Quotulatiousness

August 2, 2023

You say you want a revolution …

Filed under: Books, History, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The latest book review from the Psmiths is Bernard Yack’s The Longing for Total Revolution: Philosophic Sources of Social Discontent from Rousseau to Marx and Nietzsche, by John Psmith:

This is a book by Bernard Yack. Who is Bernard Yack? Yack is fun, because for a mild-mannered liberal Canadian political theorist he’s dropped some dank truth-bombs over the years. For example, check out his short and punchy 2001 journal article “Popular Sovereignty and Nationalism” if you need a passive-aggressive gift for the democratic peace theorist in your life.1 The subject of that essay is unrelated to the subject of the book I’m reviewing, but the approach, the method, and the vibe are similar. The general Yack formula is to take some big trendy topic (like “nationalism”) and examine its deep philosophical and intellectual substructure while totally refusing to consider material conditions. He’s kind of like the anti-Marx — in Yack’s world not only do ideas have consequences, they’re about the only things that do. Even when this is unconvincing, it’s usually very interesting.

The topic of this book is radicalism in the ur-sense of “a desire to get to the root”. What Yack finds interesting about radicalism is that it’s so new. It’s a surprising fact that the entire idea of having a revolution, of burning down society and starting again with radically different institutions, was seemingly unthinkable until a certain point in history. It’s like nobody on planet Earth had the idea, and then suddenly sometime in the 17th or 18th century a switch flips and it’s all anybody is talking about. We’re used to that sort of pattern for scientific discoveries, or for very original ways of thinking about the universe, but “let’s destroy all of this and try again” isn’t an incredibly complex or sophisticated thought, so why did it take so many millennia for somebody to have it?

Well, first of all, is this claim even true? One thing you do see a lot of in premodern history is peasant rebellions, but dig a little deeper into any of them and the first thing you notice is that (sorry vulgar Marxists)2 there’s nothing especially “revolutionary” in any of these conflagrations. The most common cause of rebellion is some particular outrage, and the goal of the rebellion is generally the amelioration of that outrage, not the wholesale reordering of society as such. The next most common cause of rebellions is a bandit leader who is some variety of total psycho and gets really out of control. But again, prior to the dawn of the modern era, these psychos led movements that were remarkably undertheorized. The goal was sometimes for the psycho to become the new king, sometimes the extinguishment of all life on earth, but you hardly ever saw a manifesto demanding the end of kings as such. Again, this is weird, right? Is it really such a difficult conceptual leap to make?

Peasant rebellions are demotic movements, but modern revolutions are usually led by frustrated intellectuals and other surplus elites. When elites did get involved in pre-modern rebellions, their goals were still fairly narrow, like those of the peasants — sometimes they wanted to slightly weaken the power of the king, other times they wanted to replace the king with his cousin. But again this is just totally different in kind from the 18th century onwards, when intellectuals and nobles are spending practically all of their time sitting around in salons and cafés, debating whose plan for the total overhaul of society, morality, and economic relations is best.

The closest you get to this sort of thing is the tradition of Utopian literature, from Plato’s Republic to Thomas More, but what’s striking about this stuff is how much ironic distance it carried — nobody ever plotted terrorism to put Plato’s or More’s theories into practice. Nobody ever got really angry or excited about it. But skip forward to the radical theorizing of a Rousseau or a Marx or a Bakunin, and suddenly people are making plans to bomb schools because it might bring the Revolution five minutes closer. So what changed?

Well this is a Bernard Yack book, so the answer definitely isn’t the printing press. It also isn’t secularization, the Black Death, urbanization, the Reformation, the rise of industrial capitalism, the demographic transition, or any of the dozens of other massive material changes that various people have conjectured as the cause of radical political ferment. Instead Yack points to two abstract philosophical premises: the first is a belief in the possibility of “dehumanization”, the idea that one can be a human being and yet be living a less than human life. The second is “historicism” in the sense of a belief that different historical eras have fundamentally different modes of social interaction.

