Lindybeige
Published 24 Jan 2023I teamed up with the highly-skilled Alasdair Beckett-King and together we threw together this sketch. Can you tell that he went to film school?
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May 1, 2023
Doctor Sketchy and the Strange Case of the Syndrome of Doom
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April 30, 2023
Sarah Hoyt – “I told you so”
At According to Hoyt, Sarah reminds us that she was right and won’t apologize for being right … and will say “I told you so” as often as necessary:
Only infants and the mentally incompetent could look at locking up the vast majority of the population and think it would have NO effect on the economic well being of this country. Worse, only infants, the mentally incompetent and indoctrinated Marxists (BIRM) could think — after the numbers from the Diamond Princess were out there for everyone to read — that either COVID-19 was the end of the world, or that we should put the entire population under house arrest to prevent people dying of it. As though it wouldn’t become endemic anyway.
And it took a particular level of bizarre insanity to believe that COVID-19 would kill you at your favorite restaurant or church but not in Walmart.
We won’t even get into the specialness that caused a bunch of you to tell me that it was okay for the homeless to be congregating in every street corner (and in Denver in proliferating encampments EVERYWHERE with all the shared needles, trash, etc. of such encampments) WITHOUT dropping like flies, because they lived outdoors and were “particularly hardy”. Dudes, if you ever work in any emergency room, you’ll learn that not only aren’t the homeless “particularly hardy” but that they have the most bizarre medieval diseases. Yes, there are jokes about “tooth to tattoo ratio” and that low/high means they live forever, but in truth if you see before and after pictures, you know homeless people tend to die early and hard and not just because most of them are crazy and drug addicted (though that’s a contributing factor.) IF THIS HAD BEEN A REALLY DANGEROUS PANDEMIC, the kind those videos from China — some of which were manifestly fakes, like where people put out their hands to break the fall when they “drop dead” in the street — suggested, the homeless would have first been very sick, then dead.
Also, note the same people then said it was very important to wear masks OUTSIDE WHILE JOGGING because this virus was some kind of magical and could hang suspended in the air outside in a “cloud” so that if you walked through it hours later, you could catch the dread disease.
AND let’s not forget treating us like lunatics when we explained that the masks did nothing, and that yes, they’re used in operating rooms — where they’re changed every few minutes, btw — to PREVENT THE SURGEON from coughing on an open wound.
And I want to award no prizes, and may G-d have mercy on your souls to those that told me that the Diamond Princess‘s numbers were as low as they seemed to be because “They have the best of care in cruise ships”. This when cruise ships are known as floating illness barges and the population aboard is the oldest of any gathering in the nation.
Oh, oh, oh, and a special mention goes to everyone who ran around with their heads on fire because “the ER is at 95% capacity” when it is at 100% capacity every flu season, AND also all the “special wards” built for “overflow” patients saw not ONE patient. All these facts were available and easily looked up.
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QotD: Propaganda, dezinformatsiya, and maskirovka in the Current Year
… I don’t speak Russian, but as an amateur Sovietologist I’m aware of the KGB’s rich lexicon of “information warfare”. Disinformation is, of course, either a loan word or a calque, depending on how you want to look at it — dezinformatsiya. (A loan word comes over directly, like “concerto”; a calque is a literal translation of a foreign term, like “flea market”). And then there’s the maskirovka, a whole class of specifically military deceptions. No nation poured more resources into this stuff than the Soviets. A KGB defector named Golitsyn wrote a study, New Lies for Old, that’s interesting. A general in the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, named Ion Mihail Pacepa wrote another, called Disinformation. Good stuff.
Looking at the “news” these days is a fraternal socialist experience, comrades. Of course, we must be careful to distinguish between disinformation and propaganda. As we know from Theodore Dalrymple, propaganda is designed to humiliate you. All the “Biden won” stories, obviously, are pure propaganda — we know they’re not true, they know they’re not true, but by shoving them down our throats, they emphasize the almost total power differential between them and us. This is obvious, therefore uninteresting.
The dezinformatsiya, though, that’s fun. You know it’s a lie — is it in the Media? then it’s a lie — but the purpose of the lie is often opaque. For instance, this new variant of COVID supposedly making the rounds in England. You don’t have to wear a tinfoil hat to find the timing of that pretty damn suspicious. After all, we’re all supposed to have our “warp speed” mandatory goop shots here in a month, which means no more masks, no more lockdowns, no more of the führer-iffic fun our Glorious Leaders are jonesing for. We can’t be having that, and so hey, whaddaya know, just in time for Christmas, a new pox …
[…]
The problem with any disinfo op, of course, is that you have to pitch it at not just how smart the enemy actually is, but how smart he thinks he is. The KGB used to use two-stage deceptions all the time. There was a clumsy, obvious ploy that was designed to fail. The counterintelligence people would sniff it out, then congratulate themselves for seeing through those goofy commies and their hilarious misunderstandings of the free world. Meanwhile, the second caper sailed right through, because the counterintel boys stopped looking after busting the first one.
