Count up the victims of World War I, and American tourists will be pretty far down the list. But victims they were. When the conflict broke out, thousands of Americans were overseas visiting the cathedrals of Florence or the museums of London. They woke up one morning to find the ships that were supposed to take them back had been conscripted into the war effort, or refused to sail for fear of enemy fire. The banks that were supposed to cash their travelers’ checks were panicking, or devoting all their funds to the war effort, or dealing with a million other things. The hotels that were supposed to house them were closed indefinitely, their employees rushing to enlist out of patriotic fervor. And so thousands of frantic Americans, stuck in a foreign continent with no money and nowhere to stay, showed up at the door of the US Embassy in London and said – help!
The US Consulate in London didn’t know how to solve these problems either. But Herbert Hoover, still high on his decision to pivot to philanthropy and public service, calls them up and asks if he can help. They say yes, definitely. Hoover gets in touch with his rich friends, passes around the collection plate, and organizes a Committee For The Assistance Of American Travelers. Then he gets to work, the way only he can:
Within 24 hours, Hoover’s committee had its own stationery, and within forty-eight it was operating a booth in the ballroom of the Savoy Hotel as well as three other London locations. Through his business connections, Hoover managed to bypass restrictions on telegraph service and open a transatlantic line to allow Americans to wire money to stranded friends and relatives. In a city suddenly flooded with refugees, he reserved for American travelers some two thousand rooms in hotels or boardinghouses. He issued a press release proclaiming that his Residents’ Committee was assuming charge of all American relief work in the city, and that in doing so it had the blessings of its honorary chairman, Walter Hines Page, the US ambassador to London.
… which is totally false. Hoover is starting to display a pattern that will stick with him his whole life – that of crushing competing charities. He begins a lobbying effort to get the US Embassy to ban all non-Hoover relief work, focusing on the inefficiency of having multiple groups working on the same problem. When the US Assistant Secretary Of War arrives in London to coordinate a response, he is met on the dock by Hoover employees, who demand he consult with Hoover before interfering in the US tourist issue. Eventually the Embassy, equally exasperated by Hoover’s pestering and impressed with his results, agrees to give him official control of the relief effort.
After two months of work, Hoover and his Committee have repatriated all 120,000 US tourists, supporting them in style until it could find them boat tickets. All of its loans and operating costs have been repaid by grateful tourists, and its budget is in the black. The rescued travelers are universal in their praise for Hoover, partly because Hoover has threatened to ruin any of them who get too critical:
Other complainants were received with less patience, including a hotheaded professor of history from the University of Michigan, who wrote to accuse the Residents’ Committee of mistreatment. Hoover refuted his charges indignantly and comprehensively, copying his response to the president of the university and its board of regents. After a meeting with his employer, the professor returned Hoover an abject retraction and apology.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.
August 23, 2020
August 22, 2020
QotD: Sex-differentiated status hierarchies
Girls can win by winning in their own hierarchy — by being good at what girls value, as girls. They can add to this victory by winning in the boys’ hierarchy. Boys, however, can only win by winning in the male hierarchy. They will lose status, among girls and boys, by being good at what girls value. It costs them in reputation among the boys, and in attractiveness among the girls. Girls aren’t attracted to boys who are their friends, even though they might like them, whatever that means. They are attracted to boys who win status contests with other boys.
“whatever that means”. Heh. Shivvy way to say, “which means nothing”.
When JP discusses sex differences, he could be reading CH posts. Whatever one thinks of the criticisms leveled against him (some are valid), he does have a decent grasp of the sexual market and how men and women navigate divergent routes through an ocean of mate prospects to get what they want.
However, this is one of the rare instances when I disagree with his premise. He’s generally correct that, at least within the bounds of our current cultural arrangement, women have two status hierarchies available to them while men only have one. Our gynarcho-tyranny not only encourages but aggressively impresses upon women the urgency and even moral duty of succeeding in male domains (leaning in), while simultaneously encouraging men to sacrifice their status within their own male domains to make way for more women (and consequently rendering themselves less sexually attractive to women who are now their equal or higher in social status).