Both views had some historical precedent (for instance historicism is clearly evident in the writings of Machiavelli and Montesquieu), but it’s their combination that’s particularly explosive, and Rousseau is the first person to place the two elements together and thereby assemble a bomb. Because for Rousseau, unlike for any of the ancient or medieval philosophers, merely to be a member of the human species does not automatically mean you’re living a fully-human life. But if humanity is something you can grow into, then it’s also something that you can be prevented from growing into. Thus: “that I am not a better person becomes for Rousseau a griev­ance against the political order. Modern institutions have deformed me. They have made me the weak and miserable creature that I am.”

But what if the qualities of social interaction which have this dehumanizing effect are inextricably bound up with the dominant spirit of the age? In that case, it might be impossible to really live, impossible to produce happy and well-adjusted human beings, without a total overhaul of society and all of its institutions. This also clarifies how the longing for total revolution is distinct from utopianism — utopian literature is motivated by a vision of a better or more just order. Revolutionary longing springs from a hatred of existing institutions and what they’ve done to us. This is an important difference, because hate is a much more powerful motivator than hope. In fact Yack goes so far as to say (in a wonderfully dark passage) that the key action of philosophers and intellectuals upon history is the invention of new things to hate. Can you believe this guy is Canadian?

    1. Of course, if my reading of MITI and the Japanese Miracle is correct, popular sovereignty may not be around for that much longer.

    2. I say “vulgar” Marxists, because for the sophisticated Marxists (including Marx himself) it’s already pretty much dogma that premodern rebellions by immiserated peasants aren’t “revolutionary” in the way they care about.

Britain’s troubling rise in hospital visits due to dog bites

Filed under: Britain, Health, History — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West has a dog, but he admits he’s not really a “dog person”:

American Bully Breed Dog. Male. Name: X-Men.
Photo by Verygoodhustle via Wikimedia Commons.

Dog breeds have different natures, something that would seem self-obviously true and yet which today the leading authorities in the British dog world seem to be in denial about, in particular when it comes to one of the unspoken trends of recent years – the huge increase in dog attacks.

This spike in dog-bites-man violence has led to a 50 per cent increase in hospital admissions for dog bites over ten years, the biggest rise being among children under the age of 4. Overall the number of fatalities has gone from an average of 3.3 in the 2000s to 10 last year, while dog attacks have risen recently from 16,000 in 2018 to 22,000 in 2022, and hospitalisations have almost doubled from 4,699 in 2007 to 8,819 in 2021/22.

The underlying story behind this escalation of violence is that much of it is the work of just one breed – the American Bully. And as we enter the summer holidays, the peak period for dog attacks, it’s worth pondering why the experts in the dog world are in such denial about the issue.

Public awareness of the American Bully problem has grown in recent months, spurred by some especially horrific attacks, as well as a widely-read article by legal academic and YouTuber Lawrence Newport. Lawrence looked at the data on dog attacks and observed that “a notable pattern emerges. In 2021, 2 of the 4 UK fatalities were from a breed known as the American Bully XL. In 2022, 6 out of 10 were American Bullies. In 2023, so far all fatalities appear to have been American Bullies.”

American Bullies, Newport explains, “are a breed resulting from modern mixes of the American Pitbull Terrier. They are known for very high muscle mass, biting power, and impressive strength, and come in several variations. Those that are bred for the greatest strength, weight and size are known as a part of the American Bully XL variety.”

Pitbulls are banned in Britain for a good reason, and in the US are responsible for “60–70% of dog fatalities“; yet under the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 “the American Bully XL is currently permitted”.

What is surprising, Newport writes, is that “if you argue these dogs are dangerous, you will get a flood of comments from people … saying it’s the owner’s fault, not the dog’s. You might even be thinking this yourself, right now. But this is wrong. Whilst many Brits would contend that ‘Guns American Bully XL’s don’t kill people, people do’, the reality is different.

“Labradors retrieve. Pointers point. Cocker Spaniels will run through bushes, nose to the ground, looking as if they are tracking or hunting even when just playing – even when they have never been on a hunt of any kind. This is not controversial. Breeds have traits. We’ve bred them to have them.”