Severian, “Stojak”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-22.
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April 29, 2023
Justin can’t let Joe steal his thunder on this critical issue!
Justin Trudeau’s love of the vastly expensive and utterly useless virtue signal is almost unmatched among western leaders, but as Bruce Gudmundsson relates here, some of Joe Biden’s lower-echelon cronies in the Pentagram Pentagon have put up a virtue signal that will be very hard for Justin to top:
In the United States, the president enjoys the privilege of appointing 4,000 of his supporters to positions within the Executive Branch. When the president is a Democrat, the best connected of these invariably prefer perches in the vast social service bureaucracy, there to reign (but rarely rule) over like-minded civil servants.* Those with the fewest friends, alas, end up in the Pentagon.
I’m honestly surprised that the number of direct appointees is so low … I’d have guessed at least ten times that number. I was vaguely aware that the formal “spoils” system was broken up late in the 19th century, but the US federal government and its various arms-length agencies are several orders of magnitude larger than they were back then.
The appointees who suffer the latter fate know nothing of the work they supposedly supervise. Indeed, having been raised in homes in which there were “no war toys for Christmas”, they cannot distinguish a sailor from an airman, let alone explain the difference between a soldier and a Marine. What is worse, like impoverished Regency belles, obliged to spend the Season wearing last year’s frocks, Defense Department Democrats live in constant fear of losing caste.
With this in mind, it is not surprising that the aforementioned appointees embrace, with great enthusiasm, projects of the sort they can discuss at Georgetown cocktail parties. During the Obama years (2009-2017), many of these bore the brand of “green energy”. (No doubt, the appointees in question made much of the double entendre.) As might be expected, many of these programs went into hibernation during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017-2021), only to spring back to life after the inauguration (in 2021) of Joseph Biden.
In a recent post on his Substack, the indispensable Igor Chudov lays bare the folly of one of these initiatives. Part of the Climate Strategy unveiled by the US Army in 2022, this plan calls for the progressive replacement, over the course of twenty-eight years, of petroleum dependent cars, trucks, and tanks with their battery-powered counterparts.
I mean, on the plus side, it would mean that wars could only take place on sunny days (for solar-powered tanks) or windy days (for wind-powered tanks). The sheer stupidity of the notion would be laughable, except they really seem to be serious about military combat vehicles running on batteries recharged with solar cells, windmills, or unicorn farts. I’d call it peak Clown World, but it’s a safe bet that they can get even crazier without working up a sweat.
Searching for an appropriate graphic to go with this article, I found this gem at Iowa Climate Change from back in 2021:
Screencap from Iowa Climate Science, 14 Feb 2021
https://iowaclimate.org/2021/02/14/nato-chief-wonders-about-solar-powered-battle-tanks/
* Lest you think, Gentle Reader, that this post serves a partisan political purpose, I will mention that am convinced that the one Republican political appointee with whom I am well-acquainted is a knucklehead of the first order. Indeed, if I ever manage to locate the proper forms, I intend to nominate him for a place of particular honor in the Knucklehead Hall of Fame.
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Bad advice for Robert Kennedy Jr.
C.J. Hopkins proffers advice to the declared candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination:
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. speaking in Urbana, Illinois on October 14, 2007.
Photo by Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons.
Robert Kennedy, Jr. is running for president. I could not possibly be more excited. So, I’m going to give Bobby some unsolicited advice, which, if he knows what’s good for him, he will not take.
I feel OK about doing this because, even if Bobby, in the wee hours of the night, when the mind is vulnerable to dangerous ideas, were to seriously consider taking my advice, I am sure he has people — i.e., PR people, campaign strategists, pollsters, and so on — that would not hesitate to take him aside and disabuse him of any inclination to do that.
OK, before I give Bobby this terrible advice, I have to do the “full disclosure” thing. I’m a pretty big fan of RFK, Jr. I don’t generally get involved in electoral politics, but, if I were a Democrat, I would definitely vote for him. Also, he was kind enough to blurb my book (which isn’t going to make his PR people happy) and invite me onto his podcast, RFK, Jr. The Defender, to talk about “New Normal” totalitarianism. So, I am fairly biased in favor of Bobby Kennedy. I think he is an admirable, honorable human being. I would love to see him in the Oval Office.
That isn’t going to happen, of course. The global-capitalist ruling classes are never going to let him near the Oval Office. They learned their lesson back in 2016. There are not going to be any more unauthorized presidents. The folks at GloboCap are done playing grab-ass, and they want us to know that they are done playing grab-ass. That’s what the last six years have been about.
