Regarding bicycles, they, like motorcycles, have long since transformed from “a means of locomotion” to “a lifestyle”. Note that I’m only talking about AINO here. Everyone has heard that “more bicycles than people in the Netherlands” factoid, and Euros do seem to love them some bikes, but I haven’t spent enough time over there to say much about it. Here in the Former America, though, anyone who rides a bicycle past age 16 falls into one of two broad groups: 1) they’re nature lovers who want to be out in the countryside but for various reasons can’t take up hiking, or 2) they’re preening, posturing, virtue-signaling, passive-aggressive assholes. The latter outnumber the former about 5,000 to 1.
I’m deliberately discounting bicycles as a means of locomotion, you’ll notice, because look: America is a car society. Our cities are designed for cars. Indeed, given the vast distances involved over here, cars are what make our lifestyle possible. Europeans who haven’t been here, or who only visit the big tourist pits like NYC and LA, don’t get this. Even if you’ve seen the maps, it doesn’t really register until you experience it. I’m just guessing here, for purposes of explanation, but it really does seem to be the case that if it were possible to hop in your car and drive two hours due east from downtown Paris, you’d pass through three or four countries. There are lots of American cities where, if it were possible to hop in your car and drive two hours straight from downtown, you’d still be in that same city. The continental US is just mind-bogglingly huge; only Russians and maybe Australians share our mental maps. When you’ve got daily commutes that run an hour, hour and a half on freeways, setting anything up with bicycles in mind is just ludicrous.
Severian, “Cars, Bikes, Motorcycles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-25.
April 11, 2024
QotD: North America will never be a “bicycle” culture
April 5, 2024
QotD: When the faculty lounge turned nasty over the electric vehicle charging stations
Not because academics are worried about anything so prole as hypocrisy — as we know, cognitive dissonance only affects the Dirt People — but because eggheads operate on a different scale of values. Bentleys etc. are what those people drive … so professors have to kick it bobo style. Thus the faculty lot is filled with Priuses (Prii?), Teslas, and so forth. Back when The Simpsons was funny, it had a throwaway joke about Ed Begley Jr. driving a car so eco-friendly, it was powered entirely by his own sense of self-regard. If they actually marketed those, every professor in America would have one … but since they don’t, the “eco-pimp my ride” competition continues unabated.
Which is hilarious for two reasons. First, there isn’t — there won’t be, there can’t be — sufficient infrastructure to support more than a token few electric vehicles (EVs). Flyover State is nothing if not eco-friendly, though, and so they fell all over themselves giving the faculty charging stations … but see above: All they could manage was one charging station per level, in one parking garage. Which naturally led to much agonizing in the Faculty Senate, not to mention the student newspaper, the town newspaper, and every boutique coffee place and head shop in College Town. How can charging station time be most equitably distributed? Does the Lesbian Negress outweigh (supply your own joke here, please) the White FTM tranny? What about the genderfluid hemophiliac Inuit? Where does the wingless golden-skinned dragonkin rank?
Severian, “Luxury Beliefs”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-03.
April 1, 2024
QotD: The anatomy of the April Fool’s joke
The AFJ, as a distinct art form, uses the methods of parody and satire to achieve the condition of hoax. It is a subtle art, because the objective of the AFJ author is to achieve suspension of disbelief in the reader, then strain it as near as possible to the breaking point without actually snapping it. This is how the AFJ is distinct from a normal instrumental hoax, for which it is good play not to strain the suspension of disbelief at all.
The AFJ author aims at the strongest possible moment of cognitive rupture – when the reader realizes it was a joke and his perception of the content undergoes a catastrophic lurch. In the hands of a true master the rupture induced by AFJ can become something akin to a Zen moment of enlightenment, changing the reader’s relationship to the subject of the hoax in a lasting way.
There are four levels of possible reader reaction to an AFJ:
Level the Zeroth: AFJ attempted, humor not achieved.
