Quotulatiousness

May 31, 2022

A new history of the evil empire. No, not that one. Not that one either. The other evil empire!

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Books, Britain, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Barnaby Crowcroft reviews Caroline Elkins’ new history of the British empire, Legacy of Violence:

Elkins is correct that British decolonisation after the end of the war — if not “white-washed” — has got off lightly among historians, often via a contrast with the dreadful behaviour of the French. We remain far too influenced by the impression that Britain willingly and amicably handed over power (as Harold Macmillan put it) to Asian and African representatives of “agreeable, educated, Liberal, North Oxford society”.

There is a single map in this book which should definitively dispose of such ideas, showing all the colonial conflicts and states of emergency Britain was engaged in around the world after 1945. There are the well-known counterinsurgencies in Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden. Alongside other, less well-known ones, however — British Guiana, Malaysia, Belize, Oman and the New Hebrides — bring us pretty much into the 1980s without a single year of global colonial peace.

In Kenya and Malaya, the British carried out massive coercive interventions in the 1950s, including the forcible resettlement of over a million people into closely monitored “new villages”, which, if they cannot be likened to concentration camps, certainly resemble the kinds of things the French were doing in Algeria. Difficult though it is to believe today, until very recently the British were a “warlike” and patriotic people, and their agents could be ruthless in the pursuit of imperial interest overseas.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to take seriously the more grandiose claims of Legacy of Violence, including Elkins’ presumption to have uncovered the Key to All Mythologies of British imperial wickedness in the form of Liberalism and Racism. The prose is part of the problem. Her introductory statement of the book’s bombastic aims reads more like something written by a professional satirist, than a professional historian.

“To study the British empire,” she writes, “is to unlock memory’s gate using the key of historical enquiry. But once inside, history’s fortress is bewildering … Unlike mythical fire-breathing monsters, however, the creatures inhabiting the annals of Britain’s imperial past are not illusions [but] monstrosities [which] inflicted untold suffering …”

Much of the book is given over to a plodding chronicle of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British history, in which events are construed — and often misconstrued — to give the meanest possible interpretation. British “arch-imperialists” resemble cartoon villains, who wear “Hitleresque moustaches” and “racist coattails” and are awarded MBEs and OBEs according to how much harm they inflict upon colonial subjects. There is even an imaginative reconstruction of British pilots all but laughing as they machine-gun “defenceless women and children”; readers are invited to listen to their “screams of pain”.

To determine whether Britain’s empire was uniquely violent invites the question: compared to what? Niall Ferguson earned opprobrium for suggesting in 2003 that alongside the rival empires which arose to challenge it in the middle of the twentieth century, Britain’s looked pretty attractive.

To her credit, Elkins does not disagree with this. Her treatment of Malaya’s communist insurgency suggests that she is not particularly exercised by violence when it is committed by ideological confrères. The only thing we get in the way of any broader comparison, however, is the notably wishy-washy one implied between the “East and the West”, which she describes as the contrast between “humanity and inhumanity”.

May 30, 2022

Technocratic meddling in developing countries at the local level

Filed under: Africa, Books, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine. The reviewer looked at a few development economics stories that illustrate some of the more common problems western technocrats encounter when they provide their “expert advice” to people in developing countries. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

    But even if the project was in some sense a “failure” as an agricultural development project, it is indisputable that many of its “side effects” had a powerful and far-reaching impact on the Thaba-Tseka region. […] Indeed, it may be that in a place like Mashai, the most visible of all the project’s effects was the indirect one of increased Government military presence in the region

As the program continued to unfold, the development officials became more and more disillusioned — not with their own choices, but with the people of Thaba-Tseka, who they perceived as petty, apathetic, and outright self-destructive. A project meant to provide firewood failed because locals kept breaking into the woodlots and uprooting the saplings. An experiment in pony-breeding fell apart when “unknown parties” drove the entire herd of ponies off of cliffs to their deaths. Why, Ferguson’s official contacts bemoaned, weren’t the people of Thaba-Tseka committed to their own “development”?

Who could possibly be opposed to trees and horses? Perhaps, the practitioners theorized, the people of Thaba-Tseka were just lazy. Perhaps they “didn’t want to be better”. Perhaps they weren’t in their right mind or had made a mistake. Perhaps poverty makes a person do strange things.

Or, as Ferguson points out, perhaps their anger had something to do with the fact that the best plots of land in the village had been forcibly confiscated to make room for wood and pony lots, without any sort of compensation. The central government was all too happy to help find land for the projects, which they took from political enemies and put in the control of party elites, especially when it could use a legitimate anti-poverty program as cover. In Ferguson’s words, the development project was functioning as an “anti-politics machine” the government could use to pretend political power moves were just “objective” solutions to technical problems.

A local student’s term paper captured the general discontent:

    In spite of the superb aim of helping the people to become self-reliant, the first thing the project did was to take their very good arable land. When the people protested about their fields being taken, the project promised them employment. […] It employed them for two months, found them unfit for the work, and dismissed them. Without their fields and without employment they may turn up to be very self-reliant. It is rather hard to know.

Two things stand out to me from this story. First, the “development discourse” lens served to focus the practitioners’ attention on a handful of technical variables (quantity of wood, quality of pony), and kept them from thinking about any repercussions they hadn’t thought to measure.

