Quotulatiousness

January 17, 2023

“Karl Marx was one hollow and rotten tree, inside and out, from beginning to end”

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

To mark the passing of Paul Johnson, the Foundation for Economic Education reposted an appreciation of Johnson’s Intellectuals by Lawrence W. Reed praising his essay on Karl Marx:

None of Johnson’s subjects can match Karl Marx for sheer loathsomeness and shameless fakery. He was a virulent racist and anti-Semite with a vicious temper (“Jewish n****r” was one of his favorite epithets). On a good day, he enjoyed threatening those who disagreed with him by blurting, “I will annihilate you!” His personal hygiene was, well, suffice it to say he had none. He was heartlessly cruel to his family and anyone who crossed him. This is the same man who postured as a thinker whose ideas would save humanity.

We learn in Intellectuals that the chef who cooked up communism professed to be “scientific”. In reality, Johnson argues, “there was nothing scientific about him; indeed, in all that matters he was anti-scientific”. His most famous lines — including “religion is the opiate of the masses” and workers “have nothing to lose but their chains” — were flagrantly ripped off from other authors. He “never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life”, steadfastly abjured invitations to do so, and denounced fellow revolutionaries who did. He never let a fact or a glimmer of reality stem the flow of poison from his pen. He had no money because he refused to work for it, then cursed those who had it and didn’t share it with him. His own mother said she wished her son “would accumulate some capital instead of just writing about it”.

And that’s for starters. Read Johnson’s chapter on Marx, and you’ll begin to understand the connection between the evil within the man and the evil his gibberish wrought. The Black Book of Communism estimates the death toll from attempts to put the rantings of this detestable lunatic into practice at minimally 100 million.

“What emerges from a reading of Capital is Marx’s fundamental failure to understand capitalism”, writes Johnson.

    He failed precisely because he was unscientific: he would not investigate the facts himself, or use objectively the facts investigated by others. From start to finish, not just Capital but all his work reflects a disregard for truth which at times amounts to contempt. That is the primary reason why Marxism, as a system, cannot produce the results claimed for it; and to call it “scientific” is preposterous.

Many people who don’t know better, and an awful lot of those in “intellectual” circles who should, still think Karl Marx was some sort of prescient genius motivated by compassion for workers. Some even disgrace themselves with T-shirts bearing his unkempt image. They really ought to thank Paul Johnson for doing the thinking they themselves never made time for.

Actually, we were warned about people like Marx 2,000 years before Johnson. Matthew 7:16 wisely counsels:

    Beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. By their fruit you will know them. Are grapes gathered from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.

Karl Marx was one hollow and rotten tree, inside and out, from beginning to end.

January 16, 2023

Paul Johnson on Jean-Jacques Rousseau

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

The book Paul Johnson may best be known for is Intellectuals, an essay collection highly critical of many of the “great men” of intellectual history. Birth of the Modern, the first Johnson book I read, was also skeptical of the bright lights of European intellectualism, but Intellectuals is where he concentrated on the biographical details of many of them. Ed West selected some of Johnson’s essay on Jean-Jacques Rousseau as part of his obituary post:

… Johnson is best known to many for his history books, one of the most entertaining being Intellectuals. Published in 1989 and structured as a series of – very critical – biographies of great philosophers, poets, playwrights and novelists, Johnson’s book got to the essence of the intellectual mindset in all its worst aspects: their intense selfishness and narcissism, their callousness towards friends and lovers, and their fondness for giving moral support to some of the worst ideas and regimes in history.

One of the most prominent Catholics in British journalism, Johnson saw secular intellectuals as modern successors to the theologians of the medieval Church, the difference being that, without the restraints of religious institutions, their egotism was uncontrolled.

Writers and artists are often incredibly selfish people, and this is true across the political spectrum, but of course it’s far more satisfying to read about those men who claimed to be the saviour of the poor and humble yet were so relentlessly horrible to actual people around them. That’s what makes the book – published just as the system imagined by one of its subjects came crashing down in eastern Europe – so satisfying.

One of the targets, er, I mean “subjects” of Intellectuals was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was quite the piece of work indeed:

It begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the “first of the modern intellectuals” and perhaps the subject of Johnson’s most intense vitriol.

“Older men like Voltaire had started the work of demolishing the altars and enthroning reason,” he wrote: “But Rousseau was the first to combine all the salient characteristics of the modern Promethean: the assertion of his right to reject the existing order in its entirety; confidence in his capacity to refashion it from the bottom in accordance with principles of his own devising belief that this could be achieved by the political process; and, not least, recognition of the huge part instinct, intuition and impulse play in human conduct.

“He believed he had a unique love for humanity and had been endowed with unprecedented gifts and insights to increase its felicity.” He was also an appalling human being.

[…]

Madame Louise d’Épinay, a lover who he treated terribly, said “I still feel moved by the simple and original way in which he recounted his misfortunes”. Another mistress, Madame de Warens, effectively supported him in hard times but, when she fell into destitution, he did nothing to prevent her dying of malnutrition.
 
Rousseau had a “pseudo-wedding” with his mistress Therese Levasseur where he gave a speech about himself, saying there would be statues erected to him one day and “it will then be no empty honour to have been a friend of Jean-Jacques Rousseau”. He later accused her brother of stealing his 42 fine shirts and when he had guests for dinner she was not allowed to sit down. He praised her as “a simple girl without flirtatiousness”, “timorous and easily dominated”.

