In colonial India, Kali’s notoriety boomed. For in her both coloniser and colonised found a figurehead. Corrupted by the British, Kali was spun as a sexually depraved, blood-swigging black sorceress. As William Ward phrased it in his encyclopaedia, “She exhibits altogether the appearance of a drunken frantic fury … on whose altar victims annually bleed”. Such descriptions, deemed by Indians to be reductively fixated on her destructive powers to the omission of her maternal reserve, activated a movement for her reclamation and turned her into an icon in the struggle for Indian independence in the late-nineteenth century. Put on calendars, cigarette packets, matchboxes, and subject of hugely popular prints, Kali was embraced as a vision of freedom. The reverence for her was inseparable from politics. And it took just two decades after India gained its freedom for a politician to exploit it.
Indira Gandhi — the daughter of one of the freedom movement’s protagonists Pandit Nehru and India’s first and only female prime minister — chose consciously to co-opt this divinity in service of burnishing her own self-image. Indeed, during her first spell in office, from 1966-1977, Indira’s image was as prolific as the colourful printed pictures of the tantric goddess splashed across India’s towns and bazaars. Her appearance was, understandably, more benign. But in India’s jostling visual marketplace her image — big smile and bobbed black hair shot with a streak of white framed by a demure uttariya (veil) — was as inescapable as any deity’s.
Indira played the demagogue superbly. But just as her popularity among Indians soared, and her political confidence grew, those around her began equating her strong, intolerant, and cold politics with female divinities and their overwhelming powers. According to a hugely contentious apocryphal story, Indira’s young rival Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who would go on to succeed her as prime minister, was so overcome by devotion at the sight of her gallantry during India’s war with Pakistan in 1971 that he called her Ma Durga — Kali’s mother.
Cleo Roberts, “Indira Gandhi: a gift from the gods?”, The Critic, 2020-10-15.
January 25, 2021
QotD: Indira Gandhi’s exploitation of the goddess Kali
January 24, 2021
QotD: The “returned ballot”
Here’s what you do. You go into the polling station, show your ID (in Canada voters must identify themselves). The officer crosses you off the voting list, and gives you a ballot. Then you say, “I wish to return this ballot.” He says, “Thank you, sir,” and takes out his returned ballot book. (It need be nothing special: a school exercise book will do.) He copies your name into that, along with your address. (It is the only way to get your preference recorded.) You thank him, then wander off through the boobs who came to vote for somebody.
One has oneself, in effect, just voted for “none of the above.” This is the theory.
In practice the officer, who may or may not speak English or French, but probably needed the money, looks puzzled and a little frightened. He has no idea what you are talking about. You dig in, to provide a patient lesson in elementary civics. He won’t have a book, but you have brought along a cahier with “Returned Ballots” written on the cover in large capitals with a felt pen, and some heraldry doodled above it. To be helpful, you have already written your name and address on the first line. He consults all the other polling staff then says, “Thank you, sir.”
When, later, you check the results, you will not find a single returned ballot mentioned. Perhaps you were counted among the spoilt ones.
Now if you had been counted, and had persuaded a plurality of your fellow citizens to do likewise in, say, the riding of Parkdale (about one-in-four would triumph in most Canadian ridings; one-in-six if the turnout were low enough), the election is annulled. A by-election must then be called, in which none of the previous candidates may stand.
David Warren, “Let’s be practical”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-09-15.
January 23, 2021
QotD: “Genetics is interesting as an example of a science that overcame a diseased paradigm”
Genetics is interesting as an example of a science that overcame a diseased paradigm. For years, basically all candidate gene studies were fake. “How come we can’t find genes for anything?” was never as popular as “where’s my flying car?” as a symbol of how science never advances in the way we optimistically feel like it should. But it could have been.
And now it works. What lessons can we draw from this, for domains that still seem disappointing and intractable?
Turn-of-the-millennium behavioral genetics was intractable because it was more polycausal than anyone expected. Everything interesting was an excruciating interaction of a thousand different things. You had to know all those things to predict anything at all, so nobody predicted anything and all apparent predictions were fake.