This is a serious problem, because “negative effects on things that aren’t your primary outcome” are pretty common in the development literature. High-paying medical NGOs can pull talent away from government jobs. Foreign aid can worsen ongoing conflicts. Unconditional cash transfers can hurt neighbors who didn’t receive the cash. And the literature we have is implicitly conditioned on “only examining the variables academics have thought to look at” — surely our tools have rendered other effects completely invisible!

Second, the project organizers somewhat naively ignored the political goals of the government they’d partnered with, and therefore the extent to which these goals were shaping the project.

Lesotho’s recent political history had been tumultuous. The Basotho Nationalist Party (BNP), having gained power upon independence in 1965, refused to give up power after losing the 1970 elections to the Basotho Congress Party (BCP). Blaming the election results on “communists”, BNP Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan declared a state of emergency and began a campaign of terror, raiding the homes of opposition figures and funding paramilitary groups to intimidate, arrest, and potentially kill anyone who spoke up against BNP rule.

This had significant effects in Thaba-Tseka, where “villages […] were sharply divided over politics, but it was not a thing which was discussed openly” due to a fully justified fear of violence. The BNP, correctly sensing the presence of a substantial underground opposition, placed “development committees” in each village, which served primarily as local wings of the national party. These committees spied on potential supporters of the now-outlawed BCP and had deep connections to paramilitary “police” units.

When the Thaba-Tseka Development Project started, its international backers partnered directly with the BNP leadership, reasoning that sustainable development and public goods provision could only happen through a government whose role they primarily viewed as bureaucratic. As a result, nearly every decision had to make its way through the village development committees, who used the project to pursue their own goals: jobs and project funds found their way primarily to BNP supporters, while the “necessary costs of development” always seemed to be paid by opposition figures.

The funding coalition ended up paying for a number of projects that reinforced BNP power, from establishing a new “district capital” (which conveniently also served as a military base) to constructing new and better roads linking Thaba-Tseka to the district and national capitals (primarily helping the central government tax and police an opposition stronghold). Anything that could be remotely linked to “economic development” became part of the project as funders and practitioners failed to ask whether government power might have alternate, more concerning effects.

As we saw earlier, the population being “served” saw this much more clearly than the “servants”, and started to rebel against a project whose “help” seemed to be aimed more at consolidating BNP control than meeting their own needs. When they ultimately resorted to killing ponies and uprooting trees, project officials infatuated with “development” were left with “no idea why people would do such a thing”, completely oblivious to the real and lasting harm their “purely technical decisions” had inflicted.

May 29, 2022

Approaching the “Chekhov’s gun” denouement in the Random Penguin-Simon & Schuster play

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte updates us on the state of play in the long-running drama in the publishing world:

SHuSH readers know that back in November 2020, the fattest of the world’s five big publishing companies, Penguin Random House, outbid the second fattest, Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins, to acquire a listless third member of that group, Simon & Schuster.

Regulators in the UK, Canada, and the USA immediately began studying the $2.1-billion cash deal to determine if it would result in too much concentration of ownership and not enough competitiveness in the big leagues of book publishing. Last November, the US department of justice decided it would and sued to block it. A trial is expected this summer. Penguin Random House has until November to close the deal or it expires (with PRH owing S&S a dead-deal fee of $200-million).

For those of you who think in literary terms, the deal is Chekhov’s gun, and we’re coming in hard on the third act. Either S&S gets shot (acquired) or the play ends in an anticlimax (although whoever has been stewarding the deal at PRH may get shot by its parent company, Bertelsmann.)

If the deal fails, we’re in for a sequel because the current owner of S&S, Paramount (formerly ViacomCBS) won’t want it back. It is a motion picture/television company in the process of selling everything it owns not directly related to screen entertainment. It hopes to cement its status as a fourth-rate streaming service. S&S no longer fits, if it ever did.

Our view of the PRH-S&S deal is that the department of justice suit will fail to block the merger and S&S will be swallowed whole. It will be difficult to present the merger as the end of competition in the book industry when there are still four large publishers operating in the US, and a shitload of mid-size and smaller publishers. Combined, PRH&S&S may amount to less than a third of the American trade book market, and as little as 20 per cent, depending on how you do the math. That’s a long way from monopoly.

The DOJ, moreover, has chosen to fight its battle on low ground. It’s saying that the deal is bad for competition in books generally, but it is particularly concerned that the merger will result in less competition for the services of writers of anticipated top-selling books, loosely defined as authors commanding huge advances. You read that right: the DOJ is seeking justice for the .001% of the literary world. We argued all this at length, and destroyed the government’s case back in SHuSH 123.

May 26, 2022

The hierarchy of scientific journals

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

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Melinda Baldwin’s Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

The world of scientific publishing is organized as a hierarchy of status, much like the hierarchy of angels in the Abrahamic religions. At the bottom are the non-peer-reviewed blog posts and Twitter threads. Slightly above are the preprint servers like arXiv, and then big peer-reviewed journals like PLOS One. Above those are all the field-specific journals, some with higher reputation than others. And at the top, near the divine presence, are the CNS journals: Cell, Nature, and Science.

Full title: The Assumption of the Virgin..Artist: Francesco Botticini..Date made: probably about 1475-6..

For an actual hierarchy of journals based on citation data, see this paper, which puts Nature and Science at the top. Might be worth mentioning that it comes from a journal in the Nature Publishing Group family.

Leaving aside Cell, a more specialized biology journal that seems to have gotten into the CNS acronym the same way Netflix got into the FAANG acronym, Nature and Science are very similar. They both publish articles in all scientific fields. They both date from the 19th century. They’re published weekly. They jointly won a fancy prize for services to humanity in 2007. And having your paper in either is one of the best things that can happen to a scientist’s career, thanks to their immense prestige.