This easily-dominated woman gave birth to five of his children, whom he had sent to an orphanage where two-thirds of babies died within the first year and just one in 20 reached adulthood, usually becoming beggars. He made almost no attempt to ever track them down, and said having children was “an inconvenience”.

“How could I achieve the tranquillity of mind necessary for my work, my garret filled with domestic cares and the noise of children?” He would have been forced to do degrading work “to all those infamous acts which fill me with such justified horror”.

He was spared that horror and instead given time to develop his ideas, which were fashionable, attractive and completely unworkable. “The fruits of the earth belong to us all, the earth itself to none”, he said, and hoped that “the rich and the privileged would be replaced by the state which reflected the general will”. 

What would this mean in practice? “The people making laws for itself cannot be unjust … The general will is always righteous”. 

Despite his ideas veering between woeful naivety and sinister authoritarianism, they proved hugely popular, especially with the men and women who in 1789, just a decade after his death, would bring France’s old regime crashing down — with horrific consequences. As Thomas Carlyle famously said of Rousseau’s The Social Contract: “The second edition was bound in the skins of those who had laughed at the first.”

Rousseau was perhaps the most influential figure of the modern era. In particular his rejection of original sin would become far more popular in the late 20th century; indeed it is at the core of what we call the culture war, and its fundamental conflict over human nature.

QotD: The avant-garde

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

There is no more evanescent quality than modernity, a rather obvious or even banal observation whose import those who take pride in their own modernity nevertheless contrive to ignore. Having reached the pinnacle of human achievement by living in the present rather than in the past, they assume that nothing will change after them; and they also assume that the latest is the best. It is difficult to think of a shallower outlook.

Of course, in certain fields the latest is inclined to be best. For example, no one would wish to be treated surgically using the methods of Sir Astley Cooper: but if we want modern treatment, it is not because it is modern but because it better as gauged by pretty obvious criteria. If it were worse (as very occasionally it is), we should not want it, however modern it were.

Alas, the idea of progress has infected important spheres in which it has no proper application, particularly the arts. It is difficult to overestimate the damage that the gimcrack notion of teleology inhering in artistic endeavour has inflicted on all the arts, exemplified by the use of the term avant-garde: as if artists were, or ought to be, soldiers marching in unison to a predetermined destination. If I had the power to expunge a single expression from the vocabulary art criticism, it would be avant-garde.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Architectural Dystopia: A Book Review”, New English Review, 2018-10-04.

January 15, 2023

QotD: The uncertain “certainties” of war in space

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

The comments for that post were very active with suggestions for technological or strategic situations which would or would not make orbit-to-land operations (read: planetary invasions) unnecessary or obsolete, which were all quite interesting.

What I found most striking though was a relative confidence in how space battles would be waged in general, which I’ve seen both a little bit here in the comments and frequently more broadly in the hard-sci-fi community. The assumptions run very roughly that, without some form of magic-tech (like shields), space battles would be fought at extreme range, with devastating hyper-accurate weapons against which there could be no real defense, leading to relatively “thin-skinned” spacecraft. Evasion is typically dismissed as a possibility and with it smaller craft (like fighters) with potentially more favorable thrust-to-mass ratios. It’s actually handy for encapsulating this view of space combat that The Expanse essentially reproduces this model.

And, to be clear, I am not suggesting that this vision of future combat is wrong in any particular way. It may be right! But I find the relative confidence with which this model is often offered as more than a little bit misleading. The problem isn’t the model; it’s the false certainty with which it gets presented.

[…]

Coming back around to spaceships: if multiple national navies stocked with dozens of experts with decades of experience and training aren’t fully confident they know what a naval war in 2035 will look like, I find myself with sincere doubts that science fiction writers who are at best amateur engineers and military theorists have a good sense of what warfare in 2350 (much less the Grim Darkness of the Future Where There is Only War) will look like. This isn’t to trash on any given science fiction property mind you. At best, what someone right now can do is essentially game out, flow-chart style, probable fighting systems based on plausible technological systems, understanding that even small changes can radically change the picture. For just one example, consider the question “at what range can one space warship resolve an accurate target solution against another with the stealth systems and electronics warfare available?” Different answers to that question, predicated on different sensor, weapons and electronics warfare capabilities produce wildly different combat systems.

(As an aside: I am sure someone is already dashing down in the comments preparing to write “there is no stealth in space“. To a degree, that is true – the kind of Star Trek-esque cloaking device of complete invisibility is impossible in space, because a ship’s waste heat has to go somewhere and that is going to make the craft detectable. But detectable and detected are not the same: the sky is big, there are lots of sources of electromagnetic radiation in it. There are as yet undiscovered large asteroids in the solar-system; the idea of a ship designed to radiate waste heat away from enemies and pretend to be one more undocumented large rock (or escape notice entirely, since an enemy may not be able to track everything in the sky) long enough to escape detection or close to ideal range doesn’t seem outlandish to me. Likewise, once detected, the idea of a ship using something like chaff to introduce just enough noise into an opponent’s targeting system so that they can’t determine velocity and heading with enough precision to put a hit on target at 100,000 miles away doesn’t seem insane either. Or none of that might work, leading to extreme-range exchanges. Again, the question is all about the interaction of detection, targeting and counter-measure technology, which we can’t really predict at all.)

