Quotulatiousness

December 8, 2012

Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill, and Yogi Berra

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:27

What do these four men have in common? They’re “flypaper figures“: people who frequently are quoted as saying things they never said:

“People will see a quote and it appeals to an opinion that they have and if it has Jefferson’s name attached to it that gives it more weight,” she says. “He’s constantly being invoked by people when they are making arguments about politics and actually all sorts of topics.”

A spokeswoman for the Guide‘s publisher said it was looking into the quote. Mr. Norris’s publicist didn’t respond to requests for comment.

To counter what she calls rampant misattribution, Ms. Berkes is fighting the Internet with the Internet. She has set up a “Spurious Quotations” page on the Monticello website listing bogus quotes attributed to the founding father, a prolific writer and rhetorician who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

[. . .]

Jefferson is a “flypaper figure,” like Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and baseball player and manager Yogi Berra — larger-than-life figures who have fake or misattributed quotes stick to them all the time, says Ralph Keyes, an author of books about quotes wrongly credited to famous or historical figures.

November 29, 2012

QotD: Transforming Ontario’s wine market

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:33

A major transition is never easy, but it would be worth it. The strategy we recommend would lead to more government revenue for health care and education; a sustained commitment to the socially responsible use of alcohol; increased economic growth based on greater access to markets; a renewed emphasis on responsible environmental practices; and wider choice, more convenience and competitive prices for consumers.

The present beverage alcohol system took shape at the end of Prohibition. For decades, Ontario has made minor repairs to the system when a complete overhaul was needed. In our view the government should focus its role on effective regulation, and restructure the system from top to bottom to establish a more competitive model.

After 78 years, change is long overdue. It is time to transform Ontario’s beverage alcohol system for the 21st century.

“Part IV. Conclusion: Towards a Competitive System”, A Report of the Beverage Alcohol System Review Panel July, 2005

November 27, 2012

QotD: The “journalism of attachment”

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:57

In conversation with spiked editor Brendan O’Neill, the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis captured well the admixture of emotionalism and narcissism encouraged by the formal immediacy of much of contemporary journalism: ‘We’ve created a journalism that feeds contemporary emotionalism brilliantly. The Orla Guerins, the poetic Fergal Keanes — they feed it with these cubist blips of description. Dark. Dangerous. The horror. It’s very much of its time, of its emotional time. But by doing this, we are amplifying and increasing people’s emotional sense that everything happens inside their heads. We are contributing to a feeling of being trapped in our heads and our emotions and a feeling of disconnection from a more political, physical world.’

This, the journalism of attachment, the journalism in which subjective feeling becomes objective fact, reaches its apogee in the actions of BBC war reporter Jon Donnison. Seeing that someone called Hazem Balousha had posted a picture of an injured child with the words ‘Pain in #Gaza’ on Twitter, Donnison could not resist and retweeted it, with the words ‘Heartbreaking’. Which it was. But what it was not was a picture of an injured girl from Gaza. The picture was actually of an injured girl from the conflict in Syria.

The lesson is clear. When emoting and feeling become the substance of journalism, then facts, and the truth, suffer.

Tim Black, “Roll up, roll up, behold dead Palestinians”, sp!ked, 2012-11-27

November 13, 2012

QotD: British women in WW2

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

A British woman officer or non-commissioned officer can and often does give orders to a man private. The men obey smartly and know it is no shame. For British women have proven themselves in this war. They have stuck to their posts near burning ammunition dumps, delivered messages afoot after their motorcycles have been blasted from under them. They have pulled aviators from burning planes. They have died at the gun posts and as they fell another girl has stepped directly into the position and “carried on.” There is not a single record in this war of any British woman in uniformed service quitting her post or failing in her duty under fire.

Now you understand why British soldiers respect the women in uniform. They have won the right to the utmost respect. When you see a girl in khaki or air-force blue with a bit of ribbon on her tunic — remember she didn’t get it for knitting more socks than anyone else in Ipswich.

Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain, 1942

November 8, 2012

QotD: The English Gentleman

Filed under: Britain, Education, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:26

The idea of a gentleman was a more inclusive one than it sounds to modern ears. One of its greatest advantages was that you could define it so as to include yourself. You could behave like a gentleman, without possessing any of the social attributes which a gentleman might have: there was no need to possess a coat of arms, or a country estate, or engage in field sports, or wear evening dress. At least since Chaucer’s time, there had been a distinction between the social meaning of the word, and the moral. It was evident that well-born people, who ought to know how to behave like gentlemen, did not always do so, while others sometimes did.

