The death at ninety of Dame Sibyl Hathaway, the Dame of Sark, removed the only person in the British Isles whom I still wanted to meet. Unfortunately, she rejected all my advances. She was a model ruler for out times, forbidding not only cars and aircraft on her island, but also trade unions, taxation, female dogs, divorce, and most of the troublesome manifestations of our age. I had always hoped to persuade this admirable lady to take England under her rule when our parliamentary system finally disintegrates. Now she is dead I think I shall leave the country for a time — probably for a very long time. I can see no hope.
Auberon Waugh, Diary, 1974-07-25.
November 5, 2021
QotD: The Dame of Sark
November 4, 2021
QotD: The “Righteousness Fallacy”, California style
The Righteousness Fallacy (also known as the fallacy of good intentions) is described by author Dr. Bo Bennett as the idea that one is correct because their intentions are pure.
It recently occurred to me that California is a perfect example of this fallacy. Consider these three facts about the Golden State:
- California spends about $98.5 billion annually on welfare — the most in the US — but has the highest poverty rate in America.
- California has the highest income tax rate in the US, at 13.3 percent, but the fourth greatest income inequality of the 50 states.
- California has one of the most regulated housing markets in America, yet it has the highest homeless population in American and ranks 49th (per capita) in housing supply.
That politicians would persist with harmful policies should come as little surprise. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once observed the uncanny proclivity of politicians “to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results”.
In his book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman described the danger of such thinking.
[The threat comes] from men of good intentions and good will who wish to reform us. Impatient with the slowness of persuasion and example to achieve the great social changes they envision, they’re anxious to use the power of the state to achieve their ends and confident in their ability to do so. Yet … Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.
Jon Miltimore, “Data Show California Is a Living Example of the Good Intentions Fallacy”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2019-01-09.
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November 3, 2021
QotD: English literature
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
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November 2, 2021
QotD: The foreign journalist’s best local source, the cabbie
I was a three-day man in that period of my life when newspapers would occasionally ask me to report on some revolution, civil war, social upheaval or other unusual event (I once went on a daytrip to India from Europe).
Given the circumstances, I gathered much of my information from the taxi-driver from the airport to the hotel where all the other journalists were staying. They did likewise, and in many an article, even in serious publications, a journalist has acted as a mere amanuensis for a taxi-driver.
I am far from decrying this genre of journalism: in my experience, taxi-drivers are exceptionally sensible and level-headed men, intelligent and well-informed but not educated, or rather not indoctrinated into believing the most obvious nonsense by having attended western-type establishments of supposedly higher learning.
Knowing that a journalist is a bird of passage, they did not fear, even in dictatorships, to speak the truth as they saw it: and generally they had seen a lot. With the advent of the mobile phone that hears everything and erases nothing, they may since have become more cautious. I don’t know: no one sends me anywhere these days.
Theodore Dalrymple, “On Taxi Cab Drivers, Barbers, and Learning the Truth”, The Iconoclast, 2021-06-21.
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November 1, 2021
QotD: Latin
This being said, anyone who denies the language is worth learning is a barbarian who deserves to live in the illiterate swamp that we nowadays call civilisation. Without denying the importance of the Greeks, Rome stands at the origin of our literature and law and religion. Latin was, until the late seventeenth century, the normal language of learning and international communication. Directly or indirectly, Latin has given English around sixty per cent of its words. I am not sure if anyone can write English well who is ignorant of Latin. I do not believe anyone can appreciate or notice the full register of our own classical literature without some knowledge of Latin. A further point is that, even today, a qualification in Latin is taken as proof of general intelligence. In short, Latin is a struggle, but a struggle worth undertaking.
Sean Gabb, “A Review of Latin Stories (2018)”, Sean Gabb, 2018-12-23.