And that uncertainty attaches to almost every sort of technological interaction. Sensors and targeting against electronics warfare and stealth, but also missiles and projectiles against point-defense and CIWS, or any kind of weapon against armor (there is often an assumption, for instance, that armor is entirely useless against nuclear strikes, which is not the case) and on and on. Layered on top of that is what future technologies will even prove practical – if heat dissipation problems for lasers or capacitor limitations on railguns be solved problems, for instance. If we can’t quite be sure how known technologies will interact in an environment (our own planet’s seas) that we are intimately familiar with, we should be careful expressing confidence about how future technology will work in space. Consequently, while a science fiction setting can certainly generate a plausible model of future space combat, I think the certainty with which those models and their assumptions are sometimes presented is misplaced.

Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: August 14th, 2020”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-14.

January 14, 2023

More on the Barnes & Noble turnaround

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte looks at the Barnes & Noble recovery story (discussed a couple of weeks back):

“Barnes & Noble Book Store” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Back in 2018, the bookselling chain was losing $18 million a year. It had just fired 1,800 full-time employees. About 150 stores had been closed, leaving the company with 600. It had lost its fourth CEO in five years, this one to a sexual-harassment charge. The firm’s big digital initiative, the Nook e-reader, was a flop. The share price was down 80 percent.

Not only was the business failing: it was demoralized. As the writer Ted Gioia noted in a recent newsletter, B&N had lost faith in the public’s willingness to buy books from anyone but Amazon. Its leadership “shifted a huge portion of its floorspace to peddling toys, greeting cards, calendars, and various tchotchkes”. It doubled down on in-store cafes and even tried launching freestanding Barnes & Noble restaurants.

Just when it seemed B&N was certain to follow the path of its former competitor, the Borders chain, which closed in 2011, it was purchased for $638 million (US) by Elliott Advisors, a hedge fund.

SHuSH has been skeptical about the record of hedge funds in the cultural space. We are also skeptical of hedge funds in the retail space where they have a well-established record of buying chains, slashing costs, and driving them into the ground: Sears, Toys R Us, Payless Shoes, Radio Shack, Aeropostale, Sports Authority, etc.

Elliott Advisors is an exception.

The UK based-firm has a demonstrated commitment to bookselling (at least in the medium term — more on this later). It bought the Waterstones chain in 2018. Waterstones and its 283 stores had been rescued from near-bankruptcy in 2011 by lifelong bookseller James Daunt and a Russian backer. Elliott kept Daunt at the helm and a year later bought Barnes & Noble and added this second chain to his responsibilities.

Daunt acknowledged that Barnes & Noble was in rough shape when acquired by Elliott. Its stores were “crucifyingly boring”. But he was confident the chain could be turned around. There was no template or magic ingredient, he said. It was a simple matter of “running really nice bookshops”. To that end, he gives his stores unusual autonomy to develop their own personalities and tailor their stock to the interests of their communities.

Barnes & Noble stores have since dropped most of their crap: they no longer look like big-box flea markets. They’ve quit accepting payments from the major publishers to put their books on display, a practice that brought B&N revenue but left publishers in charge of what customers saw when they walked into stores. Local managers now decide how their books are presented based on what they think will appeal to their customers.

The company used the COVID lockdown to freshen up its dowdy stores. Managers were instructed to take every single book off the shelves and “weed out the rubbish”. Walls were painted, aged carpet replaced, furnishings upgraded. The result is a much improved browsing experience. Readers like to browse.

There were hard decisions, too. Daunt cut the B&N head office staff in half and shed about 5,000 of 30,000 employees.

All in all, it worked. Last spring, The New York Times reported that sales were up and costs were down at Barnes & Noble and that “the same people who for decades saw the superchain as a supervillain are celebrating its success. In the past, the book-selling empire, with 600 outposts across all 50 states, was seen by many readers, writers and book lovers as strong-arming publishers and gobbling up independent stores in its quest for market share … Today, virtually the entire publishing industry is rooting for Barnes & Noble — including most independent booksellers. Its unique role in the book ecosystem, where it helps readers discover new titles and publishers stay invested in physical stores, makes it an essential anchor in a world upended by online sales and a much larger player: Amazon.”

There are not a lot of reliable financial numbers available on Barnes & Noble because it is no longer a public company, but it reports that its 2021 sales in were up 3 percent over pre-pandemic times. Most importantly, sales of books were up 14 percent.

January 5, 2023

The injustices inherent in “asymmetrical multiculturalism”

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

Ed West traces the start of “asymmetrical multiculturalism” to a 1916 article in The Atlantic by Greenwich Village intellectual Randolph Bourne and traces the damage that resulted from widespread adoption of the policy:

“Asymmetrical multiculturalism” was first coined by demographer Eric Kaufmann in his 2004 book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, and later developed in his more recent Whiteshift, in a chapter charting Bourne’s circle, the “first recognisably modern left-liberal open borders movement”. 

Kaufmann wrote how asymmetrical multiculturalism “may be precisely dated” to the article where Bourne, “a member of the left-wing modernist Young Intellectuals of Greenwich Village and an avatar of the new bohemian youth culture,” declared “that immigrants should retain their ethnicity while Anglo-Saxons should forsake their uptight heritage for cosmopolitanism.”

Kaufmann suggested that: “Bourne’s desire to see the majority slough off its poisoned heritage while minorities retained theirs blossomed into an ideology that slowly grew in popularity. From the Lost Generation in the 1920s to the Beats in the ’50s, ostensibly ‘exotic’ immigrants and black jazz were held up as expressive and liberating contrasts to a puritanical, square WASPdom. So began the dehumanizing de-culturation of the ethnic majority that has culminated in the sentiment behind, among other things, the viral hashtag #cancelwhitepeople.”

The hope, as John Dewey said of his New England congregationalist denomination around the same time as Bourne, was that America’s Anglo-Saxon core population would “universalise itself out of existence” while leading the world towards universal civilisation.

