[W]ho wants to be foretold the weather? It is bad enough when it comes, without our having the misery of knowing about it beforehand.
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), 1889.
February 12, 2019
QotD: Weather
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February 11, 2019
QotD: Gandhi’s conflicted views of war and pacifism
… the real center and raison d’être of Gandhi is ahimsa, nonviolence, which principle when incorporated into vast campaigns of noncooperation with British rule the Mahatma called by an odd name he made up himself, satyagraha, which means something like “truth-striving.” During the key part of his life, Gandhi devoted a great deal of time explaining the moral and philosophical meanings of both ahimsa and satyagraha. But much as the film sanitizes Gandhi to the point where one would mistake him for a Christian saint, and sanitizes India to the point where one would take it for Shangri-la, it quite sweeps away Gandhi’s ethical and religious ponderings, his complexities, his qualifications, and certainly his vacillations, which simplifying process leaves us with our old European friend: pacifism. It is true that Gandhi was much impressed by the Sermon on the Mount, his favorite passage in the Bible, which he read over and over again. But for all the Sermon’s inspirational value, and its service as an ideal in relations among individual human beings, no Christian state which survived has ever based its policies on the Sermon on the Mount since Constantine declared Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. And no modern Western state which survives can ever base its policies on pacifism. And no Hindu state will ever base its policies on ahimsa. Gandhi himself — although the film dishonestly conceals this from us — many times conceded that in dire circumstances “war may have to be resorted to as a necessary evil.”
It is something of an anomaly that Gandhi, held in popular myth to be a pure pacifist (a myth which governments of India have always been at great pains to sustain in the belief that it will reflect credit on India itself, and to which the present movie adheres slavishly), was until fifty not ill-disposed to war at all. As I have already noted, in three wars, no sooner had the bugles sounded than Gandhi not only gave his support, but was clamoring for arms. To form new regiments! To fight! To destroy the enemies of the empire. Regular Indian army units fought in both the Boer War and World War I, but this was not enough for Gandhi. He wanted to raise new troops, even, in the case of the Boer and Kaffir Wars, from the tiny Indian colony in South Africa. British military authorities thought it not really worth the trouble to train such a small body of Indians as soldiers, and were even resistant to training them as an auxiliary medical corps (“stretcher bearers”), but finally yielded to Gandhi’s relentless importuning. As first instructed, the Indian Volunteer Corps was not supposed actually to go into combat, but Gandhi, adamant, led his Indian volunteers into the thick of battle. When the British commanding officer was mortally wounded during an engagement in the Kaffir War, Gandhi — though his corps’ deputy commander — carried the officer’s stretcher himself from the battlefield and for miles over the sun-baked veldt. The British empire’s War Medal did not have its name for nothing, and it was generally earned.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
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February 10, 2019
QotD: Hell is other drivers
There are many reasons to become a more competent and more conscious user of the American road, but allow me to acquaint you with one reason that you’ll regret having done so: once you get to the point where every action you take behind the wheel has a defined and precise purpose, you will find the unconscious and purposeless actions of everybody on the road around you to be utterly maddening. I’m talking about the people who wander from lane to lane for no reason. The drivers who speed up to match you as you pass them on the freeway, not out of anger or machismo but simply because their subconscious herd-animal instincts tell them that it’s completely safe and comforting to be driving at 75mph next to another 4,000-pound unguided missile. Tailgaters. People who can’t merge at speed. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
I’m not saying that road rage and aggressive driving isn’t a problem in the United States — it obviously is — but much of the bizarre behavior you see out there on the road is simply due to the fact that the average driver puts no more thought into his choices behind the wheel than I do into selecting toilet paper at the supermarket. They aren’t trying to offend you or “beat” you. They’re just kind of stroking along on instinct and the dimly remembered lessons of high-school driver’s ed. That’s why you will have somebody blow by you in a 55 zone only to hold you up in the 75 zone that follows: they aren’t even looking at the speed limit signs. Instead, they’re simply doing a speed that feels comfortable to them. It’s completely unconscious.
Jack Baruth, “How To Mentally Manipulate Your Fellow Drivers: This is not the lane you’re looking for…”, Road and Track, 2017-03-07.
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February 9, 2019
QotD: The global utility of a national carbon tax
James Griffin [of] Texas A&M’s Bush School of Government […] is a carbon-tax advocate who begins by acknowledging what everyone knows but hardly anyone says: that, absent subsidies and mandates, renewables and so-called green energy could not begin to compete with oil and coal, and the market would be entirely dominated by fossil fuels.
