It bears repeating: actual justice holds you responsible for the actions you take. “Social justice” holds you responsible for actions taken, without your knowledge or consent, by people you do not know and have never met. It’s guilt by association, and a perversion of true justice.
Sam Duncan, in a comment posted to “Elsewhere (234)”, DavidThompson, 2017-06-01.
June 13, 2019
June 12, 2019
QotD: Militant Islam and the Western media
“I’m always willing to stand with the guys in Denmark,” says Steyn. “But the reason all these left-wing Europeans end up on a stage with an eccentric right-wing Canadian like me is that no real A-list stars will agree to be there. At the tenth anniversary both the American State Department and the British Foreign Office even issued official warnings to their citizens to stay away from the Danish Parliament, where we were holding the ceremony. What kind of signal does that send? Why don’t the artists show up for these things? Why aren’t the movie stars there? When Theo Van Gogh was assassinated, no one at the Oscars had a word to say about it. They didn’t even put him in the obituary montage. And yet they congratulate themselves on their moral courage. George Clooney wears a Je suis Charlie Hebdo pin. Helen Mirren wears a brooch. But they were not with Charlie. Those guys died alone. This is gesture politics. No one would stand with them. I honour the genuine courage of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Ayaan’s point is absolutely right — in the end you have to share the risk. Charlie Hebdo supported the Danish cartoonists, but the rest of the world didn’t. If every newspaper had published those cartoons, there would have been no point in killing anyone because there would have been too many people to kill. Instead, nobody stands with them, and so the small publication that does ends up massacred. The writer of the comic strip Doonesbury in America [Garry Trudeau] attacked the decision of PEN to honour Charlie Hebdo. Well, they were lying on the floor, bleeding and dying. I don’t think they noticed.”
The Danish cartoon controversy was actually the first moment the American press had been challenged by Islam and could do something in response — and their reaction was a spectacular failure of will and principle. In several countries around the world, it was actually against the law to publish the Danish cartoons, but many editors stepped up, published them anyway, and suffered the civil and criminal consequences. In the United States — where there was no such law — no major publication would print them.
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
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June 11, 2019
QotD: Advice to young men
H.L. Mencken in 1928.
Photo by Ben Pinchot for Theatre Magazine, August 1928.
Since Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, published his celebrated letters to his morganatic son, in 1744, there has been no adequate book, in English, of advice to young men. I say adequate, and the adjective tells the whole story. There is not, of course, a college president or a boss Y.M.C.A. secretary, or an uplifting preacher in the United States who has not written such a book, but all of them are alike filled with bilge. They depict and advocate a life that no normal young man wants to live, or could live without ruin if he wanted to. They are full of Sunday-school platitudes and Boy Scout snuffling. If they were swallowed by the youth of today the Republic of tomorrow would be a nation of idiots.H.L. Mencken, “Another Long-Awaited Book”, Chicago Tribune, 1926-09-12.
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June 10, 2019
QotD: Robert Heinlein on “honest work”
The beginning of 1939 found me flat broke following a disastrous political campaign (I ran a strong second best, but in politics there are no prizes for place or show).
Robert A. Heinlein at the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention
Via Wikimedia Commons.I was highly skilled in ordnance, gunnery, and fire control for Naval vessels, a skill for which there was no demand ashore — and I had a piece of paper from the Secretary of the Navy telling me that I was a waste of space — “totally and permanently disabled” was the phraseology. I “owned” a heavily-mortgaged house.
About then Thrilling Wonder Stories ran a house ad reading (more or less):
GIANT PRIZE CONTEST —
Amateur Writers!!!!!!
First Prize $50 Fifty Dollars $50In 1939 one could fill three station wagons with fifty dollars worth of groceries.
Today I can pick up fifty dollars in groceries unassisted — perhaps I’ve grown stronger.
So I wrote the story “Life-Line.” It took me four days — I am a slow typist. I did not send it to Thrilling Wonder; I sent it to Astounding, figuring they would not be so swamped with amateur short stories.
Astounding bought it… for $70, or $20 more than that “Grand Prize” — and there was never a chance that I would ever again look for honest work.
(“Honest work” — an euphemism for underpaid bodily exertion, done standing up or on your knees, often in bad weather or other nasty circumstances, and frequently involving shovels, picks, hoes, assembly lines, tractors, and unsympathetic supervisors. It has never appealed to me. Sitting at a typewriter in a nice warm room, with no boss, cannot possibly be described as “honest work.”)
