Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
[Dali’s] aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism. “At seven”, he says in the first paragraph of his book, “I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such feelings are common enough. “I knew I was a genius”, somebody once said to me, “long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about.” And suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real métier to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?
There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break his spectacles — or, at any rate, dream about doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! It is much less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in Dali’s autobiography, it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would have done in an earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties, when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed with aristocrats and rentiers who had given up sport and politics and taken to patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back. A phobia for grasshoppers — which a few decades back would merely have provoked a snigger — was now an interesting “complex” which could be profitably exploited. And when that particular world collapsed before the German Army, America was waiting. You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of repentance from the fashionable salons of Paris to Abraham’s bosom.
That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dali’s history. But why his aberrations should be the particular ones they were, and why it should be so easy to “sell” such horrors as rotting corpses to a sophisticated public — those are questions for the psychologist and the sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism. They are “bourgeois decadence” (much play is made with the phrases “corpse poisons” and “decaying rentiers class”), and that is that. But though this probably states a fact, it does not establish a connection. One would still like to know why Dali’s leaning was towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality), and why the rentiers and the aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting and making love like their grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval does not get one any further. But neither ought one to pretend, in the name of “detachment”, that such pictures as Mannequin rotting in a taxicab are morally neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to start out from that fact.
George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”, Saturday Book for 1944, 1944.
August 23, 2019
QotD: The ego of Salvador Dali
August 22, 2019
QotD: Stars of the silver screen
There have always been gold-diggers – considering the intellectual castration of women historically, it would have been lunacy for bright broads not to attempt to gain wealth by any means necessary. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, they were often the wittiest and warmest onscreen female role models around; ironically, the women who played them were grafters, rarely asking for anything during any of their multiple divorces. There’s a story about Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner going home early from a Hollywood party to be ready in time for the studio dawn call as a trio of expensive call girls sweep in just getting ready to get started on some serious fun. One of the sex goddesses remarks to the others: “We picked the wrong job!” Of course she was kidding – an ageing hooker has about as much prestige as an ageing racehorse. But there’s something admirably realistic about a gold-digger who knows she’s one.
Julie Burchill, “The Princess generation needs to grow up”, The Spectator, 2017-07-18.
August 20, 2019
QotD: Autobiography
Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats. However, even the most flagrantly dishonest book (Frank Harris‘s autobiographical writings are an example) can without intending it give a true picture of its author. Dali’s recently published [The Secret Life of Salvador Dali] comes under this heading. Some of the incidents in it are flatly incredible, others have been rearranged and romanticised, and not merely the humiliation but the persistent ordinariness of everyday life has been cut out. Dali is even by his own diagnosis narcissistic, and his autobiography is simply a strip-tease act conducted in pink limelight. But as a record of fantasy, of the perversion of instinct that has been made possible by the machine age, it has great value.
George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”, Saturday Book for 1944, 1944.
August 19, 2019
QotD: Hitler’s “wonder weapons”
Marcus Jones, “Innovation For Its Own Sake: The Type XXI U-boat”, Naval War College Review, 2014-04.
August 18, 2019
QotD: “Hitting back” at protectionist policies
But soon a trade dispute erupts. Stump discovers – correctly, we can assume – that XYZ is charging you less for its lawn-care services than Stump agreed is acceptable for you to be charged and that XYZ agreed in the trade deal to charge. Stump, being a master negotiator, threatens to reimpose the $25 tariff on you unless and until XYZ raises the price it charges you to at least the level that Stump has divined is acceptable and that is enshrined in the terms of the trade agreement between him and XYZ. Alas, XYZ gives in and agrees to raise the price it charges you. Stump then boasts that, by not letting XYZ get away with breaking its word in the trade deal, he is not only protecting the neighborhood from dangerously low prices but is also upholding the sacred rule of law and the sanctity of contractual agreements.
Of course, in reality, Stump’s presumptuous exercise of the power to
rob youimpose a tariff on you whenever you engage in commerce that he finds objectionable is a wrong inflicted on you and on your trading partner, XYZ. The fact that the practicalities of the situation result in your and XYZ going along with the “deal” to entice Stump to stop robbing you each time you buy XYZ’s services does not ethically oblige you to stick to the terms of the deal if you can, in secret, get better terms from XYZ. When Stump threatens to reimpose on you the $25 tariff, he harms you. That is, when in response to Stump’s threat to reimpose the tariff XYZ agrees to abide by the terms of its trade agreement with Stump and raise the price that it charges you, you are made worse off, not better off.Stump’s enforcement of this agreement, in short, does not protect you from further victimization in the future; instead, that enforcement is itself an act of victimizing you. Successful enforcement of this agreement assures you a future less prosperous than it would be were Stump instead to ignore XYZ’s “violation” of the deal.