Women who do succeed in the man’s world can expect to ascend the intrafemale status ladder (more precisely, the intra-feminist status ladder), but where JP is wrong is assuming these women don’t also suffer an SMV status loss the near-equivalent of the SMV status loss suffered by men who succeed at girlie games of one-uppance.
Just as girls aren’t attracted to effeminate males, and other men are repulsed by nancyboys, the inverse is as true: men aren’t attracted to masculine, status-striving girls, and other women don’t subconsciously look up to mouthy careerist shrikes with the same mix of envy and admiration that they look up to physically beautiful women.
CH, “Sex-Based Status”, Chateau Heartiste, 2018-06-04.
August 21, 2020
QotD: Our overprotective culture
There’s a rule of thumb for dealing with elderly people in old age homes: Never do anything for anyone that they can do for themselves. It sounds cruel, but it’s not cruel.
This is one of the pathologies of our culture. A major pathology, and this is associated with a kind of immaturity and a kind of fear and this Oedipal mother problem, which is, “I don’t want you to suffer any distress right now.” Fine, but what about tomorrow and next week and next month? You might have to suffer a lot of distress right now so that you’re better next week and next month.
Jordan Peterson, “Christie Blatchford Sits Down With ‘Warrior For Common Sense’ Jordan Peterson”, National Post, 2018-02-07.
August 19, 2020
QotD: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
But it is an infestation of leftist biases, and is often grossly unprofessional. For decades, despite being almost entirely funded by Canadian taxpayers, it was the principal house organ of the Quebec separatist movement, to the point that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, shortly before the 1980 Quebec independence referendum, threatened to shut the French network down; when asked what he would replace it with, he responded with his customary vivacity of wit: “Still pictures of Chinese and Japanese vases, at least they have some cultural value.” It is compulsively misanthropic and nasty, and almost always takes a snide leftist view of everything, including foreign affairs. Brexiters were cavemen, U.S. President Donald Trump is a racist, sexist crook and moron, and it is racism and xenophobia to assert that the coronavirus originated in China. Can’t we have better and more original insights than this?
Conrad Black, “Canada needs a much better CBC”, New English Review, 2020-05-02.
August 18, 2020
QotD: Stigma
But in fact there is almost a law of conservation of stigma that operates in human societies, such that if it does not attach to one thing, it will attach to another. No doubt there is more stigma in shame societies than in guilt societies, but even in the latter everyone, except perhaps the most psychopathic of psychopaths, is afraid of being shown up in some respect or another.
Stigma begins early in life and children are much guided or influenced in their conduct by the fear of it. A teacher told me the following story. A child of about seven or eight came crying to her one day because another child had called him names.
“What did he say?” she asked.
“He called me a virgin.”
“What is a virgin?” asked the teacher,
“I don’t know,” said the boy. “But I know it’s something horrible.”
Stigma is a kind of shorthand to indicate what we detest. Anyone who pretends that he never stigmatises is probably lying, or perhaps I should say not telling the truth, since not every untruth that emerges from the human mouth is a lie. There are people who can contradict themselves without disbelieving in the law of non-contradiction, and therefore people who can genuinely despise people who pass moral judgment on others.
What would living completely without stigma and stigmatisation mean? Surely that there was nothing that we or anyone else could do to make people think badly of us. One of the reasons — I don’t say the only one — that I don’t steal is that I don’t want to be stigmatised as a thief. One sin doesn’t define a person’s character, however, so that when we stigmatise we must be careful to be just and proportionate. If we called everyone a liar who had told a lie, then we should all be liars (quite apart from the fact that it is sometimes virtuous to tell a lie). We call a liar someone who habitually lies, so that untruthfulness is a central part of his character.
Stigma is one of those many things that is neither good nor bad in itself, and depends for its social beneficence or maleficence on what it attaches to and how strongly. In the company of rogues or scoundrels, one can be stigmatised for honesty. Many a cruel act has been performed to avoid the stigma of being too cowardly to be cruel.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Situational Nature of Scorn and Stigma”, New English Review, 2020-04-28.