Level the First: Obvious humor, immediate cognitive rupture. The reader instantly catches on that an AFJ is in progress, and laughs. Perhaps he entertains fleetingly the thought that others less perceptive than he might take it seriously.
Level the Second: The reader is briefly taken in, but reaches some assertion or train of phrase that strains his credulity past the breaking point. He re-evaluates what he has read, enjoys the rest as a joke, and entertains rather more seriously the thought that the less perspicacious might be fooled.
Level the Third: The reader swallows it all, hook line and sinker; cognitive rupture does not occur until afterwards, he realizes (or has someone point out to him) that it is April 1st and he has been had.
Level the Fourth: The reader swallows it all, has it pointed out that the work is an AFJ, experiences cognitive rupture, and then repairs the rupture by insisting that the hoax is actually true!
You have achieved the fourth level of mastery of the AFJ when you utter examples in which the distribution of responses includes a large number of Level Threes and a handful of Level Fours. Achieving too many Level Four reactions goes over the line from an AFJ into founding a religion; that is not the AFJ author’s objective, though some examples of hoaxes such as Discordianism and the Rosicrucian Manifestos resemble long-form AFJs and straddle the dividing line with religion in interesting ways.
Eric S. Raymond, “The Four Levels of AFJ Mastery”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-04-02.
March 19, 2024
QotD: “Not In Our Name”
Mark Steyn, “Omar’s Girls”, National Post, 2001-11-29.
March 17, 2024
Green Beer (You Suck at Cooking) Episode 87
You Suck At Cooking
Published Mar 17, 2019The history of Ireland is a long and storied one, and one I know next to nothing about. The history of St. Patrick is a short one, relative to the length of the history of the world. The current St. Patrick’s day celebrating has little or nothing to do with the actual St. Patrick, and that’s the way we like it.
The first step to making green beer is to add a few drops of food coloring, then add beer. When selecting a glass to drink it out of, make sure it’s transparent, that way you are able to see the green part of the beer not only from the top or from within the stomach, but also from the side while drinking beer.
While pouring the beer, making sure not to pour it from a great height. This will decrease the amount of bubbles that end up in the beer when you are drinking it, and therefore the enjoyment. If you were aware of the lengths that the manufacturers went to in order to get bubbles inside of that beer in the first place, you wouldn’t even drink it at all.
While drinking the beer, make sure you don’t allow the beer to come into contact with anything that could get stained, such as your clothes, dog, or mouth. If you swallow quickly enough you can keep your mouth from turning green permanently.
If you dislike drinking beverages that are colored green but want to get into the festive spirit, simply tape green construction paper around your drinking vessel, and dye your beer purple instead.
March 9, 2024
Titania McGrath – From parody to prophecy
Andrew Doyle‘s imaginary Social Justice Warrior known as Titania McGrath was created as a satire on some of the more extreme goings on among SJWs … today, her work can be seen as amazingly accurate prophecy of how our culture has deteriorated thanks in no small degree to the very, very woke:
“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle
Today is the fifth anniversary of the publication of Titania McGrath’s acclaimed book Woke: A Guide to Social Justice. I created this intersectional activist and slam poet in order to satirise this new intolerant and authoritarian identity-obsessed religion and its stranglehold on society. Having seen so many posh and entitled activists berating working-class straight white people for their privilege, I could think of no more appropriate reaction than mockery. Even Harry Windsor was at it. And he’s an actual prince.
Five years on, and I cannot decide whether I find it funny or depressing that so many of Titania’s ideas in that book ended up becoming reality. Nothing that Titania was ever able to suggest has not eventually been outdone by real-life activists. It is as though they were reading her book for inspiration.
For instance, in a chapter from Woke entitled “Towards an Intersectional Socialist Utopia”, Titania makes the following observation:
Capitalism, after all, is a singularly male phenomenon. The ultimate symbol of capitalism, the skyscraper, is nothing more than a giant cock on the horizon, fucking the heavens.
