I like living in a society where women are, generally speaking, as free to choose their own path in life as I am. I like strong women, women who are confident and look me in the eye and see themselves as my equals. But I wonder, sometimes, if sexual equality isn’t doomed by biology. The relevant facts are (a) men and women have different optimal reproductive strategies because of the asymmetry in energy investment – being pregnant and giving birth is a lot more costly and risky than ejaculating, and (b) a woman’s fertile period is a relatively short portion of her lifetime. Following the logic out, it may be that the consequence of sexual equality is demographic collapse — nasty cultures which treat women like brood mares are the future simply because the nice cultures that don’t do that stop breeding at replacement rates.
Eric S. Raymond, “Fearing what might be true”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-10-23.
January 10, 2021
QotD: Sexual equality and the risk of demographic collapse
January 9, 2021
QotD: Heinlein’s “Future History”
Written between 1939 and 1950 for quickie publication in pulp magazines, the Future History is a series of snapshots of what is now an alternate human future — one that features atomic energy, solar system imperialism, and the first steps to deep space, all within a Spenglerian choreography of social progress and occasional resurgent barbarity. It stands with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy as a monument of golden-age science fiction.
In some respects the Future History has not aged any better than one might expect. Like other young nerds who created the science-fiction canon, Heinlein was interested in rocketry before it was thought to have any practical use. And Heinlein was really, really good at acquiring or faking expert knowledge of those topics in which he happened to get interested. The man knew his Tsiolkovsky.
The result, in the key story of the Future History, is an uncannily accurate description of the design and launch of a Saturn V rocket. (Written before 1950, remember.) But because Heinlein happened not to be interested in electronic computers, all the spacefaring in his books is done with the aid of slide rules or Marchant-style mechanical calculators (which, in non-Heinlein history, had to become obsolete before humans could go to Luna at all). Heinlein sends people to colonize the moon, but nobody there has internet, or is conscious of its absence.
Colby Cosh, “Heinlein’s monster? The literary key to Elon Musk’s sales technique”, National Post, 2018-02-12.
January 8, 2021
QotD: Culinary appropriation
Some of the resulting dishes are deplorable. I could live happily in a world without chop suey, chilli con carne, or coronation chicken. I’m not going to try a recipe described in Eater magazine as “huevos Kathmandu that paired green chutney and spiced chickpeas with fried eggs”.
Tex-mex cuisine is Montezuma’s most effective revenge. Rijstafel conquered the Netherlands more thoroughly than the Dutch ever subjected the East, and now rivals the drearier Hutspot as Holland’s national dish. Yet Dutch food still lags behind grandes cuisines.
Vindaloo is the epitome of culinary appropriation: a Bengali dish with ingredients from the Americas — potatoes and chillies — and a corruption of a Portuguese name: vinho d’alho, or garlic wine. It has become so British that “Vindaloo nah-nah” was the chorus of a chant popular among English football fans at a World Cup tournament (perhaps they confused it with Waterloo). I still dislike it.
Usually, however, culturally exchanged foods produce admirable dishes. Chocolate, tomato and avocado are among the few English words derived from Nahuatl. The Aztecs never used the items they designate in pain au chocolat, or tricolore, or avocado toast. But the responsible cultural appropriators deserve praise, not blame.
Satay would be unthinkable if Malays hadn’t incorporated peanuts that Portuguese pinched from Brazil. The basics of cajun cuisine reached Louisiana with “Acadian” migrants from French Canada — but cultural appropriation made it what it is today. Black chefs in the same region would be at a loss without African-born yams.
Curries would be historical curiosities if Indians hadn’t appropriated chillies from Mexico. Is Sichuanese cuisine imaginable without American peppers or sweet potatoes. Tempura would be unavailable if Japanese chefs hadn’t annexed and improved Portuguese techniques of frying. Culinary historians bicker over whether Jewish or Italian immigrants developed fish and chips. But almost everyone agrees that the British could never have done it on their own.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “Bad taste of PC foodies”, The Critic, 2020-09-19.
January 7, 2021
QotD: Sneering at “the throwaway society”
These are not new truths, even if it took the Covid-19 pandemic to reveal them again. The throwaway age began because of public-health campaigns a century ago to control the spread of pathogens. Disposable products were celebrated for decades for promoting hygiene and saving everyone time and money. It wasn’t until the 1970s that they became symbols of decadent excess, and then only because of economic and ecological fallacies repeated so often that they became conventional wisdom.