Note: we can all agree that, between the two options (1) $25 tariff and (2) no tariff but an enforced price-hike, under the trade agreement, of $15, that the second option is better for you than the first option. It is in this limited sense that trade agreements in reality are beneficial. But there’s a third option: (3) Stump does not interfere with your commerce and you pay whatever price you negotiate with XYZ without that price being artificially affected by Stump’s interference. This third option is, for you, the best of the three – and it’s the only fully ethical one of the bunch. (So when Dan Griswold, myself, and other free-traders defend trade agreements, we do so with the realistic recognition that option (3) is politically infeasible. Given this unfortunate infeasibility of option (3), we endorse option (2) over option (1).)
Don Boudreaux, “Strict Enforcement of an Impoverishing Deal Assures Continuing Impoverishment”, Café Hayek, 2017-07-07.
August 16, 2019
QotD: It’s not really accurate to call the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”
When it comes to military history, this particular bias mostly comes out in references to three weeks in May 1940, and specifically one piece of particularly crap judgement by General Gamelin and one bypassed fortress line. The fact that that the allied participants — France, Britain, the Netherlands and Belgium — have spent most of the time since blaming each other and trying to work out who sold out whom has been allowed to mask the fact that this particular campaign was successful beyond all reasonable expectations for the Germans, and that when the French actually had troops in the right places, they were perfectly capable of fighting the advancing Panzers to a standstill at a tactical or operational level. Visitors to Paris may wish to note that the big — rather bigger than you think until you actually see it in the flesh — structure at one end of the Champs Elysées is called the Arc de Triomphe, and not the Arc de Defaite; it bears an admittedly tedious and tasteless, but indubitably long, list of battles at which the French did rather well. The fact that your school history lessons may have taught you rather more about Paul Revere or Clive of India than about Charles Martel is not relevant in the greater scheme of things.
Albert Herring, “Why neither the French nor the Italians are the worst military nation”, Everything2, 2002-01-07.
August 15, 2019
QotD: Strong female characters in fiction
Today, when I telling the kids about it, I realized why. It was because the character was a strong woman. Born with the ultimate disadvantage, the ultimate lack of support, she doesn’t – like fairytale princesses – either get rescued by a strong knight nor even by fate that reveals her to be a hidden princess. Also, she never complains; she never repines – she takes the situation she finds herself in and makes the best out of it, all the while looking out for those who are weaker or in more need than her. This last characteristic nets her the all-important recipe book (supposedly created by a medieval convent, which rings true for Portugal, and lost for centuries.) When her romance doesn’t work because her very conventional suitor wants a girl of suitable family, she doesn’t go into a decline, she just goes on with life.
She is, in fact, what editors so often say they want “a strong woman heroine, self sufficient, a good role model for growing girls.” Only, from my observation and reading, by this they usually mean mouthy, aggressive, foolhardy and complains a lot about men till one wonders if said character has an issue with being born female. There are exceptions, of course, but complaining about fate and men and being bitter seems to be obligatory.
And yet, it is true that this type of character is not only a great role model for young women, she is the type of role model we do need. Earth needs women (yes, and men, but we’re talking women here) who take care of the weak and helpless. Earth needs women who don’t whine. Earth needs women who cheerfully shoulder the burden of what needs to be done.
Earth does not need women who complain about men all the while neurotically obsessing on clothes and jewelry to attract said men and pursuing the highest-status males they can possibly get. There is nothing wrong with these activities, in moderation, but when they become the focus of existence they create a generation of infantile harpies. Now, I don’t think any women in real life are as bad as that, but almost all women characters in books and movies are just like that.
Young women who read/watch these characters end up feeling they must APPEAR like them or they’ll be thought weak. And this is wrong. Strength in women – and men – can be defined not as throwing weight around but in doing what must be done for oneself and those who depend on one.
Earth needs grown up women.
I very much hate to tell people what to do, much less what to be, but I wish we could set about writing – and living – role models for the women Earth needs.
Sarah Hoyt, “Earth Needs Women a blast from the past of November 2010”, According to Hoyt, 2017-07-13.
August 14, 2019
QotD: Proto-progressive thought
Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Southey’s Colloquies on Society”, 1830.
August 13, 2019
QotD: Karl Popper on the paradox of tolerance
In note 4 of volume 1, chapter 7, of Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, he clarifies his position on how best to deal with intolerant philosophies:
… I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.