Sixteen months after the book was published, this article appeared in the Guardian:
Or what about this passage from a chapter in Woke called “White Death”? Here, Titania calls out Hellen Keller for her white privilege:
Consider, if you will, the example of white American author Helen Keller (1880–1968). Even though she was left deaf and blind following an illness as a baby, she still managed to study for a degree, write twelve books and travel the world to give lectures. This kind of privilege is staggering.
Compare this with an article that appeared in Time magazine over a year later, in which the author writes:
However, to some Black disability rights activists, like Anita Cameron, Helen Keller is not radical at all, “just another, despite disabilities, privileged white person”, and yet another example of history telling the story of privileged white Americans.
And how about this tweet from October 2019, in which Titania had some advice for dog owners:
The subsequent outrage ensured that the tweet went viral. And just a couple of months ago, a leading pet talent agency in the UK called Urban Paws was asking owners whether their cats or dogs identified as “gender neutral” or “non-binary”.
After the backlash, the company claimed that it was a mistake. But the specific addition of a “gender identity” category on an application is hardly the equivalent of a typo.
QotD: Reading for snobs
Megan McArdle, writing as “Jane Galt”, Asymmetrical Information, 2004-12.
February 23, 2024
QotD: Eating roti
You roll the roti up and eat the curry like a bear eating a Cub Scout in a sleeping bag.
Steve H., “Roti Stuffed With Curry: Green and Mean”, Hog on Ice, 2005-01-01.
February 18, 2024
“Please, sir, can we have some more Roads?”
Every week, Tristin Hopper helps us understand an element of the week’s news by “imagining” the diary entries of the people or organizations involved. This week, it’s the turn of federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, who had a hell of a week even by Trudeaupian standards:
Monday
There was a time when I was naïve enough to think that the climate crisis could be solved with mere emissions reductions or alternative energy. But it becomes more clear every day that Canada can never hope to meet its climate goals unless we’re prepared to remove redundancies from our economic system.Do we really need to produce any more music? I feel humanity has pretty well covered what a guitar or a trumpet can do; why waste scarce energy to continue heating concert halls or power tour buses? We have a food system that irresponsibly makes no distinction between the carbon footprint of certain foods: We cannot hope to be a climate leader if Canadians continue to eat prawns when a few strips of jicama could suffice.
And above all, this country is positively drowning in unnecessary roads. When the average Albertan starts up his masculinity-compensating coal-rolling monster truck and drives it for hours on a rural Canadian highway without seeing a soul, does it not cross his mind that some resources have been wasted? That man would be fitter, happier and richer if he’d instead been able to make the trip by the eminently more efficient method of bicycle, gondola or monorail.
Tuesday
“Steven Guilbeault wants to ban roads,” they say. But this is not a road ban. Provinces and municipalities can still build all the roads they want. If you and your buddies pool your money for some asphalt and graders — and I decide that it meets all necessary requirements for environmental mitigation, reconciliation and gender-based impacts — then pave away.We’ve merely correctly decided that roads are a wholly inappropriate concern for a Canadian federal government. The task of government is to focus on the fundamentals such as inclusion initiatives for federally regulated industries and means-tested dental subsidies. Things that could not exist if not done by the state.
Anybody can build a few hundred kilometres of glorified driveway.
Wednesday
I’m honestly appalled at the road-worship exhibited in recent days by my Conservative colleagues. I knew they had a regressive fixation on guns, trucks and plastic straws, but even I did not suspect a mass-genuflection for mere strips of asphalt, gravel and whatever else roads are made out of.But perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. Where else but on a road can one pursue the right-wing fantasies of unfettered resource extraction or colonialist subjugation? Where is their law-and-order militarism without latticeworks of slick, black tarmac to survey and control the citizenry? When armed capitalistic thugs violently crushed the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919, how did they get there? That’s right; roads.
