Yesterday in a group, a friend said what is obvious about the left is that they seriously oppose human reproduction and longevity. Ultimately human life, I guess.
Here’s the list as to why:
NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST:
1) Pushing to maximize abortion
2) Pushing to maximize homosexuality
3) Multiple different initiatives to make child rearing more difficult and expensive including
a) Ramping up the intensity of social services scrutiny, effectively necessitating high intensity “helicopter parenting”
b) Turning schools into indoctrination factories that don’t prepare children to function independently but do prepare them to have constant fights with their parents over their indoctrination
c) Making healthcare more expensive through constantly ramping regulation, making the actual having of children more difficult and prohibitively expensive
d) Pushing to nationalize healthcare, granting them further power over who lives or dies – allowing limitation of IVF, and also
e) legitimizing legal euthanasia while also pushing to make healthcare decisions for the public (see Canada right now)4) Pushing from other regulatory angles to make the de facto standard a two-income family, ensuring children are raised in daycares and further pushing family budgets to the brink
5) Using the student loan system to turn the bulk of reproductive age, upwardly mobile people into collateral in a deal that passes billions of dollars directly from the US government to the same system that then indoctrinates those kids to the point of full societal dysfunction; encouraging, as much as possible, the use of sex as entertainment ONLY
6) Turning sterilizing yourself into the hot new fad for kids
7) Turning the simple identification of gender into a minefield so that even sex between people who aren’t mutilating themselves is suddenly difficult to even consider
8) Willfully manipulating nursing homes into putting elderly people in a position where they are MOST LIKELY to die during COVID
9) Adopting COVID policies which foreseeably shut down cancer diagnostics and treatment for almost two years, which is the most likely cause of the 10 fold increase in the rate of cancers since the COVID lockdowns (although I can’t entirely discount that the vaccines themselves are partially responsible because, sing it with me now, you can’t ensure the long term safety of something that hasn’t been around long enough to have long term safety data, which is why we do clinical trials and not mass experiments on the general public. I note in passing that the drug companies are so trustworthy they demanded legal indemnity as a condition of participating, while swearing blind that the product was safe and effective even though it was physically fucking impossible for them to have data to back that up due to minor problems like the requisite quantity of time not passing.)
Sarah Hoyt, “I Don’t Believe in Aliens”, According to Hoyt, 2022-10-31.
February 4, 2023
QotD: Leftists against humanity
February 3, 2023
QotD: Democracy
Democracy always devolves into ochlocracy, as some Dead White Male said, but since the last Dead White Male died centuries before Twitter, he didn’t realize that ochlocracy was just a pit stop on the way to kakistocracy.
“Democracy” only works — if, in fact, it does work, which is a very fucking open question — in a stakeholder society. When Madison and the boys pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to each other, they meant all of that literally — Washington could well have died a pauper, Alexander Hamilton ordered his cannon to fire on his own house, and so on. They had skin in the game, which is why they were so public-spirited — if they screwed up, they personally would have to live with the consequences. These days, of course, getting “elected” — or even selected to run for “election” — is a free pass to Easy Street. The rules apply only to the plebs, and only so long — and, insh’allah, the day is soon coming — as we have to pretend to let them “vote” on stuff.
Severian, “The Stakeholder State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-22.
February 2, 2023
QotD: “Selfies”
I am always appalled by its results. I do not look like that when I glance in the mirror: I look far younger, less bald, wrinkled, ugly in short. I conclude, of course, that I lack that mysterious quality that only some lucky people have: I am not photogenic. If the camera never lied, if it showed me as I truly am, I would come out much better in photos.
I think it was the French-Romanian writer Emil Cioran who said that if a man knew that someone would one day write a biography of him, he would cease to live; in other words, it would paralyze him. In like fashion, if I thought that people would photograph me, I would stay indoors — the millions of spy cameras everywhere don’t count, no one looks at what they have recorded until there has been a murder or a terrorist attack (and then everyone is mostly unrecognizable).
I conclude, therefore, that most people who take selfies are at least minimally satisfied with their appearance, however they may appear to others. But in fact it hardly requires reflection on the selfie as a social, or antisocial, phenomenon to know that very large numbers of people have no idea what they look like to others. Or perhaps it is simply that they don’t care.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Suit Yourselfie”, Taki’s Magazine, 2017-09-16.