Robert A. Heinlein, 1980.
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June 9, 2019
QotD: What is economics?
To me, economics is that approach to understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to take the acts that best achieve them. That is what economists mean by “rationality,” and it is the assumption of rationality that is, in my view, the distinguishing characteristic of economics. What I am looking for are works that tell us something interesting about the implications of that assumption.
Someone at some point suggested Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. It is an interesting book, although much too long for my purposes. But what makes it interesting, economically speaking, is not the vivid picture of poverty in the period between the wars but particular details relevant to implications of rational behavior.
I can give, by memory, an example. Orwell observed waiters in a fancy Paris restaurant, out of sight of the diners, spitting in the dishes they were going to serve. In an idealized market context, the waiter would never spit in the dish unless the value to him of doing so was more than the disvalue to the patron he was serving, which is unlikely. But throw in the inability of either the patrons or the waiter’s employers to monitor the waiter’s behavior and any benefit to the waiter of expressing his hostility is a sufficient incentive to make him do it. That suggests the further point that, when you cannot monitor someone’s behavior, his preferences matter — you want the job he is doing for you to be done by someone whose preferences are close enough to yours so that he will want to do what you would want him to do — even if nobody is watching.
Economics is not the study of the economy. A picture of poverty, or unemployment, or wealth, or economic growth, however accurate and vivid, does not in itself teach you any economics. A story such as Poul Anderson’s “Margin of Profit,” which deals with a wholly fictional future, does, because it demonstrates in that world an important implication of rationality that holds in our world as well — that in order to prevent someone from doing something you do not want him to do it is not necessary to make it impossible, merely unprofitable.
David Friedman, “Thoughts on Literature, Economics and Education”, Ideas, 2017-05-01.
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June 8, 2019
QotD: Labour’s celebration at Thatcher’s death
A few hours after Margaret Thatcher’s death on Monday, the snarling deadbeats of the British underclass were gleefully rampaging through the streets of Brixton in South London, scaling the marquee of the local fleapit and hanging a banner announcing “THE BITCH IS DEAD”. Amazingly, they managed to spell all four words correctly. By Friday, “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead”, from The Wizard of Oz, was the Number One download at Amazon UK.
Mrs Thatcher would have enjoyed all this. Her former speechwriter John O’Sullivan recalls how, some years after leaving office, she arrived to address a small group at an English seaside resort to be greeted by enraged lefties chanting “Thatcher Thatcher Thatcher! Fascist fascist fascist!” She turned to her aide and cooed, “Oh, doesn’t it make you feel nostalgic?” She was said to be delighted to hear that a concession stand at last year’s Trades Union Congress was doing a brisk business in “Thatcher Death Party Packs” – almost a quarter-century after her departure from office.
Of course, it would have been asking too much of Britain’s torpid left to rouse themselves to do anything more than sing a few songs and smash a few windows. In The Wizard of Oz, the witch is struck down at the height of her powers by Dorothy’s shack descending from Kansas to relieve the Munchkins of their torments. By comparison, Britain’s Moochkins were unable to bring the house down: Mrs Thatcher died in her bed at the Ritz at a grand old age. Useless as they are, British socialists were at one point capable of writing their own anti-Thatcher singalongs rather than lazily appropriating Judy Garland blockbusters from MGM’s back catalogue. I recall in the late Eighties being at the National Theatre in London and watching the crowd go wild over Adrian Mitchell’s showstopper, “F**k-Off Friday”, a song about union workers getting their redundancy notices at the end of the week, culminating with the lines:
I can’t wait for That great day when F**k-Off Friday
Comes to Number Ten.You should have heard the cheers.
Mark Steyn, “The Uncowardly Lioness”, SteynOnline.com, 2019-05-05.
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June 7, 2019
QotD: Ruling France
De Gaulle, with his Fifth Republic, appeared to have settled the ancient argument between the monarchists and the republicans by creating a monarchy and calling it a republic. But the presidents of that republic — de Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard d’Estaing, Mitterand, Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande — have been a downward sequence. Each was at least slightly, and sometimes sharply, less talented than his predecessor.