As I put it in a column in January, 2021 …
… This, basically, is what we’ve just experienced. The global capitalist ruling classes have just reminded us who is really in charge, who the US military answers to, and how quickly they can strip away the facade of democracy and the rule of law. They have reminded us of this for the last ten months, by putting us under house arrest, beating and arresting us for not following orders, for not wearing masks, for taking walks without permission, for having the audacity to protest their decrees, for challenging their official propaganda, about the virus, the election results, etc. They are reminding us currently by censoring dissent, and deplatforming anyone they deem a threat to their official narratives and ideology … GloboCap is teaching us a lesson. I don’t know how much clearer they could make it. They just installed a new puppet president, who can’t even simulate mental acuity, in a locked-down, military-guarded ceremony which no one was allowed to attend, except a few members of the ruling classes. They got some epigone of Albert Speer to convert the Mall (where the public normally gathers) into a “field of flags” symbolizing “unity”. They even did the Nazi “Lichtdom” thing. To hammer the point home, they got Lady Gaga to dress up as a Hunger Games character with a “Mockingjay” brooch and sing the National Anthem. They broadcast this spectacle to the entire world.
Does that sound like the behavior of an unaccountable, supranational power apparatus that is prepared to stand by and let Bobby Kennedy, Jr., or Donald Trump, or any other unauthorized person, become the next president of the United States?
So, here’s my bad advice for Bobby.
Fuck them. They’re not going to let you win, anyway. They are going to smear you, slime you, demonize you, distort every other thing you say, and just generally lie about who you are and what you believe in and what you stand for. They are going to paint you as a bull-goose-loony, formerly smack-addled, conspiracy-theorizing, anti-vax fanatic no matter what you do. If you tone down your act and try to “heal the divide” and “end the division,” they are going to have you for lunch, and then sit around picking their teeth with your bones. You know, and I know, and the American people know, that the things you say you want to do as president — which I know you sincerely want to do as president and are crazy enough to actually try to do, i.e., “to end the corrupt merger of state and corporate power that is threatening now to impose a new kind of corporate feudalism in our country” — are things … well, as Michael Corleone once put it, that they would “use all their power to keep from happening”.
So, fuck it, and fuck them. Tell the truth.
Not the ready-for-prime-time truth. Not the toned-down-for-mainstream-consumption truth. The truth. The ugly, unvarnished truth. The scary, crazy-sounding truth. The angry, divisive, uncensored truth.
Yes, there is a “divide”. A great divide. A chasm. A schism. A gulf. An abyss. A gaping, yawning, unbridgeable fissure. A Grand Canyon-sized fault in the foundation of society. A rupture in the very fabric of reality.
H/T to Robert Swanson for the link.
Of course, not everyone is as fond of RFK, Jr. — and for good reason, as Matt Welch points out:
Ever since the 69-year-old conspiratorial activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination last week, a curious new category has appeared among the commentariat—libertarians and/or right-of-center journalists expressing strange new respect for a Hugo Chavez–admiring scion of the Establishment who has serially fantasized about throwing his political opponents in jail.
“I’m quite certain that I’ve never heard a more erudite speech in any political context,” enthused Brownstone Institute President Jeffrey Tucker after attending Kennedy’s announcement rally. “As [a] Democrat he must be bad on all sorts of things,” tweeted Antiwar.com’s Scott Horton, “But not the ones that matter the most.” The Libertarian Party of Colorado tweeted (and then deleted) “Bravo and godspeed hero.” Tablet, a publication not usually known for boosting overheated analogies to murderous 20th-century totalitarians, gave RFK Jr. an 18,000-word valentine with such soft-toss “questions” about his previous controversial statements (like terming the impact from childhood vaccines “a holocaust”) as: “You activated an automated outrage machine that was looking for a gotcha.”
The newly Kennedy-curious are intrigued by the rabble-rouser’s potential to disrupt an otherwise rubber-stamped Democratic primary, sure, but also by him having the right enemies — the media, the military-industrial complex, and, most of all, a political class that backed COVID-19 lockdowns and mandates.
“Just as Donald Trump … retrieved political themes from the deep past of the Republican Party,” National Review‘s Michael Brendan Dougherty mused, “so it must be that a Democrat should come along and try to revive left-leaning skepticism of government and corporate power, to denounce crony capitalism, censorship, and the CIA to boot.”
Recasting RFK Jr. as a foe of censorship and potential tamer of government requires ignoring what he has been and imagining things he’ll never be. Among a lifetime of eyebrow-raising public activities, Bobby Kennedy’s son has repeatedly egged on government to punish those who disagree with his idiosyncratic understandings of science.
[…]
Yet in 2023, Kennedy can plausibly claim (to those with short memories) the mantle of anti-censorship, for having been on the receiving end of Big Social Media’s often government-pressured pandemic speech-policing. He was banned from Instagram in February 2021 “for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines”, and his anti-vaccine-mandate nonprofit Children’s Health Defense was similarly booted by both Instagram and Facebook in August 2022. He published a book last year called A Letter to Liberals: Censorship and COVID: An Attack on Science and American Ideals. As Tablet‘s David Samuels wrote, in one of that piece’s many eye-popping passages, “At this point, the fact that Robert F. Kennedy is the country’s leading ‘conspiracy theorist’ alone qualifies him to be president.”