February 1, 2023
QotD: Creating a hostile working environment
Anecdote is not data, of course; but ask any ordinary working woman* whether she’d prefer to work with men, or in a female-only workplace. The response may surprise you.
* This definition would exclude gender careerists and almost all rabid feministicals.
Kim du Toit, “Just Sayin'”, Splendid Isolation, 2022-10-26.
January 31, 2023
QotD: Religious rituals
We tend to have an almost anthropological view of rituals, even ones we still practice: we see them in terms of their social function or psychological impact. Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (the Sci-fi miniseries; I can’t find the quote in the text, but then it’s a lot of text) put it wonderfully, “Ritual is the whip by which men are enlightened.” That is, ritual’s primary effect is the change that takes place in our minds, rather than in the spiritual world. This is the same line of thinking whereby a Church service is justified because it “creates a sense of community” or “brings believers together”. We view rituals often like plays or concerts, experiences without any broader consequences beyond the experience of participation or viewing itself.
This is not how polytheism (ancient or modern) works (indeed, it is not how most modern Christianity works: the sacraments are supposed to be spiritually effective; that is, if properly carried out, they do things beyond just making us feel better. You can see this articulated clearly in some traditional prayers, like the Prayer of Humble Access or Luther’s Flood Prayer).
Instead, religious rituals are meant to have (and will have, so the believer believes, if everything is done properly) real effects in both the spiritual world and the physical world. That is, your ritual will first effect a change in the god (making them better disposed to you) and second that will effect a change in the physical world we inhabit (as the god’s power is deployed in your favor).
But to reiterate, because this is key: the purpose of ritual (in ancient, polytheistic religious systems) is to produce a concrete, earthly result. It is not to improve our mood or morals, but to make crops grow, rain fall, armies win battles, business deals turn out well, ships sail, winds blow. While some rituals in these religions do concern themselves with the afterlife or other seemingly purely spiritual concerns (the lines between earthly and spiritual in those cases are – as we’ll see, somewhat blurrier in these religions than we often think them to be now), the great majority of rituals are squarely focused on what is happening around us, and are performed because they do something.
This is the practical side of practical knowledge; the ritual in polytheistic religion does not (usually) alter you in some way – it alters the world (spiritual and physical) around you in some way. Consequently, ritual is employed as a tool – this problem is solved by a wrench, that problem by a hammer, and this other problem by a ritual. Some rituals are preventative maintenance (say, we regularly observe this ritual so this god is always well disposed to us, so that they do X, Y, and Z on the regular), others are a response to crisis, but they are all tools to shape the world (again, physical and spiritual) around us. If a ritual carries a moral duty, it is only because (we’ll get to this a bit more later) other people in your community are counting on you to do it; it is a moral duty the same way that, as an accountant, not embezzling money is a moral duty. Failure lets other people (not yourself and not even really the gods) down.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part II: Practice”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-01.
January 30, 2023
QotD: Teaching … back in the day
Of course, this was so long ago that students used to be unsure how to address me. Most professors had gone “hip” and had students call them by first name, but there were enough crusty old codgers around who insisted on “Dr. So-and-So” that they didn’t assume. After which I started telling them “you can call me whatever you want, but as a general rule life runs smoother if we respect each other’s station. If you know someone has a title, it’s best to use it unless they specifically tell you otherwise, and it’s always good to respect the social distance between yourself and someone who has something you want. So, choose accordingly.” 20 years ago, most of them got it, and addressed me by my title. 15 years ago, I started getting lots of puzzled puppy dog looks (“what’s a ‘social station’?”). 10 years ago, they all just assumed first names were fine, and before I retired I counted myself lucky if I got so much as a “hey dude”.
Meanwhile, as far as the students were concerned, my job went from “trying to teach them something” to “the annoying meat puppet whose presence we have to tolerate until he puts the A+ in the gradebook for record-keeping purposes”.
Severian, responding to a comment on “Movies Made On Mars”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-02-04.
