Quotulatiousness

November 8, 2023

Reality will continue to be real long after you can keep on denying it

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

But, as Chris Bray illustrates, some people have truly heroic reality-denial complexes going on and they want you to deny reality along with them:

Hey, look, it’s the zeitgeist.

No one knows what to do. About this:

    Court records show the man who pushed Whitcomb currently faces charges ranging from harassment and menacing to assault and illegal possession of a knife. He has also been accused of groping and assaulting women on the north side of the neighborhood and is on the state’s sex offender registry for forcible touching and sexual abuse convictions in 2017 and 2021.

He hurts people a lot, and he’s a registered sex offender, and he sometimes carries a knife, and he walks up to strangers on the street and just hurts them for no reason, and he especially likes to hurt women quite a lot, especially in ways that seem pretty consistently sexual. It’s … complicated. Hard to know what to do!

Note that the story takes care to avoid identifying the person the story is about, because the reporter is concerned that identifying the serial aggressor will make it possible for someone to hurt him: “Gothamist has chosen to withhold the man’s name because of his mental illness and because he is at risk of additional attacks by people who want to take matters into their own hands”. And hurting people is wrong. To prevent attacks, see, you don’t tell people the name of a person who keeps … attacking.

The story warns that the constant aggression of [unnamed person] is a warning about “the systemic failures that allow people to fall through the cracks,” because what a man hurting people over and over again shows us is that the man who’s being forced to hurt all those people by society’s deep cruelty isn’t getting enough services. Greenpoint, an increasingly expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn, is represented by “some of the city’s most progressive lawmakers”, but they’re still struggling with these hard questions. America in 2023, ladies and gentlemen.

But finally, as a test of the reporter’s good faith, we get a broader description that contextualizes the problem. There are a lot of people in New York City who are being forced to hurt other people because they aren’t being given enough services, and here comes a famous example: “Earlier this year, Daniel Penny fatally choked Jordan Neely, a beloved Michael Jackson impersonator who Penny said was ‘going crazy’ and acting aggressively toward fellow subway riders.”

That’s it — that’s the whole description. Who was Jordan Neely? He was a man who impersonated Michael Jackson, and he was loved a whole lot, but then for some unaccountable reason Daniel Penny claimed the beloved man was going crazy, so he just suddenly killed the poor man. It’s strange that this Penny person would say something like that, right?

Now, in a city of eight million people, Jordan Neely was on a list, kept by the city government, of the fifty homeless people whose behavior is most persistently troubling. His case was regularly monitored by the “Coordinated Behavioral Health Task Force”, which “consists of workers from across city government, including the departments of Health, Homeless Services and Hospitals, along with representatives of the nonprofits that the city contracts with to try to connect homeless people to shelter and services, a process known as outreach”. At the time when the mean Daniel Penny suddenly killed him for no reason, Neely had an active arrest warrant. And other passengers in the subway car said that — well, let’s turn to the headline in the New York Times: “Witnesses in Subway Chokehold Case Describe Fears of Death and Violence“.

Details from the day of the Hamas terror attack on Israel

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Matt Gurney in The Line:

On Nov. 6, one-month-less-a-day after the Hamas assault on southern Israel, I was one of a small number of journalists to receive a briefing by a senior Israeli government official at the Israeli consulate in Toronto. Part of the briefing was the showing of a film, approximately 42 minutes long, that contained video and audio records of the attack. The sights and sounds came from many sources, including home security footage, survivor footage, surveillance cameras at private residences, military facilities and in public places, as well as cameras and Go-Pro-style body worn cameras carried by Hamas. Later in the film, we also see footage taken by Israeli first responders — some of it informally, via body worn cameras and smartphones, but some of it also deliberately and meticulously, as part of the documenting of the attack’s aftermath. The video also included audio portions of what the Israeli government claims is intercepted Hamas communications sent during the attack.

