As a bumptious adolescent in upstate New York, I stumbled on a British collection of Oscar Wilde’s epigrams in a secondhand bookstore. It was an electrifying revelation, a text that I studied like the bible. What bold, scathing wit, cutting through the sentimental fog of those still rigidly conformist early 1960s, when good girls were expected to simper and defer.
But I never fully understood Wilde’s caustic satire of Victorian philanthropists and humanitarians until the present sludgy tide of political correctness began flooding government, education, and media over the past two decades. Wilde saw the insufferable arrogance and preening sanctimony in his era’s self-appointed guardians of morality.
We’re back to the hypocrisy sweepstakes, where gestures of virtue are as formalized as kabuki. Humor has been assassinated. An off word at work or school will get you booted to the gallows. This is the graveyard of liberalism, whose once noble ideals have turned spectral and vampiric.
Camille Paglia, “Hillary wants Trump to win again”, Spectator USA, 2018-12-04.
November 23, 2022
QotD: Humour and political correctness
November 22, 2022
QotD: The obligatory orgy scene
It seems that all opera productions these days need an orgy scene, just as doctoral theses in the Soviet Union used to need at least one quotation from Lenin. There was a time when an orgy would have been censored, but now it is obligatory — no opera without one. There was a brief orgy scene in the last Flying Dutchman that I saw, and it was a bit of a relief when they got it over with because I knew that it must be coming and tension mounted until it did. It was a bit like childhood diseases in the old days: The sooner you had them, the quicker you got over them.
The problem with orgies is that once you’ve see one, you’ve seen them all, and these days they are staged literally rather than suggestively, as if the aging audience has to be reminded of what sex actually is. Moreover, they are staged like a tableau of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, the fin de siècle compendium of what used to be called, in those far-off judgmental days, perversions. The implicit, however, is more powerful than the explicit, or it used to be. The explicit, in fact, is the enemy of the voluptuous.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Adding Injury to Insult”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-01-20
November 21, 2022
City Minutes: Colonial America
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Jul 2022Colonial-era North America was a busy place, so let’s take a quick look through some of the major players from the perspective of the lands & cities they inhabited.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Lectures from The Great Courses: “1759 Quebec – Battle For North America” from The Decisive Battles of World History by Gregory Aldrete, “The American Revolution” from Foundations of Western Civilization II by Robert Bucholz, “North American Peoples and Tribes” from Big History of Civilizations by Craig Benjamin, “The Iroquois and Algonquians Before Contact” from Ancient Civilizations of North America by Edwin Barnhart, “Iroquoia and Wendake in the 1600s”, “Indian-European Encounters 1700-1750”, “The Seven Years War in Indian Country” and “The American Revolution Through Native Eyes” from Native Peoples of North America by Daniel M. Cobb, Britannica articles “New York” & “Boston” https://www.britannica.com/place/New-… & https://www.britannica.com/place/Bost…
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November 18, 2022
“WOLLT IHR DEN TOTALEN TWEET?“
When German public TV is willing to invoke literal Nazi imagery, you know the Twitter situation has gotten out of hand:
After Germany’s “first” public television network, ARD, compared Elon Musk reducing Twitter censorship to “letting rats out of their holes”, Germany’s “second” public television network, ZDF, has now compared Musk to Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels! (The network’s name Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen literally means “Second German Television”.)
Thus, last Friday, ZDF’s would-be comedy program, the “Heute Show”, posted the below tweet and photoshop.
The Tweet reads: “Thanks to Elon Musk, you’re allowed to say anything again on Twitter! Total freedom of speech! #heuteshow.” The caption, whose color scheme and font invoke Nazi-era propaganda, reads “Do you want total tweet?” It is an allusion to Goebbels’s 1943 speech at the Berlin Sportspalast, in which the Nazi Minister of Propaganda famously shouted, “Do you want total war?” – in response to which audience members leapt to their feet shouting “Yes!” and raising their arms in the Hitler-salute.
The background image appears to show a Nazi Party rally with the swastikas replaced by the Twitter bird logo. Two smaller swastikas are still visible in the lower left-hand corner of the full-size image.