So is the enemy of your enemy your friend? Depends on your tolerance for unlikely conspiracy theories, and your comfort level in Kennedy’s proposed punishments for alleged perpetrators. Where Jeffrey Tucker sees an orator with a “command of facts, history, and issues,” motivated both by “truth-telling in an age of nonstop lies” and a genuine urge to “heal” the political divide, I see someone whose presentation of facts — including grave accusations of criminality — have been repeatedly and persuasively found lacking.
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QotD: The problem of war-elephants
On the other hand, the Romans spend about 200 years (from c. 264 to 46 B.C.) mopping the floor with armies supported by war elephants – Carthaginian, Seleucid, even Roman ones during the civil wars (Thapsus, 46 B.C.). And before someone asks about Hannibal, remember that while the army Hannibal won with in Italy had almost no war elephants (nearly all of them having been lost in the Alps), the army he lost with at Zama had 80 of them. Romans looking back from the later Imperial period seemed to classify war elephants with scythed chariots and other failed Hellenistic “gimmick” weapons (e.g. Q. Curtius Rufus 9.2.19). Arrian (a Roman general writing in the second century A.D.) dismisses the entire branch as obsolete (Arr. Tact. 19.6) and leaves it out of his tactical manual entirely on those grounds.
This negative opinion in turn seeps into the scholarship on the matter. This is in no small part because the study of Indian history (where war elephants remained common) is so under-served in western academia compared to the study of the Greek and Roman world (where the Romans functionally ended the use of war elephants on the conclusion that they were useless). Trautmann, (2015) notes the almost pathetic under-engagement of classical scholars with this fighting system. Scullard’s The elephant in the Greek and Roman World (1974) remains the standard text in English on the topic some 45 years later, despite fairly huge changes in the study of the Achaemenids, Seleucids, and Carthaginians in that period.
All of which actually makes finding good information on war elephants quite difficult – the cheap sensational stuff often fills in the gaps left by a lack of scholarship. The handful of books on the topic vary significantly in terms of seriousness and reliability.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part I: Battle Pachyderms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-26.
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April 27, 2023
“… the Department of Defense is rejoicing that Tucker Carlson has been driven off of Fox News”
Chris Bray on the odd phenomenon of the US military formally having opinions on who is sitting at the big desk for Fox News these days:
In 2001, I was a nominal infantryman assigned to some exceptionally tedious duty at Fort Benning, Georgia. That spring, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army decided to symbolically make the whole army feel elite by changing the uniform and putting everyone into the black beret that had been unique to the Ranger battalions. See, now you have a special hat, so morale and esprit de corps and stuff.
Because I was in the infantry, surrounded all day every day by infantrymen, I can report the absolutely rock-solid consensus in the combat arms branches with complete confidence: we wondered why we were being led by idiots.* Quietly, but not quietly enough, we said things like, “See, the lethality of a combat force is tied directly to the quality of its fashion design“. A series of impromptu briefings and formal training sessions reminded us that we were not allowed to express open contempt for our senior leaders, so shut up about the dumbassery with the berets.
In retrospect, I think history shows us that new hats really were the most pressing challenge facing the American military as we rolled into the summer of 2001, but whatever.
So Politico, the most reliably wrong publication in the history of the known universe, reports this week that the Department of Defense is rejoicing that Tucker Carlson has been driven off of Fox News.
See, Tucker Carlson was an authoritarian, a Trumpian protofascist. For example, he criticized the leadership of the military, who therefore rejoiced in his departure. Anti-authoritarianism, on the other hand, is when the leaders of the armed forces have a hand in shaping the culture and deciding who’s allowed to speak in the public sphere. Fascism is open discourse, so we need the military to say who should be on television so we can have freedom.
[…]
See, it’s good when the military “smites” civilian critics and expresses “revulsion” for them. In fascist countries, critics of the military are just allowed to speak freely. The culture has gone full Alice In Wonderland, and freedom is compliance.
* See also the switch from BDUs and ACUs.
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QotD: The unexpected sources of musical innovation
These epicenters of musical innovation are always densely populated cities where different cultures meet and mingle, sharing their distinctive songs and ways of life. This intermixing results in surprising hybrids — new ways of making music that nobody can foresee until it actually happens in this hothouse environment.
New Orleans provides a great example. Around the time jazz originated in New Orleans, it was the most diverse city in the world — an intense intermixing of French, Spanish, African, Caribbean, Latin American, and other cultures. And the mixture was enhanced by the huge number of travelers and traders who came to the region because of the prominence of the Mississippi River as a business and distribution hub.
Here’s how I described this process in the appendix to my book Music: A Subversive History, where I shared 40 precepts on the evolution of human songs.