I have to preface this near the top: I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the videos, or of the translations. I believe that the videos are authentic and the translations accurate — the latter is easier, since it has by now been shown to enough people that any false translations would have been noted by members of the audience, but I don’t speak Hebrew or Arabic, and had to rely on the captions. As for the videos, while some of what I saw on Monday was new to me, other clips have already been shared widely on social media. There’s a decent chance you’ve seen some of them, too. For further disclosure, many of the clips are very short — a few seconds each. The Israelis said that in many cases, they are only choosing to release what the families of victims have agreed to allow to be shown. That’s an editorial decision, and I haven’t seen the unedited videos. I can’t tell you what I wasn’t shown.

So if you’re absolutely determined to find a way to discredit or dismiss everything I’m about to say, I’ll keep it easy for you. I saw what was presented to me, by Israel, and have little ability to independently confirm any of it.

If you’re interested in hearing what I saw, though, here it is.

I should start by telling you I don’t plan to dwell on all the atrocities or try to summarize the whole 42 minutes of carnage I watched in any kind of coherent sequence. It’s not that the atrocities aren’t important — they’re obviously the central point of the briefing for reporters, and what I was asked to bear witness to. My thinking is simply this: much of what I could tell you has been summarized elsewhere. The global media first saw this film, in Israel, two weeks ago; some of my Ottawa-based colleagues saw it last week. If you’re looking for a summary of the contents, those exist already. I don’t think you’d benefit from just another version of that, and I know I wouldn’t enjoy writing one. So in the main, I’ll avoid long, descriptive passages where I tell you what I saw. I’ll try to offer something different.

But first, let’s get this out of the way. I confess that I was afraid when the video started. Simple fear. Fear I’d crack, fear I’d have to look away, fear I’d somehow fail to meet the moment. I don’t know if that was a rational fear — what the hell does meeting the moment even mean? — but I was afraid. I was afraid from the moment I was asked to attend and said yes. As the film began, though, I found many of the videos less graphic than I’d feared, and actually less graphic than some of what I’d already seen and written about. No one should mistake me — the videos are graphic, some of them extremely so. But in many cases, the videos are taken from too far away or from an unsteady camera (particularly the body worn ones) and many of the worst gruesome details are thus obscured or missed.

Not all of them. Lord no, not all. But some. That helped.

Sampling the alternate history field

Filed under: Books, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jane Psmith confesses a weakness for a certain kind of speculative fiction and recommends some works in that field. The three here are also among my favourites, so I can comfortably agree with the choices:

As I’ve written before, I am an absolute sucker for alternate history. Unfortunately, though, most of it is not very good, even by the standards of genre fiction’s transparent prose. Its attraction is really the idea, with all its surprising facets, and means the best examples are typically the ones where the idea is so good — the unexpected ramifications so startling at the moment but so obvious in retrospect — that you can forgive the cardboard characters and lackluster prose.

But, what the heck, I’m feeling self-indulgent, so here are some of my favorites.