August 17, 2020
QotD: Orwell and faith
Charles Curran, “Orwell: The man behind 1984 — and all that”, Daily Mirror, 1954-12-14.
August 16, 2020
QotD: Labour is now the “party of government” even when they’re not in power
Anyone official and highly educated sounding who challenges whatever happens to be the prevailing supposed wisdom of this governing class, on Coronavirus or on anything else, must be scolded into irrelevance and preferably silenced. The governors must be obeyed, even if they’re wrong. In fact especially if they’re wrong, just as the soldiers of the past were expected to obey their orders, no matter what they thought of the orders or of the aristocratic asses who often gave them. Whether they were good orders was an argument that those giving orders could have amongst themselves, but that orders must be obeyed was a given. “Capitalism” isn’t worth dying for, but this new dispensation is, right or wrong.
Our new class of entitled asses, together with all those who have placed their bets for life on carrying out their orders or trying to profit from them, seems now to be the limit of the Labour Party’s electoral ambition. And who knows? The awful thing is that this class and its hangers-on could be enough, in the not too distant future, to get them back into direct command of the governmental process that they so adore.
Brian Micklethwait, “Mick Hartley on the politics of the Lockdown”, Samizdata, 2020-05-15.
August 15, 2020
QotD: The worth of a human being
According to this article, the worth of a human being was 98 cents. The authors showed how their figure was arrived at. They had combined current market prices for the materials in an average human frame of 130 pounds. (Details like this I remember.) A sceptic, even then, I recall noting that they excluded hat, mid-season clothing, and shoes, from their total; and that they didn’t mention whether they were citing wholesale or retail values on the flesh and chemicals. Most pointedly, while accompanying my mother to a supermarket, I checked the prices for beef, pork, and broiler chicken, choosing the lowest grades. All were over 10 cents a pound; and so I concluded that the overall price of the meat alone, per human, would exceed their estimate.
Given background inflation rates, I think the total value in 2020 may approach twenty dollars, or even twenty-five. I’d have to recheck chemical prices, to be sure. Though perhaps the total might be reduced, closer to one dollar again, for babies.
David Warren, “Virtual March for Life”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-05-14.
August 14, 2020
QotD: Eisenhower and Churchill
Their common love of history became a bond. Churchill was happiest when discussing history and its lessons, and in Eisenhower he found not only a worthy companion but also one of the few who could match him. Once while dining at Chequers, Churchill “remarked to Eisenhower that he had studied every campaisgn since the Punic Wars,” leading Commander Thompson to whisper to his neighbour, “And he’s taken part in most of them!”
Carlo d’Este, Warlord: A life of Winston Churchill at war, 1874-1945, 2008.
August 13, 2020
QotD: The discovery of anaesthesia and antisepsis
Joseph Lister first used carbolic acid (phenol) to perform sterile surgery at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary, in August, 1865. This would have the effect of vastly increasing the survival rate from these now commonplace surgical operations. But the news took years to circulate, and by the twentieth century surgeons were still working with infected equipment in filthy environments. Indeed, I have read accounts of the horrors of battlefield medicine in the First World War: men with survivable injuries, lost by the hundred thousands from ignorant, unnecessarily unhygienic medical procedures.
As Dr Gawande points out — in passing — both advances made life easier on patients. But the second saved lives on a — vastly — greater scale. The first was unique, in making life easier for doctors, who no longer had to operate on screaming, writhing customers. This also, incidentally, hugely increased their trade, and thus their income. Washing up, effectively, only added nuisance.
I already knew this history — my mommy was a ward matron, after all — but until the comparison was spelt out, the full significance was lost on me. I had read the “official” versions in several standard medical histories. They assume the slow spread of antisepsis was a problem of communications. Gentle reader will note that this is a lie. Methods of communication did not slow in the generation between the two inventions.
David Warren, “Heaven, Hell, & Alder Hey”, Essays in idleness, 2018-05-09.