The carbon tax is one of those policy ideas that is largely sound in theory but runs up hard upon the shoals of reality. I am not convinced that a national carbon tax would change U.S. consumer behavior to such an extent that it would have positive effects on what is after all a global phenomenon, nor am I convinced that the U.S. government would use the revenue from a carbon tax to invest in real climate-change mitigation. That makes the carbon tax a very expensive way of demonstrating good intentions, which does not seem to me like a very fruitful way to work. And compared to more direct programs, such as clearing the way for the development of new, modern, nuclear-power facilities, a carbon tax is even less attractive.
Kevin D. Williamson, “The Case for a Carbon Tax”, National Review, 2017-03-08.
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February 8, 2019
QotD: Sex toys and sexbots
The global market in these abominations is currently valued at more than £12 billion, and that’s not counting the monstrous regiment of aforementioned sex dolls, the ‘high end’ of which began in Japan in the 1980s. Also coming soon will be sex robots, beginning with a robot ‘Fellatio Café’ in Paddington, due to open later this year. Even though I describe myself as a feminist, I can’t wait to mock the self-appointed spokeswomen for my gender slamming this set-up after years of bigging up broads bringing themselves off using battery-operated devices. As the rather rabid David Mills, an atheist activist and admirer of sex dolls, ranted to Vanity Fair: ‘Women have enjoyed sex toys for 50 years, probably 5,000 years, if the truth be known, but men are still stigmatised! We have to correct that! I want to be the Rosa Parks of sex dolls! Men are not going to sit in the back of the bus any more!’
Indeed, you could argue that a blowjob from a humanoid sexbot is far more indicative of a healthy desire to be connected to humanity than a quick once-over with a gilded pebble or a faceless phallus. But that won’t stop the lady columnists from penning predictable screeds about the woeful immaturity of men, and their willingness to risk having their tackle snagged in a faulty man-trap rather than ‘commit’ to a living, breathing female.
So can I (for once) put my head above the parapet and say that I totally get the appeal of sexbots in the current climate? Sex is, generally, a rather basic thing. Yet somewhere along the line some women have adopted the notion that it should be akin to a trip to Disneyland on gossamer wings for a playdate with Barbie and her pet unicorn. Some women seem to think sex should be about communicating, sharing, scented candles, two-hour massages, three-hour role play, kissing, cuddling and then… that other thing, if you must… whereas men generally tend to believe that sex is about having sex, the rotters. So can you blame them for wanting to keep it short and simple with a sexbot? And if it’s OK for women to pleasure themselves with friends electric, why not men?
Julie Burchill, “The other sexual double-standard: Why is self-love for women so cool and feminist? For men it’s seen as sad and sleazy”, The Spectator, 2017-03-23.
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February 7, 2019
QotD: Generation Z begins to hit adulthood
Those born after 1998 are currently (and quite unimaginatively) being called Generation Z. And, by Pew’s math, the eldest members of this nascent generation are turning 18 this year [2017].
Welcome to adulthood, Gen Z!
As one of the oldest members of your immediate ancestors in American youth, I’d like to officially transfer the think-piece mantle your way. As millennials’ misadventures in youthful entitlement and narcissism dwindle, may your place as a scapegoat for societal fears about sex, technology, and general change shine bright. May Gen X prove as much a collective nemesis for you as boomers have so generously done for my generation. And, perhaps most importantly, may you please be patient in a few years when you’re trying to explain to us how to upload a hologram snap to Mind Twitter.
Also, for what it’s worth, millennials may have spawned Facebook, but don’t blame us if Americans are more politically polarized these days. According to another recent generational study, it’s the oldest Americans who have grown the most polarized within their own generation in recent decades. While many people attribute political polarization to social media or the internet more broadly, the study’s authors found that, between 1996 and 2012, the increase in polarization was “largest among the groups least likely to use the internet and social media.” On a nine-point measure of different sorts of polarization, the gap grew by 0.38 index points for respondents ages 75 and older, but just 0.05 index points for adults ages 39 and below.
Lastly, don’t get too comfortable, kids — your generational predecessors are already arriving. Going by Pew’s parameters, the typical generation spans about 17 years … which means that the last of Gen Z babies were likely born in 2016. A new generation starts being born this year.
