Quotulatiousness

June 11, 2021

Latin and Greek are the next sacrifices to the great god Antiracism

Filed under: Education, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest edition of It Bears Mentioning, John McWhorter considers the Princeton University classics department decision to get rid of the requirement for students to read classic texts in the original languages:

“USA – New Jersey – Princeton” by Harshil.Shah is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

I have written recently about the Princeton classics department’s decision to eliminate the requirement that students engaging closely with Latin and Greek texts be able to … read them in Latin and Greek. The new idea is that the department will attract more majors by opening up to ideas from students who may be full of beans but just not inclined to tackle complex, ancient languages. And sub rosa, the idea is clearly – as we can see from words in the official statement like underrepresented, perspectives, and experiences – that of especial interest will be black students, especially in light of today’s racial reckoning which the department openly acknowledges was the primary spur for this change.

My disappointment with this decision is because it is part of a tradition of arguments that we do black people a favor by exempting them from certain kinds of faceless, put-up-or-shut-up challenges to entry. Back in the aughts, the classic example was brilliant, fierce black lawyers confidently arguing that because black firefighter applicants don’t do as well on the entrance exams required for the job, the exams are racist and should be eliminated. More recently there has been the idea that if black kids are rare at top-ranked public schools in New York City like Stuyvesant because few excel on the standardized test one must ace to be admitted, then the solution is to eliminate the test as “racist”. The Princeton decision is a variation: to get black kids into classics, it’s supposedly immoral to expect them to master the intricacies of Latin and Greek, languages which I suppose we can see as foreign, “white” to them as well. Rather, they must be admitted in shining expectation that their class comments will be bracingly “diverse” in good old English.

My Atlantic colleague Graeme Wood is more sanguine about the Princeton decision. He argues sagely that a certain kind of student happens to enjoy working their way through languages like Latin as a kind of puzzle (I openly admit being that type), but that there are others who don’t go in for that particular task and yet are itching and well-equipped to engage and analyze classical texts regardless. Graeme notes that we do not consider it an educational tragedy that specialists in English history are not required to be able to read Old English. (Although I wonder if this analogy would hold if the idea were someone specializing in England of the first millennium, where all of the relevant linguistic matter was in Old English [and Latin].)

I can go with him here to an extent. On the one hand, as I have argued here, to engage work only in translation is, of course, to lose a lot. Yet, in making that argument here, I was referring to my own reading War and Peace in English, as I myself was not inclined to hack through it in Russian (although my being black was not the reason for this disinclination [couldn’t help it!]). The question is how important we consider that loss to be.

Having no facility in languages myself, I’m more sympathetic to the students’ viewpoint than I might otherwise be, but depending on someone else’s translation of the text being studied has unexpected risks, as Sarah Hoyt explained from her own translation studies:

The discussion […] reminded me of when I was sixteen and embarked on a class called “Techniques of Translation”.

Although I had studied French and English and German, the translations I’d done so far were of the “I took the pen of my neighbor” variety. I thought the class would teach me to smooth out the sentence to “I took my neighbor’s pen” and that would be that.

I was wrong. Oh, it taught that also, but that was a minor portion of it. The class mostly hinged on the moral, ethical and — most of all — professional dilemmas of being a translator. I know any number of you are translators, formal or informal, but any number of you are also not. So, for the ones who are not, let me break the news with my usual gentleness:

There is no such thing as translation.

The French have a proverb “to translate is to betray a little” — or at least that’s the closest meaning in English. It’s fairly close to the true meaning, but slightly askew, of course. Every language is slightly askew to other languages.

The idea that there exists in every language a word that is exactly the equivalent of other languages is sort of like assuming that aliens will — of course — live in houses, go to school, ride buses, understand Rebecca Black’s “Friday”. [This was originally written in 2011.]

Language is how we organize our thoughts, and each word, no matter how simple, carries with it the cultural freight and experience of the specific language. Oh, “mother” will generally mean “the one who gave birth to” — except for some tribal, insular cultures where it might mean “the one who calls me by her name” or “my father’s principal wife” — but the “feel” behind it will be different, depending on the images associated with “mother” in the culture.

So, when you translate, you’re actually performing a function as a bridge. Translation is not the straightforward affair it seems to be but a dialogue between the original language and the language you translate into. If you’re lucky, you meet halfway. Sometimes that’s not possible, and you feel really guilty about “lying” to the people receiving the translation. When on top of language you need to integrate different cultures and living systems (which you do when translating anything even an ad) you feel even more guilty, because you’re going to betray, no matter how much you try. At one point, a while back, I had my dad on one phone, my husband on the other, and I was doing rapid-fire translation about a relatively straight forward matter. And even that caused me pangs in conscience, because my dad simply doesn’t understand how things are done here. I had to approach his experience and explain our experience in a way he wouldn’t think I was insane or explaining badly. That meant a thousand minor lies.