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October 31, 2021
QotD: We’re still trapped in Heinlein’s “Crazy Years”
Looking forward from the year 1940, when the timeline was first formed, it was reasonable, even conservative, guesswork to predict the moon landing by the 1980’s, forty years later, since the first powered flight by the Wright Brothers had been forty years earlier. Heinlein’s Luna City founded in 1990 a decade or so later, with colonies on Mars and Venus by 2000. Compare: a submersible ironclad was written up as a science romance by Jules Verne in 1869, based on the steam-powered “diving boat” of Robert Fulton, developed in 1801. In 1954 the first atomic-powered submarines — all three boats were named Nautilus — put to sea. The gap between Verne’s dream and Rickover’s reality was eight decades, about the time separating Heinlein’s writing of “Menace from Earth” and its projected date.
Looking back from the year 2010, however the dates seem remarkably optimistic and compressed. We have not even mounted a manned expedition to Mars as yet, and no return manned trips to the Moon are on the drawing boards.
One prediction that was remarkably prescient, however, was the advent of “The Crazy Years” described as “Considerable technical advance during this period, accompanied by a gradual deterioration of mores, orientation, and social institutions, terminating in mass psychoses in the sixth decade, and the interregnum.”
He optimistically predicts a recovery from the Crazy Years, the opening of a new frontier in space, and a return to nineteenth-century economy. Full maturity of the human race is achieved by a science of social relations “based on the negative basic statements of semantics.” Those of you who are A.E. van Vogt fans will recognize our old friends, general semantics and Null-A logic cropping up here. Van Vogt, like Heinlein, told tales of a future time when the Non-Aristotlean logic or “Null-A” training would give rise to a race of supermen, fully integrated and fully mature human beings, free of barbarism and neuroses.
Here is the chart [full size version here]. Note the REMARKS column to the right.
What Heinlein failed to predict was that the Crazy Years would simply continue up through 2010, with no sign of slackening. Ladies and gentlemen, we live in the Crazy Years.
John C. Wright, “The Crazy Years and their Empty Moral Vocabulary”, John C. Wright, 2019-02-18.
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October 30, 2021
QotD: Britain as a nation
One gets a better view of this question if one considers the minor point first. It is quite true that the so-called races of Britain feel themselves to be very different from one another. A Scotsman, for instance, does not thank you if you call him an Englishman. You can see the hesitation we feel on this point by the fact that we call our islands by no less than six different names, England, Britain, Great Britain, the British Isles, the United Kingdom and, in very exalted moments, Albion. Even the differences between north and south England loom large in our own eyes. But somehow these differences fade away the moment that any two Britons are confronted by a European. It is very rare to meet a foreigner, other than an American, who can distinguish between English and Scots or even English and Irish. To a Frenchman, the Breton and the Auvergnat seem very different beings, and the accent of Marseilles is a stock joke in Paris. Yet we speak of “France” and “the French”, recognizing France as an entity, a single civilization, which in fact it is. So also with ourselves. Looked at from the outside, even the cockney and the Yorkshireman have a strong family resemblance.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
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October 29, 2021
QotD: Another proof of Parkinson’s “Law of the Custom-Built Headquarters Building”
John Terraine, The Mighty Continent, 1974, quoted by Brian Micklethwait, 2021-07-20.
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October 28, 2021
QotD: Romantics
Gerard Vanderleun, “The Man Who Loved Not Wisely But At Least Twice”, American Digest, 2005-04-29.
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October 27, 2021
QotD: China’s single child policy
Another effect is legions of older people with not enough of a younger population to support them, a social security problem that dwarfs any such in the West.
The Chinese solution is likely to be simplicity itself: shoot the punks and let the geezers starve. Either way, it means social upheaval.
J.R. Dunn, “The Myth of China as Superpower”, American Thinker, 2019-01-09.
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October 26, 2021
“…watching The Media spin for Brandon; it’s just so Pravda-licious”
Severian manages to find entertainment in the full-blown propagandization of “The Media”, especially during the course of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:
Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.
Back when the Kung Flu nonsense first started, I took it quasi-seriously. Let me clarify: Like America’s greatest philosopher, I assume that everything in the newspaper is 90% bullshit, and I read it because it entertains me. Nonetheless, the bullshit operates on several levels, and it’s important to distinguish between them if you want to extract more than entertainment from it. In the case of Covid, back in the earliest days, I assumed that the bullshit was more top tier — that is, that it was mostly ignorance.