February 15, 2024
QotD: Multitasking is a myth
Slasher: Someone who works in multitask mode
Oh no, I don’t like that. Multitasking is a myth. Multitasking means simultaneously doing lots of things equally badly. A Jack of all failures? No thanks. Let’s see if there’s an alternative description …
Slashers come from all walks of life, and are also referred to as “hustlers”/”work-a-holics”. They are prone to work endlessly in pursuit of accomplishing their goals because of their thirst and hunger for success &/or personal fulfilment.
Almost right: the thirst and hunger come from not being paid on time. This can leave a slasher feeling poor SLASH homeless.
Alistair Dabbs, “Multitasking is a myth: It means doing lots of things equally badlySome people just like to take the p*ss”, The Register, 2019-09-27.
February 11, 2024
Charlie Angus, Canada’s one-man campaign for struggle sessions, re-education, and prison for people who say things he doesn’t like
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper imagines the inside thoughts of NDP MP Charlie Angus, who introduced a Private Member’s Bill this week to criminalize speech that even hints at not being fully onboard with Team Climate Catastrophe, especially anything supporting the use of fossil fuels:
“Charlie Angus at convention 2023 2 (cropped)” by DrOwl19 is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
.
Monday
It’s an odd thing to work in the House of Commons; a place where the country’s most cynical, power-mad misanthropes are gathered together into one distilled mass of treachery.This is why I aligned myself with the only true bastion of moral rectitude in this wretched, faithless town. The NDP does not court power, and thus remains untainted by it. Only by insulating ourselves against the corrupting lure of ambition can we truly know we are on the right side of history.
And today, more than ever, I know the only true moral course is to introduce a federal program of jailing any Canadian who expresses positive opinions of a non-renewable fuel source. Not every Canadian, mind you, just those who can’t provide evidence that an oil company doesn’t indirectly benefit them in some way.
Tuesday
As predicted, the usual agents of disinformation have libelled my bill as “illiberal” or “fascistic”. We’ll prescribe appropriate criminal consequences for this kind of mendacity in due course, but for now I would only ask these deceit-merchants to consider what we’re up against.Oil companies are, quite literally, the knowing architects of the complete destruction of the human race. If the so-called “market” had been left to its own devices, the world would currently be a utopia of bottomless green energy. But instead, the oil and gas industry has tricked humanity into believing that fossil fuels are bringers of anything except slavery.
Against this kind of perfidy, I was forced to devise legislation that was broad enough to eliminate any conceivable loophole. If we banned pro-oil commercials, they would simply pour their advertising dollars into billboards. If we banned billboards, they would start embedding secret pro-gasoline messages in popular music. If we banned that, they would train armies of crows to attack e-cyclists while cawing the words “Suncor” and “pipelines”.
And you know what they would say when I tabled a bill to ban the attack crows? They would call it “illiberal”.
February 2, 2024
Perhaps something for Wodehouse fans who want a bit more sex and violence in their fiction
At The Conservative Woman, Alan Ashworth recommends a book by one of P.G. Wodehouse’s disciples, but only for those who are ready for Plum-like wit with “lashings of sex, violence, murder and drunkenness”:
If, like me, you have read every line of PG Wodehouse’s 90-odd books – at least half a dozen times each in the case of the Jeeves novels – your attention might be piqued, if piqued is the word I seek, by one of the Master’s disciples. His name is Kyril Bonfiglioli.
In a trilogy about an art dealer named Charlie Mortdecai based loosely on himself, Bonfiglioli, or Bon as his friends and enemies called him, combines a Woosterish turn of phrase with lashings of sex, violence, murder and drunkenness. Mortdecai is snobbish, greedy, lustful, unscrupulous, untrustworthy, gloriously politically incorrect and hilarious to boot.
The first book, Don’t Point That Thing At Me, was published in 1973, two years before Wodehouse died. In a short foreword, Bon writes: “This is not an autobiographical novel: it is about some other portly, dissolute, immoral and middle-aged art dealer.”