Modern genetics is healthy and functional because it turns out that although genetics isn’t easy, it is simple. Yes, there are three billion base pairs in the human genome. But each of those base pairs is a nice, clean, discrete unit with one of four values. In a way, saying “everything has three billion possible causes” is a mercy; it’s placing an upper bound on how terrible genetics can be. The “secret” of genetics was that there was no “secret”. You just had to drop the optimistic assumption that there was any shortcut other than measuring all three billion different things, and get busy doing the measuring. The field was maximally perverse, but with enough advances in sequencing and computing, even the maximum possible level of perversity turned out to be within the limits of modern computing.
(This is an oversimplification: if it were really maximally perverse, chaos theory would be involved somehow. Maybe a better claim is that it hits the maximum perversity bound in one specific dimension)
Scott Alexander, “The Omnigenic Model As Metaphor For Life”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-09-13.
January 22, 2021
QotD: The enclosure movement, in historical fact and in Marxist imagining
How this process played out all depended on extremely specific, local conditions. But on the whole it was slow — piecemeal enclosure had been happening to varying degrees since at least the fourteenth century. It’s hard to see how such a sporadic and piecemeal process could have led to such consistently and increasingly massive numbers flocking specifically to London. Indeed, the fact that they singled out London as their target suggests that this narrative might have it back-to-front. Some economic historians argue that it was the prospect of higher wages in the ever-growing metropolis that induced farmers to leave the countryside in the first place, selling up or abandoning their plots to those they left behind. Rather than enclosure pushing peasants off the land and into the city, London’s specific pull may instead have thus created the vacuum that allowed the remaining farmers to bring about enclosure. Otherwise, why didn’t the peasants simply flock to any old urban centre? The second-tier cities like Norwich or Bristol or Exeter or Coventry or York would all have been far less dangerous.
Anton Howes, “London the Great”, Age of Invention, 2020-10-20.
January 21, 2021
QotD: The Laurentian Elite and the “new Canada” of the 1960s
Because the Liberals were so successful in creating this new identity, conservatives, especially Western conservatives (understandably) felt alienated in this new Canada. Brimelow gave some intellectual heft and crafted a coherent theory around why conservatives felt this way.
The broader narrative Brimelow, and others, put forward is that Canada’s British heritage was central to our identity and sense of who we are, but that this identity was destroyed by the Liberals who then built a new one in their own image. In the 1960s, Canadian Liberalism became self-consciously post-British, and the 1960s really do represent an approximate decade in which the “old Canada” died and a “new Canada” was born. The 1960s weren’t just a time of social change, they marked the end of the British Empire, the start of the Quiet Revolution, and of course most symbolically saw the replacement of the Red Ensign with the Maple Leaf flag. The battles between Diefenbaker and Pearson (and Pierre Trudeau) work as a stand in for the divide between old British Canada and new Liberal Canada.
Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.
January 20, 2021
QotD: Helping the homeless
I see a number of sources nowadays trying to pin these closures entirely on tight-fisted Republican governors, and I am sure this is partly true. But this misses an important element — that civil libertarians had real issues with both the conduct of these institutions (e.g. One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest) and the fairness of the forced-institutionalization process. Also tied up in all this were Cold War stories of Soviet Russia using institutionalization in mental hospitals as a way to dispose of dissidents. After all, it is a short step from the totalitarian view of ideology (ie that everyone must believe, not just comply) to declaring that any deviation from the official orthodoxy constitutes mental illness.
Warren Meyer, “Why I Go Back and Forth On Issues of Forced Psychiatric Institutionalization”, Coyote Blog, 2018-09-20.
January 19, 2021
QotD: British foods
First of all, British apples, one or other variety of which is obtainable for about seven months of the year. Nearly all British fruits and vegetables have a good natural flavour, but the apples are outstanding. The best are those that ripen late, from September onwards, and one should not be put off by the feat that most British varieties are dull in colour and irregular in size. The best are the Cox’s Orange pippin, the Blenheim Orange, the Charles Hoss, the James Grieve and the Russet. These are all eaten raw. The Bramley Seedling is a superlative cooking apple.