Leaving aside the extreme mental contortionism required to associate freedom of speech with Nazi Germany, if ever there was a don’t-throw-stones-in-glass-houses moment, this was it. For, as so happens, during the Second World War, the founding director of ZDF, Karl Holzamer, himself served in one of the propaganda units that none other than Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda embedded with the different divisions of the Germany military.
Holzamer served in a propaganda unit of the Luftwaffe or German air force. As noted in a 2012 article titled “Goebbels’s Soldiers” in the German daily Die Frankfurter Rundschau, Holzamer was embedded with the Luftwaffe during its April 1941 bombing of Belgrade and was “the first” to report on the German subjugation of the Yugoslav capital.
November 13, 2022
Carrying on about the Carry On movies
In The Critic, Alexander Larman looks back at one of the longest-running film series beginning with 1958’s Carry On Sergeant (not to be confused with the earlier — and reputedly terrible — interwar Canadian film of the same name) and continuing with many more until the filmic disaster of Carry On Emmanuelle in 1978 (there was also a 1992 attempt to revive the franchise, which failed):
In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, it is decreed by the contrarian history master, Irwin, that “if George Orwell had lived, nothing is more certain than that he would have written an essay on the Carry On films”.
We are invited to take Irwin’s instructions that the Carry On films represent a valuable insight into British social history with suitable detachment. (The precise, suitably pompous quote is that “while they have no intrinsic merit, they acquire some of the permanence of art simply by persisting, and acquire an incremental significance if only as social history”.)
Yet Irwin (or Bennett) was almost certainly right that, had Orwell survived into the Sixties and Seventies, he would have found the Carry On film series both repellent and fascinating. It is literature’s, and history’s, loss that we do not have an account of Orwell’s thoughts on the antics of Charles Hawtrey, Kenneth Williams, Barbara Windsor et al.
In 1941, Orwell wrote of postcards by the cheerfully lowbrow artist Donald McGill that “your first impression is one of overpowering vulgarity” and that “what you are really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European consciousness”. He goes on to say that “jokes barely different from McGill’s could casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare’s tragedies”.
[…]
The joy of watching the Carry On films, then, is twofold. On the one hand, the hackneyed stories, two-dimensional characterisation and laboured puns and innuendo can be enjoyable, on a purely basic level, but hardly threaten to aspire to the levels of great art.
Yet on the other, the cheerfully Rabelaisian sentiments of the pictures — in which all men and women are defined purely in sexual and scatological terms — exist on a level of reductio ad absurdum.
It is no coincidence that the best Carry On films contain a vein of social satire in their mocking of great British institutions, whether it be the NHS, MI5, the army or the Raj, and the final set piece of Carry On Up The Khyber — in which the stiff-upper-lip British occupiers ignore the Afghan invaders while taking formal dinner in black tie — rises to a level of surrealist genius that would have made Buñuel proud.
There is occasional talk of making another Carry On film, but with all the principal cast (save the ever-sprightly Dale) now dead and with the world a very different place, it is impossible to imagine that we will ever see, say, Carry On Tweeting or the like.
There is every possibility that a really top-notch cast could be assembled, if there was any serious intent behind it — I would love to see Andrew Scott, for instance, offer a more dynamic take on the kind of roles that Williams essayed, because he would do so brilliantly, and if the script could be written by the award-winning likes of Patrick Marber or Richard Bean, it could be a thing of innuendo-heavy beauty.
But then the Carry On series never was a thing of beauty. In its grim and hilarious way, it took every British national stereotype, pulled its trousers down, and gave it a hearty slap on its bare buttocks. Some might find this offensive; others might mourn its loss from public life.
In either case, we shall not look upon its like again. Dr Nookey, Francis Bigger, Professor Inigo Tinkle, Vic Flange: your services are no longer required. To which unkind cut we must solemnly say: “Ooh, matron.”
November 12, 2022
SUPERCUT – Every Window Cameo in Batman (1966-1968)
Tommy Westphall’s Snowglobe
Published 14 Jan 2020The dynamic duo’s show of the 60s was fond of celebrity cameos. Here is a Supercut of every single one of them.