Welcome to the world, post-Gen Z generation! What a weird, absurdist time to be starting your lives. May we course correct a bit here before you hit adulthood. (Alternately, tell your kids to give President Ivanka’s reanimated corpse and V.P. Chelsea Clinton’s cryogenically frozen head my love, and sorry about the Kardashians. That one really is our fault.)
Elizabeth Nolan Brown, “Welcome to Adulthood, Gen Z: The post-millennial generation starts turning 18 this year, while the eldest members of the post-Gen Z cohort are starting to be born.”, Reason, 2017-03-22.
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February 6, 2019
QotD: “Get off my lawn!”
The zeitgeist, of course, has also changed since 2002. Childhood obesity and screen addiction are now perceived as urgent matters of public health. A politician who wants those damn kids off his lawn is likely to be told “You’re a monster who is spreading diabetes and ruin, and, frankly, it’s amazing that there are kids on your lawn in 2017 and we would like to know how you accomplished this.”
Colby Cosh, “Hamilton finally ends its decades-old ban on street hockey, and it won’t actually change a thing”, National Post, 2017-03-06.
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February 5, 2019
QotD: Democracy and diversity
Whether ethnic diversity is compatible with democratic republican government is open to question, though it is considered impolite, or worse, to raise that question. Democracy requires a demos. Truly free, democratic, and stable multiethnic societies are rare, as the Europeans are learning again. There’s Switzerland, sure, but a core principle of the Swiss solution is separation: the country’s four ethnicities are mostly concentrated in their own cantons. Switzerland is a highly decentralized confederacy, where most political issues get decided at the canton level, which minimizes ethnic and regional tensions. The federal government in Bern is practically invisible; most Swiss can’t name their country’s president. This is not a model easily replicated.
The history of the United States does not convincingly prove that ethnic diversity is part and parcel with democracy. Ask a random man in the street of any blue-state city what the purpose of America is, and he’s likely to tell you that it’s immigration—though the word appears nowhere in the founding documents. The U.S. was, from its beginnings, multiethnic, multiracial, multi-religious, and multilingual. But until recently, this background condition was not seen as the font of our national strength. Rather, for most of our history, it was a problem to be overcome through nation-building and assimilation, which America excelled at. By the early 1960s, United States had come close to creating its own unique national ethnicity, albeit one that starkly excluded African-Americans. But even this exception seemed to be moving rapidly toward resolution before the country gave up on nation-building in the late 1960s. One can make a strong case that the early Civil Rights movement was a product of the mid-century high-water mark of American nationalism. Listen to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; it’s striking how classically nationalist it is, from its evocation of the country’s geographical features to the reaffirmation of its basic creed of freedom, equality, and individual rights, to its Old Testament rhetoric rooted in John Winthrop’s Puritanism.
E.M. Oblomov, “The Case for National Realism: Diversity is the hallmark of empires, not democracies”, City Journal, 2019-01-02.
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February 4, 2019
QotD: Brasilia and reconciling with Jane Jacobs
Brasilia is interesting only insofar as it was an entire High Modernist planned city. In most places, the Modernists rarely got their hands on entire cities at once. They did build a number of suburbs, neighborhoods, and apartment buildings. There was, however, a disconnect. Most people did not want to buy a High Modernist house or live in a High Modernist neighborhood. Most governments did want to fund High Modernist houses and neighborhoods, because the academics influencing them said it was the modern scientific rational thing to do. So in the end, one of High Modernists’ main contributions to the United States was the projects – ie government-funded public housing for poor people who didn’t get to choose where to live.
I never really “got” Jane Jacobs. I originally interpreted her as arguing that it was great for cities to be noisy and busy and full of crowds, and that we should build neighborhoods that are confusing and hard to get through to force people to interact with each other and prevent them from being able to have privacy, and no one should be allowed to live anywhere quiet or nice. As somebody who (thanks to the public school system, etc) has had my share of being forced to interact with people, and of being placed in situations where it is deliberately difficult to have any privacy or time to myself, I figured Jane Jacobs was just a jerk.
But Scott has kind of made me come around. He rehabilitates her as someone who was responding to the very real excesses of High Modernism. She was the first person who really said “Hey, maybe people like being in cute little neighborhoods”. Her complaint wasn’t really against privacy or order per se as it was against extreme High Modernist perversions of those concepts that people empirically hated. And her background makes this all too understandable – she started out as a journalist covering poor African-Americans who lived in the projects and had some of the same complaints as Brazilians.
