I suspect […] one of the main reasons rock stars, who really can have the super hot model, always end up cheating on her — because it’s not really her. In their minds, they became rock stars specifically to get that kind of girl … but that’s the thing: That kind of girl doesn’t exist. She’s a 2D image, heavily photoshopped. Oh, I’m sure Supermodel X really IS hot in real life, but she’s also just a person, which means she farts and snores and wakes up with bed head and all that. Plus, rock stars really do live with the equivalent of their own personal Photoshop, in the form of a small army of flunkies who make all of life’s routine frustrations go away. So it must be even more maddening to find out that the Cover Girl really does have myriad small blemishes, because, you know, she’s a real person, and not the fantasy you signed up for when you signed that big record deal.
Severian, “Junkies”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-18.
May 11, 2021
QotD: The (disappointing) sex lives of the rich and famous
May 10, 2021
QotD: Against the notion of the “Social Contract”
In all of his political writings, Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a “culture of repudiation.” The Left is “negative.” It dismisses “every aspect of our cultural capital” with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of “racism,” “xenophobia,” “homophobia,” and “sexism.” Like 1984‘s “two minutes of hate,” this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive — it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.
Daniel J. Mahoney, “Beyond the Culture of Repudiation”, Claremont Review of Books, 2018-06.
May 9, 2021
QotD: Boys
[ … ]
I admit to being a little more than angry and frustrated myself. Partially it is at a school system that won’t allow boys any physical activities where they can blow off steam. No football, soccer, hockey, baseball, dodge ball, or any other kind of game that “promotes aggression” or the “possibility of injury”. Volleyball and cross country running are all well and good but they are seasonal, and frankly, to a lot of boys; it blows. I do understand that not all boys are the “physical” sort but more are than not. While I realize no parent wants their child injured; it just seems that by denying that boys really do need a way to physically deal with aggression, you set them up for horseplay which eventually leads to fighting. How can anyone expect boys to spend all recess at the wall or standing around chatting about the weather?
Kate “The Last Amazon”, “When Biology is Destiny”, The Last Amazon, 2005-03-02.
May 8, 2021
QotD: That time the global elites were against diversity
See, in those days, the elites believed in keeping people in their own damn land. Hard as that might be to fathom now, that used to be a mantra of the progressive internationalists. There was a die-hard belief that the key to world peace was the separation of people, the segregation of populations by race, religion, and ethnicity. That was the entire point of the Greek/Turkish population exchange of 1923, overseen by the League in the name of keeping Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims separated for the sake of peace. As UNC Chapel Hill history professor Sarah Shields wrote in her 2016 essay in the Journal of the History of International Law, the prevailing belief at that time was that “Muslims and non-Muslims could not live together peacefully, and modernity required rejecting a diverse past in favor of a nation-state along European (unmixed) lines.”
Separation was the future, diversity was the past. Damn near 1.6 million Greeks and Turks were sent from the land of their birth to the land where they could live with those of a similar faith. Many of the other population transfers and redrawn boundaries that followed World War I were based on that same concept of giving people their “own” homeland based on characteristics like religion or ethnicity. It was simply taken as fact back then that nations function better with some level of homogeneity. That was canon back then. By the time the U.N. came around, that notion was still very much a guiding principle, as the internationalists realized that a vision of a multireligious, multiethnic Palestine was unrealistic and unattainable. And the Jews and the Arabs realized that too, which is why they started slaughtering each other, because they couldn’t bear to live in a partitioned state. Being separate but equal was not enough. They wanted to be separate and separated.
David Cole, “When Refugees Were Conquerors”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-10-29.
May 6, 2021
QotD: Bureaucracy and “Dunbar’s Number”
Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships — relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person … By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, [Dunbar] proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.
Wikipedia
Let’s stipulate that the “leader” of a “Dunbar Group” can effectively manage ALL of the group’s affairs. In our hypothetical community, “Dunbarville” (note that we’re doing a very Hobbesian “thought experiment” here), our leader – let’s call him Steve – can grasp the essentials of every issue facing the town. He doesn’t need to be an expert without portfolio. He doesn’t have to know all the ins-and-outs of, say, farming to be the effective leader of Dunbarville. However, he has to know that farming is a thing, the basics of how it’s done, understand the importance of well-maintained farms to the community, etc. Steve can delegate the management of Dunbarville’s kolkhoz to an experienced expert farmer, but Steve knows enough to be able to intervene effectively if the farm expert gets too big for his overalls.
