… I’m baffled by this idea — seemingly everywhere in modern marketing — that they can somehow annoy you into buying their products. Music streaming services like Spotify are all but unlistenable because of it — not only do you get four ads every three songs, but three of the four ads ask “Want a break from the ads? Join premium!!” Or … you know … I could just go back to listening to tunes the old fashioned way. Humanity’s Greatest Genius, when he lays off that shtick for a minute, actually has some good riffs on this. We all must learn to deprogram ourselves from the Cult of Free. If they’re giving away the product, then you are the product. Much like a college degree, “free” tech is actually negative equity — you’re actually worse off for doing it.
It has gotten so bad lately that they don’t just barrage you with ads, they’re now starting to force-feed you content. I used to have Amazon Music — the free one, of course — because it was a good way to listen to The Z Man’s podcasts and my classical library during my commute. I’d download albums to my phone, switch to “offline” mode, and listen that way. Which Amazon obviously considers no good, because they pushed out some “car mode” bullshit that now automatically turns your wifi on, then starts blasting hip hop at you. And that’s not all! A few weeks back, while trying to figure out a way to turn the damn thing off, I noticed that it now has a “your playlist” feature, based on “your” music … which is, of course, the same force-fed rap shit I’ve been trying so desperately to avoid. It has decided that not only shall I listen to Young Jeezy, Big Weezy, and MC Funetik Spelyn, I will also like it, to such a degree that they will start force-feeding me other shit based on my “likes”.
Yeah. Uninstalled. Fuck you, Bezos. I’ve got a CD player. And when Microsoft decides that I’m not listening to the right music on that, and uninstalls the driver, I’ve got a tape deck. And when that breaks, I will sing to myself as I go down the highway. 99 bottles of beer on the wall, motherfucker, just like bus trips back in Boy Scouts. Enough is enough.
Severian, “Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-18.
September 23, 2021
QotD: The problem with “free” tech stuff
September 22, 2021
QotD: Urban bohemians
Powers fails to recognize that her bohemia is predicated upon a market liberalism that throws off so much wealth that you can live like a Pharaoh just by scavenging what other people throw out — as she and her slacker buddies did in San Francisco in the ’80s and early ’90s. Her bohemian lifestyle is part of the same system that underwrites free markets, consumerism, and tolerance for all sorts of offensive speech and alternative lifestyles. In other words, the liberty to be bohemian is a glorious result of the very capitalist reality that Powers says a real bohemian must be against.
Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason Online, 2000-10.
Update: Broken link fixed, thanks to “somercet1” for the heads-up.
September 21, 2021
QotD: Canadian international virtue signalling is not a new thing
You know how much of that $425 million has been spent so far? Fifty thousand dollars — Canadian. That’s about 40 grand in U.S. dollars. The rest isn’t tied up in [Sri Lankan] bureaucracy, it’s back in Ottawa. But, unlike horrible “unilateralist” America, Canada enjoys a reputation as the perfect global citizen, renowned for its commitment to the U.N. and multilateralism. And on the beaches of Sri Lanka, that and a buck’ll get you a strawberry daiquiri. Canada’s contribution to tsunami relief is objectively useless and rhetorically fraudulent.
Mark Steyn, “Bolton’s sin is telling truth about system”, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005-05-15.
September 20, 2021
QotD: English jingoism
The reason why the English anti-militarism disgusts foreign observers is that it ignores the existence of the British Empire. It looks like sheer hypocrisy. After all, the English have absorbed a quarter of the earth and held on to it by means of a huge navy. How dare they then turn round and say that war is wicked?
It is quite true that the English are hypocritical about their Empire. In the working class this hypocrisy takes the form of not knowing that the Empire exists. But their dislike of standing armies is a perfectly sound instinct. A navy employs comparatively few people, and it is an external weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs and the crash of boots. Decades before Hitler was ever heard of, the word “Prussian” had much the same significance in England as “Nazi” has to-day. So deep does this feeling go that for a hundred years past the officers of the British Army, in peace-time, have always worn civilian clothes when off duty.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
September 19, 2021
QotD: Gender stereotypes
Apparently, it is more to do with the content of your character than the content of your underpants.
Fraser Orr, commenting at Samizdata, 2018-12-08.
September 18, 2021
QotD: Material prosperity and happiness
Gallantly, Mister Tucker has articulated the desire of the Right and Left-wavering to raise the tone of American politics to that of Bhutan. His most striking expressions called attention to the fact that material prosperity does not make people happy. Perhaps we should instruct the statisticians to replace their calculations of Gross Domestic Product, with Gross National Happiness, as they now do in Thimphu. The figure would still be meaningless, but might provide some modest, transient uplift.
