… it was a problem of permitting, by and large. Portugal isn’t as bad, mind, nowhere near but in the seventies a lot of places were designated “green belts” everywhere, so that to build on them (and you had to build on them, or you were stymied in growth) you had to know who to bribe, and of course have the money to do it. This isn’t the only reason why favelas end up housing even the middle class. There’s a ton of other reasons, including but not limited to land ownership and property rights, and a shit-ton of stuff. But permitting is part of it.
This is because people don’t view their public posts as something they do to make society better/serve society or even do a job, but as a way to enrich themselves/benefit their friends/make it easier to make money in the future.
Everything, from truly shoddy workmanship to rushed, corner/cutting work, to outright corruption comes from viewing a job not as something you take pride in and work to do your best at, but from viewing a job as an opportunity to enrich yourself and your family while doing as little work as humanly possible. In fact in some societies, this is viewed as a duty. As someone in comments cited there are places in Africa where locals can’t run a shop, because all their relatives near and distant will expect to be given merchandise for free … or even money out of the till.
A lot of this is because the idea of the individual as independent of the tribe and the family is a very new thing in most of the world. We kind of have a head start on it because we are/are descended from those who left family and tribe behind.
[…]
Also in most of the world working for money is vaguely shameful. Particularly so if you’re working for someone else. […] And even here not only does that attitude persist, but it’s trying to make itself normal. Particularly in politics.
So, take pride in what you do, and do the best job you can. It’s not just important for you, it’s a building block of society. Do the best you can, and control as much as you can, so maybe you will have just reward which is an incentive to do better.
This way is civilization built. This way do things actually improve.
Sarah Hoyt, “BUILD!”, According to Hoyt, 2018-07-25.
November 8, 2020
QotD: Tribal and post-tribal economies
November 7, 2020
QotD: “Hate speech”
It is, of course, fatal to humour, if enforced and persisted in. For one vital quality of humour is inequality, and striking visual, aural, and physical differences. Differences in sex, age, colour, race, religion, physical ability, and strength lie at the source of the majority of jokes since the beginning of human self-consciousness. And all jokes are likely to provoke discomfort if not positive misery among those laughed at. Hence any joke is liable to fall foul of those laws. The future for humourists thus looks bleak, at the time I write this. The ordinary people like jokes, often crude ones, as George Orwell pointed out in his perceptive essay on rude seaside picture postcards. But are ordinary people, as opposed to minor officials, in charge any more? Democracy doesn’t really seem to work, and people are insufficiently dismayed at its impotence.
Paul Johnson, Humourists: From Hogarth to Noël Coward, 2010.
November 6, 2020
QotD: When you use a racist lens, everything looks like racism
If DiAngelo’s friends had told her not to live in the neighborhoods because they had black and brown residents, she could call them out for overt racism. But even when her friends made no mention of race whatsoever, DiAngelo attributed their warnings to racism as well. There was no way for her friends to mention the neighborhood’s high crime rates without DiAngelo finding them guilty of racism.
DiAngelo also supports her theory that all white people are racist by interpreting ambiguous events to support her conclusions, despite other plausible explanations. In one anecdote, DiAngelo describes an incident in which a white female teacher had two black students at her desk. The teacher prefaced something she said with the word “girl.” One student felt that the use of the word “girl” was racist. The other student disagreed, saying that the teacher called all her students “girl” regardless of their race.
Any reasonable person would conclude that if the teacher called every student — white, black, Asian, Latinx — “girl,” the teacher’s use of the word resides somewhere between “not racist” and “open to interpretation.” But DiAngelo reached a different conclusion, demonizing the teacher’s lack of concern for the offended student’s feelings, and calling the teacher arrogant for thinking the use of “girl” was not racist. To be clear, while teachers should listen to their students’ concerns, there is no proof this teacher’s word choice was racially motivated. And ironically, DiAngelo is guilty of everything she criticizes the teacher for because DiAngelo arrogantly ignores the other black student who did not think the comment was racist.
David Edward Burke, “The Intellectual Fraud of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility“, The Logical Liberal, 2020-06-13.