In 2017, in utter exasperation, France embraced a 39-year old former banker and senior financial civil servant who had no more sought elective office than had Donald Trump before running for president, Emmanuel Macron. He achieved the office not by gaining control of a political party; French political parties are very fluid and rise and disappear and change their names every few years, but by standing as an independent and setting up a new party of rank political amateurs as legislators. It was magnificent in the country of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other triumphant theorists. It ran on a euphoric platform: a green revolution, lower taxes, a better social benefit system, completed unification of Europe, stronger armed forces, everything that was desirable and the quick elimination of all that was not.
The predictable happened and Macron is now diminished by the incoherent rioting every weekend of mobs of angry bourgeois crabbing about taxes, reinforced by outright hooligans, all wearing the silly yellow vests all French drivers are required to have in their automobiles so they can put them on to signify an emergency. It is that splendid French combination of the perfect goal and the absurd result.
Conrad Black, “What’s the Matter With Europe?”, New English Review, 2019-05-06.
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June 6, 2019
QotD: Reviewing Saving Private Ryan
When Saving Private Ryan was released in America, I made a mild observation to the effect that its premise was a lot of hooey, and received in response several indignant letters pointing out that it was “based on a true story”, that of the Sullivan brothers. Er, not quite. The Sullivans’ story is stirringly told in The Fighting Sullivans (1942, directed by 42nd Street’s Lloyd Bacon): after Pearl Harbor, all five brothers enlist — and all five die aboard the [cruiser] Juneau at Guadalcanal. As a result, to avoid the recurrence of such a freakish tragedy, the United States changed its policy on family members serving together. Steven Spielberg’s film is not “based” on the Sullivans, except insofar as General George C. Marshall, the US Army’s chief of staff, mentions their fate to explain his decision.
Rather, the film is a kind of extension of the thinking behind the policy change: when three out of four Ryan brothers are killed in action, General Marshall orders a rescue mission to retrieve the sole surviving sibling, whose general whereabouts are somewhere behind enemy lines in Normandy — and all this a couple of days after D-Day. No such incident took place: no Allied commander would have thought it worth the risk in lives to assuage one distraught mother’s potential further bereavement.
Spielberg’s mistake is that, as one of the last remaining hardcore Clinton groupies, he’s thinking in Clintonian terms — about publicity, image, spin: the death of another Ryan brother would not “look good”. When Spielberg has General Marshall read out a letter from Lincoln to a mother whose sons all died in the Civil War, we’re certainly meant to find his consoling words — that they gave their lives in a great and noble cause — inadequate. It’s a measure of the gulf between 1944 and 1998 that The Fighting Sullivans was released during the war because it was thought the supreme sacrifice of one family would be inspiring. Alas, not to baby boomers.
So much has been written about the unprecedented “realism” of this film’s war scenes that the equally unprecedented unrealism of its thinking has passed virtually unnoticed. You’ve probably seen a zillion articles about the film’s prologue — a recreation of D-Day which lasts almost as long and doubtless cost a lot more — so I’ll say only this: yes, it’s impressive; yes, every shot of blood and tissue and body parts is underlined by adroit effects; yes, every moment is a testament to Spielberg’s command of cinematic technique; but that’s the problem — you react to it as technique, as showmanship. There’s one perfect shot after another: the silence underwater, with its dangerous illusion of respite; the pitterpatter of rain on leaves gradually blurring into rifle fire. The whole thing is oddly pointless: you’re not engaged by the predicament of the troops because you’re so busy admiring the great film-maker behind them. A film cannot really be “authentic” if all you notice is the authenticity.
Mark Steyn, The Spectator, 1998-09-12 (linked from SteynOnline).
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June 5, 2019
QotD: The almost unknown economic good news since 1800
Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.
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June 4, 2019
QotD: Freedom of speech and “balancing” competing rights
“And actually it’s no better in the United States. On the one hand you have the absence of a monarchy and free-speech absolutism, but on the other hand you prostrate yourselves before judges. I’m in the fifth year of a lawsuit that started with a 140-word blog post — there’s not much of a First Amendment when that happens. And then, on your college campuses, you have the debate about ‘acceptable’ and ‘safe’ speech. You have a tiny little Canada on each campus, with the same sort of shrunken, shrivelled public discussion. ‘Safe speech’ is a road to hell. Their goal is the abolition of hate — the abolition of a human emotion. They want everyone to have this glassy-eyed look, celebrating diversity. And they don’t recognise their own totalitarianism.”
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
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June 3, 2019
QotD: The roots of Italian Fascism
Colourized portrait of Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in 1940.
Colourization by Roger Viollet via Wikimedia Commons.