I wish I had time to defend these assertions here with empirical evidence. But we don’t have the space to do that. Let me say, however, that these statements are amply documented and supported with dozens of examples and case studies in the course of that book.
Ted Gioia, “The Most Important City in the History of Music Isn’t What You Think It Is”, The Honest Broker, 2023-01-26.
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April 26, 2023
HMS Prince of Wales, the media’s favourite target of abuse
Sir Humphrey defends the Royal Navy’s handling of the unplanned repairs to HMS Prince of Wales against the British media’s constant clamour that the ship is somehow cursed and not as good as sister ship HMS Queen Elizabeth by any measure:
HMS Queen Elizabeth (R08) and HMS Prince of Wales (R09) at Portsmouth in December 2019.
It’s never easy being the younger child. You don’t get anywhere near the same level of interest when key development milestones occur, people take your presence far more for granted and you often end up with your older sibling’s “hand me downs” and cast-offs. This is definitely true for warships where there is sometimes a perception that the first of class has a style and elan that other siblings lack. In the case of the QUEEN ELIZABETH class aircraft carriers it could be argued that QE has very much grabbed the headlines and glory while the PRINCE OF WALES (PWLS) has perhaps lacked as exciting an opportunity.
Following an incident which involved a propellor loss (something that befalls other navies too as the French carrier CHARLES DE GAULLE discovered), PWLS has had a challenging year in dry dock. The media are reporting it as the ship is broken, she needs a year in dock for extensive repairs and now todays Mail on Sunday story is that she has effectively become a “scrapyard” for her older sibling, providing parts and materiel as a donor vessel. It has hard to think of a less loved vessel in the eyes of the media. What is actually going on is a little more complex and perhaps boring.
In reality PWLS was sent to Scotland for an unplanned dry docking to resolve the issues with her propellor shaft. It seems to have become clear that this would take some months to resolve – which can feel a long time in a 24/7 newscycle, but realistically feels about right for repairing an extremely complex major warship and in line with historical timescales. The original plan for PWLS was that after she came back from the US last year, she’d not deploy in 2024 before undergoing a major capability upgrade anyway during the year. The purpose of this upgrade, which is standard for all newbuild warships, is to add on the new equipment and capabilities that have entered service since her build design was frozen many years ago.
Part of the challenge of building a complex warship is that at some point you need to lock the design down to enable construction to begin, rather than tinkering it to handle every new “oooh shiny” moment as new technology emerges. To solve this ships will usually enter service as per the specs agreed years before, then a period in refit is planned early in her life once the ship is working and commissioned to add on the various equipment items that have entered use. This is about bringing the ship up to the most modern standard at the time – throughout her life she will then continue to receive regular upgrades like this as new technology is developed.
In this case the plan evolved so that as she was in dry dock anyway the RN seems to have decided to merge the two pieces of work. What this means is that rather than return to sea in a meaningful way, PWLS will have spent about a year in both unplanned repairs and planned refit. Again this period of time out of service isn’t unusual for a major warship – if you look through most vessels lifespans, refits of 1-3 years are entirely common. It can though appear bad news if you interpret this data as saying that the emergency repairs will take a year.
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QotD: The vanishing “entertainer” of yore
It was still possible — barely — to be an entertainer as late as the early 2000s. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was one. Schwarzenegger’s dharma heir, he, along with guys like Jason Statham, made goofy shoot-em-up movies in which improbably muscled men killed a bunch of generic baddies in inventive ways. It’s a lot harder than it looks, since it calls for the lead actor to be fully committed to the role while being fully aware of how silly it all is. The fact that these guys aren’t “actors” in any real sense is no accident.
See also: the only real actor to take on such a role successfully: Liam Neeson, that poor bastard, who uses acting as therapy. (I don’t think it’s an accident that Neeson, too, was an athlete before he was an actor — Wiki just says he “discontinued” boxing at 17, but I read somewhere he was a real contender). Note also that Neeson’s Taken movies have a “real life” hook to them, human trafficking. They’re Schwarzenegger movies, and Neeson acquits himself well in them, but Neeson would fall flat on his face in all-out Arnold-style fantasies — a Conan or a Total Recall. Actors can’t make those movies; only entertainers can [cf. The A-Team, a role Arnold would’ve crushed].
In other words: you can make an “Arnold movie” without Arnold Schwarzenegger, the man, in the lead role, but you absolutely must have an entertainer as a leading man. Nothing could’ve saved the Total Recall “remake”, since it was clearly some other film with a tacked-on subplot to justify using the title, but Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson could’ve saved the Conan remake. It still wouldn’t have been very good — too self-consciously meta and gritty — but as a young guy trying to establish himself, poor ol’ Aquaman wasn’t up to it. He wanted to be a good actor; Arnold, in all his roles, just wanted to make a good movie. Arnold didn’t have to worry about his “performance”, because he was always just being Arnold (this seems to be the secret of Tom Cruise’s success, too). Aquaman had to worry about being taken seriously as an actor.