June 10, 2021

“That’s a nice Pride flag you’ve got there. Be a shame if something were to happen to it …”

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Allan Stratton argues against replacing the common “rainbow” Pride flag with a new “Progress” variant:

Two people at EuroPride 2019 in Vienna holding an LGBTQ+ pride rainbow flag featuring a design by Daniel Quasar; this variation of the rainbow flag was initially promoted as “Progress” a PRIDE Flag Reboot.
Photo by Bojan Cvetanović via Wikimedia Commons.

Question: What do the following have in common: A hammer and sickle, a Union Jack, five interlocked rings, a Black fist, a cross, a Star of David, and the Rainbow flag?

Answer: They are internationally recognized symbols. Not spring fashions. Not cool memes. No. Symbols that communicate across all languages and countries in the world.

That’s what’s so infuriating about the push by hashtag activists to replace the Rainbow flag with the so-called “Progress flag”. The Progress flag takes the pink, blue, and white stripes of the trans flag, adds black and brown stripes for race, turns those five stripes into a chevron tipped on its side, and ploughs it into the rainbow in an eleven-colour pile-up. It’s a regressive, ill-considered mess that looks like a child’s Crayola box.

Naturally, it’s the creation of a Portland designer who whipped it off one night while suffering insomnia. The story of Daniel Quasar (ze/them) and their flag is a real-life satire, featuring moxie, hustle, viral posts and a Kickstarter campaign. Ze and their (not surprisingly) all-white team have leveraged ze’s design into Quasar Digital, a company that sells Progress flags, pins, patches, T-shirts, tank tops, notebooks, clutch bags, coffee mugs, stickers, slappers, socks and more, individually and in bundles.

Marketed with the trendy buzzwords progress, diversity and inclusion, the Progress flag has been a viral hit with woke straights and nouveau queers as well as corporate PR departments at places like Goldman Sachs and TD Bank, who signal virtue while screwing customers of every gender. But by separating specific races and a single identity from the rainbow, the Progress flag creates divisions, hierarchies and exclusions. And it trashes the power and weight that a 43-year-old symbol of hope and strength gives to people worldwide who continue to be imprisoned, beaten and murdered for being LGBT+.

[…]

Slapping the “Progress” chevron on the Rainbow is like slapping the fleur de lys on the Maple Leaf. It creates resentment and division to the sole benefit of performative social climbers keen to wave their Alphabet status and cachet. Step outside the West to see what it really means to have people out to “deny your very existence”. To trade the Rainbow, the symbol of our suffering and resilience, for a viral craze is bourgeois privilege at its self-indulgent worst.

The odd history of Irish Cream as we make Irish Cream hard candy at Lofty Pursuits

Filed under: Europe, Food, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Lofty Pursuits
Published 25 Feb 2021

Jake makes Irish Cream green shamrock hard candy for St. Patrick’s day. We discuss the history of the weird flavor and how it has become a tradition even though it was invented in the 1970’s

A great article about the history of Irish Cream
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/bo…​

Buy our candy: http://www.pd.net​
Listen to our podcast: http://loftypursuits.libsyn.com/website​
Join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/LoftyPursuits

June 9, 2021

Charles Stross on Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers

Filed under: Books, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his first blog post in nearly a month, Charlie Stross opines on one of Heinlein’s most polarizing novels:

In the 1930s, Heinlein was a soft socialist — he was considered sufficiently left wing and “unreliable” that he was not recalled for active duty in the US Navy during the Second World War. After he married Virginia Gerstenfeld, his third and last wife, his views gradually shifted to the right — however he tended towards the libertarian right rather than the religious/paleoconservative right. (These distinctions do not mean in 2021 what they might have meant in 1971; today’s libertarian/neo-nazi nexus has mostly emerged in the 21st century, and Heinlein was a vehement opponent of Nazism.) So the surface picture is your stereotype of a socially liberal centrist/soft leftist who moved to the right as he grew older.

But to muddy the waters, Heinlein was always happy to pick up a bonkers ideological shibboleth and run with it in his fiction. He was sufficiently flexible to write from the first person viewpoint of unreliable/misguided narrators, to juxtapose their beliefs against a background that highlighted their weaknesses, and even to end the story with the narrator — but not the reader — unaware of this.