In a strange turn of events, the most affluent society in history suddenly turned into a mass of neurotic hoarders. Sifting through garbage for valuables, an activity formerly associated with the most destitute inhabitants of Third World shantytowns, became a moral duty in American suburbs. Greens campaigned for “zero waste” and a “circular economy” in which disposable products would be outlawed. They confidently predicted that the throwaway society was doomed, but if they’d known anything about its history, they would have realized that it was created for very good reasons — and that it will endure long after their lamentations are forgotten.
John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.
January 6, 2021
QotD: George Bernard Shaw’s views on eugenics
The Irishman’s opinions are, however, coming back to mangle and even smash his reputation. A group of students at RADA have called for Shaw’s name to be removed from the drama school’s theatre as part of an anti-racism action plan. This matters, because Shaw provided for the school in his will, and last year the royalties from his work contributed more than £78,000 to RADA. Yet the accusation that the renowned theatre college “celebrates historical figures who embraced racist ideologies” does have a certain merit. Problem is, as has been debated myriad times: do, can, and should we separate an artist’s work from their period, character and ideas? If the ghosts of anachronism and historical assumptions are never to be exorcised, there are an awful lot of people who will fail and fall to the wide-awake litmus test.
Shaw did indeed write, that, “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man” and, chillingly, “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.” He lectured for the Eugenic Education Society, praised Stalin (naturally) the early Mussolini, and even Hitler as late as 1935. He abandoned most of all this in his old age but never made any formal apology.
He was also an incisive critic of imperialism, mercilessly exposed establishment hypocrisy, opposed war and oppression throughout his career, and cared passionately about actors and writers – the very people at RADA trying to expunge his name from their place of learning. And here’s another challenge and even embarrassment for those who would remove the social engineers from the litany of the great and the good: many of their harshest opponents were not others on the left but, in Edwardian Britain and in the 20s and 30s, conservative Roman Catholic writers led by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
Michael Coren, “Eugenics and the intellectual left”, The Critic, 2020-09-16.
January 5, 2021
QotD: Tax “loopholes”
Nope. They’re just laws. These “loopholes” exist because at some point in time congress (both democrat and republican both!) decided that they wanted to promote some type of behavior or discourage some other behavior. So they basically put a reward into the law saying if you do this thing we like, you’ll pay less taxes! Or the opposite, congress wanted to discourage some behavior, so if you do that thing we don’t want, it will cost you more.
Both sides have done this forever, state and federal. We want you to drive electric cars so if you buy an electric car you get a tax break this year. YAY! Uh oh, we want you to stimulate the economy by buying this kind of machinery faster, so you have to depreciate your assets this other way or you’ll pay more! BOO! You get a discount for paying your employees health insurance, YAY! Oh, wait … Not that kind of health insurance. BOO!
So on and so forth, up and down, these perks come and go, all based upon whatever behavior congress is trying to promote at that time (or what favors they are doing for their friends). Why was mortgage interest deductible? Because at one point congress said “we really want people to own houses!” Even regular people have things that are considered “loopholes” to somebody.
So when the blue check mark journalism major (who probably dropped out of PoliSci because “there’s too much math”) declares that it is immoral that some rich dude didn’t pay his fair share because he used loopholes, those are basically a bunch of meaningless buzz words strung together to prey on the feelings of the gullible.
Larry Correia, “No, You Idiots. That’s Not How Taxes Work – An Accountant’s Guide To Why You Are A Gullible Moron”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2020-09-28.
January 4, 2021
QotD: Repressing the facts in genetic research
In fact, given the state of our present knowledge, I judge all three of these outcomes are near certain. I have previously written about some of the evidence in Racism and Group Differences. The truth is out there; well known to psychometricians, population geneticists and anyone who cares to look, but surrounded by layers of denial. The cant has become thick enough to, for example, create an entire secondary mythology about IQ (e.g., that it’s a meaningless number or the tests for it are racially/culturally biased). It also damages our politics; many people, for example, avert their eyes from the danger posed by Islamism because they fear being tagged as racists. All this repression has been firmly held in place by the justified fear of truly hideous evils – from the color bar through compulsory sterilization of the “inferior” clear up to the smoking chimneys at Treblinka and Dachau. But … if the repressed is about to inevitably return on us, how do we cope?
It’s not going to be easy. I saw this coming in the mid-1990s, and I’m expecting the readjustment to be among the most traumatic issues in 21st-century politics. The problem with repression, on both individual and cultural levels, is that when it breaks down it tends to produce explosions of poorly-controlled emotional energy; the release products are frequently ugly. It takes little imagination to visualize a future 15 or 20 years hence in which the results of behavioral genetics are seized on as effective propaganda by neo-Nazis and other racist demagogues, with the authority of science being bent towards truly appalling consequences.