In order of appearance:
1. Jerry Lewis
2. George Cisar (from the 1966 film)
3. Dick Clark
4. Van Williams and Bruce Lee as The Green Hornet and Kato from The Green Hornet
5. Sammy Davis Jr.
6. Bill Dana as José Jiménez
7. Howard Duff as of Sam Stone from Felony Squad
8. Werner Klemperer as Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes
9. Ted Cassidy as Lurch from The Addams Family
10. Don Ho
11. Santa Claus
12. Art Linkletter
13. Edward G. Robinson
14. Suzy Knickerbocker
15. The Carpet King
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November 10, 2022
QotD: Sarah’s rules of art
And why was this a bad idea, Sarah?
Mostly because I’m married to a mathematician. There is a certain … ah … compulsiveness that comes with it. If there’s something that’s numbered and has a route, we OF COURSE have to follow the route and see every single statue, even if that’s not what we set out to do.
This made things very interesting, since the wedding parties were blocking some of the statues, and others we could see from a distance were the sort of modern art that your kids could do with a backyard forge, meaning the actual level of artistry was about the level of a kindergartner, only they used metal instead of playdough.
This leads us to Sarah’s first rule of art: if people viewing it have trouble telling it from accidental formations, it’s probably not art.
The second corollary of this is: if you need an elaborate card pointing out to you that it’s art, it’s probably not art.
The third would be that if you need a placard explaining to you how daring and courageous this art is, and how it defied some tyrannical regime at great peril to the artist’s life, it’s not only not art, you’re in the presence of a self-aggrandizing conman.
Sarah Hoyt, “Art and Revolution”, According to Hoyt, 2019-05-31.
November 4, 2022
QotD: History while it’s happening
Well, future historian, since I know how much that sucks, I’ll spare you. If you’re plowing through my papers (you’re welcome for all the Slave Leia pictures, by the way) and you get to the “Impeachment of Donald Trump” section, you’ll have something. Maybe nothing interesting, or particularly coherent, but at least it’s something. Professional courtesy.
If nothing else, this impeachment fiasco confirms that we’re ruled by fools. No earth-shattering insight, that, I realize, but there it is. Really it’s just math — since most people in all times and places have been fools, it stands to reason that nearly every human who has ever lived has had a large part of his fate decided by an idiot. This is true even of those blessed to have seen good leadership in action, as even the best men are fools about lots of things. Up to and including the things that make their reputations. George Washington, for instance, was indisputably a great leader, but a terrible general — with Cornwallis trapped on the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia, he had to be talked out of moving the Continental Army north, to reconquer New York. He was one of history’s great captains, but I bet I could take him in a game of Risk.
Severian, “Impeachment Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-19.
October 31, 2022
Halloween Special: The Wild Hunt
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 30 Oct 2020It’s a Halloween special AND a miscellaneous myth! Who could ask for more? Today let’s dive into a very spooktacular folkloric motif and get real in the spirit of the season!
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October 28, 2022
The real tech startup lifecycle
Dave Burge (aka @Iowahawk on the Twits) beautifully encapsulates the lifecycle of most successful tech startups:
I like the thing where people assume everybody working at Twitter is a computer science PhD slinging 5000 lines of code daily with stacks of job offers for Silicon Valley headhunters, and not a small army of 27-year old cat lady hall monitors
Successful social media companies begin in a shed with 12 coders, and end up in a sumptuous glass tower with 1200 HR staffers, 2000 product managers, 5000 salespeople, 20 gourmet chefs, and 12 coders
True story, I was in SV a few weeks ago and visited a startup that’s gone from $4MM to $100+MM rev in 2 years. HQ currently cramped office with 30-40 coders in a strip mall, but moving to office tower soon. I’m like, man, you’ll eventually be missing this.
Why do successful tech companies have so many seemingly useless employees? For the same reason recording stars have entourages
Here’s the sociology: 5 coders form startup. Least embarrassing one becomes CEO. The other ones, CFO, COO, CMO, and best coder becomes CTO.
Company gets big; CFO, COO CMO hold a dick measuring contest to hire the biggest dept.
CTO still wants to be the only coder.
I suspect it really does takes 1000 or more developers to keep Twitter running; backend, DB, security, adtech/martech etc. But I’d guess a significant # of Twitter devs are basically translating what triggers the cat ladies into AI algorithms.