August 12, 2020
QotD: The circle of recycled life
2. As soon as they are completed millions of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are shipped by truck to the various regional receiving centers of the U.S. Post Office.
3. From those centers, any number of allocated pallets of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are broken out, put on U.S. Post Office trucks and delivered to local postal carrier destinations inside northern California.
4. My personal Paradise postal carrier and hundreds of others report for work at local postal carrier centers throughout northern California and load up their vans with enough of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements to deliver one or more to each and every house on their route.
5. My very polite personal Paradise postal carrier parks her van at the end of my block and loads her sack with these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.
6. She comes up my walk, up the porch stairs, and deposits my full share of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my mailbox with a clang every day between one and three in the afternoon.
7. Hearing the clang I sigh and wend my weary way to the front door and open my mailbox and pluck out said colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.
8. With a heavier sigh I go back in, trudge through my house, out my back door to the alley, and place the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my Recycling bin with the rest of the week’s mound.
9. Tomorrow the huge, lumbering Paradise Waste Management Recycling garbage truck will stop and empty my Recycling bin into its maw and haul all the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements off to the Chico California Recycling and Brand New Mountain of Garbage center.
10. The collected colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements will then be shipped, by truck, to the center for turning recyclable paper into … recycled paper which will then be used by a concerned and responsible corporation for their twice-weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplements printed on 100% recycled paper.
Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Next year, as sure as spring brings septic system failures to Paradise, postage will increase because the U.S. Postal Colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements “Service” will need more money to keep The Recycled Circle of life going.
Gerard VanderLeun, “The Circle of Recycled Life”, American Digest, 2018-06-01.
August 11, 2020
QotD: Our culture shapes what we can see
I have a little more insight into how culture shapes what’s possible to think, because I changed my culture as an adult. While this can be done (obviously) and immigrants should be encouraged to do it, (or go home), the acculturation is never complete. What happens is that you acquire a sort of cultural double vision. Depending on how far your acculturation goes, you’ll see the defects in thought or at least the unquestioned assumptions in one of the countries better, but also have a strong feeling of being outside enough to see some flaws in your dominant culture. In my case, for instance, I see the flaws in Portugal very clearly, like the obsession with speed over diligence or being decisive over being right, but I still see some in the US which is why sometimes I say “what people born and raised here don’t see.”
I have, of course, even more insight, due to being a conservative in the US, in a culture and profession (the arts/publishing) that is not only majority left, but majority extreme left. For many years, the only way to stay at least plausibly under cover was to see what they were seeing, and what they expected.
But without that, most people are blind to the … ah, unconscious or unthinking parts of their culture. Heck, even with what I’ve been through, I still tend to accept a lot of things unconsciously, unless I step back and go “Now wait a minute.”
Sarah Hoyt, “Slouching Into Shackles”, According to Hoyt, 2018-04-27.
August 10, 2020
QotD: Gandhi’s legacy
We can only wonder, furthermore, at a public figure who lectures half his life about the necessity of abolishing modern industry and returning India to its ancient primitiveness, and then picks a Fabian socialist, already drawing up Five-Year Plans, as the country’s first Prime Minister. Audacious as it may seem to contest the views of such heavy thinkers as Margaret Bourke-White, Ralph Nader, and J.K. Galbraith (who found the film’s Gandhi “true to the original” and endorsed the movie wholeheartedly), we have a right to reservations about such a figure as a public man.