In Starship Troopers Heinlein was again playing unreliable narrator games. On the surface, ST appears to be a war novel loosely based on WW2 (“bugs” are Nazis; “skinnies” are either Italian or Japanese Axis forces), but each element of the subtext relates to the ideological awakening of his protagonist, everyman Johnny Rico (note: not many white American SF writers would have picked a Filipino hero for a novel in the 1950s). And the moral impetus is a discussion of how to exist in a universe populated by existential threats with which peaceful coexistence is impossible. The political framework Heinlein dreamed up for his human population — voting rights as a quid pro quo for military (or civilian public) service — isn’t that far from the early Roman Republic, although in Rico’s eyes it’s presented as something new, a post-war settlement. Heinlein, as opposed to his protagonist, is demonstrating it as a solution to how to run a polity in a state of total war without losing democratic accountability. (Even his presentation of corporal and capital punishment is consistent with the early Roman Republic as a model.) The totalizing nature of the war in ST isn’t at odds with the Roman interpretation: Carthago delenda est, anyone?

It seems to me that using the Roman Republic as a model is exactly the sort of cheat that Heinlein would employ. But then Starship Troopers became the type specimen for an entire subgenre of SF, namely Military-SF. It’s not that MilSF wasn’t written prior to Starship Troopers: merely that ST was compellingly written by the standards of SF circa 1959. And it was published against the creeping onset of the US involvement in the Vietnam War, and the early days of the New Wave in SF, so it was wildly influential beyond its author’s expectations.

The annoying right wing Heinlein Mil-SF stans that came along in later decades — mostly from the 1970s onwards — embraced Starship Troopers as an idealized fascist utopia with the permanent war of All against All that is fundamental to fascist thought. In doing so they missed the point completely. It’s no accident that fascist movements from Mussolini onwards appropriated Roman iconography (such as the Fasces): insecure imperialists often claim legitimacy by claiming they’re restoring an imagined golden age of empire. Indeed, this was the common design language of the British Empire’s architecture, and just about every other European imperialist program of the past millennium. By picking the Roman Republic as a model for a beleagured polity, Heinlein plugged into the underlying mythos of western imperialism. But by doing so he inadvertently obscured the moral lesson he was trying to deliver.

Do the Nazis Have Atomic Bombs? – WW2 – Spies & Ties 03 – Sam & Erwin part 2

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 8 Jun 2021

All belligerents are working hard to develop a powerful nuclear super-weapon. The Americans wonder how far along the Germans are, and send in their spies.
(more…)

June 8, 2021

The utter failure of political leadership in most countries during the pandemic

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jay Currie runs through some of the many reasons our political leadership and their “expert class” advisors in most western countries were utter shit almost from the starting gun of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The first response of most of our political class was to doggedly claim to be following the science, turn day to day decision making over to “public health experts”, follow the guidance of the WHO and the CDC – guidance which was, to be charitable, inconsistent – and to largely avoid questioning the experts. (Trump seemed to make some attempt to raise questions but made little headway in the face of his own public health bureaucracy.)

“Wipe everything” (which the CDC now concedes is pointless because the virus is rarely, if ever, transmitted by contact, “wash your hands” (good advice at any time), “social distance” (hilarious when in effect outdoors where there is next to no transmission), “walk this way” in the essential grocery and liquor stores, “wear a mask”, “wear two masks”, “stay home” (logical for two weeks, insane for six months), “curfew” (no known benefit, Quebec ended up being under curfew for five months), “no indoor dining” (despite next to no evidence that restaurants were significant sources of infection), “don’t travel” (with a vast list of exceptions), “don’t gather outdoors (unless BLM protest)” (ignoring entirely that the virus rarely spreads outdoors): it was all COVID theatre and, to paraphrase Dr. Bonnie Henry, “There’s no science to it.”

What the politicians did was simply to panic. They abdicated their responsibility to lead to “experts” who seemed to all be reading from the same “mass lockdown, masks everywhere, hang on for the vaccine, there is no treatment” script.

The key political failure was the acceptance of the “there is no treatment” story. Back in February/March 2020 there were suggestions that there might well be treatments of some sort. HCQ was trotted out and, partially because Trump mentioned it and partially because of very badly designed studies, dismissed. The very idea of a COVID treatment regime was, essentially, made illegal in Canada and much of the United States.

The idea of boosting immunity with things like Vitamin D and C and a good long walk every day did not come up at most of the Public Health Officer’s briefings across Canada. And, again, not very well done studies were cited showing that “Vitamin D does not cure COVID”. A claim which was not being made. A healthy immune system, to which Vitamin D can contribute, most certainly does cure COVID in the vast majority of cases.

Citing privacy concerns, public health officials were unwilling to give many details as to who was dying of or with COVID. Age, co-morbidities, race, and the socio-economic status of the dying were disclosed reluctantly and long after the fact.