Pitbulls were created for bull-baiting, and when that was banned, they came to be bred to hunt down rats in a locked pen. “This required more speed, so they were interbred with terriers to make Pitbull Terriers. In addition to this, they began to be used for dog fighting: bred specifically to have aggression towards other dogs, and to be locked in a pit to fight (some are still used for this today). These were dogs likely kept in cages, away from humans, and bred for their capacity to earn money for their owners by winning fights. These were not dogs bred for loyalty to humans, these were dogs bred for indiscriminate, sustained and brutal violence contained within a pit.”

How Shipping Containers Took Over the World (then broke it)

Filed under: Business, Economics, History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Calum
Published 5 Oct 2022

The humble shipping container changed our society — it made International shipping cheaper, economies larger and the world much, much smaller. But what did the shipping container replace, how did it take over shipping and where has our dependance on these simple metal boxes led us?
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QotD: The Coolidge years

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I washed my car this morning and it rained this afternoon. Therefore, washing cars causes rain.

So-called “progressives” tell us that Calvin Coolidge was a bad president because the Great Depression started just months after he left office.

This is precisely the same, lame argument expressed in two different contexts.

In five years (August 2023), we will mark the 100th anniversary of the day that Silent Cal became America’s 30th President. I intend to celebrate it along with others who believe in small government, but you can bet there’ll be plenty of progressives trying to rain on our parade. So let’s get those umbrellas ready.

Let’s remember that the eight years of Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921) were economically disastrous. Taxes soared, the dollar plummeted, and the economy soured. A sharp, corrective recession in 1921 ended quickly because the new Harding-Coolidge administration responded to it by reducing the burden of government. When Harding died suddenly in 1923, Coolidge became President and for the next six years, America enjoyed the unprecedented growth of “the Roaring ’20s.” Historian Burton Folsom elaborates:

    One measure of prosperity is the misery index, which combines unemployment and inflation. During Coolidge’s six years as president, his misery index was 4.3 percent — the lowest of any president during the twentieth century. Unemployment, which had stood at 11.7 percent in 1921, was slashed to 3.3 percent from 1923 to 1929. What’s more, [Coolidge’s Treasury Secretary] Andrew Mellon was correct on the effects of the tax-rate cuts — revenue from income taxes steadily increased from $719 million in 1921 to over $1 billion by 1929. Finally, the United States had budget surpluses every year of Coolidge’s presidency, which cut about one-fourth of the national debt.

That’s a record “progressives” can only dream about but never deliver. Yet when they rank U.S. presidents, Coolidge gets the shaft. If you can get your hands on a copy of the out-of-print 1983 book, Coolidge and the Historians by Thomas Silver, buy it! You’ll be delighted at what Coolidge actually said, and simultaneously incensed at the shameless distortions of his words at the hands of progressives like Arthur Schlesinger.

Lawrence W. Reed, “Cal and the Big Cal-Amity”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-07-25.

August 1, 2023

Evil climate heretics deny the revealed holy truth of global BOILING!

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Notorious heretic Brendan O’Neill preaches climate denial! Where are the Green Gestapo when you need them?

And just like that we’ve entered a new epoch. “The era of global warming has ended, the era of global boiling has arrived”, decreed UN chief António Guterres last week. It’s hard to know what’s worse: the hubris and arrogance of this globalist official who imagines he has the right to declare the start of an entire new age, or the servile compliance of the media elites who lapped up his deranged edict about the coming heat death of Earth. “Era of global boiling has arrived and it is terrifying”, said the front page of the Guardian, as if Guterres’s word was gospel, his every utterance a divine truth. We urgently need to throw the waters of reason on this delirious talk of a “boiling” planet.

Guterres issued his neo-papal bull about the boiling of our world in response to the heatwaves that have hit some countries over the past two weeks. “Climate change is here [and] it is terrifying”, he said. We see “families running from the flames [and] workers collapsing in scorching heat” and “it is just the beginning”, he said, doing his best impersonation of a 1st-century millenarian crackpot. In fact, forget “climate change”, he said. Forget “global warming”, too. What we’re witnessing is a boiling. It all brings to mind the Book of Job which warned that the serpent Leviathan would cause the seas to “boil like a cauldron”. Leviathan’s back, only we call him climate change now.