These ideas certainly didn’t remain in New England or even the United States, as Britain has certainly seen just how destructive they can be recently:

Late last year I wrote about the tragedy of Telford, a town in the English midlands where huge numbers of young girls had been sexually abused. Telford, along with Rotherham in South Yorkshire, had become synonymous with this form of sexual abuse, mostly committed by men of Kashmiri origin against girls who were poor, white and English. 

This is the subject of an upcoming GB News documentary by journalist Charlie Peters, and it is quite clear, from all the various reports, that grooming had been allowed to carry on in part because of the different ways the system treats different groups.

Had the races of the perpetrators and victims been reversed, this tragedy would almost certainly be the subject of countless documentaries, plays, films and even official days of commemoration. But it wouldn’t have come to that, because the authorities would have intervened earlier, and more journalists would have been on the case.

Sex crime is perhaps the most explosive source of conflict between communities, and most recently the 2005 Lozells riots began over such a rumour. It is understandable why journalists and reporters were nervous about this subject; less forgivable is the way that, away from the public eye, those in charge signal how gravely they view what happened.

Until Peters revealed the story, Labour had planned to make the former head of Rotherham council its candidate for Rother Valley; this week Peters revealed that one of the councillors named in a report into the town’s failures to deal with the grooming gangs scandal has gone onto become a senior Diversity & Inclusion Manager working for the NHS. Presumably the people who hired Mahroof Hussain knew about his previous job, and still felt that it was appropriate to have him in a “diversity and inclusion” position. Again, were things different, would a Mr Smith whose council had been condemned for its handling of the gang rape of Asian girls have landed that job? The whole thing seems as morbidly comic as Rotherham becoming Children’s Capital of Culture.

Such a clear inconsistency can only exist because of socially-enforced taboos and norms which have developed over race. In Whiteshift, Kaufmann cited sociologist Kai Erikson’s description of norms as the “accumulation of decisions made by the community over a long time” and that “each time the community censures some act of deviance … it sharpens the authority of the violated norm and re-establishes the boundaries of the group”. Every time an individual is punished for violating the anti-racism norm, it strengthens society’s taboo around the subject, to the point where it begins to overwhelm other moral imperatives.

Then there is regalisation, the name for the process “in which adherents of an ideology use moralistic politics to entrench new social norms and punish deviance”, in Kaufmann’s words. This has proved incredibly effective; after paedophilia or sexual abuse, racism is perhaps the most damaging allegation that can be made.

Few people wish to be accused of deviance, which perhaps explains why Peters’s story has received so little coverage in the press this week. Again, were the roles reversed, it’s not wild speculation to suggest that it would feature on the Today programme, seen as clear evidence of racism at the heart of Britain. When the Telford story broke, it did not even feature on the BBC’s Shropshire home page.

January 1, 2023

Public Domain Day for 2023

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

Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain highlights just some of the creative works that have entered into the public domain (in the United States: other countries’ laws may vary substantially) today:

Here are just a few of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2023. They were supposed to go into the public domain in 2003, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over. (To find more material from 1927, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.)

Books:

  • Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
  • Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
  • Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
  • Countee Cullen, Copper Sun
  • A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, illustrated by E. H. Shepard
  • Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
  • Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women (collection of short stories)
  • William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
  • Agatha Christie, The Big Four
  • Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep
  • Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (the original 1927 publication)
  • Franklin W. Dixon (pseudonym), The Tower Treasure (the first Hardy Boys book)
  • Hermann Hesse, Der Steppenwolf (in the original German)
  • Franz Kafka, Amerika (in the original German)
  • Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (the final installment of In Search of Lost Time, in the original French)

[…]

Movies Entering the Public Domain

  • Metropolis (directed by Fritz Lang)
  • The Jazz Singer (the first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue; directed by Alan Crosland)
  • Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for outstanding picture; directed by William A. Wellman)
  • Sunrise (directed by F.W. Murnau)
  • The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller)
  • The King of Kings (directed by Cecil B. DeMille)
  • London After Midnight (now a lost film; directed by Tod Browning)
  • The Way of All Flesh (now a lost film; directed by Victor Fleming)
  • 7th Heaven (inspired the ending of the 2016 film La La Land; directed by Frank Borzage)
  • The Kid Brother (starring Harold Lloyd; directed by Ted Wilde)
  • The Battle of the Century (starring the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy; directed by Clyde Bruckman)
  • Upstream (directed by John Ford)

1927 marked the beginning of the end of the silent film era, with the release of the first full-length feature with synchronized dialogue and sound. Here are the first words spoken in a feature film from The Jazz Singer: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet.” Read about the transition from the silent film to the “talkie” era, and the quest to preserve some of the remarkable silent films on this list, here. Please note that while the original footage from these films will be in the public domain, newly added material such as musical accompaniment might still be copyrighted. If a film has been restored or reconstructed, only original and creative additions are eligible for copyright; if a restoration faithfully mimics the preexisting film, it does not contain newly copyrightable material. (Putting skill, labor, and money into a project is not enough to qualify it for copyright. The Supreme Court has made clear that “the sine qua non of copyright is originality.”) In the list above, while some of the titles were not registered for copyright until 1928 or 1929, the original version of the film was published with a 1927 copyright notice, so the copyright expires over that version in 2023.