  • Island in the Sea of Time et seq., by S.M. Stirling: This is my very favorite. The premise is quite simple: the island of Nantucket is inexplicably sent back in time to 1250 BC. Luckily, a Coast Guard sailing ship happens to be visiting, so they’re able to sail to Britain and trade for grain to survive the winter while they bootstrap industrial civilization on the thinly-inhabited coast of North America. Of course, it’s not that simple: the inhabitants of the Bronze Age have obvious and remarkably plausible reactions to the sudden appearance of strangers with superior technology, a renegade sailor steals one of the Nantucketers’ ships and sets off to carve his own empire from the past, and the Americans are thrust into Bronze Age geopolitics as they attempt to thwart him. The “good guys” are frankly pretty boring, in a late 90s multicultural neoliberal kind of way — the captain of the Coast Guard ship is a black lesbian and you can practically see Stirling clapping himself on the back for Representation — but the villainous Coast Guardsmen and (especially) the natives of 1250 BC get a far more complex and interesting portrayal.1 Two of them are particularly well-drawn: a fictional trader of the thinly attested Iberian city-state of Tartessos, and an Achaean nobleman named Odikweos, both of whom are thoroughly understandable and sympathetic while remaining distinctly unmodern. The Nantucketers, with their technological innovations and American values, provide plenty of contrast, but Stirling is really at his best in using them to highlight the alien past.
  • Lest Darkness Fall, by L. Sprague de Camp: An absolute classic of the genre. I may not love what de Camp did with Conan, but the man could write! One of the great things about old books (this one is from 1939) is that they don’t waste time on technobabble to justify the silly parts: about two pages into the story, American archaeologist Martin Padway is struck by lightning while visiting Rome and transported back in time to 535 AD. How? Shut up, that’s how, and instead pay attention as Padway introduces distilled liquor, double-entry bookkeeping, yellow journalism, and the telegraph before taking advantage of his encyclopedic knowledge of Procopius’s De Bello Gothico to stabilize and defend the Italo-Gothic kingdom, wrest Belisarius’s loyalty away from Justinian, and entirely forestall the Dark Ages. If this sounds an awful lot like the imaginary book I described in my review of The Knowledge: yes. The combination of high agency history rerouting and total worldview disconnect — there’s a very funny barfight about Christology early on, and later some severe culture clash that interferes with a royal marriage — is charming. Also, this was the book that inspired Harry Turtledove not only to become an alt-history writer but to get a Ph.D. in Byzantine history.

    • […]

  • Ruled Britannia, by Harry Turtledove: Turtledove is by far the most famous and successful alternate history author out there, with lots of short pieces and novels ranging from “Byzantine intrigue in a world where Islam never existed” (Agent of Byzantium) to “time-travelling neo-Nazis bring AK-47s to the Confederacy” (The Guns of the South), but this is the only one of his books I’ve ever been tempted to re-read. The jumping-off point, “the Spanish Armada succeeded”, is fairly common for the genre2 — the pretty good Times Without Number and the lousy Pavane (hey, did you know the Church hates and fears technology?!) both start from there — but Turtledove fasts forward only a decade to show us William Shakespeare at the fulcrum of history. A loyalist faction (starring real life Elizabethan intriguers like Nicholas Skeres) wants him to write a play about Boudicca to inflame the population to free Queen Elizabeth from her imprisonment in the Tower of London, while the Spanish authorities (represented, hilariously, by playwright manqué Lope de Vega) want him to write one glorifying the late Philip II and the conquest of England. Turtledove does a surprisingly good job inventing new Shakespeare plays from snippets of real ones and from John Fletcher’s 1613 Bonduca, but of course I’m most taken by his rendition of the Tudor world. Maybe I should check out some of his straight historical fiction …

    1. Well, except for the peaceful matriarchal Marija Gimbutas-y “Earth People” being displaced from Britain by the invading Proto-Celts; they’re also “good guys” and therefore, sadly, boring.

    2. Not as common as “the Nazis won”, obviously.

I agree with Jane about Island in the Sea of Time, but my son and daughter-in-law strongly preferred the other series Stirling wrote from the same start point: what happened to the world left behind when Nantucket Island got scooped out of our timeline and dumped back into the pre-collapse Bronze Age. Whereas ISOT has minimal supernatural elements to the story, the “Emberverse” series beginning with Dies the Fire went on for many, many more books and had much more witchy woo-woo stuff front-and-centre rather than marginal and de-emphasized.

While I quite enjoyed Ruled Britannia, it was the first Turtledove series I encountered that I’ve gone back to re-read: The Lost Legion … well, the first four books, anyway. He wrote several more books in that same world, but having wrapped up the storyline for the Legion’s main characters, I didn’t find the others as interesting.