Philip Mason, whose perceptive study, The English Gentleman, was published in 1982, argues that “the desire to be a gentleman” runs through and illuminates English history from the time of Chaucer until the early 20th century. He suggests that “for most of the 19th century and until the Second World War” the idea of the gentleman “provided the English with a second religion, one less demanding than Christianity. It influenced their politics. It influenced their system of education; it made them endow new public schools and raise the status of old grammar schools. It inspired the lesser landed gentry as well as the professional and middle classes to give their children an upbringing of which the object was to make them ladies and gentlemen, even if only a few of them also became scholars.”

Andrew Gimson, “Strange Death of the English Gentleman”, Standpoint, 2012-09

October 26, 2012

QotD: Supporting the “undeserving” poor

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:26

Two of the great and correct insights of libertarianism are that the state has very limited knowledge, and that its interventions often lead to people gaming the system. This is true of welfare spending as of anything else. The government doesn’t have the knowhow to distinguish well between the deserving and undeserving poor. And its efforts to do so are not only expensive — in terms of paying bureaucrats and corporate scroungers and fraudsters — but also bear heavily upon the honest and naive deserving poor whilst the undeserving, who know how to game the system, get off.

Chris Dillow, “Support the undeserving poor”, Stumbling and Mumbling, 2012-10-25

October 21, 2012

QotD: Environmental externalities

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

That other people place different values upon the environment than I do worries me not in the slightest. It is precisely such differences of opinions about value that make a market. What does annoy me intensely is that almost all of the environmental problems that are currently being complained about have indeed been studied by economists. And they’ve found solutions to them as well. Just about any and every environmental problem is either about externalities or common access to a resource. In many ways these are just the flip side of exactly the same problem. But we do indeed know how to solve each of them and both of them. Hardin on ownership or regulation, Pigou on tax or regulation, both mediated through Coase on transactions costs (with a decent assit from Ostrom on communal ownership). There, that’s it: far from economics ignoring matters environmental economics has solved the damn problems.

So why won’t the environmentalists listen?

Tim Worstall, “Why won’t the environmentalists learn any economics?”, Adam Smith Institute blog, 2012-10-21.

September 28, 2012

Even when they quote you accurately, they can still miss the point you’re trying to make

Filed under: Economics, Food, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:11

Tim Worstall, after thanking all the folks who got him to the point he can be quoted (and quoted accurately) in the Los Angeles Times, realizes that they’re using his words to present a point he isn’t trying to make:

I wrote here about the coming bacon famine. My point was that we’ve just had a bad crop and this requires a modest change in how we use that crop that we do have. We’d rather like people to stop feeding the now in short supply grains to pigs to make bacon and leave rather more of it to be eaten directly by humans. Further, I gloried in the fact that we have a system which achieves this. We have the futures markets: the future price of corn and soy and wheat has gone up. Farmers are culling their pig herds to avoid the future higher costs of feeding them. This will cause a shortage of bacon in the future and if not an excess then certainly more grain than otherwise that can be eaten by humans. I do regard this as a good result, yes. But what I am pointing to is the way in which in a market, price driven, system the entirely selfish pursuit of gelt and pelf, the desire purely for filthy lucre, brings about such a desirable result. The sole desire of agricultural commodity speculators is to increase the amount of cash in their wallets and reduce the amounts in those of other such speculators. Yet from this system we get a rebalancing of the use of a scarce resource which leads to more humans leading longer and better lives even if we’ve a certain shortage of pigs. At which point Hurrah! for capitalism and aren’t we all such lucky people.

[. . .]

Which is indeed what I said. However, we’re then told this:

    Worstall doesn’t go so far as to say we should stop eating meat, but his line of thinking is headed in the right direction. If we didn’t use grain as feed for livestock, we could take significant steps toward ending global hunger while also drastically reducing greenhouse gases. Meantime, we’d spare a whole lot of pigs — and maybe even our health.

All of which makes me sound like some kind of hippie, advocating vegetarianism and the equitable distribution of the world’s resources. When what I’m actually applauding is the way in which financial capitalism red in tooth and claw solves our distribution of scarce resources problems.

September 25, 2012

QotD: Replacement NFL referees

Filed under: Football, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

The replacement officials are a mockery wrapped in a travesty, dunked in a vat of incompetence, glazed with WTF and set to the Benny Hill theme song.