The obsequious speed with which the media turned Guterres’s commandment into frontpage news was extraordinary. They behaved less like reporters than like the slavish scribes of this secular god and his delusional visions. “World entering ‘era of global boiling'”, cried the Independent, and we “know who is responsible”. No prizes for guessing who that is. It’s you, me and the rest of our pesky species. It always is. “Planet is boiling”, one headline breezily declared, confirming that Guterres’s fearful phrase, his propagandistic line no doubt drawn up with the aid of spin doctors in some UN backroom, is already being christened as fact.

Almost instantly, media outlets started lecturing readers on how they might help to put a halt to the coming evaporation of our planet. SBS in Australia advised us to “Reduce meat intake”, “Stop driving cars” and “Cut down on flights”. In short, stop all the fun stuff; make sacrifices to appease nature’s angry gods. Even self-styled radicals made themselves mouthpieces of the UN’s medieval sermonising. Novara Media instantly embraced “global boiling” as an apt metaphor for the arsonist impact humanity has had on Earth. Scratch a Marxist these days, find a Malthusian.

“Tonight in the news: the moon is made of green chees- wait, patch downloading … not made of green cheese, and anyone who says it is is a MAGA conspiracist h8er.”

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

Sarah Hoyt on the amazing co-ordination of messaging from so many legacy media and their social media collaborators:

Many of us are amused with how fast the left acquires a sudden mission to propagate the one holy acceptable opinion. How it changes overnight, and how it comes from all of them at once, in almost the same words. And how it gets repeated ad-nauseam, in defiance of all sense, until the message changes.
This has led the least kind among us (eh. Myself, sometimes) to refer to our leftist brethren as “NPC”s who do whatever the programmers put in their heads.

The sad truth, though, is they’re not NPCs. They’re humans, like the rest of us, just — a lot of them — through cowardice or a more conformist temperament, humans who want to be “right” with the “majority” as they perceive it. They, like most primitives the world over, have no moral center, and want to back the winner and the strong horse.

Add in a dose of truly bad education, and their self-conceit as smart, and what you have is someone who reads all the accepted publications, catches on to what they’re saying, and runs to get ahead of what they think will be (and to be fair is, of their kind only) a parade.

The sequence goes something like this: Leftists, for nefarious, stupid, or money reasons (and often all three) declare that they want something utterly, inconceivably stupid to happen: ban something, force some tech, whatever.

Immediately, on command, some “scientist” (usually of the softer side) who smells grant money does studies showing this idea is brilliant and will bring about utopia. The stupid is flawed and irreproducible, but the journalists are all leftists who want to “support the current thing” and jump on it. Suddenly every possible and some imaginary publications tell us how the Current Thing is the most important thing ever, and it must be done nowwwww.

Take Joe Biden’s idea of cooling the Earth by covering the sunlight. — Okay, not his idea. Or maybe it is. Who knows how much meth they’re putting in his ice-cream? — But the idea of the group of people who form “Joe Biden.” Or the idea of those jokers at the WEF that the planet is BOILING and the only solution if for us peasants to surrender to their wisdom and eat the bugs, and give up private transportation.

Dire Straits – Tunnel Of Love (Rockpop In Concert, 19th Dec 1980)

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Dire Straits
Published 28 Apr 2023

Dire Straits performing ‘Tunnel Of Love’ at Rockpop in Concert on December 19th 1980.
Footage licensed from ZDF Enterprises. All rights reserved.
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QotD: US Army culture before the Korean War

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Doolittle Board of 1945-1946 met, listened to less than half a hundred complaints, and made its recommendations. The so-called “caste system” of the Army was modified. Captains, by fiat, suddenly ceased to be gods, and sergeants, the hard-bitten backbone of any army, were told to try to be just some of the boys. Junior officers had a great deal of their power to discipline taken away from them. They could no longer inflict any real punishment, short of formal court-martial, nor could they easily reduce ineffective N.C.O.’s. Understandably, their own powers shaky, they cut the ground completely away from their N.C.O.’s.

A sergeant, by shouting at some sensitive yardbird, could get his captain into a lot of trouble. For the real effect of the Doolittle recommendations was psychological. Officers had not been made wholly powerless — but they felt that they had been slapped in the teeth. The officer corps, by 1946 again wholly professional, did not know how to live with the newer code.