Mel Blanc on How He Created His Iconic Voices | Carson Tonight Show

Filed under: Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Johnny Carson
Published 27 Jun 2023

Original Airdate: May 26, 1983
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QotD: Climate change, sorcerism and magical thinking

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

Many primitive societies believe that maleficient spirits cause all sorts of human misfortune that in the modern West we have learned to attribute to natural causes – cattle dying, crops failing, disease, drought, that sort of thing. A few societies have developed a more peculiar form of supernaturalism, in which evil spirits recede into the background and all misfortune is caused by the action of maleficient human sorcerers who must be found and rooted out to end the harm.

A society like that may be a grim, paranoid place with everyone constantly on the hunt for sorcerers – but a sorcerer can be punished or killed more easily than a spirit or a blind force of nature. Therein lies the perverse appeal of this sort of belief system, what I’ll call “sorcerism” – you may not be able to stop your cattle from dying, but at least you can find the bastard who did it and hurt him until you feel better. Maybe you can even prevent the next cattle-death. You are not powerless.

[…]

The most puzzling thing about the whole exchange was his insistence on interpreting my talk about the weather as a political move. I report the Central Valley superstorm of 1861-62 and R’s response is “When did you turn into Rush Limbaugh?” Uh, WTF, over?

It took me a while to model the frame of mind that produced this, but when I managed to I had an insight. Which is why I’m writing this essay. I think, now, what I actually threatened was R’s belief that he, or somebody, could do something emotionally satisfying about the bad weather. Fix it, or prevent it from recurring, or at least punish the bastards who did it.

Supernaturalizing the causes of large-scale misfortunes has become a difficult strategy to sustain for anyone with more exposure to modern scientific knowledge than a cinderblock. Politicizing them into someone’s bad juju, however … that’s easy. And, perhaps, more attractive than ever before – because the alternative is to feel powerless, and that is painful.

Science and the increase in our control over our immediate environment at the small scale may, in fact, be driving us back towards a sort of sorcerism by making the feeling of powerlessness more painful. We are children of humanism and the Enlightenment; terror of the storm and dark is something we associate with the bad old days of angry gods. We should be beyond that now … shouldn’t we?

Thus, the politicization of every bad thing that happens. And people like R, for whom “When did you turn into Rush Limbaugh?” becomes a sort of aversive charm to ward off fear of the Central Valley superstorm and its like.

Yes, we need a word for this, too. Not “sorcerism”; “politicism”, perhaps. The insistence on locating for every large-scale problem a human cause that can be addressed through politics and a set of serviceable villains to punish. Also, the insistence that anyone who rejects the politically fashionable explanation must be in league with the evil sorcerers.

Unfortunately, reality isn’t like that. If a supernova goes off within eight parsecs of us and strips off the Earth’s ozone layer it won’t have been Halliburton or the International Communist Conspiracy that did it. And if the Central Valley superstorm does repeat on us – well, statistically that looked pretty likely at a mean interval of about 150 years; welcome to your new normal, and hunting for the evil carbon-or-whatever emitters that did it is highly unlikely to do any more than supplying you with a scapegoat to ease your hurt feelings.

Finally … feeling powerless may suck, but on the whole it’s preferable to sorcerer hunts. People get killed in sorcerer hunts, almost always people who are innocent. One reason I’m not a politicist is that I don’t want to be any part of a howling mob. It’s a form of self-restraint I recommend to others.

Eric S. Raymond, “Heavy weather and bad juju”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-02-03.