Update: Michael Geist explains why there’s no equivalent Public Domain day for Canada:

December 30, 2022

Barnes & Noble used to be like an even more boring Indigo … but they’ve been turned around

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

Back when my job required more travel, one of the things I used to look forward to was visiting US bookstores, as they always had a wider and more interesting stock than our staid Canadian equivalents. Over time, the interesting local bookstores got harder and harder to find as the big box stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble took over much of their customer base. Of the two, I much preferred going into a Borders store, as they had better stock than B&N and the staff seemed friendlier and (generally) more helpful to clueless foreigners like me. Borders went under around the same time my business travels to the US tapered off and it looked like it was only a matter of time for B&N to follow it into bankruptcy. Even if it struggled on, surely the pandemic killed off what Amazon left behind? Ted Gioia says not so fast:

“Barnes & Noble Book Store” by JeepersMedia is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

But Barnes & Noble is flourishing. After a long decline, the company is profitable and growing again — and last week announced plans to open 30 new stores. In some instances, they are taking over locations where Amazon tried (and failed) to operate bookstores.

Amazon seems invincible. So the idea that Barnes & Noble can succeed where its much larger competitor failed is hard to believe. But the turnaround at B&N is real. In many instances they have already re-opened in locations where they previously shut down.

Barnes & Noble tried exactly the same sort of “re-imagining” of their stores that Canada’s Indigo chain is currently floundering with: cutting back on the floorspace devoted to books in favour of throw cushions, candles, decorations, bath salts, scarfs and towels. It worked just as badly for B&N as it is working for Indigo: it chases out the primary customer base (book-buyers) in favour of bored people looking to waste away an hour or two just browsing tchotchkes. (And if you can find an Indigo staff member to ask about a particular book, they almost always assure you that you can find it on their website, which I’m sure helps bring more people into the store …) In desperation, B&N looked to expand into a very different market:

… in a bizarre strategic move, the company decided to launch freestanding restaurants under the name Barnes & Noble Kitchen — no books, just meals. But this was another disaster.

The company chairman Leonard Riggio eventually admitted, in September 2018, that running a restaurant is “a lot harder than you think it is … The bottom line is awful.”

Given the incredibly short and profitless life of most start-up restaurants, that really does qualify as a “No shit, Sherlock” moment. So how did Barnes & Noble turn things around?

It’s amazing how much difference a new boss can make.

I’ve seen that firsthand so many times. I now have a rule of thumb: “There is no substitute for good decisions at the top — and no remedy for stupid ones.”

It’s really that simple. When the CEO makes foolish blunders, all the wisdom and hard work of everyone else in the company is insufficient to compensate. You only fix these problems by starting at the top.

In the case of Barnes & Noble, the new boss was named James Daunt. And he had already turned around Waterstones, a struggling book retailing chain in Britain.

Bringing in fresh blood can be a life-saver for a business, but we also have that expression about deck chairs on the Titanic in common business parlance, so just being “new” isn’t enough … new leaders must also bring new approaches and fresh ideas:

But the most amazing thing Daunt did at Waterstones was this: He refused to take any promotional money from publishers.

This seemed stark raving mad. But Daunt had a reason. Publishers give you promotional money in exchange for purchase commitments and prominent placement — but once you take the cash, you’ve made your deal with the devil. You now must put stacks of the promoted books in the most visible parts of the store, and sell them like they’re the holy script of some new cure-all creed.

Those promoted books are the first things you see when you walk by the window. They welcome you when you step inside the front door. They wink at you again next to the checkout counter.

Leaked emails show ridiculous deals. Publishers give discounts and thousands of dollars in marketing support, but the store must buy a boatload of copies — even if the book sucks and demand is weak — and push them as aggressively as possible.

Publishers do this in order to force-feed a book on to the bestseller list, using the brute force of marketing money to drive sales. If you flog that bad boy ruthlessly enough, it might compensate for the inferiority of the book itself. Booksellers, for their part, sweep up the promo cash, and maybe even get a discount that allows them to under-price Amazon.

Everybody wins. Except maybe the reader.

Daunt refused to play this game. He wanted to put the best books in the window. He wanted to display the most exciting books by the front door. Even more amazing, he let the people working in the stores make these decisions.

This is James Daunt’s super power: He loves books.

“Staff are now in control of their own shops”, he explained. “Hopefully they’re enjoying their work more. They’re creating something very different in each store.”

This crazy strategy proved so successful at Waterstones, that returns fell almost to zero — 97% of the books placed on the shelves were purchased by customers. That’s an amazing figure in the book business.

On the basis of this success, Daunt was put in charge of Barnes & Noble in August 2019. But could he really bring that dinosaur, on the brink of extinction, back to life?

The continued relevance of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”

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

In Quillette, George Case praises Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (which was one of the first essays that convinced me that Orwell was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century), and shows how it still has relevance today:

George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential essays ever written. First published in Britain’s Horizon in 1946, it has since been widely anthologized and is always included in any collection of the writer’s essential nonfiction. In the decades since its appearance, the article has been quoted by many commentators who invoke Orwell’s literary and moral stature in support of its continued relevance. But perhaps the language of today’s politics warrants some fresh criticisms that even the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm could not have conceived.

“Politics and the English Language” addressed the jargon, double-talk, and what we would now call “spin” that had already distorted the discourse of the mid-20th century. “In our time,” Orwell argued, “political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. … Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Those are the sentences most cited whenever a modern leader or talking head hides behind terms like “restructuring” (for layoffs), “visiting a site” (for bombing), or “alternative facts” (for falsehoods). In his essay, Orwell also cut through the careless, mechanical prose of academics and journalists who fall back on clichés — “all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and vagueness generally”.