One important thing was forgotten by the citizenry: by 1946 all the intellectual and sensitive types had said goodbye to the Army — they hoped for good. The new men coming in now were the kind of men who join armies the world over, blank-faced, unmolded — and they needed shaping. They got it; but it wasn’t the kind of shaping they needed.

Now an N.C.O. greeted new arrivals with a smile. Where once he would have told them they made him sick to his stomach, didn’t look tough enough to make a go of his outfit, he now led them meekly to his company commander. And this clean-cut young man, who once would have sat remote at the right hand of God in his orderly room, issuing orders that crackled like thunder, now smiled too. “Welcome aboard, gentlemen. I am your company commander; I’m here to help you. I’ll try to make your stay both pleasant and profitable.”

This was all very democratic and pleasant — but it is the nature of young men to get away with anything they can, and soon these young men found they could get away with plenty.

A soldier could tell a sergeant to blow it. In the old Army he might have been bashed, and found immediately what the rules were going to be. In the Canadian Army — which oddly enough no American liberals have found fascistic or bestial — he would have been marched in front of his company commander, had his pay reduced, perhaps even been confined for thirty days, with no damaging mark on his record. He would have learned, instantly, that orders are to be obeyed.

But in the new American Army, the sergeant reported such a case to his C.O. But the C.O. couldn’t do anything drastic or educational to the man; for any real action, he had to pass the case up higher. And nobody wanted to court-martial the man, to put a permanent damaging mark on his record. The most likely outcome was for the man to be chided for being rude, and requested to do better in the future.

Some privates, behind their smirks, liked it fine.

Pretty soon, the sergeants, realizing the score, started to fraternize with the men. Perhaps, through popularity, they could get something done. The junior officers, with no sergeants to knock heads, decided that the better part of valor was never to give an unpopular order.

The new legions carried the old names, displayed the old, proud colors, with their gallant battle streamers. The regimental mottoes still said things like “Can Do”. In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots — there was money for these — the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile.

What they lacked couldn’t be seen, not until the guns sounded.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

July 31, 2023

2023 compared with the world of C.M. Kornbluth’s “Marching Morons”

Filed under: Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

John C. Wright on what he calls our “incompetocracy”:

The conceit of the C.M. Kornbluth story “The Marching Morons” (Galaxy, April 1951) is that low-IQ people, having less practical ability to plan for the future, will reproduce more recklessly hence in greater numbers than high-IQ people, leading to a catastrophic general decline in intelligence over the generations.

A small group of elite thinkers tries, by any means necessary, to maintain a crumbling world civilization being overrun by an ever increasing underclass of morons.

In this morbid and unhappy little short story, the solution to overpopulation was the Final Solution, that is, mass murder of undesirables followed by the murder of the architect of the solution.

The eugenic genocide is played for laughs, as the morons are herded aboard death-ships, told they are going on vacation to Venus. The government forges postcards to their widows and orphans to maintain the fraud, which the morons are too stupid to penetrate.

You may recognize a similar conceit from the film Idiocracy (2006), written and directed by Mike Judge. Unlike the short story, no solution is proposed for the overpopulation of undesirables.

No one seems to note the absurd self-flattery involved in entertaining Malthusian eugenicist fears: no one regards himself as a moron unworthy of reproduction. Margaret Sanger did not volunteer to sterilize herself on the grounds that she was a moral cripple suffering from Progressive mental illness, hence unfit.

It is only the working man, the factory hand, the field hand, who is unfit, and usually he is an immigrant from some Catholic hence illiterate nation, with a fertile wife and a happy home.

The happy Catholic with his ten children will not die alone, empty and unloved, in some sterile euthanasia center in Canada, like the Progressive will, and so the Progressive hates the happy father like Gollum hates the sun.

The self-flattery is absurd because, first, IQ is not genetic — if it were, average IQ scores for a given bloodline would not change over two generations. Darwinism allows for genetic changes only over geologic eras.

Second, education in the modern day is inversely proportional to intelligence. No intelligent man would or does subject himself to the insolent falsehoods of college indoctrination: we are too independent in thought to be allowed to pass.