November 7, 2023

The “slopes of Lyle”, and why they matter

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney explains what Paul Wells christened the “slopes of Lyle” and why Canadian political discourse is so hypocritical so often:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the (pick your team’s preferred term) [protest | insurrection] in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

It was a bit over a year ago when Paul Wells, in one of the best pieces of his I’ve ever read, created the concept of the “slopes of Lyle”. The “Lyle” refers to some polling published by Greg Lyle, of Innovative Research Group. I won’t spend a ton of time recapping the polling or what Paul drew from it, beyond the necessary: Lyle found and could graph what amounts, in effect, to political hypocrisy. Using the example of whether governments should meet with protesters, even if those protesters have broken the law, Lyle found that one’s opinion on the matter hinged less on any overall value-neutral philosophical belief and more on the specifics of the protesters. Left-leaning Canadians (NDP and Liberal voters, in Lyle’s poll) were a lot more sympathetic to a government that would meet with Indigenous Canadians (and supporters) protesting a new pipeline than they were with the Ottawa convoy protesters. CPC-supporting Canadians — and who’da thunk it?! — felt the reverse. Graphing out these positions resulted in those slopes Paul noticed — left-wing and right-wing support for governments meeting with protesters tanked when you changed who the protesters were.

The slopes of Lyle.

It’s been basically a month since the appalling assault by Hamas into southern Israel. Israel’s war against Hamas grinds on, and is producing the kind of horrible collateral damage we all feared. People across the West, including very much here at home in North America, are devastated by what they’re seeing, hearing and reading, and of course they are. It’s awful, every bit of it. There have been large rallies and protests and from them, we’re starting to see some of those Lyle-ian slopes emerge. It’s predictable, but it’s still bad, and it’s worth noting. Because we can do better, and it’s not hard to try.

Consider one issue: whether or not a protest is defined by the worst elements within it. Personally, I say no. Any large group of people necessarily becomes impossible for any organizer to control, and if terrible people show up to wave terrible signs, chant terrible slogans and do terrible things, I don’t think that reflects badly on everyone who showed up. That’s my overall philosophical view on such matters. I felt that way about the convoy in Ottawa, as some of you may remember — I tried really hard in my pieces from the capital to hammer home how the crowd there was a blend of the nasty and the harmlessly well-meaning. At the time, many were portraying the entire event as harmless — just a bunch of bouncy castle fans, folks! Others were portraying every last one of them as Confederate Nazis. Neither was accurate, and I said so then, and I’ve said so since.

Ditto with the protests we’re seeing in Canadian cities of late. I have no problem agreeing that many, probably even most, of the people showing up are good people, motivated by genuine concern over the plight of the Palestinian people, both in the broader sense of their aspirations for a better future but also over their current endangered state, as the war grinds on around them. I’m also not blind to the fact that some of what we’ve seen — some of the flags, some of the chants and slogans, some of the signs being waved, and some of the behaviour — has been wildly inappropriate, perhaps even illegal, and has absolutely gone well beyond simple criticism of Israel into outright antisemitism. There’s just no way to deny that we’ve had antisemites marching through our streets, saying and doing antisemitic things. Loud and proud, out in the open.

And yet I’ve noticed some, ahem, difficulty in admitting this or acknowledging this. And that’s interesting, because some of the very same people who will go to their deathbed believing the convoy was a Nazi uprising get very upset at the suggestion that there’s much to be worried about in the anti-Israel protests or that we should read much into people who want Jews killed for the mere fact of their Judaism.

So that’s a conundrum, eh? I don’t care what side you take. I really don’t. I just want you to be consistent. So I’ll just ask the question: does the presence of a radical group with a larger protest invalidate the protest and even tarnish the cause, or nah? Again, I don’t care which way you vote. But kindly put yourself on the record.

Birth Gap, the future none of us expected

Filed under: Europe, Health, Japan, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Elizabeth Nickson takes the warnings of infertility from BirthGap quite seriously:

Jordan Peterson’s face morphed through a series of changes as he realized that nine out of ten women who don’t have children, wanted them. Ready to blame the culture of narcissism, he stalled confused, wrestling his face to neutral. I knew that fact from experience. For the many women I know who don’t have children, it is an abiding sorrow. From country to country, class to class, race to race, the sorrow is coruscating and it is ignored or diminished.

Only one in ten women actually don’t want children. One in ten is infertile, but the rest who don’t have children and that is one-third of us and counting, wanted them. By the time they are in their 40’s and incapable, badly.