I don’t think most of this can be blamed on the public health officials. They had their jobs to do and, to a greater or lesser degree, managed to do them. They are hired to apply current best practices – often mandated on a world wide basis by the WHO – to the situation before them. Public Health officials are not expected to be imaginative nor innovative.

Imagination, leadership, thinking outside the proverbial box is what we elect politicians for.

But, hey! Doesn’t Justin wear cool socks? Totally worth flushing decades of economic growth down the toilet for those nice socks! Canada’s back! (Back to 1974, approximately.)

Midway pt.2 – A New War? – WW2 – 145c – June 7, 1942

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 7 Jun 2021

We left off last time with several burning behemoths. Watch today to see the action that follows, not just on the high seas, but also in Alaska. We also turn to Washington DC and Tokyo and follow the reaction to the Battle of Midway there. The Japanese one may surprise you.
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If you were trying to destroy American cities from within … what would you be doing differently?

Filed under: Economics, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt’s latest Libertarian Enterprise post considers the state of US urban areas after more than a year of Wuhan Coronavirus lockdowns, social controls, and medically “justified” repression:

“Homeless encampment above the 101 @ Spring” by Steve Devol is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Look, I’m sure this was suggested by China, and the dunderheads are totally buying it under their Compleate Illusions system.

Sure climate change. Climate change can justify anything. If we told them they needed to burn people alive to prevent climate change, they’d already been building the pyres.

But that’s just sort of a reflexive thing, like a Moslem saying “Insh Allah“. It’s not actually involved in their thinking as such. Or their thinking is not involved in it. whichever.

The truth is that they realized that the Covidiocy has destroyed the cities.

You see they had everything planned. They were going to force more and more of us into the city, because they were going to make running an internal combustion engine so hard. So if you had a job, you’d live in the city. Where you’re more easily controlled. And where they could make you believe bullshit like overpopulation and that — look at all the homeless — we needed more and more welfare. Their idea of their perfect world is the 1930s version of the future. Just megalopolisis, isolated, with people completely controlled. It has the bonus of leaving pristine wilderness outside that, for the elites to build their dachas.

And part of the problem is that they never understand other people have agency and respond to circumstances.

I don’t know what they expected when they went full fashboots and — in the case of Polis, and I bet not the only one — gave homeless the right to camp in every public land, and defecate in public as well as freeing a bunch of felons.

Did they expect this would just scare people more, and they’d lock themselves in, in fear and trembling, allowing the idiots to design society.

Instead, people left. Americans are on the move. I swear half of my friends are moving from more locked to less locked, from bluer to redder. Some demographers have caught on, seeing through the smoke and mirrors, and are confused — most of them being leftist — because Americans are in the middle of a full migration. As full and as all pervading as the movement west. Or after the civil war the movement of black people North.

Some of this must have penetrated the granite-like heads of the ruling left. Or at least the planning left.

They somehow didn’t expect—possibly because they don’t really get technology. I mean, I have my moments, but I swear most democrats were disappointed when laptops started being made with no “cup holders”. They’re at that level of stupid — that a tech that hasn’t been fully implemented, giving us the ability to work from home, would be kicked into high gear from the covidiocy.

I guess they expected people who work mostly from their computers to sit at home watching panic porn on TV and not work?

More importantly, I don’t think they expected people who have to work in person to follow that migration because, well … if you owned a restaurant that the covidiocy killed, you might, for instance, pay heed to the fact people are driving everywhere because, duh, masks on planes, and therefore build a roadside diner or perhaps find a small town that’s underserved and start anew there.

Oh … a lot of people are changing jobs too, and the jobs are no longer binding them to big cities.

Honestly, the only way for big cities to save themselves is to become touristic centers. NYC was halfway there when the covidiocy hit. Only not fully there because lefty governance sucks at making a city safe.

If I were a lefty governor or mayor right now, I’d aim the fashboots at crime and disorder, get rid of the homeless, spruce up the place, and go all out in courting tourism. Then people would move in to cater to the tourists, and eventually other businesses would move in, because that’s where people are.

But leftists don’t think that way. Carrot and incentive is beneath them (of course.) Their idea is rather that they will force those unwashed peasants to do what they want.

June 6, 2021

George Orwell’s “Politics And The English Language” remains the best guide to writing non-fiction

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Despite pulling most of his writing behind a paywall, I still get the occasional “Weekly Dish” post excerpt from Andrew Sullivan, including his homage to the still-relevant Orwell essay “Politics and the English Language”:

From time to time, I make sure to re-read George Orwell’s classic essay, “Politics And The English Language“. It remains the best guide to writing non-fiction, and it usually prompts a wave of self-loathing even more piercing than my habitual kind. What it shows so brilliantly is how language itself is central to politics, that clarity is as hard as it is vital, and that blather is as lazy as it is dangerous. It’s dangerous because the relationship between our words and our politics goes both ways: “[The English language] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts”. We create language and language creates us. If the language is corrupted, so are we.