History Summarized: Mycenaean Greece & the Bronze Age Collapse
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 24 Jun 2022I’m pronouncing Mycenaean & Mycenae with a hard “K” sound because that’s how it sounds in Greek, and I would not be so impolite as to mispronounce the name of the first Greek-speaking civilization in history. (The name of “Mycenae” can be spelled Μυκῆναι or Μυκήνη, and I’m using the first one: mee-KEE-neh)
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September 30, 2022
History Re-Summarized: The Roman Empire
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 16 Sept 2022
The plot twist of Rome is that it was always a mess, now sit back and enjoy the marble-covered mayhem.This video is a Remastered, Definitive Edition of three previous videos from this channel — “History Summarized: The Roman Empire”, “History Hijinks: Rome’s Crisis of the Third Century”, and “History Summarized: The Fall of Rome”. This video combines them all into one narrative, fully upgrading all of the visuals and audio, with a substantially re-written script in parts 1 and 3.
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September 22, 2022
QotD: In my 20s … and in my 40s
Me in my 40s: Sleeps with head at slightly different angle than usual. Spends 3 weeks taking painkillers for neck pain whilst sobbing and wondering if my life will ever be the same again.
Amanda (@Pandamoanimum), Twitter, 2022-06-13.
September 19, 2022
“… the Royal Family has always seemed less like a business enterprise than a giant open-air prison”
The editors at The Line have a rather unusual view of the monarchy, or perhaps more accurately, of the Royal Family itself:
The Royal Family at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping of the Colour, 30 June, 2015.
Photo by Robert Payne via Wikimedia Commons.
We have a soft spot for the monarchy, here at The Line. We believe that as an organizing principle of our system of government, the Crown provides a decent balance between effectiveness and accountability. And while the idea of our head of state residing in a foreign country seems perverse, as a practical matter the physical distancing of the sovereign in London, and the institutional distancing via the Governor General, helps Canada sidestep what would otherwise be yet another occasion for national recrimination.
So, call it two cheers for the monarchy.
That the Queen was a model of duty, decorum and discretion throughout her long reign is undeniable, and there’s not much to add on that front that hasn’t been spread over square miles of newsprint over the past week. By the same token, she and her husband raised a rather problematic set of boys, of whom the best (Edward) that can be said is that he’s a nullity. But again, there’s been more written on this than one could safely consume in a lifetime.
But we’d like to say a few things about the Royal Family itself. The Royals have long described themselves not as a family, but as The Firm — a corporate entity and business enterprise that has extensive land holdings. It pokes its fingers in countless pies, and employs an army of secretaries and assistants and advisers and servants. It has been described as an enormous, bureaucratically organized machine that dictates and determines the lives of its members.
Yet to us, the Royal Family has always seemed less like a business enterprise than a giant open-air prison. A well-funded and nicely appointed prison to be sure, but a prison nonetheless.
What’s the difference between a complicated overbearing bureaucracy and a jail? Where does the line between compliance end and incarceration begin? It can be hard to say, but the key difference can be found in whether or not you have the right of exit. As Harry put it in his infamous interview with Oprah Winfrey: “My father and my brother, they are trapped. They don’t get to leave.”
But beyond that, it is found in how you treat those who try to change things, or more importantly, those who try to escape. Diana tried to change things, and got destroyed for her efforts. Her second son has attempted an escape, and he’s paying an enormous price.
Diana was no saint obviously, and Harry is a dim fellow who married poorly and has not always exercised the best judgment. But who could, under the circumstances? How could any human be reasonably expected to behave properly, to act normally, to judge wisely, given the insane combination of internal pressure, public expectation and media scrutiny that is a non-negotiable part of the royal package? A panopticon is no less carceral for being well-funded.
With the accession of Charles to the throne as King Charles III, there have been a number of articles published running through the main plot points of his life, with a great deal of focus on his romantic life, his marriage to Diana, and ultimately his reunion with the great love of his life, Camilla. What is remarkable is to read about the number of women he proposed to, prior to Diana, who saw the monarchy for what it was, and turned him down. It’s a testament to how much Camilla must really love the old fart that she prefers a life imprisoned with him than free without.
City Minutes: Crusader States
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 13 May 2022Crusading is one thing, but holding your new kingdoms is a much trickier business. See how the many Christian states of “Outremer” rolled with the punches to evolve in form and function over multiple centuries.
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