Steven F Shaw searches for answers in Birth Gap, his masterwork documentary, the first part of which you can watch here. The most obvious is that they waited too long, thinking it was possible, their “career” taking precedence. He interviews two prominent women in their late 30’s, both journalists. One of whom has a child, and having had one, wanted more but it was too late. “No one told us”, she said. Throughout her childhood and education, no one told her that the hammer would come down, that fertility drops off a cliff in your 30’s. That if you are 30 and childless, there is a 50% chance you won’t have children. The other, Megan McArdle, who writes for the Washington Post, left it too late. McArdle is a brilliant woman. If she didn’t know she was playing with fire, who could?

The catastrophic statistics run across all cultures but sub-Saharan Africa. Every industrialized country is racing to the bottom, which is to say extinction within four or five generations. Cities left to ruin, old people without help, decaying schools, hospitals, and no employees to be found. The unretrievable extinction of the culture and its people. I’ll leave it to you to follow Shaw’s math, but it is convincing. And he is by no means, alone in his analysis.

Europe, Japan and especially South Korea are by far the most in trouble. But Spain, Italy, the Scandis, are not far behind. America’s massive migration is masking the effect now, but, as Shaw doesn’t point out, but others have, immigrants quickly default to the current zeitgeist. Even in Muslim countries, pace Mark Steyn, women are choosing to not have children until too late. And forget multiples, even for the devout, it’s no longer on the cards.

To me, one underlying reason is the firehose of overpopulation propaganda that we have endured for the past fifty years. Women, in general, as kids, are good girls, accepting of authority, and compassionate. When told their desire for children is stressing the earth, they are more likely to accept that nonsense without question if it is coming from every authority figure in every sector of the culture. Today from kindergarten on, we are taught that we are a virus, a plague on the earth. Who among us, at the age of 15 or 25, can contravene that level of brainwashing? Contrast Peterson saying this week, “we can make the deserts bloom”. When was the last time you heard that sentiment from anyone in authority?

Potentially killing off Quebec’s English-language universities isn’t a bug, it’s a feature

Filed under: Cancon, Education — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Selley on the Quebec government’s vindictive decision to massively hike tuition rates for out-of-province students of the province’s three English-language universities:

“McGill University Montreal 3” by Laslovarga is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 .

McGill, Concordia and Bishop’s universities have begun to budget for the nightmare Quebec Premier François Legault’s government has imposed on the English-language schools by doubling out-of-province tuition fees — a way to keep socially corrosive anglophones out of Montreal, the premier has said in so many words.

In an open letter Thursday, McGill principal and vice-chancellor Deep Saini suggested the policy might lead to a $94-million annual shortfall in revenue, necessitating the layoff of 700 staff and closure of certain programs (notably the Schulich School of Music) and fewer athletics teams. It depends how many international students they can recruit to replace out-of-province Canadians unwilling to splash out $17,000 a year. (Yes, those international students would also speak English. No, Legault’s plan doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.)

Concordia president Graham Carr said much the same in an internal university memo on Tuesday, estimating the Coalition Avenir Québec’s latest attack on English could cost it 10 per cent of its total budget. As for Bishop’s, a small 180-year-old liberal-arts college near Sherbrooke: “I don’t believe that Bishop’s can survive under this policy,” former university principal Michael Goldbloom said bluntly this week.

Premier François Legault says he’s willing to meet with officials from all three universities. So they’ve got that going for them, which is nice. The provincial Liberals, what’s left of them, have spoken out against the tuition grab, as has Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante.

But opposition to this in Ottawa remains utterly pathetic. “Quebec makes its own decisions, but I don’t necessarily think this is the best one,” is still the best Pablo Rodriguez, the prime minister’s Quebec lieutenant, has managed to muster. Liberal Francis Scarpaleggia, who represents a riding on Montreal’s West Island, is the only MP to have mentioned it in the House of Commons, calling it “an improvised and populist policy that is not justified.”