These objections still hold up almost 80 years later, but historic changes in taste and technology mean that they apply to a new set of unexamined truisms and slogans regularly invoked less in oratory or print than through televised soundbites, online memes, and social media: the errors of reason and rhetoric identified in “Politics and the English Language” can be seen in familiar examples of empty platitudes, stretched metaphors, and meaningless cant which few who post, share, like, and retweet have seriously parsed. Consider how the following lexicon from 2023 is distinguished by the same question-begging, humbug, and sheer cloudy vagueness exposed by George Orwell in 1946.

[…]

Climate, [mis- and dis-]information, popular knowledge, genocide, land claims, sexual assault, and racism are all serious topics, but politicizing them with hyperbole turns them into trite catchphrases. The language cited here is largely employed as a stylistic template by the outlets who relay it — in the same way that individual publications will adhere to uniform guidelines of punctuation and capitalization, so too must they now follow directives to always write rape culture, stolen land, misinformation, or climate emergency in place of anything more neutral or accurate. Sometimes, as with cultural genocide or systemic racism, the purpose appears to be in how the diction of a few extra syllables imparts gravity to the premise being conveyed, as if a gigantic whale is a bigger animal than a whale, or a horrific murder is a worse crime than a murder.

Elsewhere, the words strive to alter the parameters of an issue so that its actual or perceived significance is amplified a little longer. “Drunk driving” will always be a danger if the legal limits of motorists’ alcohol levels are periodically lowered; likewise, relations between the sexes and a chaotic range of public opinion will always be problematic if they can be recast as rape culture, hate, or disinformation. This lingo typifies the parroted lines and reflexive responses of political communication in the 21st century.

In “Politics and the English Language”, George Orwell’s concluding lesson was not just that parroted lines and reflexive responses were aesthetically bad, or that they revealed professional incompetence in whoever crafted them, but that they served to suppress thinking. “The invasion of one’s mind by ready-made phrases … can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one’s brain”, he wrote. He is still right: glib, shallow expression reflects, and will only perpetuate, glib, shallow thought, achieving no more than to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

December 27, 2022

Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Bijan Omrani reviews Crassus: The First Tycoon by Peter Stothard:

If you are feeling despondent about the dismal quality of the current generation of politicians, it may be some comfort to remember that even in the golden age of Rome such complaints were legion.

The poet Horace wrote at length about how the ruling class had gone downhill. Once, there had been paragons of virtue such as Cincinnatus, who after saving Rome as dictator laid down his power without demur and returned to live on his humble farm; or the consul Regulus, who refused to make any concessions after being captured by the Carthaginians, although he knew they would torture him to death. Instead of these titans, the modern age had brought forth a base generation. Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome and subject of this new biography, was foremost among them.

The formidable influence wielded by Crassus in the final years of the Roman Republic — he was an ally, and rival, of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great — came not by way of old-fashioned heroics and victories on the battlefield. His methods were recognisably modern. Peter Stothard characterises him as a “disrupter of old rules, fixer and puller of the puppet strings of power”. His tools were money and the economy of favours. He employed them with a coldness, ruthlessness and level of calculation that makes him unappetising, but deeply compelling. Stothard’s description of him as “The First Tycoon” is apt. He is the sort of character one might expect to find wearing red braces in a New York boardroom, rather than a brocaded toga in the Roman Forum.

By origin, Crassus was a member of one of Rome’s blue-blooded families. His pursuit of political influence by means of business rather than military prowess would seem at first sight unexpected, given the traditional prohibition against the senatorial aristocracy engaging in trade. Yet, the turmoil of Crassus’s formative years overturned these niceties. The last sight he had of his father, who had served as a consul, was of his head on a spike in the Forum.

He was a victim of the perennial strife that plagued Rome at the beginning of the 1st century BC, caused by imbalances in wealth and tensions between Rome and wider Italy, not to mention discord over land, military and constitutional reforms. With the death of his father and two of his brothers, Crassus had to flee Rome and hide in a cave for eight months in Spain, where his family still had allies. It is doubtless these upheavals — similar to those of Julius Caesar, who lost his father young and had to go into hiding during this chaos — led Crassus to seek an inviolable security, regardless of whether he trampled on old Roman conventions and upset others to do so.

When the aristocratic faction seized power in the late 80s BC, Crassus was able to return to Rome. There, he pursued every commercial method, no matter how disreputable, to accumulate wealth. It satisfied not only his needs for security but, as Stothard argues, it was also a way of seeking revenge for the death of his father. He bought up the properties of those families allied to the earlier populist regime which had just been displaced.

These came at a knock-down price, as the families had been outlawed, with some executed and others sent into exile. Crassus appears to have been on a committee which determined the loyalty of citizens to the new government and appears not to have scrupled to condemn those whose property he coveted. His other prime method for enlarging his portfolio was to buy up cheaply buildings that were on fire, or else in the path of a fire. He organised his slaves along military lines, using them with relentless efficiency to acquire, rebuild and sell on property for a huge profit.

Whatever government touches, it makes worse – book publishing as a prime example

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian government has always claimed to want to encourage Canadian book publishers and many, many speeches and press conferences and announcements and gestures have been produced over the years (not just by the Liberals, but usually by the Liberals). The actual results of all that political performance? “Meh” at the very best:

Another of my favorite SHuSHs of 2022 was no. 168, “It Started as Polite Talk”, in which my colleague Dan Wells of Biblioasis complained of the dominance of foreign publishers in the Canadian book market. “I don’t think there’s a literate nation in the world whose native industry makes up a small percentage of its overall market”, he said. “This, perhaps, is the real crisis of Canadian publishing.”