Her critique of Le Corbusierism was mostly what you would expect, but Scott extracts some points useful for their contrast with the Modernist points earlier:
First, existing structures are evolved organisms built by people trying to satisfy their social goals. They contain far more wisdom about people’s needs and desires than anybody could formally enumerate. Any attempt at urban planning should try to build on this encoded knowledge, not detract from it.
Second, man does not live by bread alone. People don’t want the right amount of Standardized Food Product, they want social interaction, culture, art, coziness, and a host of other things nobody will ever be able to calculate. Existing structures have already been optimized for these things, and unlesss you’re really sure you understand all of them, you should be reluctant to disturb them.
Third, solutions are local. Americans want different things than Africans or Indians. One proof of this is that New York looks different from Lagos and from Delhi. Even if you are the world’s best American city planner, you should be very concerned that you have no idea what people in Africa need, and you should be very reluctant to design an African city without extensive consultation of people who understand the local environment.
Fourth, even a very smart and well-intentioned person who is on board with points 1-3 will never be able to produce a set of rules. Most of people’s knowledge is implicit, and most rule codes are quickly replaced by informal systems of things that work which are much more effective (the classic example of this is work-to-rule strikes).
Fifth, although well-educated technocrats may understand principles which give them some advantages in their domain, they are hopeless without the on-the-ground experience of the people they are trying to serve, whose years of living in their environment and dealing with it every day have given them a deep practical knowledge which is difficult to codify.
How did Jacobs herself choose where to live? As per her Wikipedia page:
[Jacobs] took an immediate liking to Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, which did not conform to the city’s grid structure.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
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February 3, 2019
February 2, 2019
QotD: Le Corbusier
So the early modern period is defined by an uneasy truce between states who want to be able to count and standardize everything, and citizens who don’t want to let them. Enter High Modernism. Scott defines it as
A strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws
…which is just a bit academic-ese for me. An extensional definition might work better: standardization, Henry Ford, the factory as metaphor for the best way to run everything, conquest of nature, New Soviet Man, people with college degrees knowing better than you, wiping away the foolish irrational traditions of the past, Brave New World, everyone living in dormitories and eating exactly 2000 calories of Standardized Food Product (TM) per day, anything that is For Your Own Good, gleaming modernist skyscrapers, The X Of The Future, complaints that the unenlightened masses are resisting The X Of The Future, demands that if the unenlightened masses reject The X Of The Future they must be re-educated For Their Own Good, and (of course) evenly-spaced rectangular grids.
(maybe the best definition would be “everything G. K. Chesterton didn’t like.”)
It sort of sounds like a Young Adult Dystopia, but Scott shocked me with his research into just how strong this ideology was around the turn of the last century. Some of the greatest early 20th-century thinkers were High Modernist to the point of self-parody, the point where a Young Adult Dystopian fiction writer would start worrying they were laying it on a little too thick.
The worst of the worst was Le Corbusier, the French artist/intellectual/architect. The Soviets asked him to come up with a plan to redesign Moscow. He came up one: kick out everyone, bulldoze the entire city, and redesign it from scratch upon rational principles. For example, instead of using other people’s irrational systems of measurement, they would use a new measurement system invented by Le Corbusier himself, called Modulor, which combined the average height of a Frenchman with the Golden Ratio.
The Soviets decided to pass: the plan was too extreme and destructive of existing institutions even for Stalin. Undeterred, Le Corbusier changed the word “Moscow” on the diagram to “Paris”, then presented it to the French government (who also passed). Some aspects of his design eventually ended up as Chandigarh, India.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
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February 1, 2019
QotD: Fanatics and monomaniacs
Imagine being willing to take a stranger into your home only on the condition that he did not vote for the man who won the 2016 presidential election. One of those Trump-excluding roommates mentioned in the Times insisted that this discrimination was in the interest of the Trump voters, too, who would be unhappy in a household full of “raging liberals.”
Meditate, for a moment, upon the word “raging.”
The people who believe that there can be no art, literature, culture, or life apart from politics are people who do not understand art, literature, culture, or politics, and whose lives are sad and sadly deficient.
A Buddhist writer once described two kinds of material unhappiness: the absence of what one desires and the presence of what one despises. But the Buddha was known to associate with worldly men and their unclean enthusiasms in much the same way that Jesus slummed around with prostitutes and tax collectors, instructing us by example to seek after lives that are as large as our love and not as small as our hatred. The people who close their doors against those who simply see the world in a different way, who scream profanities at Betsy DeVos or chant “You should die!” at Jewish musicians, are people who cannot rise far enough above their own pettiness to understand that the thing they fear is the thing they are.