Near the end of the essay, Orwell lists a few rules to keep writing clear, accessible and meaningful:

    i. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

    ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

    iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

    iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

    v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

    vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Originality, simplicity, brevity, active verbs, everyday language, decency: as simple as it is very, very hard. It’s a relief in a way to recall that Orwell thought things were pretty damn shitty in his day as well, but the more you read broadly across most elite media platforms these days, the more similar it all sounds. To reverse Orwell’s virtues: so much of it is repetition, complexity, length, passive verbs, endless jargon, barbarism.

I was just reading about the panic that occurred in the American Medical Association, when their journal’s deputy editor argued on a podcast that socio-economic factors were more significant in poor outcomes for non-whites than “structural racism”. As you might imagine, any kind of questioning of this orthodoxy required the defenestration of the deputy editor and the resignation of the editor-in-chief. The episode was withdrawn from public viewing, and the top editor replaced it with a Maoist apology/confession before he accepted his own fate.

But I was most struck by the statement put out in response by a group called “The Institute for Antiracism in Medicine”. Here it is:

    The podcast and associated promotional message are extremely problematic for minoritized members of our medical community. Racism was created with intention and must therefore be undone with intention. Structural racism has deeply permeated the field of medicine and must be actively dissolved through proper antiracist education and purposeful equitable policy creation. The delivery of messages suggesting that racism is non-existent and therefore non-problematic within the medical field is harmful to both our underrepresented minoritized physicians and the marginalized communities served in this country.

Consider the language for a moment. I don’t want to single out this group — they are merely representative of countless others, all engaged in the recitation of certain doctrines, and I just want an example. But I do want to say that this paragraph is effectively dead, drained of almost any meaning, nailed to the perch of pious pabulum. It is prose, in Orwell’s words, that “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”

It is chock-full of long, compounded nouns and adjectives, riddled with the passive voice, lurching and leaning, like a passenger walking the aisle on a moving train, on pre-packaged phrases to keep itself going.

Notice the unnecessary longevity: a tweet becomes an “associated promotional message”. Notice the deadness of the neologisms: “minoritized”, “marginalized”, “non-problematic”. As Orwell noted: “the normal way of coining a new word is to use a Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the -ize formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning.” Go back and see if you can put the words “minoritized” or “non-problematic” into everyday English.

Part of the goal of this is political, of course. The more you repeat words like “proper antiracist education” or “systemic racism” or “racial inequity” or “lived experience” or “heteronormativity”, the more they become part of the landscape of words, designed to dull one’s curiosity about what on earth any of them can possible mean. A mass of ideological abstractions, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.”

Then this: “Racism was created with intention.” Abstract noun, passive voice, vague meaning. Who “created” it? What was the intention exactly? Hasn’t racist tribalism been a feature of human society for tens of thousands of years? They never say. Or this phrase: “purposeful equitable policy creation”. Again: what are they talking about? It is as vague as “doing the work” — and as deliberate as the use of a highly contested term like “structural racism” to define objective reality. These are phrases not designed to say anything real. They are phrases designed to send a message of orthodoxy, and, as Orwell also noted, “orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style”. Try reading Slate or Vox or the Huffington Post: the tedium you feel is the tedium of a language rendered lifeless by ideology.

Midway, pt.1 – Clash of the Titans – 145a – June 5, 1942

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 5 Jun 2021

The supposedly surprise Japanese operations against Midway Atoll and the Aleutian Islands kick-off, but they don’t know that Allied intelligence has cracked their codes. As the Japanese fleet advances in the Central Pacific and Japanese planes bomb Midway, the US Navy has a big surprise waiting for them.
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Decoding NPR’s revised approach to reporting in a social justice age

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Ace of Spades H.Q., K.T. listens to some NPR broadcasts (so you don’t have to) including an insight into how NPR and probably other media organizations are changing how they report the news:

We Hold These Truths: How Newsroom Leaders Wrestled With Covering A Tumultuous Year

This was sort of a panel discussion (light on the “discussion”), with commentary on things like how social media pressured newsrooms, for example, to say that “police murdered George Floyd” rather than “George Floyd died”.

But I kind of homed in on an academic phrase that bothers me. Sara Just from PBS:

    Yeah, I think that you’re absolutely right. There’s been a deeper understanding and deeper conversation about how much our lived experiences play into the reporting that we do. And there’s no question that it does for each and every one of us in different ways. And I think that lived experience we especially highlight now is valuable, whether it’s race or gender or the challenges. I don’t think people with those lived experiences have to carry the burden, though, of being the only ones to report on it by any means. And so that’s something that we are always balancing. (emphases mine)

So, are they balancing whether or not people without “lived experiences” can report on issues involving “lived experiences”? Like Lori Lightfoot deciding she would only do one-on-one interviews with journalists of color? Will white people be allowed to report on stories involving black people? Will men be allowed to report on stories involving women?