Scott Feschuk, “In defence of the replacement officials (Kidding: they’re terrible)”, Maclean’s, 2012-09-25

September 12, 2012

QotD: Detroit’s golden age

Filed under: History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:12

It bears repeating that the ’60s — not the ’50s, and certainly not the ’70s — were Detroit’s golden age. The age of tailfins and bulbous deco car bodies was over, and designers went about the business of making the cars look as fast as their increasingly powerful engines actually made them go. The zenith of this is probably the Mustang, but its design aesthetic — less chrome, long lines, agonizing thought put into key details like the grille and the silhouette — dominated the industry, resulting in a decade of cars that look like they want to be driven, not parked (the ’50s) or rolled off cliffs (the ’70s.)

Rick McGinnis, “Fury”, Zero to Sixty, 2012-09-10

September 11, 2012

QotD: Degrees of elitism

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, History, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Over the last thirty years, the university has replaced the labor union as the most important institution, after the corporation, in American political and economic life. As union jobs have disappeared, participation in the labor force, the political system, and cultural affairs is increasingly regulated by professional guilds that require their members to spend the best years of life paying exorbitant tolls and kissing patrician rings. Whatever modest benefits accreditation offers in signaling attainment of skills, as a ranking mechanism it’s zero-sum: the result is to enrich the accreditors and to discredit those who lack equivalent credentials.

Jean Baudrillard once suggested an important correction to classical Marxism: exchange value is not, as Marx had it, a distortion of a commodity’s underlying use value; use value, instead, is a fiction created by exchange value. In the same way, systems of accreditation do not assess merit; merit is a fiction created by systems of accreditation. Like the market for skin care products, the market for credentials is inexhaustible: as the bachelor’s degree becomes democratized, the master’s degree becomes mandatory for advancement. Our elaborate, expensive system of higher education is first and foremost a system of stratification, and only secondly — and very dimly — a system for imparting knowledge.

The original universities in the Western world organized themselves as guilds, either of students, as in Bologna, or of masters, as in Paris. From the first, their chief mission was to produce not learning but graduates, with teaching subordinated to the process of certification — much as artisans would impose long and wasteful periods of apprenticeship, under the guise of “training,” to keep their numbers scarce and their services expensive. For the contemporary bachelor or master or doctor of this or that, as for the Ming-era scholar–bureaucrat or the medieval European guildsman, income and social position are acquired through affiliation with a cartel. Those who want to join have to pay to play, and many never recover from the entry fee.

The Editors, “Death by Degrees”, n+1, 2012-06-19

September 8, 2012

QotD: The European Project

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:22

Like all people with bad habits, politicians and bureaucrats are infinitely inventive when it comes to rationalizing the European Project, though they’re inventive in nothing else. Without the Union, they say, there would be no peace; when it’s pointed out that the Union is the consequence of peace, not its cause, they say that no small country can survive on its own. When it is pointed out that Singapore, Switzerland, and Norway seem to have no difficulties in that regard, they say that pan-European regulations create economies of scale that promote productive efficiency. When it is pointed out that European productivity lags behind the rest of the world’s, they say that European social protections are more generous than anywhere else. If it is then noted that long-term unemployment rates in Europe are higher than elsewhere, another apology follows. The fact is that for European politicians and bureaucrats, the European Project is like God — good by definition, which means that they have subsequently to work out a theodicy to explain, or explain away, its manifest and manifold deficiencies.

[. . .]

The personal interests of European politicians and bureaucrats, with their grossly inflated, tax-free salaries, are perfectly obvious. For politicians who have fallen out of favor at home, or grown bored with the political process, Brussels acts as a vast and luxurious retirement home, with the additional gratification of the retention of power. The name of a man such as European Council president Herman Van Rompuy, whose charisma makes Hillary Clinton look like Mata Hari, would, without the existence of the European Union, have reached most of the continent’s newspapers only if he had paid for a classified advertisement in them. Instead of which, he bestrides the European stage if not like a colossus exactly, at least like the spread of fungus on a damp wall.

Corporate interests, ever anxious to suppress competition, approve of European Union regulations because they render next to impossible the entry of competitors into any market in which they already enjoy a dominant position, while also allowing them to extend their domination into new markets. That is why the CAC40 of today (the index of the largest 40 companies on the French stock exchange) will have more or less the same names 100 years hence.