The action begins with Mortdecai in his Mayfair mansion burning a gilt picture frame in the fireplace. He, of course, has a sidekick whose name begins with J but Jock has little in common with Bertie Wooster’s loyal manservant. As Bon puts it, “Jock is a sort of anti-Jeeves; silent, resourceful, respectful even, when the mood takes him, but sort of drunk all the time, really, and fond of smashing people’s faces in. You can’t run a fine-arts business these days without a thug and Jock is one of the best in the trade … his idea of a civil smile is rolling back part of his upper lip from a long, yellow dogtooth. It frightens me.
“Having introduced Jock – his surname escapes me, I should think it would be his mother’s – I suppose I had better give a few facts about myself. I am in the prime of life, if that tells you anything, of barely average height, of sadly over-average weight and am possessed of the intriguing remains of rather flashy good looks. (Sometimes, in a subdued light and with my tummy tucked in, I could almost fancy me myself.) I like art and money and dirty jokes and drink. I am very successful. I discovered at my goodish second-rate public school that almost anyone can win a fight if he is prepared to put his thumb into the other fellow’s eye.”
Charlie is receiving a visit from a fat policeman named Martland who suspects him, correctly, of involvement in the theft of a Goya from Madrid five days earlier.
“Somewhere in the trash he reads, Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun. In he pranced, all silent and catlike and absurd, buttocks swaying noiselessly. ‘Don’t get up,’ he sneered, when he saw that I had no intention of doing so. ‘I’ll help myself, shall I?’
“Ignoring the more inviting bottles on the drinks tray, he unerringly snared the great Rodney decanter from underneath and poured himself a gross amount of what he thought would be my Taylor ’31. A score to me already, for I had filled it with Invalid Port of an unbelievable nastiness. He didn’t notice: score two to me. Of course he is only a policeman.”
Martland features heavily in the ensuing romp, which involves several murders, a journey across America in a Rolls-Royce, a nymphomaniac millionairess and a remote cave near Silverdale, Lancashire.
January 29, 2024
QotD: Amtrak’s improvements
No, Amtrak is in good shape. The cars have been rebuilt, the blankets no longer draw blood when they come in contact with human skin, the tracks are smoother, and the Pit of Hazy Death — the snack car — is now smoke-free.
That means it’s not packed with throaty-voiced semi-toothed drifters who emit a Pompeii-sized cloud of ash every time they start in on one of those up-from-the-ankles 20-minute hacking fits. And somehow — don’t ask me how — the general aromatic profile of the train is no longer “feet, with a top note of septic tank.” The train actually smelled good. Bravo, Amtrak.
James Lileks, “A windy narrative of a trip to Chicago”, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, 2004-12-19.
January 25, 2024
The Bathtub Hoax and debunked medieval myths
David Friedman spends a bit of time debunking some bogus but widely believed historical myths:
“Image” by Lauren Knowlton is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .
The first is a false story that teaches a true lesson — the U.S. did treat Amerinds unjustly in a variety of contexts, although the massive die off as a result of the spread of Old World diseases was a natural result of contact, not deliberate biological warfare. The second lets moderns feel superior to their ignorant ancestors; most people like feeling superior to someone.
Another example of that, deliberately created by a master, is H.L. Mencken’s bathtub hoax, an entirely fictitious history of the bathtub published in 1917:
The article claimed that the bathtub had been invented by Lord John Russell of England in 1828, and that Cincinnatian Adam Thompson became acquainted with it during business trips there in the 1830s. Thompson allegedly went back to Cincinnati and took the first bath in the United States on December 20, 1842. The invention purportedly aroused great controversy in Cincinnati, with detractors claiming that its expensive nature was undemocratic and local doctors claiming it was dangerous. This debate was said to have spread across the nation, with an ordinance banning bathing between November and March supposedly narrowly failing in Philadelphia and a similar ordinance allegedly being effective in Boston between 1845 and 1862. … Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was claimed to have campaigned for the bathtub against remaining medical opposition in Boston; the American Medical Association supposedly granted sanction to the practice in 1850, followed by practitioners of homeopathy in 1853.