Third, a truly intelligent man, if he thought his bloodline was in danger of being outnumbered and swamped, rather than trying to inflict infertility on the competition, would seek the only intelligent solution compatible with honesty and decency: lifelong monogamy in a culture that forbids contraception and encourages maternity. He would, indeed, become Catholic, and attempt to evangelize his neighbors likewise.

A truly intelligent man would accept rather than reject the divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply. The idea of overpopulation is and always was a Progressive scare tactic, meant to undermine and control the underclass. It is the tactic of making the poor feel poorly for trying to use resources and grow rich. It is the politics of enforced poverty.

Why else would billionaires on private jets fly to Davos to eat steak dinners over wine, in order to pressure peons to ride bikes and eat bugs?

Our salvation is that they cannot even do that right. These James Bond style villains who are committing slow genocides with experimental injections, with wars against farming, against guns, against police, against oil drilling, against nuclear energy, and against family life, have not sacrificed the billions their dark and ancient gods crave dead, but this is due only to their lack of skill and organization.

The grim plight of the UK as global BOILING advances

Filed under: Britain, Environment — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Alexander McKibbin reports on the UK’s latest set of climate-related warnings from the Met Office:

No one who has read and digested this authoritative and comprehensive report can fail to be apprehensive about the future. Harnessing the technological power of its powerful computer modelling system, the Met Office can produce a highly accurate forecast of how the changing climate will affect the UK. It is a truly dystopian projection and one which should ring alarm bells in the top echelons of Whitehall.

Below is a selection of areas highlighted as being at risk if we do not achieve Net Zero by 2030.

Berwick-upon-Tweed

This charming border town with castle ruins and cobbled streets will disappear in the next five years, according to the Met Office. The picturesque Royal Border, Berwick and Union Suspension bridges will all be drowned by an unstoppable and ever-rising River Tweed. Displaced residents will need to find alternative accommodation and it is likely that looting and scavenging will become commonplace.

Kent

Known for centuries as “The Garden of England”, this delightful county currently plays host to gentle hills, fertile farmland and fruit-filled orchards. Country estates such as Penshurst Place, Sissinghurst Castle and Hall Place Gardens are all well known for the scenic views they offer.

Sadly, this will all shortly vanish under burning heat exceeding 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The rivers Stour, Medway, Darent and Dour will slow to a trickle and finally dry up completely. Dust storms and dust bowls will be part and parcel of daily living, as will camels and occasional prickly pear cacti dotted across a barren and arid wasteland. Dartford, the Met Office confidently asserts, will be a never-ending vista of shape changing sand dunes.

Yorkshire

Known to inhabitants as “God’s Own County”, no one can deny the many charms of England’s largest county with a population twice the size of Wales.

Horse-racing is a major attraction and with nine courses to choose from including Thirsk, Wetherby, Redcar and Catterick, no wonder Yorkshire is a popular tourist destination. What a pity that all of these temples to equestrian prowess will be lost to an all-consuming glacier that will blanket the land. The report is not sure whether at 104ft high the scenic Ribblehead Viaduct will avoid being trapped in this icy embrace. It is suggested that refugees should make their way south to seek food and shelter.

RSC 1917: France’s WW1 Semiauto Rifle

Filed under: France, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Nov 2015

Did you know that the French Army issued more than 80,000 semiautomatic rifles during WWI? They had been experimenting with a great many semiauto designs before the war, and in 1916 finalized a design for a rotating bolt, long stroke gas piston rifle (with more than few similarities to the M1 Garand, actually) which would see field service beginning in 1917. An improved version was put into production in 1918, but too late to see any significant combat use.

The RSC 1917 was not a perfect design, but it was good enough and the only true semiauto infantry rifle fielded by anyone in significant numbers during the war.

http://www.Patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

QotD: Stranger in a Strange Land at 50

Filed under: Books, Health, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Heinlein’s very popular novel had a significant short-term effect on the culture when it came out but a negligible long-term effect, beyond adding “grok” to the language. Its most radical message was the idea of group marriage of a particular sort. The nests it described were stable high trust families formed with minimal search and courtship. You looked into someone’s eyes, recognized him or her as a water brother, and knew you could trust each other forever after. It was a naively romantic picture, possibly workable with the assistance of the protagonist’s superpowers, risky in the real world but fitting well into the naively romantic hippy culture of the time. Quite a lot of people tried to implement it; for some it may have worked. When I spoke on a panel at a science fiction convention some years ago, one audience member made it reasonably clear that she had joined a nest, was still in it, and was happy with the result.