November 5, 2020
QotD: The idiocy of tariffs
The true sadness here being that the spiral works the other way too. But hugely, vastly, more slowly. GATT was founded in 1947, it became, the process was transferred to, the WTO and it has taken them since then, that two generations, to reduce tariff levels to where they’re not really all that important in trade matters. Something that is being undone in just a couple of months of foolishness. GATT being something of a response to the economic demolition work done by Smoot Hawley of course.
Trade protection does spiral up and spiral down, the sadness being that here’s an asymmetry to the process. The reductions that make us richer take very much longer than the nonsenses that impoverish.
Tim Worstall, “The China, US, Trade War – It’s All Mutual On The Way Down As Well As Up”, Continental Telegraph, 2018-07-11.
November 4, 2020
QotD: The dangers of breaking the “fourth wall”
Note that the rules can be broken from either side, the spectacle’s or the audience’s. Movies these days are most often guilty of the former, while rasslin’ bankrupted itself doing the latter. The last Star Wars movie I saw, for instance, was the first one with Girl Luke. It broke its own in-universe rules by having Girl Luke do everything Luke did, minus the training and effort and self doubt. She was just instantly awesome at everything, because grrrl power, and now that franchise is in the process of bankrupting (oh God, let it be so, and soon!) the entire Disney empire. Rasslin’ first tried to fool the “smart marks,” then went the nudge-nudge wink-wink route — both fatal to the suspension of disbelief for the majority of fans, who were still operating under the old contract.
Under the old contract, “wrestling fan,” like “Star Wars fan” or “Schwarzenegger movie fan” or what have you was a temporary identity. You went to the spectacle to put your real self aside for a few hours. You buy the ticket, and cease being Joe Schmoe the mechanic or the plumber or the customer service rep or the shmuck who still lives at home because he just can’t catch a break. Instead you’re transported to a galaxy far, far away, where bodybuilders are time-traveling robots and men in spandex come back from the dead to body slam their rivals.
For that kind of person, breaking the fourth wall, as the lit-crit types call it, is a slap in the face. Ha ha, fuck you, you loser! You don’t get to enjoy a few hours in a galaxy far, far away from your normal life, because we’ll be constantly reminding you that all of this is fake fake fake fake fake! You can watch the body slams and light saber fights, but every time you’re just starting to get into it and forgetting yourself, we’re gonna pop back up with an in-your-face aside! You’re a loser, and the very fact that you’re here watching this proves you’re a waste of oxygen! Take that!
In other words, loser is the fixed identity on which Postmodern entertainment is parasitic. This is just aces for the dorks-with-big-microphones who write the Tweets, since nudge-nudge wink-winking each other about what losers those other fans are is what keeps them, the Postmodern ironists, from feeling like losers themselves. But see above, with wrestling. Or Star Wars, or now sportsball, or pretty much anything else. The Postmodern ironists don’t buy tickets. They don’t go to the show in person, because they know that bringing their Postmodern ironic act into the theater would likely end with them getting their asses kicked.
Severian, “Rasslin'”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-07-26.
November 3, 2020
QotD: Water pricing
Near all freshwater availability problems come from the fact that farmers get it cheap or for free, diverting it from much more valuable uses like keeping people alive if they drink it. This is true in California – we’ve actually cases of farmers using $400 of water to grow $100 of alfalfa – as it is in Pakistan. There are cases of people growing water hungry crops in near drought areas just because they get that water too cheaply.
[…]
Gaining revenue with which to build dams is useful, it most certainly is. But that’s not the only function of pricing. The cash to increase supply, great, but the very fact of charging will reduce demand. And we should be charging what it costs to produce the water too. So charges should cover 100% of the costs of the dams, not just 25%.
It’s entirely possible that charging that full cost will mean that no farmers want the water. OK, then we shouldn’t build the dam, should we? For if the value of the water – measured by what people will pay – is less than the cost of its provision, then that’s value destroying, providing the water. The dam makes us all poorer, therefore we shouldn’t build it.
The point here being – and it’s an important one – that prices affect both supply and demand. They’re what brings them into balance even. So, yes, charge for water, but not just so that we can pay to increase supply, also so that we, merely by charging, reduce demand.
Tim Worstall, “Pakistan’s Chief Justice Almost Right – Charge For Water, Not For Dams, But To Charge For Water”, Continental Telegraph, 2017-07-17.