Severian, “The Entertainer”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-08.
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April 25, 2023
The Grauniad now thinks sailing ships are racist
Henry Getley on the Guardian‘s ongoing crusade to expiate their historical links to the slave trade which now expands to denouncing the badges of the city’s two professional football teams:
But the latest chapter in this bizarre campaign is really scraping the barrel … targeting the city’s football club badges. Feature writer Simon Hattenstone has homed in on the logos of Manchester City and Manchester United, which both include an illustration of a sailing ship. And he has reached what he clearly sees as a “Gotcha!” conclusion – sailing ships were used to carry cotton, which was produced in the southern United States using slave labour. Therefore, displaying sailing ships is shameful. Both clubs must immediately delete the offending vessels from their badges.
I hold no brief for either Man City or Man United (quite the contrary). But I find it absurd and offensive that the clubs should be thus gratuitously assailed in an attempt to shore up the Guardian‘s increasingly crazed crusade.
For the record, the sailing ships are taken from the coat of arms of the Borough of Manchester. They were granted in 1842, 35 years after Britain’s 1807 abolition of the slave trade, and are there simply to symbolise the city’s trade with the rest of the world. In fact, no large ships were seen in Manchester until the opening of the 35-mile-long Manchester Ship Canal in 1894.
Hattenstone’s argument is that the city was still using slave-produced US cotton up to the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, so the symbolic use of the vessels must be denounced. Talk about clutching at straws! I wonder if he knows that in 1862 Manchester mill workers supported US President Abraham Lincoln’s call for an embargo on Confederate cotton, even though it meant destitution and starvation for them and their families. He could have read about this selfless gesture in a Guardian article ten years ago.
I’ll tell you what, Mr Hattenstone, if we’re talking about links to slavery, how about demanding that the Guardian abandons its main headline typeface, which is shamefully called “Guardian Egyptian”? After all, slavery was practised in Egypt from ancient times right until the late 19th century. Yes, it’s a ridiculous link to make, but no more ridiculous than calling for the removal of ships from football badges. Sorry, Mr Hattenstone, you may be a self-proclaimed City fan, but this is an own goal.
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April 24, 2023
Unconventional hiring practices
In The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia recounts tracking down Jazz saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre to interview him for a chapter in the book he was writing and discovering things about team-building that he hadn’t learned at Stanford Business School:
Back when I interviewed Jimmy Giuffre, I was gigging constantly and the format was obvious. The best option was piano, bass, and drum with at least one horn. If I didn’t have enough money to cover that, I brought just a trio — piano, bass, and drums — to the gig. If I couldn’t afford that, I did just piano and bass. And if cash was really tight, I opted for solo piano.
And which players did I hire?
Back then, I wanted to play with the best of the best. I kept careful tabs on all the jazz musicians in the greater San Francisco area, and wanted to play with all the top cats. Even if I didn’t know the musician, I’d make a cold call and try to hire them, provided I could afford it. If I got turned down, I went to the next name on my list.
Didn’t everybody do it that way?
Not Jimmy Giuffre. He explained that musicians played better when they were happier. Now that was a word I’d never heard in organizational theory class.
Giuffre continued to spell it out for me — surprised that I couldn’t figure this out for myself. Didn’t I know that people are always happier when they were with their friends? So group productivity is an easy problem to solve.
In other words, if my three best buddies played bongos, kazoo, and bagpipe, that should be my group.
When I heard this, I thought it made no kind of sense. They don’t call it “show friends” — they call it show business. I couldn’t imagine following Giuffre’s advice.
But over the years, I’ve thought a lot about what Jimmy Giuffre said about group formation—which is not only unusual for a music group but also violates everything I was taught back at Stanford Business School.
[…]
Can I turn this into a rule? And, even more to the point, could you apply this to other settings? Could you start a business with this approach?
That seems like a recipe for disaster, at least at first glance.
But I now think even large corporations could benefit from a dose of Jimmy Giuffre’s thinking. One of the biggest mistakes in hiring practices, as handled by HR (Human Resources) professionals in the current day is an obsession with the “required qualifications” for the job. They won’t even give you an interview unless you mention the right buzz words on your resume. But the best people take unconventional paths, and this checklist approach will exclude precisely those individuals.
(I’ve even heard of a scam for getting interviews — which involves copying and pasting the job description word-for-word at the bottom of your resume. This apparently rings all the bells in their algorithms and gets you moved to the top of the candidate list.)
Giuffre’s quirky theory gets straight to the heart of the problems with contemporary society outlined by Iain McGilchrist in his book The Master and His Emissary. That book is ostensibly a study of neuroscience, but is actually a deep-thinking critique of institutions and cultural biases. The best decisions. McGhilcrhist shows, are made by holistic thinkers who can see the big picture, but the system rewards the detail orientation of people who manage with checklists and jump through all the bureaucratic hoops.