I should not be surprised if Gandhi’s greatest real humanitarian achievement was an improvement in the treatment of Untouchables — an area where his efforts were not only assiduous, but actually bore fruit. In this, of course, he ranks well behind the British, who abolished suttee — over ferocious Hindu opposition — in 1829. The ritual immolation by fire of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres, suttee had the full sanction of the Hindu religion, although it might perhaps be wrong to overrate its importance. Scholars remind us that it was never universal, only “usual.” And there was, after all, a rather extensive range of choice. In southern India the widow was flung into her husband’s fire-pit. In the valley of the Ganges she was placed on the pyre when it was already aflame. In western India, she supported the head of the corpse with her right hand, while, torch in her left, she was allowed the honor of setting the whole thing on fire herself. In the north, where perhaps women were more impious, the widow’s body was constrained on the burning pyre by long poles pressed down by her relatives, just in case, screaming in terror and choking and burning to death, she might forget her dharma. So, yes, ladies, members of the National Council of Churches, believers in the one God, mourners for that holy India before it was despoiled by those brutish British, remember suttee, that interesting, exotic practice in which Hindus, over the centuries, burned to death countless millions of helpless women in a spirit of pious devotion, crying for all I know, Hai Rama! Hai Rama!
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
August 9, 2020
QotD: The economic concept of “revealed preferences”
Now, you can’t help but notice that there is a disparity between those who say that taxes should be higher and those who act as if they should be. Clearly, an individual who really believes that the Government is more effective at spending his money would voluntarily offer up more than the legal minimum of taxation. That we have fewer people acting in this manner than are to be found writing columns and making speeches calling for higher taxation shows a certain gap, does it not, between public utterances and private actions? Why, we could make such donations a litmus test for those believers in higher taxation and state spending who want to compel all of us to pay more. Only those who show their commitment by sending a cheque to the Treasury should be treated seriously.
Cheques, by the way, should be made out to “The Accountant, HM Treasury”, and sent to 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ. A 2nd-class stamp is sufficient and you are encouraged to add a covering note so that your donation is spent in the way you like.
Tim Worstall, “Show us your cheques”, Times of London, quoted in Continental Telegraph, 2020-05-07.
August 8, 2020
QotD: The British Empire
Conquest empires rarely outlive their founders, or only last a few generations. Alexander’s generals, or Charlemagne’s children and grandchildren, dividing and subdividing into smaller and smaller units, is the norm for such empires. (If not straight collapse when the dictator holding it all together vanishes.)
The only “conquest” empires that have held up are those that send settlers into the lands of hunter-gatherers or nomads. The United States, Russia and Australia being good examples. (But the only reason they can hold up is if the captured territory can be converted into a functional part of the state and society … something the US and Australia have largely managed … Russia’s attempts to enforce this unity by repression of its more developed conquered peoples have not been so successful over the last few centuries, and it is unlikely that China will do much better long-term no matter how much repression it introduces into its recent conquests of established societies like Tibet and the Uyghurs.)
Which leaves only trade empires as potentially successful long term options. And only because their success is not measured by sustaining the political unity of the “empire”, but by sustaining its economic goals.
The most successful empire in world history is the British empire, which could delightedly declare itself obsolete in the 1920s, and again (after having to work mostly co-operatively to fight World War Two) in the 1950s. Both times it encouraged the member states to go look after themselves (some successfully and some less so), and yet it still managed to leave an almost completely secure legacy for its existence … relatively safe international free trade routes. (The almost complete elimination of both piracy and slavery worldwide just being minor side benefits of the British Empire.)
For an empire developed “in a fit of absent mindedness”, and as a byproduct of trying to develop free trade around the world: the measure of success has to be the Commonwealth of Nations – comprising 54 nations with about 1/3 of the world’s population, getting together to play cricket every year and hold a Commonwealth Games every 4 years.
This is not an empire that copllapsed, or was destroyed. This is an empire that over a century or so (from granting independent Dominion status to Canada in 1886 [Canadians stoutly maintain it was 1867], Australia 1901, New Zealand and South Africa pre-Great War, Ireland and Egypt interwar, India and Pakistan post war, large parts of Asia and Africa in the 60s and 70s etc.); nonetheless developed and secured the international free trade system that the world has embraced. (Including a re-integration by an early exit-er from the empire … the 13 out of 35 British north American colonies that became the United States … and who finally inherited the title of world policeman when the rest of the Commonwealth nations had got sick of the whole thing.)
Nigel Davies, “Types of Empires: Security, Conquest, and Trade”, rethinking history, 2020-05-02.