Italian Fascism … originated as a kind of live-action role-playing game for disgruntled Italian WWI vets led by a charismatic war hero, aviator, and poet named Gabriele D’Annunzio. Compared to what it evolved into, early Italian fascism had a rather charming opera-bouffe quality about it – theoretical ideas that were incoherent to the point of surrealism, lots of prancing around in invented uniforms, and dosing of opponents with castor oil. The history of D’Annunzio’s Fascist microstate of Fiume makes amusing reading.
Then came Benito Mussolini, a man looking for a vehicle.
Mussolini was a revolutionary Socialist organizer influenced by the theories of Georges Sorel, who was responding to one of the early failures of Marxism. In Marxian “scientific socialism”, universal revolution was a process that would follow mechanically from the capitalist immiseration of the proletariat. But by the second decade of the new century it was becoming clear that most national proletariats were unwilling to play their appointed role in the theory and indeed tended to be among the most patriotic and nationalist elements of their societies. Class warfare as the engine of international socialism had failed, creating a doctrinal crisis in communist/socialist circles.
Sorel responded by writing a new theory of political motivation he called “irrationalism” which proposed that instead of fighting popular sentiments like patriotism and nationalist mythology, socialists and communists should embrace them as tools to build and perfect socialism. Mussolini was persuaded, broke with the Socialist Party, and went looking for a vehicle for a Sorelian revolution. He found it in D’Annunzio’s Fascists and, swiftly shunting D’Annunzio aside, became their leader.
I’ve covered this history in detail because it explodes one of the prevailing myths about Fascism – that it arose out of some fundamental opposition to Communism. In fact this was never true; Fascism was a Marxist heresy from the day Mussolini seized it, differing from Marxism not mainly in its aims but in the means by which they were to be achieved.
The defining doctrine of Fascism once D’Annunzio was out of the way was this quote by Mussolini: “Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” (There are a few variant translations from the original Italian.) Building directly on Leninist political economics, Benito Mussolini wrote a theoretical justification of the totalitarian state which paralleled Joseph Stalin’s less theorized but brutally-executed totalitarianization of the Soviet Union at around the same time.
The Fascist theory was of a unitary, totalizing state ruled by a leader acting as the embodiment of the will of the nation. No power centers in opposition to the embodied will can be tolerated; church, family, education, and civic institutions must all become organs of that will.
Eric S. Raymond, “Spotting the wild Fascist”, Armed and Dangerous, 2019-04-30.
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June 2, 2019
QotD: Explaining modern female sexuality
I have a theory that for many women, sex, or rather agreeing to have sex is difficult, and especially so for the first time with a new partner. How else to explain the fact that so many women admitted that their first time with a new man was generally experienced in an alcoholic haze? (For those who haven’t been keeping up, the source data is here.) So if confronting herself about her “slutty” behavior (even if the sluttiness is only in her own mind), a woman would like to have an excuse like “Oh, but I was drunk…” and thus can excuse away or justify the indiscretion. Or else, as the original study showed, women can even explain away the drunkenness as just a regular part of the dating process, so therefore it’s okay.
I also believe that this is why so many women have rape fantasies, because “Oh, he forced me to do it…” is likewise an expression that denies the woman’s [shameful] complicity in the act. (Of course, now that it’s become okay to accuse a previous partner with actual rape as part of the excuse, the whole thing has become considerably more sinister, especially as such accusations can take place months or years afterwards and still be considered valid by law enforcement. But for the sake of argument, let’s treat this scenario as but a blip on societal consciousness which will disappear at some point when women regain their sanity. We can only hope.) Certainly, this explains female submissiveness (outside a natural submissive personality anyway), which can be regarded (by women) as a kind of watered-down rape fantasy.
The only time, I think, when self-delusion disappears is when a woman encounters a universal object of female desire, such as a hunky actor or popular musician. Even then, there is a “safety in numbers” excuse — “OMG everybody is crazy about him!” — which makes it okay, or at least, provides a figleaf of an excuse for irresponsibility and sexual licentiousness. You only need a sliver of an excuse, and it will be acceptable, in other words.
Kim du Toit, “Seeking Excuses”, Splendid Isolation, 2017-04-24.
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June 1, 2019
QotD: Orwell’s fear of private monopolies
Professor Hayek is also probably right in saying that in this country the intellectuals are more totalitarian-minded than the common people. But he does not see, or will not admit, that a return to “free” competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter.