January 29, 2023
QotD: Questions from the Malleus Maleficarum – “Why would a perfectly just God allow witches to exist?”
The answer probably has something to with the Devil. And you can probably get part of the way by saying that God has a principled commitment to let the Devil meddle in human affairs until the End of Days. But then you get another issue: the Devil was once the brightest of angels. He’s really really powerful. Completely unrestrained, he can probably sink continents and stuff. So why does he futz around helping elderly women kill their neighbors’ cattle?
Put a different way, there’s a very narrow band between “God restrains the Devil so much that witchcraft can’t exist” and “God restrains the Devil so little that witches have already taken over the world”. Prima facie, we wouldn’t expect the amount God restrains the Devil to fall into this little band. But in order to defend the existence of witchcraft, Kramer has to argue that it does.
His arguments ring hollow to modern ears, and honestly neither God nor the Devil comes out looking very good. God isn’t trying to maximize a 21st century utilitarian view of the Good, He’s trying to maximize His own glory. Allowing some evil helps with this, because then He can justly punish it (and being just is glorious) or mercifully forgive it (and being merciful is also glorious). But, if God let the Devil kill everyone in the world, then there would be no one left to praise God’s glory, plus people might falsely think God couldn’t have stopped the Devil if he’d wanted to. So the glory-maximizing option is to give the Devil some power, but not too much.
Meanwhile, the Devil isn’t trying to maximize 21st century utilitarian evil. He’s trying to turn souls away from God. So although he could curse people directly, what he actually wants is for humans to sell their soul to him in exchange for curse powers. So whenever possible he prefers to act through witches.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Malleus Maleficarum“, Astral Codex Ten, 2022-10-27.
January 28, 2023
QotD: Allied anti-semitism in WW2
The following leaflet (printed) was passed to an acquaintance of mine in a pub:
LONG LIVE THE IRISH!The first American soldier to kill a Jap was Mike Murphy.
The first American pilot to sink a Jap battleship was Colin Kelly.
The first American family to lose five sons in one action and have a naval vessel named after them were the Sullivans.
The first American to shoot a Jap plane was Dutch O’Hara.
The first coastguardsman to spot a German spy was John Conlan.
The first American soldier to be decorated by the President was Pat Powers.
The first American admiral to be killed leading his ship into battle was Dan Callahan.
The first American son-of-a-bitch to get four new tyres from the Ration Board was Abie Goldstein.The origin of this thing might just possibly be Irish, but it is much likelier to be American. There is nothing to indicate where it was printed, but it probably comes from the printing-shop of some American organization in this country. If any further manifestos of the same kind turn up, I shall be interested to hear of them.
George Orwell, “As I Please”, Tribune, 1944-12-08.
Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943
January 27, 2023
QotD: What is Strategy?
(Attentive readers who know their Clausewitz (drink!) will recognize that I am being both broader and narrower than he in how I use the term strategy. Clausewitz terms strategy as “the employment of battles to gain the end of war” which is more nearly what we today mean as operations. In contrast, strategy as it is used today in a technical sense corresponds more nearly to what Clausewitz terms policy, the third element of his “marvelous trinity”. A full exegesis of Clausewitz’ trinity is beyond the scope of this essay, but I wanted to note the differing usages, because I’m going to quote Clausewitz below. And as always, every time Clausewitz gets quoted you must take a drink; it’s the eternal military history drinking game).
At the strategic level of analysis, the first question is “what are your policy objectives?” (although I should note that grand strategy is sometimes conceived as an analytical level above strategy, in which case policy objectives may go there). There’s a compelling argument common in realist international relations theory that the basic policy of nearly all states is to survive, with the goal of survival then suggesting a policy of maximizing security, which in turn suggests a policy of maximizing the military power of the state (which ironically leads to lower the security of other states who then must further increase their military power, a reaction known as the “security dilemma” or, more colorfully, the “Red Queen effect”). I think it is also possible for states to have policy goals beyond this: ideological projects, good and bad. But survival comes first.