Kevin D. Williamson, “No Republicans Need Apply”, National Review, 2017-02-12.
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January 31, 2019
QotD: Top-down solutions
The closest analogy I can think of right now – maybe because it’s on my mind – is this story about check-cashing shops. Professors of social science think these shops are evil because they charge the poor higher rates, so they should be regulated away so that poor people don’t foolishly shoot themselves in the foot by going to them. But on closer inspection, they offer a better deal for the poor than banks do, for complicated reasons that aren’t visible just by comparing the raw numbers. Poor people’s understanding of this seems a lot like the metis that helps them understand local agriculture. And progressives’ desire to shift control to the big banks seems a lot like the High Modernists’ desire to shift everything to a few big farms. Maybe this is a point in favor of something like libertarianism? Maybe especially a “libertarianism of the poor” focusing on things like occupational licensing, not shutting down various services to the poor because they don’t meet rich-people standards, not shutting down various services to the poor because we think they’re “price-gouging”, et cetera?
Maybe instead of concluding that Scott is too focused on peasant villages, we should conclude that he’s focused on confrontations between a well-educated authoritarian overclass and a totally separate poor underclass. Most modern political issues don’t exactly map on to that – even things like taxes where the rich and the poor are on separate sides don’t have a bimodal distribution. But in cases there are literally about rich people trying to dictate to the poorest of the poor how they should live their lives, maybe this becomes more useful.
Actually, one of the best things the book did to me was make me take cliches about “rich people need to defer to the poor on poverty-related policy ideas” more seriously. This has become so overused that I roll my eyes at it. “Quantitative easing could improve GDP growth…but instead of asking macroeconomists, let’s ask this 19-year old single mother in the Bronx!” But Scott provides a lot of situations where that was exactly the sort of person they should have asked. He also points out that Tanzanian natives using their traditional farming practices were more productive than European colonists using scientific farming. I’ve had to listen to so many people talk about how “we must respect native people’s different ways of knowing” and “native agriculturalists have a profound respect for the earth that goes beyond logocentric Western ideals” and nobody had ever bothered to tell me before that they actually produced more crops per acre, at least some of the time. That would have put all of the other stuff in a pretty different light.
Finally, I understand Scott is an anarchist. He didn’t really try to defend anarchism in this book. But I was struck by his description of peasant villages as this unit of government which were happily doing their own thing very effectively for millennia, with the central government’s relevance being entirely negative – mostly demanding taxes or starting wars. They kind of reminded me of some pictures of hunter-gatherer tribes, in terms of being self-sufficient, informal, and just never encountering the sorts of economic and political problems that we take for granted. They make communism (the type with actual communes, not the type where you have huge military parades and kill everyone) look more attractive. I think Scott was trying to imply that this is the sort of thing we could have if not for governments demanding legibility and a world of universal formal rule codes accessible from the center? Since he never actually made the argument, it’s hard for me to critique it. And I wish there had been more about cultural evolution as separate from the more individual idea of metis.
Overall, though, I did like this book. I’m not really sure what I got from its thesis, but maybe that was appropriate. Seeing Like A State was arranged kind of like the premodern forests and villages it describes; not especially well-organized, not really directed toward any clear predetermined goal, but full of interesting things and lovely to spend some time in.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Seeing Like a State”, Slate Star Codex, 2017-03-16.
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January 30, 2019
QotD: Political memoirs
We’re told not to judge books by their covers, but faced with these two it’s hard not to. Harman’s is one of those thick, expensive tomes which, understandably, politicians write when they’ve had enough earache and, unbelievably, publishers keep buying for vast sums, despite the fact that a fortnight after publication you can pick them up cheaper than an adult colouring book in a remainder bin. The old saw that ‘all political careers end in failure’ might now better be: ‘All political careers end with a book on Amazon going for less than the price of the postage.’
Julie Burchill, “Harriet Harman and Jess Phillips: poles apart in the sisterhood”, The Spectator, 2017-02-25.
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January 29, 2019
QotD: Fanaticism
Esar’s Comic Dictionary (1943) contains two definitions of the word “fanatic,” often wrongly attributed (by me, among others) to Winston Churchill: First, “A person who redoubles his efforts after having forgotten his aims.” Second (my favorite), “One who can’t change his opinion and won’t change the subject.”
Kevin D. Williamson, “No Republicans Need Apply”, National Review, 2017-02-12.
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