But how, exactly, did Nature and Science become so prestigious? This is the question I hoped Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal, a 2015 book by historian of science Melinda Baldwin, might answer. It focuses on Nature, but much of its lessons can likely be extrapolated to Science considering their similarity.

I grew curious about this when I realized that most researchers treat journal prestige as a given. Everyone knows that Nature and Science matter enormously, yet few would be able to say why exactly. But this is important! Prestigious institutions, from universities to media companies to major sports competitions, have a huge impact on the world. It’s useful to understand how they came to be, beyond “being famous for being famous”.

One reason this is more difficult than it sounds is that we often settle for superficial answers. Selectivity, for instance, is a common explanation: prestige simply comes from obtaining what is hard to obtain, such as a Harvard degree, an Olympic medal or a Nobel Prize. Nature is indeed highly selective, accepting less than 10% of submitted articles (and the vast majority of papers are not even deemed worthy of a submission to Nature by their authors). Yet harsh selectivity alone cannot explain prestige, or it would be trivial to launch a prestigious journal or university just by setting an artificially low acceptance rate.

Another facile explanation is longevity. It’s true that prestigious institutions are often old, and indeed Nature has been around for more than 150 years since its birth in 1869. Science is only slightly younger, having been founded in 1880. But there are many older scientific journals: the oldest one, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, was created two hundred years before Nature, in 1665. Then there are more recent publications that are prestigious: Cell, for instance, was founded in 1974. The correlation between prestige and longevity is real, but imperfect. It also says nothing of causation: does longevity cause prestige, or does prestige cause longevity?

What matters is not the span of time per se, but the specific events that happened — in other words, the history. Making Nature, while not specifically about prestige, gives us exactly that.

Alex Tabarrok reviews The Parent Trap

Filed under: Books, Economics, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok looks at Nate G. Hilger’s new book, The Parent Trap:

Hilger argues that the problems of poverty, pathology and inequality that bedevil the United States are not primarily due to poor schools, discrimination, or low incomes per se. The primary cause is parents: parents who are unable to teach their children the skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern world. Since parents can’t teach the necessary skills, Hilger calls for the state to take their place with a dramatic expansion of not just child care but collective parenting.

Let’s unpack some details. Begin with schooling. It’s very common to bemoan the state of schools in the “inner city” or to complain about “local financing” which supposedly guarantees that poor counties will have underfunded schools. All of this, however, is decades out-of-date.

    A hundred years ago there really were massive public-school resource gaps by class and race. These days, however, state and federal spending play a larger role than local property tax revenue and distribute educational resources more progressively … In fact, when we include federal aid, 42 states spent more on poor school districts than on rich school districts in 2012. The same pattern holds between schools within districts

    … The highest spending districts are large urban centers such as New York City, Boston and Baltimore. These cities spend large sums to educate rich and poor children alike. p. 10-11

Hilger is correct. No matter what you saw on The Wire, Baltimore spends more than sixteen thousand dollars per student, among the highest in the nation in large school districts and above average for the nation as a whole. Public schools are quite egalitarian in funding with any bias running towards more funding for poorer districts.

Schools, Hilger writes are “actually the smallest and most equalizing part of a much larger skill-building system.” The real problem, says Hilger, are parents.

But what about discrimination? When it comes to wage discrimination, Hilger is brutally honest:

    If we compare individuals with similar cognitive test scores, Black college graduates earn higher wages than white college graduates. Studies that don’t control for test score differences but examine earnings gaps within specific professions — lawyers, physicians, nurses, engineers, scientists — tend to find Black workers earn zero to 10 percent less than white workers. These gaps could reflect discrimination, unmeasured skill differences, or other factors such as geography. In any case, such gaps are small compared to the 50 percent overall Black-white earnings gap and reinforce the idea that closing skills gaps would go a long way toward closing income gaps.

Hilger argues that racism does play an important role in explaining Black-white wage differentials but it’s the historical racism that made black parents less skilled and less able to pass on skills to their children. In the twentieth century, Asians, Hilger argues, were discriminated against in the United States at least much as Black Americans. But the Asians that came to the United States had high skills while the legacy of slavery meant that Black Americans began with low skills. Asians, therefore, were better able to overcome discrimination. The success of Nigerians and Jamaican immigrants in the United States also speaks to this point. (Long time readers may recall that in 2016 I dubbed Hilger’s paper on Asian Americans and Black Americans the Politically Incorrect Paper of the Year.)

May 14, 2022

Operation Chariot, the “Greatest Raid of All”

Filed under: Books, Britain, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The raid on the French port of St. Nazaire in March 1942, codenamed “Operation Chariot” by the British, was one of the most daring and successful special forces operation of the Second World War. In The Critic, Richard Hopton reviews a new history of this operation by Giles Whittell:

Operation Chariot, the Raid on St Nazaire, has long been known as “The Greatest Raid of All”. The audacity of the plan, the lethal danger of the operation, the inadequacy of the equipment provided, the astonishing courage of the participants and the spectacular success of its primary object have ensured its place in the annals of British martial heroism.

In the early hours of 28 March 1942, a force of 623 commandos and naval personnel stole up the Loire estuary to attack the port of St Nazaire. Leading the force was HMS Campbeltown, a superannuated destroyer acquired from the Americans, which had been converted into a floating bomb by the addition of four tons of high explosive secreted in her bows.