From there, strategy concerns itself with the best way to achieve those policy objectives. Is peace and alliances the best way to achieve security (for a small state, the answer is often “yes”)? Would security be enhanced by, say, gaining a key chunk of territory that could be fortified to forestall invasion? Those, of course, are ends, but strategy also concerns itself with means: how do you acquire that defensible land? Buy it? Take it by force? And then – and only then, finally – do you come to the question of “what sort of war – and what sort of conduct in war – will achieve that objective?”
You may note that this is not the same kind of thinking that animates tactics or operations. Military theorists have noticed that for quite some time, often suggesting a sharp separation between the fellows who do operations and tactics (generals) and those who do strategy (typically kings or politicians). As Clausewitz says (drink!), “The political object is the goal, war is the means of reaching it, and means can never be considered in isolation from their purpose … war should never be thought of as something autonomous, but always as an instrument of policy [emphasis mine].” In short, Clausewitz stresses – and leaders have long ignored to their peril – that of all of the factors in war, policy ought to guide action (although no part of the trinity may be neglected).
This creates subordination between the three levels of analysis (to get technical, this is because operations and tactics are part of a side of the Clausewitzian trinity which ought to be subordinate to policy). Operations is subordinate to strategy; an operation which achieves something that isn’t a strategic goal accomplishes nothing. And tactics is likewise subordinate to operations. Thus the thinking pattern should always proceed from the highest questions of strategy down to the prioritization of ends (still strategy), to the means to accomplish those ends (still strategy); only then to the execution of those means (operations) and then to the on-the-ground details of that execution (tactics). Of course what this tripartite division is mean in part to signal is that all three of these stages are tremendously complex; just because tactics is the subordinate element does not mean it is simple!
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part VIII: The Mind of Saruman”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-06-19.
January 26, 2023
QotD: Non-commissioned officers
Your ideal “delta” is something like a lifer noncom in a non-pozzed military. Back in the days, I’m told, new recruits and civilians used to call crusty old gunny sergeants “sir”, to which the gunny would reply “Don’t call me ‘sir’, I work for a living!” That’s the attitude. Those guys with all the stripes on their sleeves aren’t officers because they lack “command presence”; they’re not officers because they don’t want to be officers. They know themselves, and, crucially, they know where they best fit into the organization’s overall mission. “Get in where you fit in” is, in a very real sense, their identity.
Examples of that kind of guy are tougher to find in the historical literature, which is why we need to develop, and pump up, the archetype. […] the ideal is the centurion, the backbone of Marcus Aurelius’ army. A soldier, a Stoic, a leader … but one who knows, and values, his place in the organization above all things.
Severian, “Be a Centurion!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-07.
January 25, 2023
QotD: “National unity” and economic commonsense
But never is a compelling explanation offered of just how the people of the nation are made more united – of just how some common national cause is being pursued – when one subset of the people convinces the government to reduce the real incomes, options, and freedom of another subset of the people.
Economically uninformed economic nationalists … focus only on the gains that protectionism brings to protected domestic producers. … being blind to the losses suffered by all fellow citizens save the relatively small handful of protected interests – or, inexplicably, discounting the reality or severity of these losses – interpret the gains enjoyed by the protected interests as evidence that protectionism is in the national interest.
It’s all (to use an old-fashioned term) poppycock.
Don Boudreaux, “Bonus Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2019-04-01.
January 24, 2023
QotD: The primary goal of a bureaucracy
Theodore Dalrymple, “Kafka’s Victory”, City Journal, 2005-01.
January 23, 2023
QotD: Rice farming
Wet-rice is farmed in paddies, small fields (often very small – some Chinese agronomists write that the ideal size for an individual rice field is around 0.1 hectare, which is just 0.24 acres) surrounded by low “bunds” (small earthwork walls or dykes) to keep in the water, typically around two feet high. Because controlling the water level is crucial, rice paddies must be very precisely flat, leading to even relatively gentle slopes often being terraced to create a series of flat fields. Each of these rice paddies (and there will be many because they are so small) are then connected by irrigation canals which channel and control the water in what is often a quite complex system.
The exact timing of rice production is more complex than wheat because a single paddy often sees two crops in a year and the exact planting times vary between areas; one common cycle on the Yangtze is for a February planting (with a June harvest) followed by a June planting (with a November harvest). In other areas, paddies planted with rice during the first planting might be drained and sown with a different plant entirely (sometimes including wheat) in the intervening time.