This is partly about local sources, but it is largely about people thought of as being in “oppressed groups”. This panel is informing us that news reporting will now be filtered through the language and perspective of Critical Social Justice, whether we realize it or not.

The indispensable Translations from the Woke at New Discourses provides the following information on Lived Experience:

    In the Theory of Critical Social Justice, for what turn out to be surprisingly deep and philosophically (almost) sophisticated reasons, lived experience is the overwhelmingly primary way in which knowledge can be obtained. This should not be mistaken to mean one’s firsthand experience, which most of us already recognize to provide a rather weak claim upon knowledge, though it is both implied and claimed that this is what “lived experience” refers to in Critical Social Justice. Lived experience, as Critical Social Justice uses the term, refers more specifically to one’s life experiences in allegedly systemic power dynamics of dominance and oppression that shape society structurally as understood with a critical consciousness and interpreted through Theory. That is, one’s “lived experience” refers to the interpretation that Critical Social Justice Theory gives for the anecdotal accounts of experiences one has had.

    Because “lived experience” refers to an interpretation through Theory, it is only the “lived experience of oppression,” as Theory will have it, that counts …

It appears that you can’t really understand the reporting on PBS, and probably NPR, now unless you have studied Critical Social Justice.

    Certainly, the claimed “lived experience” of members of dominant groups cannot be in any way used to challenge or dispute the assertions of Theory or those claiming to speak from it …

    This restriction extends to members of “minoritized” groups who disagree with Theory as well — Theory cannot be authentically disagreed with. One might think that the lived experience of a member of oppressed groups would be admissible as a valid challenge to the claims of Theory, but this not so. They may be talking about their own experiences in life, but they aren’t appealing to lived experience, which must comport with Theory …

    This is all very confusing and appears to be exactly what it is — a form of manipulating knowledge and epistemology as a means of asserting power and rigging the system such that those assertions of power cannot be challenged. Nevertheless, it isn’t merely an application of power and has a rather interesting and deep philosophical explanation that must be understood to understand why “lived experience” holds the status that it does and why it must comport with Theory to be granted veridical status and epistemic weight. This has everything to do with the fact that the roots of Critical Social Justice are in critical theories and, especially, postmodern philosophy.

There is much more, but it is way too deep to include here.

The NPR panel goes on to discuss new understandings of “balance” and “objectivity”. They do not intend to be objective. “Balance” will mean something different than what it has meant in the past in the news business.

Many people have found the way that TV news shows report on events since 2016 to be rather different than what they’d been used to before that. Some changes are subtle and others are quite blatant and hard to ignore unless you already agree with the viewpoint of the presenter. TV news used to at least pretend to present the news objectively but from the start of the Trump presidency most media outlets abruptly changed from a pseudo-objective (but leaning progressive) to an outright full-on progressive stance from start to finish with little or no attempt to provide other points of view for balance.

Turning Point of History: D-Day Juno Beach

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ch1201
Published 8 Nov 2014

Examines Canada’s role on June 6th, 1944 and the advance through Normandy, France.

QotD: The Soviet Union in the Cold War, China today

Filed under: China, History, Media, Quotations, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in the days of the Cold War, much was said about the titanic power of the Soviet Union. The USSR, we were told, was a superpower the equal of the United States, possibly even superior. This meme was spread by lefties who wanted the USSR to win, by sincere pacifists hoping to stop war before it could begin, and by an enormous cohort of liberals who repeated it because they heard it from the first two. (Much liberalism can be explained this way. It’s the ultimate “I heard it from somebody” ideology.)

Needless to say, it was gibbering nonsense. The late ’80s Soviet collapse revealed that the USSR was never any kind of power at all – an economy that didn’t produce, weapons that didn’t work, a populace addicted to drink and overwhelmed with despair. “Bulgaria with nukes” is how someone characterized it, and truer words were never spoken. That remains the case today, despite Vlad Putin’s chest-beating, and it’s likely to remain the case as far ahead as anyone can see.

The same trope is being repeated regarding China. China, we are told, is the coming nation. The second largest economy on Earth, soon to be the first. A billion and a half people, each more educated than any American; a military power second to none, with advanced weapons of a nature that we can only gape at. A country exercising its power over vast reaches of the Pacific and moving into the Indian Ocean, Africa, and the Mideast with no one to oppose it.