The plan was that she would ram the steel gate of the port’s immense dry dock where the charge would explode, demolishing the dock gate. The commandos would then swarm ashore to attack the dockyard installations, particularly the pumps and winding mechanisms which operated the dry dock. With the dock out of action, Hitler would not risk his battleship Tirpitz in the Atlantic where she could wreak havoc among the convoys supporting the war effort in Britain. This was the immediate, supposed object of the raid.

Giles Whittell’s new book is not the first full-length history of the event. C.E. Lucas-Phillips’s account, The Greatest Raid of All, was published in 1958 followed 40 years later by James Dorrian’s Storming St Nazaire, which remains the most detailed, authoritative account of the operation. In 2013 Robert Lyman published Into The Jaws of Death which told the story of the raid anew, with a greater concentration on the genesis and planning of the operation.

In 2007 Jeremy Clarkson took time away from messing around with cars to make a documentary for the BBC about the raid. The result was an “affectionate and enthralling” piece of television which brought the exploits of the Charioteers — as the men who took part in the raid have always been known — to a wider audience.

Although the ostensible object of the raid was to discourage the Germans from risking the Tirpitz in the Atlantic, it is now known that, by the spring of 1942, the German high command had already decided to keep the battleship moored safely in a distant Norwegian fjord. Accordingly, destroying the dry dock at St Nazaire was, strategically, a futile gesture.

Nostalgia for the Middle Ages?

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

In Wrong Side of History, Ed West considers the apparent rising interest in Europe’s Middle Ages and Renaissance in popular culture:

A social media heretic faces trial

The genre has been aided by developments in cinematic technology, allowing the sort of special effects that made such productions in the 1980s and 90s somewhat ridiculous. But there may be deeper cultural significance to this medieval revival, and it is one that evokes a strange discomfort in many people. Because, while the academic field of medieval studies has become a branch of progressive theology, medievalism as expressed through popular culture feels much more conservative, and to some minds, even fascistic. At the very least, it is “Right-coded”.

This discomfort often flares up whenever a new film or series attempts to capture our imagination, voiced in comment pieces warning us that they might be popular for the wrong reasons, among unsavoury elements.

This is what happened with Viking epic The Northman, despite director Robert Eggar’s impeccably progressive politics. “The Northman‘s 10th-century society appears to be uniformly white and firmly divided along patriarchal lines,” The Guardian warned: “Men do the ruling and killing; women do the scheming and baby-making. Its hero, played by Alexander Skarsgård, is not a million miles from the ‘macho stereotype’ Eggers complained of – a brawny warrior who settles most disputes with a sword and without a shirt. Skarsgård’s love interest, played by Anya Taylor-Joy, could be the far-right male’s dream woman: beautiful, fair-haired, loyal to her man and committed to bearing his offspring. Even before the film’s release, far-right voices were giving their approval on the anonymous message board site 4chan.”

Wow, expressing approval of a beautiful, fair-haired woman who wants to settle down and have your children? Better call Prevent!

According to a piece in the Economist, the new fixation with the Middle Ages dates to the September 11 attacks, when “the American far right … developed a fascination with the Middle Ages and the Renaissance — in particular, with the idea of the West as a united civilisation that was fending off a challenge from the East …

“The embrace of the medieval extends from the alt-right online forum culture that has exploded in the last few years to stodgier old-school racists. Helmeted crusaders cry out the Latin war-cry ‘Deus vult!’ from memes circulated on Reddit and 4Chan. Images of Donald Trump, clad in mail with a cross embroidered on his chest, abound. Anti-Islam journals and websites name themselves after the Frankish king Charles Martel, who fought Muslim armies in the 8th century, or the (slightly post-medieval) Ottoman defeat at Vienna.”

This concern is real enough that I’ve noticed a trend for medieval historians to introduce their books with what might be best described as health warnings, lest they be enjoyed in the wrong way. Neil Price’s The Children of Ash and Elm, for instance, comes with a declaration of values in the introduction:

    Over the centuries, a great many people have eagerly pressed the Vikings into (im)moral service, and others continue to do so… I strongly believe that any meaningful twenty-first-century engagement with the Vikings must acknowledge the often deeply problematic ways in which their memory is activated in the present …

    The Viking world this book explorers was a strongly multi-cultural and multi-ethnic place, with all this implies in terms of population movement, interaction (in every sense of the word, including the most intimate), and the relative tolerance required. This extended far back into Northern prehistory. There was never any such thing as a “pure Nordic” bloodline, and the people of the time would have been baffled by the very notion. We use “Vikings” as a consciously problematic label for the majority population of Scandinavia, but they also shared their immediate world with others – in particular, the semi-nomadic Sami people. Their respective settlement histories stretch so deeply into the Stone Age past as to make any modern discussion of “who came first” absurd. Scandinavia had also welcomed immigrants for millennia before the Viking Age, and there is no doubt that a stroll through the market centres and trading places of the time would have been a vibrantly cosmopolitan experience.

Well, I won’t be recommending Mr Price’s book to my friends at 4Chan, I can tell you that.

May 9, 2022

Reverend Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple

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

Chris Bray is reading a book by Tim Reiterman which goes into great detail about the life and career of cult leader and mass murderer Jim Jones:

Reverend Jim Jones in front of the International Hotel in San Francisco’s Chinatown on Kearny & Jackson Streets during a rally to save the hotel.
San Francisco Chronicle photo by Nancy Wong, 1977 via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1971, Jim Jones loaded up some buses in California and took members of his Peoples Temple across the country to Pennsylvania — to Woodmont, the estate of the late spiritual leader Father Divine, who had a much bigger church (and a lot more money) than Jones did.