Swiss Tankbuchse 41 Semi-automatic Antitank Rifle

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 29 Oct 2018

Originally developed for use in light tanks purchased from Czechoslovakia, the Tankbuchse 41 was a 24x139mm semi-automatic rifle designed by Adolph Furrer of the Waffenfabrik Bern factory. Furrer was also responsible for the LMG-25 and MP41/44 used by the Swiss, and with the TB-41 he once again used the operating system he was most familiar with: a short recoil toggle-locked action. The gun was ready and adopted in 1941, and a total of 3,581 were produced, used in light tanks, lake patrol boats, fortifications, and on wheeled carriages by the infantry.

High explosive and armor piercing projectiles were made, both weighing 3475 grains (225g) and with muzzle velocities between 2800 and 2950 fps (860-900 fps). The armor piercing round could perforate 30cm of perpendicular armor plate at 500m — more than most other contemporary antitank rifles. Designed specifically for rapid fire, the gun fed from six-round magazines, and automatically ejected the magazine when the last round was chambered, so that the crew could reload it without having to run the crank handle. The guns never saw combat use, and by the end of World War Two were being pulled back out of inventory and relegated primarily to fortress use.
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QotD: As we all know, medieval peasants wore ill-fitting clothes of grey and brown, exclusively

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

… the popular image of most ancient and medieval clothing is typically a rather drab affair, with the poor peasantry wearing mostly dirty, drab brown clothes (often ill-fitting ones) and so it might be imagined that regular folks had little need for involved textile finishing processes or dyeing; this is quite wrong. We have in essence already dispatched with the ill-fitting notion; the clothes of poor farmers, being often homespun and home-sewn could be made quite exactly for their wearers (indeed, loose fitting clothing, with lots of extra fabric, was often how one showed off wealth; lots of pleating, for instance, displayed that one could afford to waste expensive fabric on ornamentation). So it will not be a surprise that people in the past also liked to dress in pleasing colors and that this preference extended even to relatively humble peasants. Moreover, the simplest dyes and bleaching methods were often well within reach even for relatively humble people.

What we see in ancient and medieval artwork is that even the lower classes of society wore clothes that were bleached or dyed, often in bright, bold colors (in as much as dyes were available). At Rome, this extended even to enslaved persons; Seneca’s comment that legislation mandating a “uniform” for enslaved persons at Rome was abandoned for fear that they might realize their numbers, the clear implication being that it was often impossible to tell an enslaved person apart from a free person on the street in normal conditions (Sen. Clem. 1.24.1). Consequently, fulling and dyeing was not merely a process for the extremely wealthy, but an important step in the textiles that would have been worn even by every-day people.

That said, fulling and dyeing (though not bleaching) were fundamentally different from the tasks that we’ve discussed so far because they generally could not be done in the home. Instead they often required space, special tools and equipment and particular (often quite bad smelling) chemicals and specialized skills in order to practice. Consequently, these tasks tended to be done by specialist workers for whom textile production was a trade, rather than merely a household task.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-04-02.

November 6, 2023

Rob Henderson’s (lack of a) reading plan

Filed under: Books — Nicholas @ 05:00

I hesitate to admit that I don’t read as much as I once did. A few years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for me to read anywhere between 50 and 100 books per year, but my pace is much slower now. Partly it’s because I’m spending most of my time at home with the internet within easy reach and partly it’s because I’m one of those weird people who prefer to own the books I read (Rob Henderson has this quirk as well, I learn). A lack of income also impacts the ability to buy books for some reason.

That throat-clearing aside, here’s Rob Henderson‘s approach to reading:

Some books I had handy when that silly social media “how often do you think about Rome” question was being bandied about.

People sometimes ask me, “Rob, how do you read so much?” or “How many books do you read simultaneously?” or “What is your reading plan?” or even “How do you get through so many books, are you a speed reader?” (I’m not).