Secondly, salt fish, especially kippers and Scottish haddocks. Thirdly, oysters – very large and good, though artificially expensive. Fourthly, biscuits, both sweetened and unsweetened, especially those that come from the four or five great firms whose names are a trademark. Fifthly, jams and jellies of all kinds. These are usually best when home-made, with the exception of strawberry jam, which is nearly always better as a manufactured product. Some varieties not often seen outside Britain are blackcurrant jelly, bramble jelly (made of blackberries) marrow jam with ginger, and damson cheese, an especially stiff kind of jelly which can be cut in slabs. In addition, no one who has not sampled Devonshire cream, Stilton cheese, crumpets, potato cakes, saffron buns, Dublin prawns, apple dumplings, pickled walnuts, steak-and-kidney pudding and, of course, roast sirloin of beef with Yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes and horseradish sauce, can be said to have given British cookery a fair trial.
The only alcoholic drinks which are native to Britain, and are all widely drunk, are beer, cider and whiskey. The cider is fairly good (that brewed in Herefordshire is the best), the beer very good. It is somewhat more alcoholic and very much bitterer then the beers of most other countries, all save the mildest and cheapest kinds being strongly flavoured with hop. Its flavour varies greatly from one part of the country to another. The whiskey exported from Britain is mostly Scottish, but the Irish kind, which is sweeter in taste and contains more rye, is also popular in Britain itself. One excellent liquor, sloe gin, is widely made in Britain, though not often exported. It is always better when home-made. It is of a beautiful purplish-red colour, and rather resembles cherry brandy, but is of a more delicate flavour.
Finally, a word in praise of British bread. In general it is close-grained, rather sweet-flavoured bread, which remains good for three or four days after being baked. It is seen at its best in the kind of double loaf. Rye bread and barley bread are hardly eaten in Britain, but the wholemeal wheat bread is extremely good. The great virtue of British bread is that it is baked in small batches, in a rather primitive way, and therefore is not at all standardised. The bread from one baker may be quite different from another down the street, and one can range about from shop to shop until one is suited. It is a good general rule that small, old-fashioned shops make the best-flavoured bread. Throughout a great deal of the North of England the women prefer to bake their bread for themselves.
George Orwell, “British Cookery”, 1946. (Originally commissioned by the British Council, but refused by them and later published in abbreviated form.)
January 18, 2021
QotD: Francis Bacon on what we now call “Confirmation Bias”
“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it” wrote Francis Bacon in his 1620 Novum Organum, one of the major early works of the European Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. Today, we call this confirmation bias. We don’t form opinions based on the evidence — we often shape the evidence to suit our opinions. We attribute importance to facts which back our preferred theory and dismiss as unimportant those which do not. “It is the peculiar and perpetual error of the human intellect to be more moved and excited by affirmatives than by negatives; whereas it ought properly to hold itself indifferently disposed towards both alike,” Bacon added. We continue to cling to ideas which have been discredited, a phenomenon called belief perseverance. Or worse, our faith in discredited ideas becomes even stronger when we are presented with contrary evidence — the backfire effect. Or we focus on successes and ignore failures, a phenomenon called survivorship bias. Bacon reminds us of the story of Diagoras of Melos, who was shown a picture of those who had escaped shipwreck after making vows to the gods hanging in a temple. Diagoras asked where he could find a picture of those who made vows to the gods but drowned anyway.
Bacon wrote that humans are afflicted with “idols of the mind,” and he identified four. The first are idols of the tribe, flaws in thinking common to all people that come from human nature itself. Second are idols of the cave, or den. All of us, Bacon argued, have a cave in our mind where the light of reason is dimmed, and this cave varies from person to person depending on his or her character, experiences, and environment. Third are idols of the marketplace, associated with the exchange of ideas. As language can never be perfectly precise, it’s possible for falsehoods to develop and spread as a concept as explained by one person to another. Finally come idols of the theatre, ideas which have been presented to us and taken root so deeply and firmly they’ve become hard to remove. In Bacon’s time, this was the philosophy of Aristotle, which had become so fundamental to Western thought that even parts of it which could easily be disproven remained unchallenged for centuries. To manage the effect of the idols, Bacon proposed “radical induction” — the forerunner to the modern scientific method.