Yet I’ve seen — and I’m sure you have too — amazing people whose skill set can’t be conveyed by their resume. Not even close. I’ve worked alongside visionaries whose education ended with high school, but have ten times the insight and ability as their colleagues with graduate degrees and fancy credentials.
That’s why Duke Ellington is such a great role model for running an organization. He hired people because of their musical character, rather than their sheer virtuosity or technical knowledge. And he certainly paid no attention to formal degrees. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Duke went through decades of hiring for his band without looking at a single resume.
That piece of paper wouldn’t have told him a single thing he needed to know.
For all those reasons, I no longer dismiss Jimmy Giuffre’s peculiar views on group formation. I’d recommend them myself — maybe even especially in groups where no music is made.
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QotD: The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
A little joke for psychologists there.
In 1994, someone left a comment on the website of the St. Paul Pioneer Press (Minnesota) saying that he had heard two references to the Red Army Faction, AKA the Baader-Meinhof gang — a 1970s German terrorist organisation — in the space of 24 hours, having never previously been aware of them. This somehow provided a new name for a cognitive bias. Don’t let anyone tell you that posting online comments on regional newspaper websites is a waste of time.
Otherwise known as frequency bias, the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is a combination of selective attention bias (paying more attention to some things than to others) and confirmation bias (looking for things that you agree with or which serve your purposes in some way).
Arnold Zwicky added another aspect when he wrote about the significance of things happening recently, describing the “recency illusion” as …
… the belief that things YOU have noticed only recently are in fact recent.
The classic example is people’s tendency to notice a certain type of car once they own one themselves, especially when they bought it recently.
Of course it is possible that the thing you’ve just started noticing is truly becoming more frequent. I have noticed more shirts, flags and other merchandise related to Arsenal FC recently. This may be because the team is doing very well this season and I am more conscious of them as a result. Or it may be that Arsenal fans are less coy about showing their support after years of under-performing. What is less likely is that there are significantly more Arsenal fans than there were before.
Christopher Snowden, “Sudden deaths and the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon”, The Snowden Substack, 2023-01-21.
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April 23, 2023
Dylan Mulvaney’s “triumph of performance and marketing”
Andrew Sullivan weighs in on the Dylan Mulvaney phenomenon:
Bud Light’s latest brand ambassador, Dylan Mulvaney
I’ve largely ignored the entire Bud Light tempest in a toxic teacup because social media outrages and brand boycotts come and go and tend to leave little trace behind. But the fuss over the beer brand’s brief commercial dalliance with trans newbie Dylan Mulvaney — with her 10.8 million TikTok followers — nonetheless fascinates. It shows, it seems to me, just how much everyone is projecting, and how (almost) everyone is getting it wrong.
There are, it seems, many layers to Dylan. To countless straight people, left and right, Dylan is a transgender star — because she is biologically male, and yet has been saying she is a girl now for more than a year, wears women’s clothes and is pretty and charming and full of manic energy. (I’m mostly using her preferred pronouns here, the least clumsy option). The woke left therefore loves her, and the Matt Walsh right has had a collective aneurysm. But for many gay men, including yours truly, Dylan’s latest, year-long performance as a “girl” looks and sounds like something much more familiar.
Dylan, to us at least, is a pretty classic, child-actor, musical theater queen — an effeminate gay man who finds great joy and relief in Broadway camp and drama, and is liable to burst into song at any moment. (I used to wonder if this very specific manifestation would die out as gays integrated more. But no! It seems to be in our collective DNA. Every generation mints a new variety.) And she’s managed to bait both the woke left and the anti-woke right into making her very famous and a lot richer than a year ago.
It’s a triumph of performance and marketing. It can be frustrating for a young actor among so many. You can do your best, become a finalist in Campus Superstar in 2018, wear only briefs for a performance at Joe’s Pub, perform, however well, in the cast of Book Of Mormon, camp it up for Ellen, or do the exact same ditzy-girl act on The Price Is Right as a man (Dylan’s previous attempts at fame). But become a parody of a “girl” and provide breathless, daily updates on your transition — and nearly 11 million people on TikTok will follow. At the same time brand yourself as a pioneer for greater understanding, love, and civil rights … and you can get an extended interview on The Today Show and an audience at the White House.
The gimmick was simple: a TikTok clip for every day of “becoming a girl.” As Dylan explained:
When the pandemic hit, I was doing the Broadway musical Book of Mormon. I found myself jobless and without the creative means to do what I loved. I downloaded TikTok, assuming it was a kids’ app. … [R]ight before I started creating content with “Days of Girlhood”, I thought, “What am I going to do to afford my rent this month?”