It is clear from Popper’s writing that it would be unwise to resort to violence against an intolerant group that is willing to discuss and debate their ideas. So long as the intolerant group is tolerant enough to agree to debate and discuss their intolerant ideas rather than resort to violence, it is better to handle them with words.
The problem is, some groups, like Antifa, respond to arguments with violence. And it is these sorts of groups that Popper claims must not be tolerated. If a group is so intolerant that they are unwilling to discuss ideas and instead rely entirely on violence, then they must be met with violence. In other words, Popper is simply saying that a nonviolent society must, at the very least, believe in a right to use violence as a form of self-defense.
Nathan Kreider, “Misconceptions of the Paradox of Tolerance”, Being Libertarian, 2019-05-31.
August 12, 2019
QotD: The “lost technological developments” of the Great Library
Hero does seem to have been another exception to the rule when it comes to philosophers tinkering with gadgets and it’s possible (though far from certain) that he worked in the Mouseion. But the practical applications of his study of pneumatics and dynamics were more toys and curiosities than any great leaps forward in technology. He famously made an aeolipile, though he didn’t actually invent it, given that it had already been described by the Roman engineer and architect Vitruvius, but this can only be called a “steam engine” in the loosest sense of the term. Hero’s little device was not capable of doing anything more than spinning in place and Roman technology lacked the high tensile metallurgy, the mathematics or the precision tooling that would be required to make a true steam engine. The other technological wonder that is often invoked here is the Antikythera mechanism. Exactly how this intricate mechanical orrery based on a geocentric model is supposed to indicate some nascent Industrial or Scientific Revolution is never made clear, but not only did it have no connection to the Great Library, it was a kind of instrument known since the third century BC. If it is evidence that the Greco-Roman world was on the brink of a technological revolution and was only stymied by the rise of Christianity, one has to wonder what kept them from achieving this wondrous thing for the 600 years between its invention and the conversion of Constantine.
The New Atheist mythic conception of the “Great Library of Alexandria” bears very little resemblance to any historical actuality. It was a shrine with scholars attached to it, not a secular university. Its scholars were far more concerned with poetry, textual analysis, grammar, lexicography and rhetoric than anything we would see as “science”. The proto-science they did do was mainly of a highly abstract and often metaphysical nature rather than anything like modern science. And it was also generally divorced from technical innovation and what little practical application it was given did not much at all to advance technology. The idea that if the Great Library had not been burned down by wicked Christians we’d all be living in gleaming space cities on Europa or Callisto is, therefore, a silly fantasy. And not least because the Great Library … wasn’t burned down by wicked Christians.
Tim O’Neill, “The Great Myths 5: The Destruction Of The Great Library Of Alexandria”, History for Atheists, 2017-07-02.
August 11, 2019
QotD: Deconstructing “Minoan Crete”
Perhaps the most prominent high priestess of the Great Goddess was Lithuanian archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994). During the 1950s and 60s Gimbutas developed her so-called “Kurgan Thesis;” basically the idea that the archaeological marker of the arrival in Europe of Indo-European-speakers was to be found in the Bronze Age Kurgan mound burials of the Pontic Steppe, a vast region incorporating most of present-day Ukraine, southern Russia and northern Kazakhstan. Controversially, Gimbutas further claimed that these nomadic Indo-Europeans brought with them a warrior-culture dominated by male sky-gods, which supplanted earlier matriarchal and goddess-worshipping cultures. In this, she echoed ideas already expressed at great length by Robert Graves in his 1948 book The White Goddess. Over the next three decades Gimbutas developed her ideas further in a series of books, articles and lectures delivered at campuses throughout America and Europe, where she was immensely influential amongst the burgeoning women’s movement. Three major works, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (1974), The Language of the Goddess (1989), and The Civilization of the Goddess (1991), presented an overview of her conclusions regarding what she saw as Europe’s primeval matriarchy.
The importance of Gimbutas in the development of the matriarchal myth, and also by extension in the development of modern radical feminism, cannot be overstated. Her archaeological experience and expertise, together with her wide knowledge of linguistics and anthropology, seemed to give academic credibility to the romantic and poetic ramblings of Arthur Evans and Robert Graves. Yet in retrospect it is hard to imagine why anyone with even a modicum of common sense could have been taken in.