George Orwell, “The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek / The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus”, Observer, 1944-04-09.
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May 31, 2019
QotD: How we gain weight
I first learned about [Stephan] Guyenet’s work from his various debates with Gary Taubes and his supporters, where he usually represents the “establishment” side. He is very careful to emphasize that the establishment doesn’t look anything like Taubes’ caricature of it. The establishment doesn’t believe that obesity is just about weak-willed people voluntarily choosing to eat too much, or that obese people would get thin if they just tried diet and exercise, or that all calories are the same. He writes
The [calories in, calories out or CICO] model is the idea that our body weight is determined by voluntary decisions about how much we eat and move, and in order to control our body weight, all we need is a little advice about how many calories to eat and burn, and a little willpower. The primary defining feature of this model is that it assumes that food intake and body fatness are not regulated. This model seems to exist mostly to make lean people feel smug, since it attributes their leanness entirely to wise voluntary decisions and a strong character. I think at this point, few people in the research world believe the CICO model.
[Debate opponent Dr. David] Ludwig and I both agree that it provides a poor fit for the evidence. As an alternative, Ludwig proposes the insulin model, which states that the primary cause of obesity is excessive insulin action on fat cells, which in turn is caused principally by rapidly-digesting carbohydrate. According to this model, too much insulin reduces blood levels of glucose and fatty acids (the two primary circulating metabolic fuels), simultaneously leading to hunger, fatigue, and fat gain. Overeating is caused by a kind of “internal starvation”. There are other versions of the insulin model, but this is the one advocated by Ludwig (and Taubes), so it will be my focus.
But there’s a third model, not mentioned by Ludwig or Taubes, which is the one that predominates in my field. It acknowledges the fact that body weight is regulated, but the regulation happens in the brain, in response to signals from the body that indicate its energy status. Chief among these signals is the hormone leptin, but many others play a role (insulin, ghrelin, glucagon, CCK, GLP-1, glucose, amino acids, etc.)
The Hungry Brain is part of Guyenet’s attempt to explain this third model, and it basically succeeds. But like many “third way” style proposals, it leaves a lot of ambiguity. With CICO, at least you know where you stand – confident that everything is based on willpower and that you can ignore biology completely. And again, with Taubes, you know where you stand – confident that willpower is useless and that low-carb diets will solve everything. The Hungry Brain is a little more complicated, a little harder to get a read on, and at times pretty wishy-washy.
But listening to people’s confidently-asserted simple and elegant ideas was how we got into this mess, so whatever, let’s keep reading.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Hungry Brain“, Slate Star Codex, 2017-04-27.
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May 30, 2019
QotD: Wahhabism and the West
“You’re right,” he says, “it shouldn’t be different for Islam, but we make it different. Muslims fought for king and empire in both world wars. Muslims were the backbone of the Indian army. Ataturk’s Turkey was an example of Muslims functioning perfectly well in a modern democratic society — but Ataturk’s Turkey is going away. We don’t have that trust any more. It was a Wahhabi who assassinated the chief justice in British India, and that is more or less the only brand of Islam exported today — extremist Saudi-style Wahhabism. All these giant mosques you see going up in cities all over the world are not paid for locally, they’re paid for by Saudi Arabia. They’re trying to make it one-size-fits-all Islam, and a type of Islam that regards the West as its enemy, instead of the mom-and-pop Islam of the past.”
So you’re saying the problem is not Islam, the problem is Wahhabism?
“No! Wahhabism is the symptom. The problem is us. We don’t defend ourselves. If you are a woman living alone in a Muslim community in Europe, you do not venture out after 6 p.m. If there are sexual assaults by Muslims, and the allegations are made public by the victims, the accuser is inevitably accused of racism. Nobody disputes that it happened, but they’re held to a different standard because the victims are Swedes or Danes and the accused is from a Muslim country. It’s believed that it’s unreasonable to expect decent behaviour from an Afghan or an Iraqi — which is racist. You’re denying the humanity of these people. And so you surrender incrementally. You live in a citadel. You make ridiculous changes to your own culture. In Britain the banks don’t give piggy banks to children any more, because the “piggy” might be offensive. There’s a fetishisation of the burka, which should be regarded as what it is — a prison for women. Why should we abandon our own heritage to barbarism? I’m a nineteenth-century imperialist a hundred years past my sell-by date.”
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
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