Reaching Woodmont, Jones tried Plan A, announcing the glorious news that he was the reincarnation of Father Divine and had come to lead his church again, and we might as well just go ahead and put my name on all the bank accounts; the dead leader’s wife suggested, in fairly clear language, that Jones get back on his bus while he could still walk. The delegation from Peoples Temple took the hint. But Jones also executed Plan B, with modest success: He poached some congregants, and drove them across the country to his own church in Ukiah.

Back home, Jones worried that people who had followed Father Divine would struggle to make the transition, feeling more loyalty to their old leader than to their new one. So he showed them that he couldn’t be crossed. One day, as the refugees from Philadelphia sat eating a meal with everyone else in the communal dining room, Jones walked in and caught several of the earlier members of his church being disloyal to him — and so, pointing a finger, he ordered them to die.

They did, immediately. Bodies littered the floor. Jones let the silence linger, standing over the lifeless bodies of the people who had betrayed his trust, the power of death shooting through his fingertips. And then he showed his merciful side: He resurrected them, a choice that allowed the dead to share the horrible feeling of being struck down by the indescribably vast and awesome power of Jim Jones. Terrified, the new members of the church fell into line.

He did this shit all the time. During recruiting trips to rented churches in other cities, visitors had mid-sermon strokes and heart attacks; nurses in the congregation frantically tried to resuscitate them, but announced that it was too late. But no, the Reverend Jones wouldn’t allow death to strike in his own holy church! Rushing forward and shoving the nurses aside, he commanded the dead to ARISE, ARIIIIISSSSEEE yadda yadda whatever. In 1972, a church bulletin proudly announced that Jones had personally resurrected forty dead people so far in just that one year. And here you are feeling proud that you remembered to make the bed this morning.

I take these stories from Raven, a doorstop-thick history of Jones and Peoples Temple written by the journalist Tim Reiterman (with research assistance from a colleague, John Jacobs). Reiterman decided to write about Jones after he was shot at Jonestown, visiting the final Peoples Temple location with the congressional delegation led by Leo Ryan. The research task was made easier by the self-regard the Reverend Jones had felt, because he left behind a giant catalogue of taped sermons and lectures, and a long paper trail of church bulletins and memoranda. The resulting book is an extraordinarily detailed look at every step Jones took along the path to mass murder, starting with the sadistic hucksterism of his strange childhood.

May 8, 2022

QotD: Identity politics in SF

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

This story also points out another problematic issue, one that is the focus of the entire collection (or indeed, Jemisin’s entire career): Racial Identity. This issue could probably be the subject of another whole essay, and the fact that I would be excoriated up and down for writing it would be a condemnation of the rigidly politically correct conformist turn SF fandom has taken, and greater society as a whole.

The reason Racial Identity fails in Science Fiction is because there are only a few ways to cover the topic, and they are extremely limited in impact. They’ve been done to death, and there’s virtually no way to breathe new life into them without making them even less authentic.

The first is what you see in this story. Race as an utterly unimportant factor. We are told by the Narrator that it doesn’t matter – that racially specific descriptors are still used but they don’t carry the negative connotations they do (or at least that she claims they do) in our usage. But if the race of the one highlighted character doesn’t matter in a postulated SF world, then guess what, it doesn’t matter at all. The story could be told with a character of any race in that role if it truly did not matter in that world. Race would be mere window dressing. The only use of that character’s race in this story was to bludgeon the reader with accusations of racism while being straw-manned into saying that who she is is somehow shocking.

Even worse, this opens up the author (unless she’s a black woman) to criticisms of tokenism, or ignoring racial issues, or whitewashing over them. Our friend the “Social Worker” could be accused of “Acting White” since her behavior isn’t specifically ethnic. (This unavoidable criticism becomes a straitjacket on the writer.) But addressing that leads to the next sort of problem.

The second way that Racial Identity fails in Science Fiction is a current-day parable set in the future. If your story set a hundred or a thousand years in the future has race relations that haven’t changed a bit from the current day attitudes, then what is the point? Are you saying that they will never improve? Is racial equality a futile dream, destined to be sabotaged forever by society? That’s pretty dismal. But it could be worse …

The third way, rarely seen, is that relations could be even worse. I haven’t yet encountered any in my own reading, but I imagine the result would take the form of stories set in some kind of racial civil war. And even if the author takes the side of the Black Union, the result really isn’t that far from the fever dreams of the readers of The Turner Diaries. Oh, I suppose it might find an audience in the self-loathing white SJWs who hand out Hugos who feel they deserve to see themselves destroyed by proxy, or militant racial separatists on the other side. But are either of these really that large of an audience, and even if they are, do you really want to serve them?

I suppose the fourth is the Inversion tale. But given how the audience for the third way to write these things reacts to an example like Farnham’s Freehold, their desire to read a racial revenge fantasy has to be tempered by the risk of being declared a racist by their fellows.

By the way, you could say the same thing for almost any form of identity politics. And while it’s possible to have these as an element in the worldbuilding of your stories, to make them the centerpiece of your tale simply kneecaps your tale from the outset. There are four ways to do it, but all of them are wrong. Social Justice has made it so, and the only way to get a pass depends on the skin color of the author.