There were warning signals everywhere. Right from the beginning, for example, many historians were critical of Evans’ interpretation of Minoan Crete, and a devastating blow was delivered in 1974 when German author Hans Georg Wunderlich published his Wohin der Stier Europa trug? (Where did the Bull carry Europa? published in English in 1975 as The Secret of Crete). Here Wunderlich, a trained geologist, examined the structure of the “palace” of Knossos in Crete in detail and came to the conclusion that the building could never have been a palace for the living. It was, instead, a charnel house, a massive necropolis which doubled as an arena for human sacrifice. For the happy-go-lucky “bull vaulting game”, said Wunderlich, was nothing of the sort: it was a ferocious form of human sacrifice which involved young men and women being gored and trampled to death by a sacred bull. This, said Wunderlich, was the origin of the legend of the Minotaur. Since Wunderlich’s time human sacrifice has been confirmed as an integral part of Cretan religious practice, whilst the supposed “pacifism” which Evans and others had imagined, was exposed as nonsensical.
Emmet Scott, “The Myth of the Primeval Matriarchy”, The Gates of Vienna, 2016-07-13.
August 10, 2019
QotD: Progressives and spontaneous order
Conduct an on-going experiment: whenever well-meaning “Progressives” (of which there are very many) propose this government intervention or oppose that policy of reducing government’s role in the economy, ask if these “Progressives'” stated reasons can be understood to be nothing more than a reflection of a failure to understand the power and range of spontaneous-ordering forces in private-property settings. The answer will almost always be “yes.” Very often, no further explanation for “Progressives'” policy stances is necessary.
“Progressives” simply don’t “get” spontaneous order in human society. They see a problem and leap to the only conclusion that for them is sensible – namely, that that problem’s only realistic “solution” is that it be directly addressed by government officials. Indeed, even “Progressives'” frequent misdiagnoses of the results of trade-offs as being “problems” (or “market failures”) reflect a failure to understand spontaneous-ordering processes. Many phenomena and patterns that “Progressives” assume to be problems – for example, increasing inequality of monetary incomes – are often the benign results of the countless and nuanced individual trade-offs made by individuals. For “Progressives,” though, these “outcomes” are often assumed to be the consequence of sinister designs.
Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2017-06-24.
August 9, 2019
QotD: Early milestones in aviation
A couple of weeks later, on July 6th 1919 the first east-west transatlantic flight landed at Mineola on Long Island. The RAF airship R34 had left East Fortune in Scotland four days earlier, having been hastily converted to hold passengers, and with a plate welded to an engine exhaust pipe to enable it to cook and serve hot food, which is more trouble than most airlines would go to today. A tabby kitten called Wopsie who served as the crew’s mascot stowed away on the flight, and because nobody at the Long Island end knew anything about landing large airships Major E M Pritchard parachuted out a little early, and became the first man to land on North American soil by air from Europe.
These briefly famous men did not get to savor their celebrity for long: Major Pritchard died in 1921 when the R38 airship exploded over the Humber estuary; his body was never found. Captain Alcock, just six months after his triumph and being knighted by George V, died at Rouen in Normandy in December 1919 when his new Vickers Viking crashed en route to the Paris air show.
Mark Steyn, “Come, Josephine, in My Flying Machine”, SteynOnline, 2019-07-07.
August 8, 2019
QotD: Austrians – strudel-eating surrender monkeys
The Austrians (or rather the Habsburgs) built up a moderately large empire by persuading the Magyars that they could be sort of equal partners in the empire in an unequal sort of way, expert politicking and setting one lot of Slavs against another in the Balkans and central Europe, and marrying into the right ducal families in bits of what was later to become Italy. They never quite managed to sort out the Serbs, however, who felt that fighting nobly against the Turks was their speciality, and they were forced out of Switzerland early on by a small boy with an apple on his head.
The year 1683 may reasonably be considered a turning point for Western Christendom. Over the preceding century or so the Turkish Ottoman Empire had steadily advanced up the Balkan peninsula and after being balked, as it were, for many years by Macedonians, Bulgars, Albanians, Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Slovenians, Slavonians and some I’ve probably forgotten, finally got as far as the Habsburg capital, Vienna, to which they laid siege. The siege failed, and the Turks were repelled, never again to return. Why? Because Austria was rescued by the Poles under Jan III Sobieski.
Under the noted and renowned Empress Maria Theresa, a War of the Austrian Succession was held. In keeping with tradition, it was mainly fought between the French and the English in Belgium (the French, opposed to Austria, won), except for an unimportant sideshow which appears to have been between the French and the Indians in Saratoga. The upshot was naturally that the Austrians let the Prussians have Silesia. Twice, to be on the safe side. A few years later the Seven Years War, largely fought between the English and the French in Belgium (the English, opposed to the Austrians, won) confirmed the result.