Sexual mores changed but not, for most, in that direction. Living in southern California in the eighties, the view that seemed most common among young adults — many of those I associated with would have been people I met through the SCA,1 a subculture that had noticeable overlap with both science fiction fandom and hippiedom — was very different. The ideal pattern was stable monogamy but who could be so lucky? Insofar as it had been replaced it was mostly by the increasing acceptability and practice of casual sex.

There has been some development since Stranger was published, in practice and theory, along the lines of group marriage of a somewhat different sort. Polyamory is more self-conscious and, at least in theory, more structured than what we see in Stranger. Partners are classified as primary or secondary and a good deal of attention paid to what those terms mean and what behavior they imply. The result is in theory closer to the Oneida Commune of the 19th century, on a much smaller scale, than to the nest described in Stranger.2

This fits not only what happened in the real world but what happened in Heinlein’s fictional worlds. Consider a more sophisticated version of group marriage, the line marriage in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It is highly organized, with new members brought in at the low age end on a regular pattern of alternating gender. There is extensive search/courtship. And the protagonist offers a plausible explanation of its social role, why the institutions developed and what purposes it served.

Finally, consider Friday, a later novel. The protagonist, surprisingly naive given her profession — secret agent — joins a group marriage, makes a substantial commitment to it and is booted out, her share of the assets stolen, when it is discovered that she is an artificial person, the superior product of genetic engineering. Her much later commitment to a second group marriage follows more careful research.

David D. Friedman, “Odds and Ends”, David Friedman’s Substack, 2023-04-29.

    1. The Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization I have been active in for a very long time.

    2. The practice sometimes ends up as open marriage, monogamous for purposes of producing and rearing children but with no obligation to sexual exclusivity — an option made possible by reliable contraception.

July 30, 2023

“Give me Andrea Dworkin’s anti-fella fury over this matrician tripe any day of the week”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Brendan O’Neill clearly doesn’t think Caitlin Moran’s new book What About Men? is worth reading:

Men, I have bad news: Caitlin Moran is coming for us. She comes not to man-bash, not to holler: “All men are rapists!” It’s worse than that. She feels sorry for us. “I’m violently opposed to the branches of feminism that are permanently angry with men”, she writes at the very start of her very bad book. Instead she pities us. She frets over our toxic stoicism, our inability to be vulnerable, our unwillingness to be open about our fat bodies and small cocks. She wants to save us from all the “rules” about “what a man should be”. From all that “swagger” and “the stiff upper lip”. By the end I found myself pining for some good ol’ angry feminism. Give me Andrea Dworkin’s anti-fella fury over this matrician tripe any day of the week.

What About Men? is, I’m going to be blunt, rubbish. I knew it would be from the very first page where Moran says that “when it comes to the vag-based problems, I have the bantz”. Imagine using the word bantz unironically in 2023. What she means is that she’s done all the vagina stuff. She’s completed feminism. She’s known as “the Woman Woman”, she says, in an arrogant timbre that puts to shame those cocksure blokes who stalk her nightmares. She wrote the bestselling pop-feminist tome, How To Be a Woman (2011), which contained such gems of wisdom as “don’t shave your vagina” because it’s better to have a “big, hairy minge”, a “lovely furry moof”, “a marmoset sitting in [your] lap”, than a bald cooch. (Emmeline Pankhurst, I’m so sorry.) So now, naturally, she’s turning her attention to men. She’s discovered there is “a lot to say” about “men in the 21st-century”. Lucky us.

What she says about us is almost too daft for words. You realise by about page 22 that she’s never met a bloke from outside the media-luvvie, ageing rock-chick, “Glasto”-loving circle she famously inhabits. (I almost died of second-hand embarrassment when she said in How To Be a Woman that she lives an edgy existence, “like it’s 1969 all over again and my entire life is made of cheesecloth, sitars and hash”. Maam, you write a celebrity column for hundreds of thousands of pounds for The Times.)