Dr. Mauser, “Message Received”, Shoplifting in the Marketplace of Ideas, 2019-01-30.

May 5, 2022

Paul Wells reviews Davos Man by Peter S. Goodman

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

Paul Wells — now on Substack — considers an unusual-from-a-Canadian-perspective critical book on the World Economic Forum and the people who attend their exclusive shindigs in Davos, Switzerland:

I’ve been reading Peter S. Goodman’s Davos Man, a tough, angry — not entirely persuasive — critique of the sort of people who get top-level access to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Because Goodman’s vantage point is left-by-centre-left, his book provides fascinating counterpoint to a polemic about the WEF that is, in Canada, the almost exclusive preserve of the right.

[…]

Politicians who make a show of having a problem with Davos should explain what the problem is; why they didn’t raise their concerns when cabinet colleagues were lining up to go; and what solutions, if any, they propose. Otherwise they might seem to be faking their indignation to lure a few votes.

Second, it’s easy to see why Davos catastrophism has taken root in some corners of the electorate. We are coming off a COVID pandemic, after all. Very early, only weeks into this historic disaster, the WEF was quick to start discussing visions of a green egalitarian future with prominent roles for green progressive governments and Davos regulars. This was the “Great Reset”, which I discussed here in a magazine. Soon Trudeau was on video calls saying, “This pandemic has provided an opportunity for a reset. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to reimagine economic systems.” Which was jarring. Still is. Soon people were digging up old video of Klaus Schwab, the WEF founder, bragging about “penetrating the cabinets” of Western countries with “Young Global Leaders of the World Economic Forum”.

People who didn’t like everything that’s happened since — vaccines, lockdowns, restrictions — started reading great significance into all kinds of perceived Davos connections. Often Trudeau has seemed eager to help. Replacing his finance minister with the only member of his cabinet who sits on the WEF Board of Trustees, while yet again blathering on about how “we can choose to embrace bold new solutions to the challenges we face and refuse to be held back by old ways of thinking” was … loopy, sure, but it probably only accidentally resembled the second act of a Bond movie.

Bringing an element of novelty to all this is Peter S. Goodman, the Global Economics Correspondent of the New York Times. Even if he were Canadian, nobody should expect Goodman to support Poilievre for Conservative leader. Davos Man is a furious diatribe, not against the WEF as an institution but against many of Davos’s richest regulars — and it’s written from a consistently social-democratic perspective.

From its subtitle, “How the Billionaires Devoured the World”, Davos Man relentlessly skewers some of the most glamorous Davos habitués — Amazon gillionaire Jeff Bezos, Blackstone founder Stephen Schwarzman, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, banker Jamie Dimon, Salesforce guy Marc Benioff. And their, you know, ilk.

“Over recent decades, the billionaire class has ransacked governments by shirking taxes, leaving societies deprived of the resources needed to combat trouble,” Goodman writes. Davos Man — Goodman has borrowed the term from Samuel Huntington — “is a rare and remarkable creature, a predator who attacks without restraint … expanding his territory and seizing the nourishment of others.” Goodman’s language is consistently violent. The billionaires “eviscerate financial regulations”, “defenestrated antitrust authorities”, “squashed the power of labor movements”.

May 3, 2022

England’s class system, as documented by George Orwell and Theodore Dalrymple

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

I occasionally run into articles online that are clearly written to interest someone like me, and this one in Quillette by Laurie Wastell had my full attention from the title onward:

Ever since Marx, the concept of class has been foundational to sociology — as well as to almost everything else. This would not have surprised the German economist, for class, as he saw it, determines all: one’s motivations, one’s social position, even one’s consciousness. Britain, where Marx’s Capital was written, has long been known for its intricate class system, and as such is the source of much writing on the subject. Two of the most acerbic English social critics of the past century, George Orwell and Theodore Dalrymple, take class as a central subject. Drawing on firsthand experience (Orwell as a journalist, Dalrymple as a prison doctor and psychiatrist), both document in detail the suffering and privations of the class below them. Both also contend that a central cause of this poverty is the indifference of the middle and upper classes, a conclusion Marx would surely have agreed with. Yet, despite this, their work stands in flat contradiction to Marx’s central dogma that the material conditions of a society determine everything about it, including class. In their literary journalism, the authors’ social commentaries and insights into the human condition far surpass Marx’s “scientific” analysis.

[…]

That class is a function more of outlook than income was clear to Orwell, as he explains in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, which depicts both the privations of working-class life and the British class system as a whole. Orwell describes how the “lower-upper-middle-class” (Orwell’s own), generally professionals in the “Army, Navy, Church, Medicine [or] Law”, understood and aspired to all the many customs of the upper classes (hunting, servants, how to order dinner correctly) despite never being able to afford them. Thus, “To belong to this class when you were [only] at the £400 a year level was a queer business, for it meant that your gentility was almost purely theoretical.” This same dynamic applies today (though the bourgeois values aspired to now are quite different): a poor librarian is far less likely than a wealthy plumber to have voted for causes like Brexit or Trump, which are both populist and, thus, lower-class.

Themselves men of letters, both Orwell and Dalrymple understand that this class distinction is frequently signalled through language. “As for the technical jargon of the Communists,” writes Orwell, “it is as far removed from the common speech as the language of a mathematical textbook.” Such contorted academic prose means little to the ordinary worker, for whom, Orwell argues, Socialism simply means “justice and common decency”. Indeed, Orwell laments that “the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents” because of their distance from everyday concerns and inability to speak plainly. Summarising the problem, he quips: “The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight”.