In my humbly contrary view, material prosperity — i.e. getting filthy rich — does actually make people happy. Those who win the lottery do not cry from despair. But within a few months of scoring, and often within days, they have a new set of personal problems, to pile upon the old ones. Happiness, from material causes, does not last; not even for the poor. It is emotional catharsis. Something makes you happy; and then it fades away.
Only drugs can keep you happy, until you die. But the downside there is that they kill you.
David Warren, “More populist than thou”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-01-04.
September 17, 2021
QotD: Journalism
Colby Cosh, “A useless living dead”, ColbyCosh.com, 2005-03-28.
September 16, 2021
QotD: The youthful Utopian
One day I suggested facetiously that Angus stop speculating and go find out for himself. “Build a spaceship someday and fly to the planet of your choice,” I recommended. To my surprise, he took me seriously.
Some days later, Angus excitedly told me he had it all worked out. He had designed the spaceship and even brought the plans to show me. Then he unfolded a large sheet of brown wrapping paper. There it was — the entire cockpit control panel of the craft that would take Angus to the cosmos. There was a button for everything.
“This is not a plan!” I declared with a laugh. “It’s just a bunch of buttons with labels on them.”
“But it’s all here,” Angus insisted. “I’ve thought of everything — Start, Stop, Land, Take-off, Dodge Asteroids, you name it, everything you need to know.” He even had an all-purpose button to take care of anything unexpected, which he thought was a genius innovation.
What I remember most vividly about this experience was not the fine detail of my friend’s sketch. It was my frustrating inability to convince him he was delusional, that his plan was no plan at all, that as a 14-year-old he wasn’t yet ready for a senior position at NASA. He was what philosopher Eric Hoffer might call a “true believer” — convinced beyond any hope of convincing otherwise that his plan was thorough, perfect, and sure to work.
I lost track of Angus after graduation, but I am quite certain his spaceship never left the ground.
Lawrence W. Reed, “The Dark Side of Paradise: A Brief History of America’s Utopian Experiments in Communal Living”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2021-06-13.
September 15, 2021
QotD: The cult of Napoleon
Other Europeans see him very differently. While French historians amplify the myth that Napoleon himself created by dictating his idealized Memoires on St. Helena, English, German, Russian and Spanish authors count up the massacres and the destruction of their cities and their civilization.
Napoleon began shaping his reputation while he was still alive. He commonly wrote reports of his victories before the battles had even begun, which makes him the founding father of fake news. Certain disasters, such as the Battle of Eylau (now in Poland) against the Russians and Prussians, for example, are still inscribed in the walls of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris as if they were victories, since that is how they were first announced.
Since France is now part of Europe — rather than Europe becoming part of France, as Napoleon wished — what should we commemorate? French victories, such as Austerlitz, were defeats for the Russians and Austrians. Waterloo, a day of mourning for the French, is a symbol of liberation for the British, Germans, and Dutch. In any case, since the return of Napoleon’s ashes, our view of history has changed; the fate of people concerns us more than the fate of armies. Napoleon’s stature does not benefit from this change of perspective. To finance his wars, he ruined Europe, banning international commerce (only smugglers got rich), conscripting peasants, ravaging harvests, and confiscating horses. How should we commemorate the Russian and German campaigns of 1812 and 1813, when the Grand Army left in its wake not the liberation of peoples, but famine and epidemic? Worst still, how should we commemorate the restoration of slavery in the French Antilles, Guadeloupe, and Santo Domingo (Haiti), where the deputies of France’s Revolutionary Convention had abolished it in 1794?
Guy Sorman, “Which Napoleon?”, City Journal, 2021-05-14.
September 14, 2021
QotD: “In 1918 it was statistically safer for a British soldier to fight in the trenches of the Western Front than be a prisoner in Germany”
On and on the German outrages went: the sinking of the Lusitania, the execution of Nurse Cavell. Of course, the Allies were not saints, but the fashionable fallacy of moral equivalence — that all sides in the Great War were as bad as each other — founders on the rocks of Germany’s treatment of prisoners of war, who became slave labourers.
This was the main substance of the British agenda at Leipzig. Almost 165,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner on the Western Front between 1914-18; by the end of 1916, almost 80% were forced into labour for the Second Reich. Prisoners were literally worked to death in salt mines. And conditions in many camps were inhuman: in Wittenberg, two water taps served 17,000 Allied PoWs. When typhus struck the camp, the German staff abandoned it and left the prisoners to die. Some 13,000 Brits perished in the Kaiser’s camps — the vast majority because of brutality, disease, malnutrition or exhaustion. But 500 British soldiers were summarily shot or beaten to death at the Kaiser’s pleasure during their detention.