November 2, 2020
QotD: The Patriarchy
Thus it is okay to hate all men – they are all infected by the canker of patriarchy which, unlike individual thoughts and motivations, is a kind of all-powerful super-organism, a hive mind controlling its male worker bees. Men as individuals are simply tokens of something deeper – structural misogyny embedded in institutional power. If you’re a man who thinks you are not a misogynist, who in fact thinks you like women perfectly well, you are deluding yourself. For such men, their sexism is simply unconscious, just as in classical Marxism the “good” bourgeois was unconscious of the fact that he could not avoid exploiting his workers or employees, even though he might be providing them with a decent wage, good working conditions, and health and pension benefits.
This analysis, given a moment’s thought, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Even if you accept that all the ills of the world are down to patriarchy and the dominance of men, you have to concede the corollary – that all the triumphs of humankind are down to the patriarchy also, from medicine and science to the highest reaches of art and culture.
Women may point out that they have been excluded from these fields until now, and that’s largely true, although biology – the lack of control women have historically had over their own fertility and the greater physical strength of men – might be a far more simple and plausible explanation than the existence of a hypothetical, all-powerful super-organism. However, the very act that men hold the balance of power is proof of the existence of patriarchy, according to this belief system.
Tim Lott, “Why It’s Not OK to Hate Men”, Quillette, 2018-08-14.
November 1, 2020
QotD: Trumbo
And it was. Needless to say, the movie made villains of the conservatives who opposed the Marxist infiltration: people like John Wayne and Hedda Hopper in particular, Wayne because Wayne, and Hopper because she had a son serving in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War. Of course Wayne was made out to be a bully and Hopper a vindictive bitch — and the Senators and Congressmen who haled the Commies in front of the Senate and House Un-American Committee (HUAC) were depicted as ideological purists who saw Communists behind every bush — even though, in the case of Hollywood, there were Commies behind every bush at the time.
Of course, much was made of the fact that being a Communist wasn’t actually illegal (then, and now), and Trumbo made a great show of this being a First Amendment issue — which it was — and how these Commies all wanted to improve America, but of course there were evil right-wingers like Wayne, Joe McCarthy and HUAC harassing them at every turn.
The execution of the traitors Julius and Ethel Rosenberg got a little puff piece in the movie, which didn’t — couldn’t — actually say they weren’t guilty of
treasonespionage, so it was brushed over with the throwaway that it was the first execution for espionage in peacetime, as though peacetime should give espionage a pass. And if that wasn’t enough, the Rosenberg children were paraded around as sympathy magnets — as they still are — because Communists have no problem using children to serve their own purposes.Kim du Toit, “Blacklists Matter”, Splendid Isolation, 2020-07-28.
October 31, 2020
QotD: Swords
A sword never jams, never has to be reloaded, is always ready. Its worst shortcoming is that it takes great skill and patient, loving practice to gain that skill; it can’t be taught to raw recruits in weeks, nor even months.
Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road, 1963.
October 29, 2020
QotD: The art of the politician
The perfect politician, as the perfect salesman, sells this “vision” — dwarfing any specific programme with its stated assumptions and checkable facts. Details, details; to the uninitiated, these are always boring, and the voting masses will never be initiated. The people, especially in this Age of Netflix, want entertainment, and what they call “leadership.” A leader is a person who does your thinking for you. In politics, he has a rôle like that of film director, in a movie where he will be the principal star. We must go through the movie emotionally on his side; grieve his little setbacks, feel that we participate when he wins. Black hats, white hats: his opponents are clearly marked and can be seen at every moment to be deplorable.
David Warren, “Now playing”, Essays in Idleness, 2018-07-13.
October 28, 2020
QotD: The Gurkhas
October 27, 2020
QotD: Trader Joe’s
Jim Treacher, “Trader Joe’s Apologizes for Being Racist”, P.J. Media, 2020-07-20.
October 26, 2020
QotD: Living in the modern world
Zack Stentz, Twitter, 2018-07-16.
October 25, 2020
QotD: The omnibenevolent, omniscient state
Ivor Thomas, The Socialist Tragedy, 1951.
October 23, 2020
QotD: Every military organization
Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road, 1963.