A lifelong socialist, Orwell was repeatedly frustrated by the symptoms of this intellectual snobbery — why do the revolutionaries have such disdain for the ordinary punter? Dalrymple, meanwhile, in his essay “How — and How Not — to Love Mankind”, takes aim at its roots. Here, Dalrymple compares the life and work of Marx to his now lesser-known contemporary, Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev. Though their lives closely resembled one another’s, Dalrymple argues, “They nevertheless came to view human life and suffering in very different, indeed irreconcilable, ways — through different ends of the telescope, as it were. Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses. Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances.”

[…]

Both writers criticise intellectuals’ pretentious jargon, but it is worth pausing over how each relates his own social position to their subject matter. In a telling passage of Wigan Pier, Orwell describes the working man who has made it into the middle class, perhaps as a Labour MP or trade union official, as “one of the most desolating spectacles the world contains. He has been picked out to fight for his mates, and all it means to him is a soft job and a chance of ‘bettering’ himself. Not merely while but by fighting the bourgeoisie he becomes bourgeois himself.” The scare quotes reflect Orwell’s mixed feelings about social class: does Orwell not believe that a middle-class career — such as his own — is an improvement over the harsh, backbreaking labour of the miners he so vividly documents? He has hit on a deep dilemma, born of a compassionate humanism that points in contradictory directions.

Ostensibly, Orwell chronicles poverty in order to change it, to shock the comfortable hearts of his readers into action. Yet, at the same time, (romanticising the poor against his own advice), he presents the dirt as liberating: squalor and poverty are in some sense more authentic, more real than bourgeois comforts. Thus, as literary critic John Carey argues, Orwell’s “phobia about lower-class dirt collides head-on with his determination to invest dirt with political value, as the price of liberty.”

May 2, 2022

Cancel Karl Marx? That’s definitely a bridge too far for the woke

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

In the free portion of his Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan considers how other philosophers and statesmen from the age of enlightenment are quickly thrown aside by modern day Progressives, yet one political philosopher remains sacrosanct:

Discrediting a thinker’s broad worldview or legacy by discovering some statement from the distant past revealing him or her to be a bigot by today’s standards is a depressing degeneration in our intellectual life. It speaks of a compulsion to moralize rather than to understand, to shut down rather than expand debate.

Picasso was morally monstrous; but his painting is transcendent. And if you cannot disentangle the two, you are attacking a key liberal principle: that ideas and works of art should be considered on their merits, and not on the virtue or vice of their proponents.

But what makes this illiberalism even more repellent is how selective it is. For a few generations now, critical race theorists have attempted to cancel one Enlightenment thinker after another, excoriating Thomas Jefferson as a bigot and hypocrite, David Hume as a vicious racist, Immanuel Kant of all people for white supremacism. The Age of Reason has been recast as the Era of Hate.

In his new book, The War on the West, Douglas Murray quotes Black Studies professor Kehinde Andrews explaining the rationale for this: “A defense of liberalism is the worst possible thing you want to do. Because liberalism is the problem. It is the Enlightenment values which really cement racial prejudice.” The notion here is that human beings had no tribal, racial prejudices until the Age of Reason dawned. Racial hatred was invented by and is the exclusive property of white people in the last few hundred years. Seriously, that’s what the woke believe.

The attacks on Hume, Jefferson and Kant, moreover, refer to single sentences or asides that represent some of the lazy bigotries of the past. (The entire works of Aristotle and Plato are also on the chopping block because of their retrograde views on slavery, among other things.) And so one wonders if the same standard would apply to every philosopher in the past — way beyond the Enlightenment.

Well, one doesn’t wonder very much … because the bad faith of so much critical theory is a feature and not a bug. The goal is not to see the truth, but to gain power in order to impose their truth. And to accuse you of hate if you dare to demur.

Few examples demonstrate this better than Karl Marx, one of the most repellent anti-Semites and racists of the 19th century. Murray’s treatment is devastating. Let’s cite some of the greatest hits:

    The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation … It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.

Classic “race science” — yet the left pass it by. The following passage could come from Mein Kampf:

    What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man — and turns them into commodities. … The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. … The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.

And this is not just a personal aside or footnote or private correspondence. It’s in a published essay, “On The Jewish Question”, from 1843.

What did Marx think of a multicultural society? Roughly what Richard Spencer believes today. In 1853, Marx wrote of the Balkans that the region had “the misfortune to be inhabited by a conglomerate of different races and nationalities, of which it is hard to say which is the least fit for progress and civilization.”

May 1, 2022

Despite the ever-present smartphone, people are still reading actual books in pretty good numbers

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte provides some mildly hopeful numbers for both readers and writers:

I was having coffee this week with a former star journalist who now (like so many) works in a journalist-adjacent industry. “Who reads books?” she wondered.

It’s a question I’m often asked by journalists who these days get a lot of their information from Twitter. The chore of keeping up with their feed leaves little time for anything else. My guest still read books and belongs to a book club, but she asked the question all the same.

According to the authorities at the PEW Institute, 77% of Americans read books in 2021 (or, to be more precise, read one or more books in one or more format—print, audiobook, ebook). That’s not bad considering only 86% of American adults can read.

Only 21% of women read no books, and 26% of men. Eighty per cent of white people read books (as compared to 62% of Hispanics).