Now consider what happens if Steve is any good at his job. Because Dunbarville’s kolkhoz is so well-managed, it can support a much larger population than 150. What does Steve do? Well, he knows that a population greater than 150 will be beyond his capacity to handle 100% effectively … but he also knows that forcing population restrictions on Dunbarville is the fastest way to get himself exiled, after which they’re going to have a baby boom anyway, so Steve does the best he can. In a few years he’s operating at 90% efficiency, then 70%, then 55%, because the community is simply growing too large for any one man to handle.
Now he has to delegate, and the delegation has to be permanent. Steve simply can’t keep up with everything that’s going on in the kolkhoz. So he delegates “kolkhoz management” to Gary. Gary’s not a bad guy – in fact, he’s the dude who managed the kolkhoz so well in the first place. But that task is, itself, now too big for even Gary to handle, so Gary hires some assistants. Worse, Gary knows he’s getting on in years, so to make sure the kolkhoz will keep working at peak, baby-boom-causing efficiency even after he’s gone, he sets up the Gary School of Farm Management …
And so forth, you get the point, we don’t have to run through the whole thing. That’s what I mean by “irreducible complexity” (IC). Once you clear the Dunbar Number, certain tasks have to be independently managed by cadres of experts who are only nominally answerable to the central authority. That’s where bureaucrats come in, and that’s where bureaucrats are good. Steve can’t manage ALL of Dunbarville’s affairs anymore, since it’s now a bustling community of 1,500, but he can manage the 150 bureaucrats who report to him. And since those bureaucrats are supervising only 150 people themselves …
Bureaucrats are, in effect, the re-imposition of a Dunbar Number on an increasingly complex society. When I say that the Roman Empire, for example, was under-bureaucratized, that’s what I mean. Maybe the Emperor had the good sense to limit his high officials to 150, but they had to manage 400 lower officials each, and each of those 400 were responsible for 20,000 peasants, or whatever the numbers actually were. That’s “irreducible complexity,” org-charts version. Unless you’ve got a perfectly balanced ratio of managers to managed, things are going to get very fuzzy at the edges, very fast … and that’s of course assuming complete competence on everyone’s part.
Severian, “Anticipations and Objections (I)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-16.
May 5, 2021
QotD: The United Nations
Mark Steyn, “Would you trust these men with $64bn of your cash? Of course not”, Telegraph Online, 2005-02-06.
May 4, 2021
QotD: DOUBLETHINK
The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons, one of which is subsidiary and, so to speak, precautionary. The subsidiary reason is that the Party member, like the proletarian, tolerates present-day conditions partly because he has no standards of comparison … This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love.
The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it. It also follows that though the past is alterable, it never has been altered in any specific instance. For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version IS the past, and no different past can ever have existed … It is also necessary to REMEMBER that events happened in the desired manner. And if it is necessary to rearrange one’s memories or to tamper with written records, then it is necessary to FORGET that one has done so. The trick of doing this can be learned like any other mental technique. It is learned by the majority of Party members, and certainly by all who are intelligent as well as orthodox. In Oldspeak it is called, quite frankly, “reality control”. In Newspeak it is called DOUBLETHINK.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949.
May 3, 2021
QotD: Marcus Aurelius and the “Mandate of Heaven”
Marcus faced no rebellion; no one sought to usurp him. For one thing, Marcus won his wars — no mean feat, considering the plague etc. But for another, it’s hard to blame Marcus for the plague, the weakness of the army staffing system, the structural weakness of the currency. And that’s where it gets interesting, because even though you can’t consciously blame Marcus for this, all those things create excessive anxiety among the people, and that anxiety has to go somewhere …
… so they persecuted Christians.
“The extent to which Marcus Aurelius himself directed, encouraged, or was aware of these persecutions is unclear and much debated by historians,” Wiki informs us, but it doesn’t matter if he had a hand in them or not. The important thing is that the Christians were the perfect target for free-floating anxiety, since plagues etc. were supernatural events and the Christians were ostentatiously opposed to the official belief system. Perhaps Marcus didn’t lose the Mandate of Heaven; perhaps it was stripped from him. Burn the unbelievers, and maybe the world gets back into focus.