When it came to the French revolutionary and the Napoleonic wars, the Habsburgs were naturally on the side of the divine right of kings (well, Marie-Antoinette was a Habsburg herself) and against mob rule, liberty, fraternity, and most certainly equality. In furtherance of this cause, the Austrians fought the French at such places as Marengo, Austerlitz, and Wagram – among other names listed on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. By 1812 the Austrians decided to try being on the same side as Napoleon for a change. Napoleon promptly invaded Russia, with predictable results. Following Napoleon’s final defeat at a battle in Belgium which the Austrians fortunately weren’t in time to get to, they regained most of their possessions in Italy at the peace talks due to diplomatic manoeuvrings by the master of the art, Metternich, but lost influence in Germany.
In the 1850s Austria failed to back her treaty partner Russia when the latter was invaded by the Turks, French and English in the Crimean war. Sardinia/Savoy/Piedmont, the leading state in the Italian peninsula, fought with the Allies, gaining international favour when it came to removing the Austrian influence during the subsequent wars of the Italian unification. Austria lost battles at places like Magenta and Solferino, and with them most of its Italian possessions except Venice.
In 1864 the Austrians did actually win a battle, a small naval engagement near Heligoland in the North Sea, against the Danes, against whom they were fighting in support of the Prussians over the Schleswig-Holstein question, of course. Emboldened by this masterstroke, they promptly came to blows with their erstwhile allies and were soundly whipped at the battle of Sadowa-Königgratz. The Italians got most of the rest of their country back in the resulting confusion.
The Austrians managed to stay out of trouble for another few decades after that, building up a national economy based on cheap dance music and diplomatic manoeuvrings in the Balkans. Unfortunately they got out of their depth in this respect; in 1914 the foreign minister [actually Chief of the General Staff] Conrad von Hötzendorff, believing himself to be the reincarnation of Metternich, decided to start the First World War to impress a woman he fancied. It could reasonably be argued that all the countries involved lost the First World War, even the winners, but Austria, after some Pyrrhic successes against the Serbs, a certain amount of back-and-forth against the Russians in Galicia and a cheap and ultimately futile win at Caporetto after the Russians had pulled out and the Germans had sent rather a lot of extra troops, ended up losing its entire empire, its monarchy, access to the sea and any self-respect whatsoever. It also managed to export Adolf Hitler to Germany during this period, which was singularly unfortunate; he absorbed Austria into a Greater Germany and then lost a rather big war in the most spectacular of fashions, as you are probably aware. This ended the military involvement of Austria in world affairs, at least for the moment.
I rest my case.
Albert Herring, “Why neither the French nor the Italians are the worst military nation”, Everything2, 2002-01-07.
August 7, 2019
QotD: “Great” “Art”
How do we know it’s true art? And before you start making gestures and sputtering, to finally come back with “knowledgeable people know that,” let me cut through the fog. The answer is, we don’t. No, not even experts. If everyone knew what great art was, investment in art wouldn’t be such a risky business. Great art, great literature, any form of “greatness” in creative expression is ultimately “What future generations think is great.” And, like all speculation about the future, it’s difficult, if not impossible. In visual art, what is often the acclaimed taste of an era is the laughable, ridiculous pastiche of a later era. In literature … Do me a favor, let your fingers do the walking through Gutenberg, then look up the biographies of some of those authors. Many of the people who make you say “who?” and who in fact would make anyone but an expert in the literature of their time go “who?” were literary lions in their times, acclaimed by all and pronounced “the next Shakespeare.” (Who, like “the next Heinlein,” used to rise every generation until people got tired of it.)
If the art is so great, how come no one is buying it? Besides the artist who is spending way too much time with absinthe and way too little time with quill and paper, or brushes and canvas, that is?
Oh. I see. Because the general public is too stupid to appreciate the greatness of the artist. Because the artist is “ahead” of the public.
Yeah, if you believe that you probably also think that history comes with an arrow since obviously art does. That is, art moves from “primitive” to “exquisite and advanced.” If you truly believe this, I invite you to go through any local art museum and move through it from, say, Roman times till now. And then I invite you to think. The Denver Museum of Art has an installation that consists of a bunch of twisted-together kitchen implements, something that often happens in my house due to the habit of overfilling drawers and my tendency – pre-coffee – to think there is no problem brute force can’t solve.
This is an “installation” worth 2 million and if you believe it is superior to Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, you should stop hitting the absinthe. No, wait. Have another cup. I have this installation …
Sarah Hoyt, “What Happens When the Artist Chides His Audience?”, PJ Media, 2017-07-13.