We hear this from the likes of Thomas Friedman, who has spent much of his career looking for his personal Mussolini. It’s repeated by deeper figures across the political spectrum. In fact, it can be said without exaggeration to have become received wisdom.

There’s no point in asking how true this is. The proper question to ask is whether it embodies any truth at all.

J.R. Dunn, “The Myth of China as Superpower”, American Thinker, 2019-01-09.

June 5, 2021

The morality of collective intergenerational responsibility

Filed under: Europe, Germany, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Arthur Chrenkoff believes that the responsibility to compensate people for historical wrongs ends when the individuals who were harmed have died:

Victims of genocide
Photo by Cantetik2 via Wikimedia Commons.

What I was querying was the practicality and the morality of reparations being paid today: “If great-great-grandchildren of perpetrators have to pay great-great-grandchildren of survivors, is there any limit on historical liability? 200 years? 500 years?”

Before we get any further into the discussion, let me restate here my position, which has not changed at all in light of the subsequent online exchanges and name-calling: I do not believe in collective intergenerational responsibility. Far from modern and enlightened, it strikes me as a primitive, ancient principle, in line with the Old Testament’s “an eye for an eye” mentality. Thought to call it Old Testament might be unkind to Old Testament, since already by the time the Book of Ezekiel was being compiled during the Babylonian Exile, mid-first millennium BC, the Judaic theology had morally evolved beyond the belief that the sins of the fathers are visited on their children. We are each a moral agent, enjoying free will and exercising own judgments and actions, and for all that we are rightly held responsible and accountable. But it is unjust to blame (and, at the other end of the spectrum, absurd to praise) us for what our literal and metaphorical ancestors had done or failed to do at one point or another in the past, or what they have collectively achieved.

And so, to the comment that genocide has no statute of limitation, I say: it should, and it should be right about the time that all those who were alive at the time and affected by it have passed away.

The concept of reparations for historical wrongs is increasingly in the news. In the United States, the question revolves around the evil of slavery, but it’s hardly an American-centric debate. In many Western European countries there is talk of reparations for colonialism. Then there is the agitation in Poland, long supported by the ruling Law and Justice party, that Germany should pay Poland reparations for death and destruction caused during the Second World War. While the quantum has sometimes been calculated upward of US$15 trillion, the official suggestions have hovered around the more “modest” €850 billion (1947 estimates in today’s currency).

[…]

Not just genocide – everything that has ever happened, both bad and good, ripples across time and shapes the present. This is what history is about. Each event has an infinite number of causes and an infinite number of consequences. Hence, conceptual problems start popping up once you try to unscramble the egg and make simple adjudications about complex past situations. It’s one thing to make moral judgments about what had happened, it’s another to apply judicial standards used in disputes between contemporaries to met out sanctions and punishment in relations to historical wrongs, which might have occurred centuries ago. For starters, the collective approach to situations where each individual was affected it their own unique way might simplify things but it surely does not paint an accurate picture or deliver real justice. This goes for both the victims and the perpetrators. (At the extreme, for example, potentially forcing the descendants of German pacifists to compensate the descendants of Polish collaborators. In fairness, there were few of either at the time, but most other historical events are significantly more complicated than the black and white story of Nazi aggression and crimes against humanity.)

Which brings me to the second problem: the supposed intergenerational nature of responsibility and punishment. Not only are we talking about entire nations or ethnic (or social or religious or other) groups as monoliths for legal purposes, somewhat akin to a corporation, but also monoliths in time, across an unlimited number of generations. I find it morally odious, but you may well say “well, it’s not about moral blame per se, but whether you have, intentionally or not, benefitted at the expense of past others as a consequence of the evil actions of your ancestors” – in other words, it’s not a punitive but a restorative justice. Putting aside, again, the fact that no two individuals are ever affected in exactly the same way, the past is much more complex than your simplistic unicausal, zero-sum calculations allow and so, consequently, simple justice in theory is simply unjust in practice. Take Germany for example; if you think that Germany and Germans as a collective had benefitted from their rapacious actions during the war, you clearly have little idea what happened to them between, say, 1943 and 1946. You might think, as many did particularly in the immediate aftermath of the war, that this was still not a (collective) punishment enough considering the extent and the gravity of crimes committed (including the Holocaust) but if there was a time to tip the scales even more it was contemporaneously. The point I’m making is that any short-term German gains have been wiped out by the deliberate actions (military or otherwise) of the Allies, who in so doing destroyed much of the native German wealth as well as the wealth stolen by Germany from the occupied territories. That Germany is rich today is despite, not because of the Second World War. And while it’s true that Poland, for example, and at least some of its people are poorer today than they would have been had there been no war, I return back to my original position: how is it just and fair for a 25-year old from Bremen to compensate Poland as a whole (or the Polish government to be exact) for the “ripples” set off six decades before they were even born?