This is the pattern whenever the Powers That Be find themselves trying to ride out a massive, structural sea-change — one where it’s obvious to the stressed-out public that something HAS to change, but a mere change in leadership won’t cut it. You’ll have to trust me on this, I guess, unless you’re up on your Chinese history, but almost all their “rebellions” had this mystical character — widespread banditry was assumed, in itself, to be a sign that the Emperor had lost the Mandate of Heaven, and the bandit groups usually ended up looking like the White Lotus sect, who caused endless trouble for something like 300 years. And then there’s the Taiping Rebellion — led by Jesus Christ’s brother! — and by now I’m sure y’all take my point. You can’t really blame the Qing for everyone’s opium addiction, or getting stomped by the British, but you’ve got to blame someone – hence the mystical character of pretty much all Chinese rebellions, certainly including the Maoist.
Severian, “Witch Trial Syndrome”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-27.
May 2, 2021
QotD: The “I don’t watch sports” bore is even more rare than the Libertarian bore
Only about 7 percent of American adults don’t watch sports at all. That means that non-sports-watchers are, by some counts, even rarer than libertarians. What I’m trying to say is, I’m fun at parties.
Peter Suderman, “Call of Duty Is the Best Sporting Event in the World”, Reason, 2018-10-19.
May 1, 2021
QotD: “WOLF! Film at 11”
Natalie Solent, “Why do Americans think the media might be hiding things from them? Let’s try asking Tony Bobulinski on Twitter”, Samizdata, 2021-01-13.
April 30, 2021
QotD: The battle of Bannockburn
The fact that the English were defeated has so confused Historians that many false theories are prevalent about the Bannockburn Campaign. What actually happened is quite clear from the sketch map shown above. The causes of the English defeat were all unfair and were:
- The Pits. Every time the Wallace saw some English Knights charging at him he quickly dug one of these unnatural hazards into which the English Knights, who had been taught to ride straight, galloped with flying colours.
- Superior numbers of the English (four to one). Accustomed to fight against heavy odds the English were uneasy, and when the Scots were unexpectedly reinforced by a large body of butlers with camp stools the English soldiers mistook them for a fresh army of Englishmen and retreated in disgust.
- Foul riding by Scottish Knights. This was typified even before the battle during an exhibition combat between the Brace and the English Champion, Baron Henry le Bohunk, when Brace, mounted on a Shetland pony, galloped underneath the Baron and, coming up unexpectedly on the blind side, struck him a foul blow behind and maced him up for life.
W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That, 1930.
April 29, 2021
QotD: Searching for useful reading lights
Lois McMaster Bujold, letter to Baen’s Bar, 2004-10.
April 28, 2021
QotD: George Orwell’s other novels
This would be a harsh and rather glib judgement, but many writers have faced worse. The book that suggested Wigan Pier, JB Priestley’s English Journey, was once hugely influential, even being credited with winning Labour the 1945 election, and is now regarded as a quaint piece of social commentary. That Priestley conducted his travels from a chauffeur-driven car, while Orwell willingly subjected himself to filthy evenings in slum bed and breakfasts and hostels, is a telling distinction between the two writers and their approaches: it is also undeniably true that Priestley died at 89, a grand old man of letters, and that Orwell’s premature death was one brought on by the tuberculosis that had affected him for years before his death. Yet Priestley is now remembered mainly for An Inspector Calls, and Orwell remains an iconic figure, beloved by millions. His canonisation was made explicit by a statue of him by Martin Jennings being erected outside Broadcasting House in 2017, complete with the phrase “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”.
Yet it is doubtful that many of his admirers have read his earlier novels, namely Burmese Days, A Clergyman’s Daughter, Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Coming Up For Air. All four were brought out by the left-wing publisher Victor Gollancz, between 1934 and 1939, and each of them is autobiographical in nature. Burmese Days draws on Orwell’s faintly unlikely time in Burma in the Twenties with the Indian Imperial Police, and A Clergyman’s Daughter uses both his life with his family in Southwold (which appears faintly disguised in the novel as “Knype Hill”) and his days tramping for its narrative. Keep the Aspidistra Flying finds Orwell mining his experiences in the lower reaches of the London literary scene, including his time working in a bookshop in Hampstead, and Coming Up For Air, written while Orwell was recuperating in Marrakesh, is suffused with an intense nostalgia for an England that may never have really existed, but is of a piece with the fascination, and repulsion, for the tenets of “Englishness” that Orwell wrote about over and over again in his essays and reportage.
Alexander Larman, “The lesser-known Orwell: are his novels deserving of reappraisal?”, The Critic, 2021-01-07.
April 27, 2021
QotD: Modern Vienna
Daniel Johnson, “The broken circle”, The Critic, 2021-01-09.
April 26, 2021
QotD: Maple-flavoured schadenfreude
William Watson, “Smug Canada probably wouldn’t let in a caravan of migrants either”, Financial Post, 2018-10-26.