According to the article, then-Vice President Millard Fillmore visited the Thompson bathtub in March 1850 and having bathed in it became a proponent of bathtubs. Upon his accession to the presidency in July of that year, Fillmore was said to have ordered the construction of a bathtub in the White House, which allegedly refueled the controversy of providing the president with indulgences not enjoyed by George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. Nevertheless, the effect of the bathtub’s installation was said to have obliterated any remaining opposition, such that it was said that every hotel in New York had a bathtub by 1860. (Wikipedia)
Writing more than thirty years later, Mencken claimed to have been unable to kill the story despite multiple retractions. A google search for [Millard Fillmore bathtub] demonstrates that it is still alive. Among other hits:
The first bathtub placed in the White House is widely believed to have had been installed in 1851 by President Millard Fillmore (1850-53). (The White House Bathrooms & Kitchen)
Medieval
The desire of moderns to feel superior to their ancestors, helps explain a variety of false beliefs about the Middle Ages including the myth, discussed in detail in an earlier post, that medieval cooking was overspiced to hide the taste of spoiled meat.
Other examples:
Medieval witch hunts: Contrary to popular belief, large scale persecution of witches started well after the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval church viewed the belief that Satan could give magical powers to witches, on which the later prosecutions were largely based, as heretical. The Spanish Inquisition, conventionally blamed for witchcraft prosecutions, treated witchcraft accusations as a distraction from the serious business of identifying secret Jews and Muslims, dealt with such accusations by applying serious standards of evidence to them.
Chastity Belts: Supposedly worn by the ladies of knights off on crusade. The earliest known evidence of the idea of a chastity belt is well after the end of the crusades, a 15th century drawing, and while there is literary evidence for their occasional use after that no surviving examples are known to be from before the 19th century.
Ius Prima Noctae aka Droit de Seigneur was the supposed right of a medieval lord to sleep with a bride on her wedding night. Versions of the institution are asserted in a variety of sources going back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, but while it is hard to prove that it never existed in the European middle ages it was clearly never the norm.
The Divine Right of Kings: Various rulers through history have claimed divine sanction for their rule but “The Divine Right of Kings” is a doctrine that originated in the sixteenth and seventeenth century with the rise of absolute monarchy — Henry VIII in England, Louis XIV in France. Medieval rulers were absolute in neither theory or practice. The feudal relation was one of mutual obligation, in its simplest form protection by the superior in exchange for set obligations of support by the inferior. In practice the decentralized control of military power under feudalism presented difficulties for a ruler who wished to overrule the desires of his nobility, as King John discovered.
Some fictional history functions in multiple versions designed to support different causes. The destruction of the Library of Alexandria has been variously blamed on Julius Caesar, Christian mobs rioting against pagans, and the Muslim conquerors of Egypt, the Caliph Umar having supposedly said that anything in the library that was true was already in the Koran and anything not in the Koran was false. There is no good evidence for any of the stories. The library existed in classical antiquity, no longer exists today, but it is not known how it was destroyed and it may have just gradually declined.
January 13, 2024
History RE-Summarized: The Byzantine Empire
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 29 Sept 2023The Byzantines (Blue’s Version) – a project that took an almost unfathomable amount of work and a catastrophic 120+ individual maps. I couldn’t be happier.
SOURCES & Further Reading:
“Byzantium” I, II, and III by John Julius Norwich, The Byzantine Republic: People and Power in New Rome by Anthony Kaldellis, The Alexiad by Anna Komnene, Osman’s Dream: The History of the Ottoman Empire by Caroline Finkel, Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History by John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich. I also have a degree in classical civilization.Additionally, the most august of thanks to our the members of our discord community who kindly assisted me with so much fantastic supplemental information for the scripting and revision process: Jonny, Catia, and Chehrazad. Thank you for reading my nonsense, providing more details to add to my nonsense, and making this the best nonsense it can be.
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