June 4, 2021

Fallen Flag — the Central Railroad of New Jersey

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

This month’s Classic Trains fallen flag feature is the Central Railroad of New Jersey (CNJ) by Peter Brill. The first of the two original lines that merged to become the CNJ was granted a charter as the Elizabethtown and Somerville Railroad to create a connection from Elizabeth, New Jersey to Somerville, including a ferry into New York City. The charter was dated 9 February, 1831 and the line was completed in 1842. The Somerville and Easton received a charter in 1847 to connect the existing Elizabethtown line to Easton, Pennsylvania and the new connecting line was leased by the Elizabethtown and Somerville in 1848 and then purchased outright in 1849. The combined railroads merged as the Central Railroad of New Jersey in February of that year.

Map of the extent and connections of the Centrail Railroad of New Jersey in 1893.
Poor’s Manual of the Railroads of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.
Click to see full-size image.

At its peak, the Central Railroad of New Jersey, the self-proclaimed “Big Little Railroad”, operated only about 700 route-miles, but in keeping with its densely populated region, totaled over 1,900 miles of track, two-thirds in New Jersey. CNJ’s Central Division extended from Jersey City to Phillipsburg, on the Delaware River. The Lehigh & Susquehanna Division (later Central Railroad of Pennsylvania, then the Penn Division) went west from Easton, Pa., to Allentown, then north to Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. The Southern Division, from Red Bank to Bridgeton/Bayside, was reached from Elizabethport via CNJ’s Perth Amboy Branch and the New York & Long Branch.

Although “little” in geographic span — it’s just 191 miles from Jersey City to Scranton — CNJ was “big” in traffic density. Between Jersey City and Raritan, 35 miles of commuter territory, four to six main tracks handled 300 daily commuter trains carrying 35,000 riders plus local freights, longer-distance passenger and freight trains, and, east of Bound Brook Junction, through Baltimore & Ohio/Reading traffic from Philadelphia and beyond.

[…]

CNJ’s evolution from tidewater connection to competing anthracite road coincided with LV [Lehigh Valley] and DL&W [Delaware, Lackawanna & Western] developing their own routes to New York Harbor. CNJ originally based its Pennsylvania operations in Mauch Chunk (now called Jim Thorpe). Narrow-gauge “lokies” worked the Wanamie Colliery on the Nanticoke Branch until 1967, and CNJ hauled the anthracite to Ashley’s Huber Breaker. In 1892, Central States Dispatch, a fast freight route on B&O, Western Maryland, RDG [Reading], CNJ, Lehigh & Hudson River, and New Haven, commenced via Allentown Yard.

In 1893, America’s first automatic, motor-operated semaphore signal was installed on CNJ at Black Dan’s Cut east of Phillipsburg. Installation of twin McMyler car dumpers at Pier 18 in Jersey City in 1919 created CNJ’s foremost destination for anthracite and bituminous coal into the 1960s. In 1925, what is regarded as America’s first successful commercial diesel locomotive, CNJ 1000, a 300 h.p. box-cab, began a 27-year assignment at Bronx Terminal. The bridge over Newark Bay was replaced in 1926 by a 1.4-mile, 4-track, 2-span, lift-type drawbridge. In the 1930s, one of the country’s most modern traffic control towers was installed at Elizabethport to control the convergence of the multi-track Central Division main with the Newark and Perth Amboy branches. E’port also hosted CNJ’s main shops.

Two Blue Comet consists, Packard blue with gold lettering and window bands of Jersey cream, in 1929 introduced luxury coach service at no extra charge between Jersey City and Atlantic City. Later that year, The Bullet debuted similar service between Jersey City and Wilkes-Barre. Specially painted Pacifics handled both: royal and Packard blue with gold striping and lettering for the Comet and dark olive with gold striping and chromium trim for The Bullet. The latter ran only two years, but the Comet lasted until 1941.

CNJ entered a 10-year bankruptcy in 1939 while controlled by the Reading, which in turn was controlled by B&O. During World War II, the German submarine menace diverted eastbound oil products from tanker to tank car, and CNJ delivered up to 1,000 loads a day, half the New York area’s requirement, until pipelines were built. In 1944 CNJ became “Jersey Central Lines” and adopted the Statue of Liberty emblem.

Builder’s photo of CNJ 1000, the first diesel-electric switch engine built by ALCO in conjunction with Westinghouse for the electrical equipment and Ingersoll-Rand for the prime mover. Built 1924 and sold to CNJ in 1928. This unit was retired from active service in 1957.
Wikimedia Commons.

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