The cycle runs thusly: after the heavy rains of the monsoons (if available), the field is tilled (or plowed, but as we’ll see, manual tillage is often more common). The seed is then sown (or transplanted) and the field is, using the irrigation system, lightly flooded, so that the young seedlings grow in standing water. Sometimes the seed is initially planted in a dedicated seed-bed and then transferred to the field, rather than being sown there directly; doing so has a positive impact on yields, but is substantially more labor intensive. The water level is raised as the plant grows; agian this is labor intensive, but increases yields. Just before the harvest the fields are drained out and allowed to dry out, before the crop is harvested and then goes into processing.
Rice is threshed much like grain (more often manually threshed and generally not threshed with flails) to release the seeds, the individual rice grains, from the plant. That is going to free the endosperm of the speed, along with a hull around it and a layer of bran between the two. Hulling was traditionally done by hand-pounding, which frees the seed from the hull, leaving just the endosperm and some of the bran; this is how you get brown rice, which is essentially “whole-grain” rice. While it is generally less tasty, the bran actually has quite a lot of nutrients not present in the calorie-rich endosperm. Whereas white rice is produced by then milling or polishing away the bran to produce a pure, white kernal of the endosperm; it is very tasty, but lacks many of the vitamins that brown rice has.
Consequently, while a diet of mostly brown rice can be healthy, a diet overwhelmingly of white rice leads to Thiamine deficiency, known colloquially as beriberi. My impression from the literature is that this wasn’t as much an issue prior to the introduction of mechanical milling processes for rice. Mechanical milling made producing white rice in quantity cheap and so it came to dominate the diet to the exclusion of brown rice, producing negative health effects for the poor who could not afford to supplement their rice-and-millet diet with other foods, or for soldiers whose ration was in rice. But prior to that mechanical milling, brown rice was all that was available for the poor, which in turn meant less Thiamine deficiency among the lower classes of society.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-04.
January 22, 2023
QotD: Evolution of the nation-state
It took the rest of Europe another 150 years, but the Thirty Years’ War did the trick. What started as another of the endless doctrinal conflicts kicked off by the Reformation ended with the creation of the modern nation-state. Cardinal Richelieu really was a Cardinal — a prince of the Roman Catholic Church, a guy with a legitimate chance of being elected Pope. This man brought Catholic France into the war on the Protestant side for “reasons of state”. This made sense in 1631 … and the war still had another 17 years to run.
Speaking of, the treaty that ended the Thirty Years’ War, the famous Peace of Westphalia, is credited with creating the modern nation-state. Which it did, but since we decided back in 1946 that nationalism was the worst possible sin, we Postmoderns forgot what everyone around the treaty table knew: That “nation” and “state” are inseparable. The nation-state, which for clarity’s sake will henceforth be known as the ethno-state, is the biggest stable form of human organization.
Severian, “The Libertarian Moment?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-03-19.
January 21, 2023
QotD: Farmers’ markets are a scam
Carefully navigating the Bugaboos, words leapt out at me from the stalls: “gluten free”, “vegan”, “no added sugar”, “no saturated fats”. It was more like advice from a doctor than things to eat. At the cheese stall I admit I was tempted by the chilli jam accompaniment, as it was described as “rich, tangy tomato with purple shallots and plump sultanas”, but all I needed to do was look at the price — a startling £10 for the small jar with a handwritten label — to decide that the Branston pickle sitting in my store cupboard would do just fine.
An older woman standing by the cheese stall looks as if she is about to pass out. It’s not the heat; rather she has just been informed by the vendor, a young woman with green hair and several face piercings, the price for a piece of Brie and a couple of small goat cheeses. And to add insult to injury, when the customer hands over the £20 to pay she is told, “We only take cards.”
So much for a local, friendly community space. The truth is, these markets are a rip-off, aimed at posturing fools with more money than sense, and food snobs that believe if food isn’t prohibitively expensive for the masses, it’s not good enough to take home and store in their gigantic Smeg fridge.
Julie Bindel, “Mugged by a mud-caked spud”, The Critic, 2022-10-15.