More interestingly, perhaps, Hannan explains the European Union’s corruption of so-called civil society. Suppose you have an association for the protection of hedgehogs because you love hedgehogs. The European Union then offers your association money to expand its activities, which of course it accepts. The Union then proposes a measure allegedly for the protection of hedgehogs, but actually intended to promote a large agrarian or industrial interest over a small one, first asking the association’s opinion about the proposed measure. Naturally, your association supports the Union because it has become dependent on the Union’s subsidy. The Union then claims that it enjoys the support of those who want to protect hedgehogs. The best description of this process is fascist corporatism, which so far (and it is of course a crucial difference) lacks the paramilitary and repressive paraphernalia of real fascism.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Rejecting the European Project”, City Journal, 2012-09-07

September 7, 2012

Gender-identity: how (many) adolescents cope with the “what am I” problem

Filed under: Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

This is from a discussion that took place on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list the other day (list info here) that explored some interesting notions. I emailed Ms. Bujold to ask her permission to use a quote from one of her posts, and she asked me to provide a bit more context as she wasn’t sure the portion I’d asked to use was sufficiently informative. The topic of discussion was the anima/animus mental model of what is “right” about the opposite sex many (most? all?) young people use to determine what it is to be male or female. A subtopic of that was the use or misuse of that mental model to judge potential dates/mates and the problems that that might entail.

It seems to tie in with my own notions of gender-identity formation in adolescence being principally accomplished by heatedly deleting everything seen to be associated with the opposite gender, and maturity being the slower process of regaining or recovering same to once again become a complete human being.

[. . .]

I might direct your attention to the large preponderance of “alpha males” as romance novel heroes. Very much the embodiment of those very assertive or practical qualities that adolescent women delete (or repress, if you prefer) in themselves, much to their later sorrow when they have to cope with real life, alas.

Your typical bad-boy alpha-jerk high-achieving rich hero is pretty much a grocery list of survival qualities discouraged in women, in fact.

Granted, women need to be socialized as sharers to a high degree, or their infants would never survive un-murdered. It’s a near thing as-is. (Says the experienced mom.)

August 29, 2012

QotD: Government funding for the arts “stinks in God’s nostrils”

Filed under: Books, Government, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:14

There’s at least a third reason to stop state funding of the arts, and it’s the one I take most seriously as a literary scholar and writer. In the 17th century, a great religious dissenter, Roger Williams (educated at Cambridge, exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony), wrote the first case for total separation of church and state in the English language. Forced worship, said Williams, “stinks in God’s nostrils” as an affront to individual liberty and autonomy; worse still, it subjugated theology to politics.

Something similar holds true with painting, music, writing, video and all other forms of creative expression. Forced funding of the arts — in whatever trivial amounts and indirect ways — implicates citizens in culture they might openly despise or blissfully ignore. And such mandatory tithing effectively turns creators and institutions lucky enough to win momentary favour from bureaucrats into either well-trained dogs or witting instruments of the powerful and well-connected. Independence works quite well for churches and the press. It works even more wonderfully in the arts.

Nick Gillespie, featured guest for “Economist Debates: Arts Funding”, The Economist, 2012-08-29

August 22, 2012

QotD: Orwell on the Dieppe raid

Filed under: Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, Quotations, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

D[avid] A[stor] very damping about the Dieppe raid, which he saw at more or less close quarters and which he says was an almost complete failure except for the very heavy destruction of German fighter planes, which was not part of the plan. He says that the affair was definitely misrepresented in the press and is now being misrepresented in the reports to the P.M., and that the main facts were: – Something over 5000 men were engaged, of whom at least 2000 were killed or prisoners. It was not intended to stay longer on shore than was actually done (ie. till about 4pm), but the idea was to destroy all the defences of Dieppe, and the attempt to do this was an utter failure. In fact only comparatively trivial damage was done, a few batteries of guns knocked out etc., and only one of the three main parties really made its objective. The others did not get far and many were massacred on the beach by artillery fire. The defences were formidable and would have been difficult to deal with even if there had been artillery support, as the guns were sunk in the face of the cliffs or under enormous concrete coverings. More tank-landing craft were sunk then got ashore. About 20 or 30 tanks were landed but none got off again. The newspaper photos which showed tanks apparently being brought back to England were intentionally misleading. The general impression was that the Germans knew of the raid beforehand. Almost as soon as it was begun they had a man broadcasting a spurious “eye-witness” account from somewhere further up the coast, and another man broadcasting false orders in English. On the other hand the Germans were evidently surprised by the strength of the air support. Whereas normally they have kept their fighters on the ground so as to conserve their strength, they sent them into the air as soon as they heard that tanks were landing, and lost a number of planes variously estimated, but considered by some RAF officers to be as high as 270. Owing to the British strength in the air the destroyers were able to lie outside Dieppe all day. One was sunk, by this was by a shore battery. When a request came to attack some objective on shore, the destroyers formed in line and raced inshore firing their guns while the fighter planes supported them overhead.

George Orwell, diary entry for August 22, 1942.

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