Eric S. Raymond, “A Specter is Haunting Genetics”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-06-19.
January 3, 2021
QotD: Literary stasis in the Byzantine empire
Sean Gabb, “The Mediaeval Roman Empire: An Unlikely Emergence and Survival”, SeanGabb.co.uk, 2018-09-14.
January 2, 2021
QotD: The Opposite Rule of Progressives
That was in fact the case. The Left has well funded “volunteer” operations to bus in protesters when needed. Often they are paid by their union, like we saw in Wisconsin with the teacher unions. It is a form of projection, for the most part, but in politics it is a way to shift the focus away from whatever crooked stuff they’re doing. One of the oldest tricks in politics is to falsely accuse your opponent of something, so the story is about the other guy denying it, not about whatever you are doing. […] For as long as I’ve been alive, there have been theories about why there is a Left and Right in American politics. All of these theories claim the mantel of science and all of them come from the Left. The reason for this is, at some level, the Left knows they are not working from facts and reason, but rather a set of beliefs. Rather than confront that, they accuse everyone that opposes them of holding irrational beliefs and acting from emotion.
The formula goes like this. They assign to themselves qualities they wish they possessed, but don’t. “Open minded” always makes the list along with “smart” and “unconventional.” Who would not want to be a smart, open minded guy, who is a little off-beat? Gosh that sounds just like the protagonist of every cool TV show and movie! Then they usually assign some bad qualities to the mythical right-winger or conservative. Then they produce a “study” that confirms all of this as science!
I’ll note that liberals have a long list of words for the people on the other side of the hive walls. You never hear liberals talk about the differences between libertarians and paleo-cons or neocons and paleos. To the liberal, they are part of the undifferentiated other on the other side of the wall. Often they avoid this and rely on their cartoon version of the conservative, which is usually a blend of the 1950’s sitcom dad and a prison guard. It’s Ward Cleaver with a closet full of Nazi uniforms.
The Z Man, “The Opposite Rule of Liberalism”, The Z Blog, 2013-11-15.
January 1, 2021
QotD: Buying “organic” food
Take “no GMOs” for starters. That’s nonsense; it’s barely even possible. Humans have been genetically modifying since the invention of stockbreeding and agriculture; it’s what we do, and hatred of the accelerated version done in a genomics lab is pure Luddism. It’s vicious nonsense, too; poor third-worlders have already starved because their governments refused food aid that might contain GMOs. And without GMOs it’s more than possible that the new wave of wheat rust, once it really gets going, might condemn billions to death.
Vegan? I’ve long since had it up to here with the tissue of ignorance and sanctimony that is evangelical veganism. Comparing our dentition and digestive tracts with those of cows, chimps, gorillas, and bears tells the story: humans are designed to be unspecialized omnivores, and the whole notion that vegetarianism is “natural” is so much piffle. It’s not even possible except at the near end of 4000 years of GMOing staple crops for higher calorie density, and even now you can’t be a vegan in a really cold climate (like, say, Tibet) because it’ll kill you. In warmer ones, you better be taking carnitine and half a dozen vitamins or you’re going to have micronutrient issues sneak up on you over a period of years.
OK, I give on gluten-free. Some people do have celiac disease; that’s a real need. But “no trans fat”? Pure faddery, or the next thing to it. The evidence indicting trans fats is extremely slim and surrounded by a cloud of food-nannyist hype. I hate helping to keep that sort of balloon inflated with my dollars.
Who could be against “fair trade”? Well, me … because the “fair trade” crowd pressures individual growers to join collectives with “managed” pricing. If you’re betting that this means lazy but politically adept growers with poor resource management and productivity prosper at the expense of more efficient and harder-working ones, you’ve broken the code.
Finally, “pesticide-free”. Do I like toxic chemicals on my food? No … but I also don’t fool myself about what happens when you don’t use them. This ties straight back to the general cluster of issues around factory farming. Without the productivity advantages of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and other non-“organic” methods, farm productivity would plummet. Relatively wealthy people like me would cope with reduced availability by paying higher prices, but huge numbers of the world’s poor would starve.
I buy “organic” food because it tastes better and I can, but I feel guilty about reinforcing all the kinds of delusion and superstition and viciousness that are tied up in that label. We simply cannot feed a world population of 6.6 billion without pesticides and factory farming and GMOs and preservatives in most bread; now, and probably forever, “organic” food will remain a luxury good.