The astonishing thing to me is that the stated policy of the federal government for more than half a century has been to foster and protect a Canadian-owned publishing sector to avoid outsourcing our intellectual life to New York and London. Acres of policy written. Billions spent. The results are risible. Here’s a visual representation of Dan’s point. The 113 members of the Association of Canadian Publishers, representing the vast majority of English-language book publishers in Canada, produce $34 million in annual sales against the $1.1 billion of foreign firms:

If you read the self-congratulatory reports from the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council, everything is fine: “The Canadian book publishing industry consistently demonstrates a high degree of resilience.”

Does this look resilient to you?

I’ve never been much of a Canadian nationalist and, all things considered, I’d prefer less of a government presence in our arts sector, but government is now so deeply entrenched in book publishing and has made such a hash of the industry that there’s really no way out that doesn’t involve better government policy.

What, exactly, better policy might look like is next year’s project.

QotD: Pedantry

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

The pedant seeks error, not truth, and delights to find it. Indeed, the search for error may be the entire purpose of his reading, to judge from certain books dating from the 19th century in my possession. In them, the sole mark made by a previous reader is the emphatic underlining, often accompanied in the margin by an explanation mark or some other expression of joyful discovery, of an error, whether of printing or grammar or fact, and of whatever magnitude. The intellectual or moral significance of the error is quite beside the point; it is the fact of error, and of having found it, that is important to the pedant. He is like a predatory animal stalking its prey, pouncing on it when it comes out in the open.

I suppose one is either born pedantic or not, though of course there are different degrees of pedantry. Just as one may be mildly or cripplingly obsessional, so one may be slightly or fulminatingly pedantic. I daresay that one day neuroscientists will put pedants in scanning machines and discover the part of their brains that lights up when they discover an error in a text, and then claim that they have found the pedantry center in the brain.

Theodore Dalrymple, “To Err Is Human, to Detect Divine”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-01-19.

December 24, 2022

The abiding influence of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

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

So many of our fading-but-still-fondly remembered Christmas traditions seem to come back to Victorian times, and especially those featured in Charles Dickens’ most famous Christmas story (certainly helped by the popularity of the Alistair Sim film adaptation):

Even in our supposedly rationalist secular era, we find one of these thin places or times in the unlikely guise of Christmas and its rich repository of ghost stories. The supernatural was not banished by the developments of modernity but rather it evolved and adapted, moving from enchanted woods to gothic houses to the streets and rooms of Victorian cities. Just as in earlier times, they found their place where it is dark, in the dead of winter, when the nights close in and fireside stories cause the mind to play tricks and shadows to seemingly change their forms.

Among the many writers who have tried their hand at yuletide ghost stories, none loom larger than Charles Dickens who, with A Christmas Carol (subtitled Being a Ghost Story of Christmas), fundamentally influenced the way we perceive and celebrate the festivity. To fully understand how and why Christmas became a thin place and remains so, we have to delve into a scourge at the very heart of Dickens’s story and our society still — loneliness.

Christmas is one of those times when, as a much earlier writer, Dante, put it: “There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.” And what time is happier, or more melancholic when irretrievable, than a childhood Christmas? Victorian writers knew that when we are alone at Christmas, a time that seems intrinsically meant for loved ones congregating (the perpetual renewal of the Nativity scene), our ghosts, borne by memory, absence and regret, would instead arrive.

Dickens knew the power of myth, and how the beautiful lie might reveal the hidden truth. Determined to speak out about the horrors of child labour and poverty he had directly experienced and witnessed, Dickens first toyed with writing a strident but fairly unwieldly political jeremiad until he realised, correctly, that there was a much more seductive approach available, through the Trojan Horse of storytelling. It was all too easy to turn away from a lecture or respond with platitudes and fallacies, but a heart-stirring tale had the ability to get under one’s skin. His characters and settings were constructed not just from satirical observations of the powerful but from encounters Dickens had had with the powerless, during his lengthy night walks around London. He was also deeply inspired, and haunted, by macabre tales that his cockney nursemaid Mary Weller used to delight in telling him as a child — full of Faustian pacts, treacherous innkeepers, poisons “distilled from toads’ eyes and spiders’ knees”, the Black Cat and Captain Murderer. To add to the unease, Weller would claim the horrors were true and she had witnessed them herself or had heard them from relatives who were eyewitnesses. As Dickens later recounted, in The Uncommercial Traveller, she “took a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember — as a sort of introductory overture — by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan”.

A Christmas Carol has this oral tradition feel, albeit delivered in a short, and affordable, novella form. It also rebalances Dickens’s heavy lean towards sentimentality (the pitiable figure of Tiny Tim, for instance) with the resolutely unsentimental tactic of terrifying child readers. This was necessary for reasons of veracity — existence was unsentimental in those days — but also as a myth-making technique. There are few lessons that stay with us longer and deeper than those which strike mortal fear in us and then propose a way out.

At the heart of the story and its extraordinary legacy is loneliness. Rereading A Christmas Carol, its power initially comes from its status as a social tract and a fable. What is crucial, however, is its existential quality. It shows that the system then in place, and perhaps still, not only oppresses and squanders but it also alienates. Dickens takes the traditional Christmas theme of visitation (the announcing angel, the wandering star leading to the Christ child, the shepherds, the Magi) and makes it sinister. Salvation can come only through the painful process of facing the truth (“Without their visits,” said the Ghost, “you cannot hope to shun the path I tread”). It can only emerge from Scrooge seeing that he has betrayed and marginalised not only his fellow human beings but himself, acknowledging that he belongs to the Malthusian “surplus population” he castigates, that he is alone and bereft (“Will you not speak to me?” he begs the final phantom), and the only precious hope he has left is to be found through gratitude and selfless communion with others.