Media people are stupid. We all know that, but unless you’ve been around them (or their inbred, banjo-picking cousins, academics) recently, you probably don’t realize just how stupid they actually are. Remember Michael Crichton’s bit about “Gell-Mann Amnesia“? He said that The Media are so dumb, they routinely get important things not just wrong, but completely backwards: The headline would read the equivalent of “Wet Streets Cause Rain”.
And to be fair to The Media — I know, I know, but again, if you want anything more than a chuckle from the propaganda, you must try — it really did seem to be more ignorance than anything. I’m the kind of guy who needs to pull off a sock every time he has to count past ten, but compared to everyone in The Media I’m Euclid himself. I could see right away that the numbers they were spouting would make Kung Flu exponentially more lethal than even the Black Plague, which would, you know, tend to show up on satellite reconnaissance. And since there’s this thing called “Google Earth” …
But even though I knew right away you’d need to scale back their projections by a factor of about eleventy billion, that wasn’t the end of it, because even doing the necessary mental math to scale it down by eleventy billion — take the cosine, carry the one, divide by zero — it still looked pretty bad. But not “pretty bad” in a factual way. Rather, pretty bad in a second-level bullshit way, the mere propaganda way.
Those were the days, you might recall, when — out of the blue, on a dime — the Official Story changed from “China categorically denies there’s any such thing as germs, much less this particular strain of flu” to “OMG, the Chinese are welding apartment doors shut as people keel over in the streets.” Accompanied, in some cases — and good luck finding those video clips now — with grainy little movies of obvious actors keeling over so hammily, Al Pacino himself would tell them to tone it down. Pravda et al would never have been so crude, but those guys were pros, and as bad as the USSR was, affront-to-basic-intelligence-wise, this is Clown World.
Sure enough, the stories soon came out that China had cornered the market on PPE gear. It was an obvious short con, but remember: Clown World.
This — the CCP cornering the PPE market — soon prompted the third level of Media bullshit, the ideological level. Not content to merely take orders from their Chinese paymasters, the Media, being ideology-addled prize graduates of American “higher” “education”, started taking it upon themselves to lecture us for our own good. Masks, which were once bad, were now good, and if one mask was good, then two were even better! Thus the flood of stories like the one covered at the old RC, where the woman went on about swabbing her eyelids with disinfectant and whatnot. They got their chance to hector us for our own good, and they will never turn that down.
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QotD: Blogging
We’ll see. In a way blogs are the refutation of the old joke: “The food’s so bad here.” “Yes, and such small portions.” Dole out crap in large amounts all day and you don’t guarantee traffic; eventually people will tired of poking through the heap with a stick looking for diamonds.
Somewhere in there, there’s a metaphor.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-05-10.
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October 25, 2021
QotD: Individual tastes
Lawrence Osborne, The Accidental Connoisseur, 2004.
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October 24, 2021
QotD: Origins of the upper-class twit
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
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October 23, 2021
QotD: Patum Peperium, the Gentleman’s Relish
Opinions differ as to how and when you should eat Gentleman’s Relish. According to the Ritz, breakfast is the time to enjoy its piquant flavour, preferably on thinly sliced, brown toast. I prefer to eat it for tea, on white toast with a little mustard and cress. Mrs Beeton suggests that anchovy paste is usually spread on toast as “an excellent bonne bouche which enables gentlemen at wine-parties to enjoy their port with redoubled gusto”.
It was originally created in 1828 by John Osborn, an English provision merchant in Paris. Like any good marketing man, he created a grandiose name from a fictitious fudge of Latin and Greek implying pepper paste, to tempt his fashion-conscious customers into buying it. It only became known as Gentleman’s Relish once his son brought the business to London. According to Elsenham, its current manufacturer, it is still made according to the original recipe. It imports the finest Spanish anchovy fillets, which have been packed in barrels of salt and left to mature for 18 months. Once suitably fruity, they are rinsed in brine and gently cooked before being cooled and blended with butter and rusk. A secret blend of spices and herbs is then added.
Sybil Kapoor, “Spreading the word”, The Guardian, 2001-02-18.
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