Adam Wakeling, “George Orwell and the Struggle against Inevitable Bias”, Quillette, 2020-08-08.
January 17, 2021
QotD: Hunter S. Thompson
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-02-21
January 16, 2021
QotD: Make companies product-focused again
But pretty much anything else … please just STFU unless it is directly related to the business. I get that certain “life style” brands might want their logo in a Formula One car or on Eddie Izzard’s frock. But I am not interested in how inclusive the local bookstore is, nor do I want to hear that an auto-parts shop is proud of the blasted NHS.
I do not even want any companies declaiming how much they support causes I like, let alone ones that I either oppose or which just make me roll my eyes at the sheer presumption of their marketing department. For me, this is negative marketing. I already avoid certain shops and restaurants that prominently display their “social awareness” to me: they are actually doing the opposite, emphasising that I am not their target market. So I take them at their word and if I can easily get what they sell elsewhere from someone who doesn’t, that is what I always do.
Make companies product-focused again.
Perry de Havilland, “Make companies product-focused again”, Samizdata, 2020-09-30.
January 15, 2021
QotD: Capitalism and socialism, viewed from Harvard in 1942
The idea that socialism would ultimately prevail over capitalism was quite a widespread view — especially in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It persisted throughout the Cold War. “The Soviet economy is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command economy can function and even thrive,” wrote Paul Samuelson, Schumpeter’s pupil, in the 1961 edition of his economics textbook — a sentence that still appeared in the 1989 edition. In successive editions, Samuelson’s hugely influential book carried a chart projecting that the gross national product of the Soviet Union would exceed that of the United States at some point between 1984 and 1997. The 1967 edition suggested that the great overtaking could happen as early as 1977. By the 1980 edition, the timeframe for this great overtaking had been moved forward to 2002–12. The graph was quietly dropped after the 1980 edition.
Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.
January 14, 2021
QotD: Collective-action problems – perfect state response versus flawed private responses
The implicit burden of the article, after all, is indignation that the government has been done too little and the wrong things. What the author fails to grasp (because his thinking is warped by the religion of state-worship) is that this sort of dysfunction is not a sporadic accidental failure that could be corrected by sufficiently virtuous thoughts and deeds; it is an essential failure, entirely predictable from the incentives operating on all the actors (including the actors within government).
His sort of fantasy thinking implicitly throws a burden of proof on anarchists to construct a perfect response to something like the Deepwater Horizon disaster in a stateless system, or else have their critique of statism dismissed as heartless and inadequate. But the correct analysis is to notice that we can only do what we can only do, and compare the rationally expectable effectiveness of flawed government action against the rationally expectable effectiveness of flawed individual and market action.
The second level of error, once you get this far, is to require that the market action achieve a better outcome without including all the continuing, institutional costs of state action in the accounting. So, for example, other parts of the continuing costs of accepting state action to solve this individual toxic-exposure problem in the Deep Horizon aftermath is that Americans will be robbed every April 15th of five in twelve parts of their income (on average), and be randomly killed in no-knock drug raids. And it’s no use protesting that these abuses are separable from the “good” parts of government as long as you’re also insisting that the prospect of market failures is not separable from the good behavior of markets!
Irrational anarchists believe that utopia is somehow achievable in a stateless system; they make the exact reciprocal error from statists, believing that all evil proceeds from government. Rational anarchists like myself know that stateless systems will have tragic failures too, but believe after analysis that they would have fewer and smaller ones.
If this seems doubtful to you, do not forget to include all the great genocides of the 20th century in the cost of statism. It was contemplating those that turned me into an anarchist – because that sort of eruption of fire and blood, too, is not accidental but essential given the logic of state collectivism.