Of all the German PoWs held in Britain during the Great War, 3% died; of the British PoWs held in Germany, more than 10% perished. In 1918 it was statistically safer for a British soldier to fight in the trenches of the Western Front than be a prisoner in Germany. That year, 5.8% of British PoWs in Germany died, compared to 4% of British soldiers on the battlefield.
John Lewis Stempel, “Germany’s First World War Guilt”, UnHerd, 2021-05-25.
September 13, 2021
QotD: Those classic British children’s stories
In a boarding school near the Kentish coast, a ruffian sneaks along the corridor, hunting for the rare stamp that will make him rich. In a Home Counties village, a tousled-haired schoolboy lies awake, putting the finishing touches to his scheme that will win the war for the Allies. Many miles to the north, a boat pulls away from Wildcat Island, bound for fortune and glory. And far across the oceans, a group of schoolboys tremble in terror, as their South Sea captors prepare to sacrifice them to their idol …
Such is the world of the classic British children’s story: the world of Billy Bunter and his Greyfriars chums, William Brown and his fellow Outlaws, Titty, Roger and the rest of the Swallows and Amazons, Jennings, Molesworth and the Secret Seven. For more than half a century, such stories dominated the imagination of millions of readers. You can still buy second-hand editions of Richmal Crompton’s Guillermo el Detective, and wonder what on earth readers in General Franco’s Spain made of them.
When I was growing up, the books of Frank Richards, Arthur Ransome and Richmal Crompton were still everywhere, just about. Our local library groaned with stories in which middle-class British children spent their weekends in the barn across the fields and their weeknights sneaking out of the dormitory for some stolen tuck. Raised on the virtues of teamwork and courage, the boys grew up to become hunters, naval commanders and Spitfire pilots. I never found out what happened to the girls. For a boy in the early Eighties, to have been caught reading Mallory Towers would have been social suicide.
Dominic Sandbrook, “Children don’t need woke stories”, UnHerd, 2021-05-17.
September 12, 2021
QotD: The US Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision of 1857
The Scott decision is now considered an important contributing cause of the U.S. Civil War, which began four years later. It proved, beyond anyone’s doubt, President Abraham Lincoln’s maxim that a sovereign nation could not survive half-slave and half-free. Northern states might be capable of abolishing slavery locally, but this “abolition” would never apply to imported slaves from elsewhere considered as property. One cannot fully understand U.S. history, never mind the progress of its law, without studying and appreciating Taney’s cruel language.
And, indeed, for the world at large, Dred Scott is an unsurpassed reminder of the distinction between law and justice, and of the limitations of a highly reverenced written constitution. Taney not only accepted the (irrefutable) argument that the constitution explicitly countenanced slavery: he wrote fawningly of the Founding Fathers as great men, “high in their sense of honour,” who could never have upheld absolute equality before the law on one hand while hypocritically denying it to Blacks in practice. The Declaration of Independence’s claim that “all men are created equal,” the ex-slaveowner Taney wrote, was never understood by anyone to include inferior races.
Abolitionists of the time saw the innate hypocrisy: the contemporary newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison risked his life by calling the constitution “a league with hell.” But [University of Buffalo law professor Matthew] Steilen thinks it is better not to expose Black students to the details of that debate. Reading Taney’s “gratuitously insulting and demeaning” words and arguments, he tweeted, is likely to, and there is no other way to put this, injure their feelings. To inquire too deeply into the detail of slavery, and of the law that shielded it, would require Black students to “relive the humiliation” of Dred Scott.
Colby Cosh, “Another Day in a Feelings-First World”, NP Platformed, 2021-06-09.
September 11, 2021
QotD: Racism, anti-racism, and cognitive dissonance
Okay – but any public discussion that both reviles the idea that black people are less intelligent than others while also lustily demanding that it’s “racist” to submit black people to cognitive challenges is hopelessly incoherent. We disparage rape culture, diet culture – this exemption culture is premised on a basic assumption that it’s unsavory to require serious challenge of black students Because Racism.
No. You don’t get past racism by creating new forms of it. Scrapping traditional challenges should only be on the table after black kids have mastered the challenge anyway. Zora Neale Hurston gets the final word:
It seems to me that if I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game, and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it, even though I know some in there are dealing from the bottom and cheating like hell in other ways.
The current “woke” consensus is that Hurston was wrong on this, that she was expecting too much. I would just love to see one of today’s Elect in a room with Hurston trying to tell her where she was going wrong.
John McWhorter, “Revisiting Classics at Princeton”, It Bears Mentioning, 2021-06-09.
September 10, 2021
QotD: Prole nationalism and the globalist elite
E.M. Oblomov, “The Case for National Realism: Diversity is the hallmark of empires, not democracies”, City Journal, 2019-01-02.
September 9, 2021
QotD: Terrorism
Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle, 2004.