Even her cultural references in What About Men? are off, as befits a woman who is essentially a square person’s idea of a cool person. She laments that young men are in “the grip of a fad” for super-skinny jeans. Jeans so tight they look “sprayed-on”. Jeans so tight that the poor lad’s balls end up “crushed against the crotch seam, in vivid detail”. Really? It’s not 2006. Bloc Party aren’t in the charts. I’m no follower of fashion but even I know most young men haven’t been wearing bollock-squashing jeans for a few years now. My nephews wear baggy jeans, à la Madchester. Pretty much the only time you see unyielding denim these days is on the portly thigh of a mid-life-crisis middle-class dad. The kind of men, dare I say it, that Ms Moran mixes with.

Her commentary on t-shirts is a dead giveaway, too. The only fashion flare the tragic male sex is allowed to enjoy is the tee, she says. Especially past the age of 40. You’ll see fortysomething fellas in “band t-shirts, slogan t-shirts, t-shirts with swearing on”, she says. Will you? Where? Again, only in the knowingly dishevelled privileged set Moran exists in. Every man in his forties I know always manages to put a shirt on. So desperate are emotionally repressed men to express themselves, says Moran, that some even buy t-shirts “from the back pages of Viz” that say things like “Breast Inspector” or “Fart Loading: Please Wait”. Not once in my life have I seen a man in a Viz tee. The problem here isn’t men – it’s Moran’s man-friends. She could have saved herself the trouble of this entire book by befriending some normal blokes.

That Moran’s pool of men is shallow is clear from the fact that all the men she talks to for the book seem to be as steeped as she is in chattering-class orthodoxy. She includes a transcript of long chats with male acquaintances and, honestly, reading it feels like being stuck in a lift with craft-beer wankers who do IT for the Guardian. At one point she informs her readers that her male friends are mostly “middle-aged, middle-class dads who know about wine, recycle, have views on thoughtful novels” and would probably “cry if they saw a dog struggling with a slight limp”. Writing a book about men from the perspective of men like that is like writing a book about women from the perspective of Princess Anne.

Bradley Unleashes His Cobra – WW2 – Week 257 – July 29, 1944

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, Germany, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 29 Jul 2023

Operation Cobra is the drop that finally opens the floodgates and the Allies make a breakthrough in Normandy; up in the Baltics the Soviets take Shaulyai, Dvinsk, and finally Narva, though their big prize this week is Lvov further south. This happens during the Poles’ Lvov Uprising, which ends badly for the Poles. Things also go badly for the Japanese on Guam, though, as their assault this week devastates their own troops.
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Letting a UN agency police “disinformation” online? What a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?

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

Savroula Pabst outlines the United Nations Development Program’s new online anti-disinformation tool, iVerify:

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has quietly announced the rollout of an automated anti-disinformation tool, iVerify, this spring. The instrument, initially created to support election integrity, centers a multi-stakeholder approach spanning the public and private sectors to “provide national actors with a support package to enhance identification, monitoring and response capacity to threats to information integrity”.

The UNDP demonstrates how iVerify works in a short video, where anyone can send articles to iVerify’s team of local “highly-trained” fact-checkers to determine if “an article is true or not”. The tool also uses machine learning to prevent duplicate article checks, and monitors social media for “toxic” content which can then be sent to “verification” teams of fact-checkers to evaluate, making it a tool with both automated- and human-facilitated elements.

On its website, the UNDP makes a blunt case for iVerify as an instrument against “information pollution“, which they describe as an “overabundance” of harmful, useless or otherwise misleading information that blunts “citizens’ capacity to make informed decisions”. Identifying information pollution as an issue of urgency, the UNDP claims that “misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech threaten peace and security, disproportionately affecting those who are already vulnerable”.

But, behind this rhetoric of fact-checking expertise and protecting society’s most marginalized, iVerify, as a tool functionally claiming an ability to separate the true from the false, actually provides governments, adjacent institutions, and the global elite an opportunity for unprecedented dismissal, and perhaps thus subsequent censorship, of dissenting perspectives and inconvenient information and reporting, all behind the pedigree of a UN institution with international reach.

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