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.
June 10, 2019
QotD: Robert Heinlein on “honest work”
June 9, 2019
QotD: What is economics?
Probably the most common definition is “the science of allocating scarce resources to diverse ends.” [Michael] Watts offers Marshall’s definition: The study of mankind in the ordinary business of life. Neither of those is what I think of as economics. Still less is it the study of the economy, which I suspect would come closest to what most people think the word means.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
May 29, 2019
QotD: Past civilizations
… when anyone says “there was a civilization before us” your head (our head) jumps to airplanes, trains, steel mills, refrigerators, dentistry.
I’m telling you the chances of that are negligible, though I won’t scruple using a more advanced than us past civilization to give my characters a nasty shock when they get to space. I won’t because that’s just cool.
However of things like Ancient Greece or Rome? I almost think the chances against it are worse. And of course civilizations that live and die by coastal sailing would be mostly engulfed in the great melt of the last ice age.
And no, Europe hasn’t been extensively studied. As I said before, Europe is mostly built on Europe. And you can’t dig in a field without finding SOMETHING. If you think everyone runs to the academics or the authorities when something is found, you don’t understand people’s interest in building a house, or sowing a field, as opposed to you know, giving up ownership of their land in all but fact. Frankly I’m amazed so many people do report discoveries.
But the thought of “superior civilizations” got me to thinking of what say the Romans or the Greeks, or those other ancient civilizations if they ever existed, would make of us in the West. We cross the globe by flying through the air. Not just heads of state or priests, no, common people. Hell, our pets fly. Most places have clean, fresh water that someone doesn’t have to carry a mile or so (which has been most of the work of humanity I think, forever.) Forget aqueducts. We have water that comes from our faucets whenever we want it. Cold AND hot. We have temperature control inside our houses, allowing us ignore the weather and keep warm in winter and cold in summer. We can magically cure diseases that killed millions of people by injecting this magical elixir into the sick person’s veins. Our old live a long time in relative comfort. We get our teeth fixed and replaced, so most people can chew to the end of their lives. Most of us can read, and most of us have access to untold wisdom of the sort their hermetic orders would kill for.
We are the superior civilization. We are the enlightened ones, the shining and resplendent inhabitants of the wonderful future.
And we worry about what gender we feel like being that day, who is allowed to pee where, whether someone used the wrong word to refer to someone else who might be offended, whether our use of fossil fuels offends Gaia, whether slapping a kid on the behind is a criminal offense, whether we are doing all we could do with our lives.
In other words, we’re neurotic, unsatisfied, and a bit crazy like most of people who were born and raised rich throughout most of human history.
Which is why if we really were doomed to repeating a cycle, and if the civilizations before us were the same but more advanced, the message of the pyramids would be “Don’t use so much toilet paper. Just wash one square and reuse it.”
Perhaps we should be grateful they are truly profoundly unlikely to ever have existed or tried to send us any message.
Sarah Hoyt, “We Are The Superior Civilization”, According to Hoyt, 2017-05-15.
May 28, 2019
May 27, 2019
QotD: The Green death cult
In keeping with all millenarian movements, the extinction-obsessed green cult reserves its priestly fury for ordinary people. Even when it is putting pressure on the government, it is really asking it to punish us. It wants tighter controls on car-driving, restrictions on flying, green taxes on meat. That these things would severely hit the pockets of ordinary people – but not the deep pockets of Emma Thompson and the double-barrelled eco-snobs who run Extinction Rebellion – is immaterial to the angry bourgeoisie. So convinced are they of their own goodness, and of our wickedness, that they think it is utterly acceptable for officialdom to make our lives harder in order to strongarm us into being more “green”. People complaining about Extinction Rebellion disrupting people’s lives in London over the past few days are missing the point – the entire point of the green movement is to disrupt ordinary people’s lives, and even to immiserate them. All in the jumped-up name of “saving the planet”.
And now the green cult has pushed Ms [Greta] Thunberg into the position of its global leader, its child-like saviour, the messiah of their miserabilist political creed. What they have done to Ms Thunberg is unforgivable. They have pumped her – and millions of other children – with the politics of fear. They have convinced the next generation that the planet is on the cusp of doom. They have injected dread into the youth. “I want you to panic”, said Ms Thunberg at Davos, and the billionaires and celebs and marauding NGOs that were in attendance all lapped it up. Because adult society loves nothing more than having its own fear and confusions obediently parroted back to it by teenagers. They celebrate Thunberg because she tells them how horrible they are: it is an entirely S&M relationship, speaking to the deep self-loathing of the 21st-century elites.
Brendan O’Neill, “The cult of Greta Thunberg: This young woman sounds increasingly like a millenarian weirdo”, Spiked, 2019-04-22.