Good news for the future of book reading: 81% of adults under the age of fifty read books compared to 72% of adults over the age of fifty.

More on the demographics: 69% of those earning less than $30,000 a year read books, while 85% of those earning over $75,000 read books; 61% of those with a high-school (or less) education read books; 89% of college graduates read books.

According to PEW, the average reader manages twelve a year.

There is some evidence that reading is a declining habit: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average time spent reading for pleasure declined from twenty-three minutes a day to seventeen minutes a day from 2005 to 2017. But the least decline was among young adults, 18 to 34 (less than 1%).

In fact, there is good evidence that the much-maligned millennials read more than their parents, and they overwhelmingly prefer hard copies to digital books. Even better, the millennials pay for their books:

April 26, 2022

A new guide to classical architecture

Filed under: Architecture, Books — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Ptolemy Dean reviews The Layman’s Guide to Classical Architecture by Quinlan Terry:

Trained in the bleakly grey era of the late 1950’s, the classical architect Quinlan Terry has achieved a remarkable legacy. At the time he embarked on his architectural career, the profession was locked firmly in the postwar austerity of flat-roofed perfunctory modernism, with planar walls of exposed aggregate concrete or unadorned “stretcher bond” brickwork.

This was the “machine age” of mass production of buildings, and it is sometimes hard to remember how restrictive this period must once have been, as so much has happened since. To the more hard-line practitioners of those times, any suggestion of creating buildings with ornament was considered at best eccentric but more often offensive and worthy of censure.

This beautifully produced red-cloth-covered hardback book is therefore a fitting record of a lifetime’s work of studying, drawing and creating new classical buildings. Such buildings are generally defined by the application of the five classical orders of columns handed down to us by the ancient Greeks and Romans. They are beautifully illustrated and explained in this book. There have been centuries of creative re-use of these Classical orders. Italian Renaissance, Palladians, Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians across the world have all offered ever inventive, fresh, new and distinctive reinterpretations of the Classical architectural language.

But, with the arrival of the International Modern Movement, the literal application of classical architecture was dramatically reduced and it was no longer taught in mainstream schools of architecture. For almost a century, Classicism has been seen as largely irrelevant in new building design. This book sets out to explain, in layman’s terms, what each part of the classical assembly is called and how the components can be developed and composed into a harmonious building.

Quinlan Terry’s classical buildings, which are illustrated in elegantly drawn elevations and crisp black and white photographs, illustrate that the selection and interpretation of the language of classicism is a highly personalised choice. Quinlan’s first employer, from 1962, had been Raymond Erith, to whom this book is dedicated. Erith was a gentle practitioner based in rural Essex who weathered the worst of the postwar austerity until his death in 1973.

After that time, and in part due to Erith and Terry’s joint achievement, the climate for making traditionalist buildings steadily improved, and the occasional country house commissions multiplied and expanded into full scale classical country houses on a substantial scale both here and in the United States.

April 17, 2022

The end of the (pandemic-induced) book boom

Filed under: Books, Business, Economics, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte metaphorically collects his winnings from predicting nearly a year back that the boom in book sales during 2020/2021 would not last once the pandemic lockdowns began to ease off:

I noted last June in SHuSH 103, “Big Guys Lose Their Minds”, that book sales, especially for the leading firms — Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Simon & Schuster — were ramping up during the pandemic, reaching 10% to 20% above 2019 levels. I also noted that the numbers were making some of these publishers giddy.

HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray, for instance, gave an interview in which he proclaimed that humanity had entered a new era of permanently higher book sales and added that he was ratcheting up his spending to meet the increased demand.

“We are being aggressive in terms of buying books. We’ve seen the book pie grow, maybe 15 percent,” says Murray, “and so our response, which is part opportunistic and part defensive, is to be aggressive in buying right now. Because if that pie remains large, we want to make sure that we get a nice share of the larger pie … we want to make sure that we have a lot of new, exciting books in the future that will maintain our revenues at the current levels.” Yikes.

In that June newsletter, I anticipated the world returning to normal and book sales falling back to earth as vaccinations took hold and the coronavirus waned (we also promised to check back in a year — so here we are, a few months early).

It did not feel dangerous, that prediction. While it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a temporary spike (or drop) in sales due to extraordinary circumstances and the beginning of a long-term trend, it’s always safest to pick extraordinary-and-temporary amid an unprecedented pandemic with people locked up and not behaving normally. Also, my buddy Jack David at ECW Press agreed with me and he’s been doing this forever. And it wasn’t like Brian Murray had any evidence to back his claim that an era of permanently higher book sales had dawned.

[…]

The share prices of big publishing companies don’t tell the same sort of story because they tend not to be pure-play book publishers: Simon & Schuster, for instance, is owned by multimedia giant Viacom; HarperCollins by the omnipresent Rupert Murdoch; Penguin Random House is less than a quarter of Bertelsmann’s business. But first-quarter 2022 revenue figures for those firms are available and they show that the great give-back is underway in the book world, too.

The headline in Publisher’s Weekly reads “The Book Sales Boom is over”. Here’s the US data:

And that’s just the beginning. Sales will continue to slide throughout 2022 and into 2023 as the world normalizes, people concentrate on doing all the things they’ve not been able to do the past two years, run through the extra cash they accumulated in the pandemic, and resume their former library borrowing habits.

What happens at the big publishing companies? If, as Murray’s comments would lead you to suspect, they’ve budgeted and spent for the good times to continue, unhappy times await.

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