Eric S. Raymond, “Pessimistic anarchism”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-09-15.
January 13, 2021
QotD: Bureaucracy as a filter
But imagine it takes the doctor an hour of painful phone calls to even get the right person from the insurance company on the line. Now there’s a cost involved. If your patient is going to die without the medication, you’ll probably groan and start making the phone calls. But if your patient doesn’t really need it, and you just wanted to approve it in order to be nice, now you might start having a heartfelt talk with your patient about the importance of trying less expensive medications before jumping right to the $10,000 one.
Organizations have a legal incentive not to deny people things, because the people involved can sue them. But they have an economic incentive not to say yes to every request they get. Seeing how much time and exasperation people are willing to put up with in order to get what they want is an elegant way of separating out the needy from the greedy if every other option is closed to you.
This story makes sense and would help explain why bureaucracy gets so bad, but I’m not sure it really fits the evidence. People complain a lot about bureaucracy in places like the Department of Motor Vehicles, but the DMV doesn’t lose anything by giving you a drivers license and isn’t interested in separating out people who really want licenses from people who only want them a little. If the DMV can be as bureaucratic as it is without any conspiratorial explanation, maybe everything is as bureaucratic as it is without any conspiratorial explanation.
Scott Alexander, “Bureaucracy as Active Ingredient”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-08-31.
January 12, 2021
QotD: The use and abuse of stigma
But stigma, and hence the fear of stigma, can be beneficial in a social creature such as Man. I want the good opinion of my neighbours, I do not want them to think I am rude or dishonest. Fearing the stigma of being thought so, I try harder to be polite and honest.
Of course, wanting the good opinion of others may, in certain situations, have bad effects. Wanting the good opinion of my superior in the Nazi Party would be very bad. But that does not mean that desiring the good opinion of others is always intrinsically bad. In the same way, fear of stigmatization is not always bad (and there can be no fear of stigma without the existence of the thing itself). For example, it might be that people are discouraged from taking drugs, drinking too much, or stealing for fear of being stigmatized.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.
January 11, 2021
QotD: Conspiracy theories
In modern times, the conspiracy theory has been formalized. The assassination of John Kennedy is probably when this formalization process began. For example, a conspiracy theory needs a series of hard to accept coincidences. In the case of Kennedy, we have the amazing marksmanship of the shooter and then his unlikely assassination at the hands of a Jewish gangster, while he was in police custody. The Jack Ruby part is what made the whole thing perfect for the conspiracy theorists.
The first step in a conspiracy theory is that the obvious answer or the official answer must be eliminated as a lie or implausible. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the start of the conspiracy dynamic was the dismissal of Oswald as the lone actor. It is a variation on the old Sherlock Holmes line. Once you eliminate the parsimonious explanation, then the more complex and convoluted explanations become more plausible. That opens the door to endless speculation.
We see this with the QAnon cult on-line. All of it starts with the assumption that the obvious answer is wrong. For example, it is plainly obvious that Bill Barr is covering up the FBI spying scandal. He’s had years to do what should have taken a few months. Instead of accepting that rather obvious and plausible explanation, the QAnon people reject it and instead weave wildly complex theories about how half of Washington is about to be charged with crimes.
Another aspect of the formal conspiracy theory is the liberal use of the associative property to connect unrelated events. Person A knows Person B and Person B once had lunch at the same place as Person C. If any of these three people can be tied to the event in question, then it is assumed the other two are connected. The weakest associations are enough to assume a conspiracy. The associative property is an essential element of the modern conspiracy theory.
In the case of Kennedy, for example, organized crime is a popular player, because Jack Ruby was a minor criminal. His tenuous association with organized crime opens the door for linking any number of underworld characters with the assassination. It also opens the door for all sorts of theories about the Kennedy administration’s connections to organized crime. The associative property then ties communism, organized crime and the Cuba situation to the assassination.
The Z Man, “Conspiratorial Rule”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-01.
