hadn’t done this, all the other countries and all the other chefs, myself included, would still be chasing the Chinese dragon.”

    2. I once tried searching Google to find out whether Eskimos really have a lot of words for snow. The top results were all places like BuzzFeed and the Atlantic denouncing this as an outmoded racist stereotype … followed by a Wikipedia article patiently explaining that no it’s actually true.

    3. The Meat-Shaped Stone is not some weird aberration. The runner-up most valuable items in the museum are a piece of jadeite carved to look like a cabbage and a very fancy cooking vessel.

As the media now tell us, it’s dangerous to do your own research and you should just trust them about everything

Filed under: Books, Education, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Friedman has some timely tips on how you might go about determining the truth of an assertion offered in the legacy media or online source of undetermined trustworthiness:

Following up the claim you come across an article, perhaps even a book, which does indeed support that claim. Should you believe it?

The short answer for all of those examples, some of them claims I agree with, is that you should not. As I think I have demonstrated in past posts, claimed proofs of contentious issues are quite often wrong, biased, even fraudulent.

More examples from previous posts, here or on my old blog:

An estimate of the cost of a ton of carbon dioxide calculated with about half the total depending on the implicit assumption of no progress in medicine for the next three centuries.

A factbook on state and local finance that deliberately omitted the most important relevant fact that readers were unlikely to know.

A textbook, in its third edition, with multiple provably false claims.

The important question is how to tell. There are three answers:

1. Read the book or article carefully, check at least some of its claims — easier now that the Internet provides you with a vast searchable library accessible from your desktop — and evaluate its argument for yourself. Doing this is costly in time and effort and requires skills you may not have; depending on the particular issue that might include near-professional expertise in statistics, history, physics, economics, or any of a variety of other fields. I have taught elementary statistics at various points in my career, both in an economics department and a law school, but gave up on a controversy of considerable interest to me (concealed carry) when the statistical arguments got above the level I could readily follow.

2. Find one or more competent critiques of the argument and see if you find them convincing. This is the previous answer on easy mode. You still have to think things through but you don’t have to search out mistakes in the argument for yourself because the critic will point you at them, with luck offer evidence.

There are three possible conclusions that that exercise may support: that the argument is wrong. that it might be wrong, that it is probably right. The way you reach the last conclusion is from the incompetence or dishonesty of the critique; I am thinking of a real case.

John Boswell, a gay historian at Yale, argued that both the scriptures and early Christianity, unlike modern Christian critics of homosexual sex, treated it as no worse than other forms of non-marital intercourse. What convinced me that Boswell had a reasonable case was reading an attack on him by a prominent opponent which badly misrepresented the contents of the book I had just read. People who have good arguments do not need bad ones.

Of course, there might be other critics with better arguments.

An entertaining version of this approach is to find an online conversation with intelligent people covering a wide range of views and follow discussions of whatever issues you are interested in. With luck all of the good arguments for both sides will get made and you can decide for yourself whether one side, the other, or neither is convincing. Forty years ago I could do it in the sf groups on Usenet, which contained lots of smart people who liked to argue. Five years ago I could do it in the comment threads of Slate Star Codex. Currently Data Secrets Lox works for a few controversies but the range of views represented on it is too limited to provide a fair view of most.

The comment threads of this blog are at present too thin for the purpose, with between one and two orders of magnitude fewer comments than the SSC average used to be, but perhaps in another few years …

3. Recognize that you don’t know whether the claim is true and have no practical way of finding out, at least no way that costs less in time and effort than it is worth. This is the least popular answer but probably the most often correct.

February 2, 2024

Perhaps something for Wodehouse fans who want a bit more sex and violence in their fiction

Filed under: Books, Britain, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Conservative Woman, Alan Ashworth recommends a book by one of P.G. Wodehouse’s disciples, but only for those who are ready for Plum-like wit with “lashings of sex, violence, murder and drunkenness”:

If, like me, you have read every line of PG Wodehouse’s 90-odd books – at least half a dozen times each in the case of the Jeeves novels – your attention might be piqued, if piqued is the word I seek, by one of the Master’s disciples. His name is Kyril Bonfiglioli.

In a trilogy about an art dealer named Charlie Mortdecai based loosely on himself, Bonfiglioli, or Bon as his friends and enemies called him, combines a Woosterish turn of phrase with lashings of sex, violence, murder and drunkenness. Mortdecai is snobbish, greedy, lustful, unscrupulous, untrustworthy, gloriously politically incorrect and hilarious to boot.

The first book, Don’t Point That Thing At Me, was published in 1973, two years before Wodehouse died. In a short foreword, Bon writes: “This is not an autobiographical novel: it is about some other portly, dissolute, immoral and middle-aged art dealer.”

The action begins with Mortdecai in his Mayfair mansion burning a gilt picture frame in the fireplace. He, of course, has a sidekick whose name begins with J but Jock has little in common with Bertie Wooster’s loyal manservant. As Bon puts it, “Jock is a sort of anti-Jeeves; silent, resourceful, respectful even, when the mood takes him, but sort of drunk all the time, really, and fond of smashing people’s faces in. You can’t run a fine-arts business these days without a thug and Jock is one of the best in the trade … his idea of a civil smile is rolling back part of his upper lip from a long, yellow dogtooth. It frightens me.

“Having introduced Jock – his surname escapes me, I should think it would be his mother’s – I suppose I had better give a few facts about myself. I am in the prime of life, if that tells you anything, of barely average height, of sadly over-average weight and am possessed of the intriguing remains of rather flashy good looks. (Sometimes, in a subdued light and with my tummy tucked in, I could almost fancy me myself.) I like art and money and dirty jokes and drink. I am very successful. I discovered at my goodish second-rate public school that almost anyone can win a fight if he is prepared to put his thumb into the other fellow’s eye.”

Charlie is receiving a visit from a fat policeman named Martland who suspects him, correctly, of involvement in the theft of a Goya from Madrid five days earlier.

“Somewhere in the trash he reads, Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun. In he pranced, all silent and catlike and absurd, buttocks swaying noiselessly. ‘Don’t get up,’ he sneered, when he saw that I had no intention of doing so. ‘I’ll help myself, shall I?’

“Ignoring the more inviting bottles on the drinks tray, he unerringly snared the great Rodney decanter from underneath and poured himself a gross amount of what he thought would be my Taylor ’31. A score to me already, for I had filled it with Invalid Port of an unbelievable nastiness. He didn’t notice: score two to me. Of course he is only a policeman.”

Martland features heavily in the ensuing romp, which involves several murders, a journey across America in a Rolls-Royce, a nymphomaniac millionairess and a remote cave near Silverdale, Lancashire.

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