Try telling its political partisans that, though. Hyped on their belief in their own virtue, and blissfully ignorant about scale problems, they have already engineered policies that have cost thousands of lives during spot famines. The potential death toll from (especially) anti-GMO policies is three orders of magnitude higher.
And my problem reduces to this: how can I buy the kind of food I want without supporting dangerous delusions?
Eric S. Raymond, “Organic guilt”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-08-23.
December 31, 2020
QotD: The “noble savage” belief system
***When the ancestors of North America’s Indigenous peoples entered the New World some 16,000 years ago via Siberia, they hunted many of the mammals, reptiles, and birds, from the Arctic down to Tierra del Fuego. Mammoths, mastodons, and enormous ground-dwelling sloths, as well as giant bears, giant tortoises, and enormous teratorn birds with 16-foot wingspans — animals that had never had a chance to evolve in the presence of humans — were among the many species that disappeared from the Americas. Some medium-sized animals — such as horse, peccary, and antelope species — were also wiped out. But others survived: Bison and deer species, tree sloths, tapirs, jaguars, bear species, alligators, and big birds such as rheas and condors are, at least for the time being, still with us. The existence of these survivors, along with the relatively unspoiled forests, grasslands, and rivers seen by the first Europeans to enter the Americas, served to support the illusion that America’s first peoples had been maintaining what popular environmentalist David Suzuki calls a “sacred balance” with the natural world. Throughout history, however, humans killed animals that were tasty, numerous, and huntable. For kin-groups, staying alive meant making life-and-death cost-benefit calculations about where to send your berry-pickers and hunters. “Sacredness” had nothing to do with it.
This is not to say that the Indigenous peoples who migrated from Asia to the Americas were especially bloodthirsty (though Europeans typically reported that their hunting and fishing skills were excellent). In every known case where humans entered continents formerly uninhabited by our species, the bigger animals tended to disappear, since they provided the most sustenance per kill. The first humans to enter Australia some 70,000 years ago wiped out giant kangaroo species, rhino-sized marsupial herbivores, jaguar-sized marsupial carnivores, big flightless birds, and many other megafauna. The same thing would happen in Europe: After sapiens completed its occupation of that sub-continent some 30,000 years ago, the mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant deer, and lions they recorded in their cave paintings and carvings also disappeared.
Baz Edmeades, “The Myth of Harmonious Indigenous Conservationism”, Quillette, 2020-09-06.
December 30, 2020
QotD: The sting in the tail of genetic research
Eric S. Raymond, “A Specter is Haunting Genetics”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-06-19.
December 29, 2020
QotD: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds
Camille Paglia: The analogy to today’s global virus crisis is very compelling. The Birds demonstrates the fragility and folly of all human artifice. When omnipotent nature turns on mankind, everything falls to pieces — from protective dwellings to personal dignity and social cohesiveness. Unleashing the birds like a black plague, Hitchcock attacks the sentimental illusions that allow us to survive and thrive in our daily routines. The film has a metaphysical sweep, exposing the terrifying great unknowns at the heart of human existence.
As for the present time, Western developed nations have become too smugly complacent about their advanced technology and prosperity. Our electronic systems and intricate international supply and distribution network function so smoothly that they have become invisible to the affluent upper-middle-class, comfortably working from home via computer. These arrogant masters of the machine attribute all human ills to unjust society — from hurricanes to global warming, as if puny mankind is capable of such staggering power. Like Greek tragedy, The Birds shows the grim reality — human helplessness in the face of nature and fate, as commerce, schooling, hospitality, and the pretty dance of courtship are reduced to horror and squalor.
December 28, 2020
QotD: Book accumulation
However, I never buy a book without intending to read it, and intention is, if not nine-tenths of accomplishment, at least some portion of it.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Sufficiently Educated to Embrace the Simplistic”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-24.
December 27, 2020
QotD: Charles Dickens
They “protest” things that, indirectly, they learnt to protest from the kind-hearted Dickens; subjective hysterias about the world being unfair. Of course it is unfair, as it has always been, and to everyone who has been living in it. But unfairness is a whim, compared to sound moral judgements, and the reticence that should accompany them. We cannot make the world “more fair” by rioting. Dickens, incidentally, agrees with me on that.
He was among the writers (and artists generally) who contributed subtly to our post-Christian worldview, based on emotion, not remorseless thought. Who made, say, Christmas about giving presents to little children, rather than centrally about the birth of Christ. That doesn’t mean his works should be suppressed. On the contrary, they should be read and enjoyed, with this thought in mind. He moralizes, but in a way that may actually subvert morality, by substituting “feelings” for the hard truths, which are to die for.
David Warren, “Retractiones”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-07-29.