Well, she no longer has to worry about that. Dylan has brand partnerships with Anheuser-Busch, Nike, Crest, Instacart, Ulta Beauty, Kate Spade and many more. And here is what Dylan means by “becoming a girl” in his/her own words. Trigger warning for feminists:
Day One of being a girl and I’ve already cried three times, I wrote a scathing email that I did not send, I ordered dresses online that I couldn’t afford, and then, uh, when someone asked me how I was, I said I’m fine — when I wasn’t fine [applies lip gloss]. How’d I do, ladies? Good? Girl power!
If you think this has to be a joke, a parody making fun of sexist ideas about women, you’re not the only one. (Trans YouTuber Blaire White also assumed it was a spoof at first, and her video on Dylan’s “womanface” is well worth a watch.) But no! Here’s more:
“Hangin with the girlieeees, woohoo! [The camera pans across a series of dolls sitting in chairs] … I almost bought this Audrey [Hepburn] portrait. I just love her, she’s everything I want to be.”
“Day Three of being a girl and I’ve already become a bimbo. … I think it’s a good fit for me. What do you think, ladies?”
“Day Four of being a girl and I’m exhausted — the hair, the makeup, the clothes, the high heels. It’s a lot to keep up with!”
“Day 12 of being a girl and I just picked up some tampons.”She never subsequently seems to put them down. At one point, we see Dylan hiking in high heels, and running hysterically away from a flying bug. In another clip, she dresses up in a skimpy evening gown and fantasizes about her future husband:
I want them to know I’ll be their cheerleader on and off the field. So they can picture me walking down the aisle to be their trophy bride, or trophy wife. I would totally be good at that, don’t you think? “Dinner’s ready! Yoo-hoo!”
Call me a transphobe, but I just don’t think that someone who has been struggling with gender identity her whole life and found a pathway to womanhood … would ever celebrate it quite like that. Yet this firehose of misogynistic tropes was one of a handful of people who were invited to the White House to interview Biden personally.
The only thing more absurd than this was the far right falling for the whole schtick as well. After the Bud Light ad, Kid Rock filmed himself shooting cases of beer with a semi-automatic rifle; a businessman opted for a baseball bat in an ad to promote his new “Ultra Right” beer; bomb threats rattled some Bud factories; countless tweets popped up alleging a collapse in sales of Bud Light; then the Trumps went to war with Matt Walsh because Anheuser-Busch is a major GOP donor; then the former cover-girl, current Fox News star Caitlyn Jenner called Dylan’s act an “absurdity“; and so on. Good times.
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From the Encyclopedia Britannica to Wikipedia
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte recounts the decline and fall of the greatest of the print encyclopedias:
I remembered all this while reading Simon Garfield’s wonderful new book, All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopedia. It’s an entertaining history of efforts to capture all that we know between covers, starting two thousand years ago with Pliny the Elder.
The star of Garfield’s show, naturally, is Encyclopedia Britannica, which dominated the field through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By the time of its fifteenth edition in 1989, the continuously revised Britannica was comprehensive, reliable, scholarly, and readable, with 43 million words and 25,000 illustrations on a half million topics published over 32,640 pages in thirty-two beautifully designed Morocco-leather-bound volumes. It was the greatest encyclopedia ever published and probably the greatest reference tool to that time. It was sold door-to-door in the US by a sales force of 5,000.
Just as the glorious fifteenth edition was going to press, Bill Gates tried to buy Encyclopedia Britannica. Not a set — the whole company. He didn’t want to go into the reference book business. He believed that the availability of a CD-ROM encyclopedia would encourage people to adopt Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The Britannica people told Gates to get stuffed. They were revolted by the thought of their masterpiece reduced to an inexpensive plastic bolt-on to a larger piece of software for gimmicky home computers.
Like the executives at Blockbuster, the executives at Britannica eventually recognized the threat of digital technology but couldn’t see their way to abandoning their old business model and their old production standards and the reliable profits that came with large sets of big books. CD-ROMs seemed to them like a child’s toy.
Even as more of life moved online and the company’s prospects for growth dwindled, the Britannica executives could still not get their heads around abandoning the past and favoring a digital marketplace. They figured that their time-honored strategy of guilting parents into buying a shelf of books in service of their kids’ education would survive the digital challenge, not recognizing that parents would soon be assuaging their guilt by buying personal computers for their kids.
By the time Britannica brought out an overly expensive and not-very-good CD-ROM version of its encyclopedia in 1994, Gates had launched Encarta based on the much inferior Funk & Wagnalls. It might not have been the equal of the printed Britannica, but with its ease of use and storage, its much lower price point, and its many photos and videos of the Apollo moon landing and spuming whales, Encarta made a splash. It was selling a million copies a year in its third year of production — a number that no previous encyclopedia had come close to matching.
As it turned out, Britannica‘s last profitable year was 1990 when it sold 117,000 bound sets for $650 million and a profit of $40 million. With the launch of Encarta, its annual sales were reduced to 50,000 sets and it was laying off masses of employees.
Encarta‘s own life was relatively short. It closed in 2009, at which point it was selling for a mere $22.95. The world now belonged to Wikipedia.
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