December 21, 2022

Tom Holland’s Dominion

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West expands on the review he wrote when Holland’s book was first published in 2019:

The Romans are the most “epic” figures in history, to use my young son’s favourite word, exerting a glamour and allure that no civilisation has successfully matched. This magnetism can also appear heightened by what followed, the illiterate bleakness of the early Middle Ages, and the fun-sucking religion that came with it. Many down the years have lamented the switch from the Rome of the Caesars to the Rome of the popes.

The young Tom Holland was one of them. Raised as an Anglican, the historian’s childhood fascination with dinosaurs evolved into one for the equally glamorous ancients. “Although I vaguely continued to believe in God,” he writes: “I found him infinitely less charismatic than the gods of the Greeks: Apollo, Athena, Dionysus. I liked the way that they did not lay down laws, or condemn other deities as demons; I liked their rock-star glamour. As a result, by the time I came to read Edward Gibbon and his great history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, I was more ready to accept his interpretation of the triumph of Christianity: that it had ushered in an ‘age of superstition and credulity’. My childhood instinct to see the biblical God as the po-faced enemy of liberty and fun was rationalised.”

This, indeed, is a widespread view. Since Gibbon wrote his great work in the late 18th century there has existed the popular idea that the Renaissance, with its return to classical values, and the Enlightenment, which saw the birth of reason over superstition, were a reaction to Christianity, which had in those thousand dark medieval years suppressed science and freedom. 

Yet the truth and paradox, as Holland shows in this truly epic account of how Christianity came to shape the West, is that the western idea of secularism is itself a very Christian one. Liberalism was never a reaction to Christianity, it was a product, perhaps one might heresy; ditto Marxism, socialism and the various progressive creeds of the modern era, right up to the current Great Awokening with its focus on the sanctity of victimhood.

All our assumptions about progress, the rights of the individual, our horror of racism and sexual exploitation, even the acceptance of gay marriage, are the products of Christianity. They are not in themselves universal or “natural”, and to the Romans these ideas of human rights and dignity would have been incomprehensible, laughable even.

Holland made his name with thrilling popular histories set in the ancient world, yet the more he studied antiquity, the more alien it became to him. It wasn’t just that Spartans or Romans killed innocents in large numbers, but that they lacked even the suggestion that the weak might be worth pitying. “That my belief in God had faded over the course of my teenage years did not mean that I had ceased to be Christian,” he writes. 

Cruelties such as the exposure of infants – especially female infants – were almost universally accepted in antiquity, except among one or two small German tribes and, at the other end of the empire, a monotheistic people in the eastern Mediterranean. Perhaps the obscenest horror, however, was the practice of crucifixion, a death so cruel that Roman writers barely touched on the subject. Indeed only “four detailed accounts of the process by which a man might be sentenced to the cross, and then suffer his punishment, have survived from antiquity. Remarkably, they all describe the same execution.”

This is the story of how on that one Friday in Judea the world was changed forever — with a moral revolution like nothing before or since.

December 20, 2022

A true behind-the-scenes look at George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four

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

In Spiked, Alexander Adams reports on a new, limited edition of the surviving portion of George Orwell’s manuscript for the novel:

A photo from SP Books’ web page showing the reproduction of Orwell’s manuscript.
SP Books, https://www.spbooks.com/150-1984-9791095457114.html

Published by SP Books, this is Nineteen Eighty-Four as you’ve never seen it before. It reproduces, in colour facsimile, the 197 surviving pages of Orwell’s manuscript, held by the John Hay Library at Brown University, Rhode Island. We see Orwell’s work in fountain pen and ballpoint (complete with ink blots), as well as 14 typewritten sides. We are even given his doodles and pen tests. Readers will remember how Winston also marvels at the beauty of the paper and binding of a blank book he buys from a junk shop.

This edition contains what amounts to 44 per cent of the text of the published novel. It is in a jumbled state, with pages missing and drastic changes made. There are many crossings out and additions. The handwriting can be a little tricky to decipher – Orwell had a habit of using cursive joining lines between words and using abbreviations. Added to that, the script can be somewhat crabbed, especially where Orwell adds text between existing lines. With a little patience, though, the reader can adjust to Orwell’s writing, especially if familiar with the text, and glimpse this most familiar of novels anew.

This version includes an introduction by Orwell scholar DJ Taylor. He tells us that although Orwell usually wrote quickly, he took five years to complete Nineteen Eighty-Four. Taylor details the difficult conditions that explain the novel’s long gestation. The death of Orwell’s first wife in 1945, the effort of raising their young son alone and the toll of tuberculosis all slowed work and drained the author’s energy (tuberculosis would kill him in 1950, only months after the novel’s publication). There are indications that Orwell let the book go to publication even though he thought it was not properly finished.

Looking at this draft, we can see Orwell revising heavily as he wrote. Some revisions are minor, such as Trotsky-figure Goldstein’s description of the workings of the Party and his description of the geopolitics of Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. Other changes are more significant. Here, in the propaganda film described by Winston at the start of his diary, there is a graphic passage about the lynching of a pregnant black woman. Orwell seems to have cut these lines on grounds of decency. He also reduced the references to race overall, perhaps uncomfortable about the implications of speaking so generally about groups and types. Orwell’s background as a policeman in Burma no doubt made him sensitive to racial issues.

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