Readers and Twitter/X followers see how frequently I post my readings or see my recommended books and assume there must be a secret.

There’s no secret.

I read pretty slowly. I take notes, I underline, I highlight, I jot my thoughts in the margins, I pause if I encounter an especially interesting passage or idea.

Years ago, I read How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. He described reading a book as being “in conversation” with the author. But reading has the added benefit of allowing you to concentrate deeply, move as fast or as slowly through an argument or idea as you want, and formulate and reformulate your thoughts as you move through the text.

In a given year, I read about 40-50 books cover to cover, read excerpts and chapters of perhaps another 100 or so, and skim many more. I also read psychology papers and other academic texts.

I read multiple books concurrently. Typically 2 or 3 physical books I cycle through, with one I devote most of my attention to. I also have 2 other books I read on the Kindle app on my phone. Waiting in line at the store. In between sets at the gym. Traveling on the train or an uber. All this time adds up. You can spend 5 or 10 minutes scrolling, or read a couple of pages of a good book. I recommend the latter.

What about audiobooks? I like this post from Naval Ravikant:

He’s right.

Reading requires a lot of effort and practice. Hearing language versus reading it engages different mental processes. Reading forces you to move more slowly. If an author explains an idea to you, the constraints of natural conversation mean that you can’t just pause for 10 minutes while you think deeply about what he or she just said and then subsequently resume the discussion. Books enable you to do that. Of course, you can pause on audiobook and think about what the author just said. Often, though, listening to audiobooks is accompanied by other tasks, making it harder to devote 100% of your attention to the ideas being discussed or the story being told.

Listening to audiobooks is easier. And it’s better than nothing. But if you want to seriously engage with ideas and increase the likelihood that you’ll retain knowledge, it’s better to read.

Some people just love audiobooks, but I’ve rarely found them to be a positive experience: either it grabs my attention and I can’t do anything else or it fails to grab my attention and I don’t really retain much of what I’ve heard. Multitasking and I are not compatible.

“But here’s the catch, if you actually try to put this philosophy into practice, you might sell your granny to sex traffickers”

Filed under: Britain, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia explains why (people like) Sam Bankman-Fried drove him away from his formal studies in Philosophy at Oxford:

I abandoned philosophy because of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto scammer.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I abandoned my formal study of philosophy because of people like Bankman-Fried.

Unfortunately, they were my professors at the time.

Where do I even begin in telling this?

It’s not easy. That’s why I’ve never given a full account of my years as a philosophy student at Oxford — despite some readers requesting this. I don’t talk about it because the story is complicated.

But Sam Bankman-Fried gives me the excuse — or even the necessity — of digging into this gnarly matter. That’s because the crypto scammer was deeply involved in a philosophical movement that originated at Oxford. It draws on the same tenets I was taught in those distant days.

My teachers didn’t run crypto exchanges, and (to my knowledge) never embezzled anything more valuable than a bottle of port from the common room. Even so, there’s a direct connection between them and Mr. Bankman-Fried.

They were erudite and devoted teachers, but I was disillusioned by what they taught. It eventually chased me away from philosophy, specifically analytic philosophy of the Anglo-American variety.

I had no idea that their worldview would come back to life as a popular movement promoted by the biggest scam artist of the digital age. But I’m not really surprised — because it’s a dangerous worldview with potential to do damage on the largest scale.

The philosophy is nowadays called Effective Altruism. It even has a web site with recruiting videos — there’s a warning sign right there! — where it brags about its origins at Oxford.

But here’s the catch, if you actually try to put this philosophy into practice, you might sell your granny to sex traffickers.

You think I’m joking?

In fact, that’s exactly what you would do. Effective altruists don’t look at the actual actions at hand or their consequences today — hah, that would be too obvious. They only think about long-term holistic results, and hope to maximize pleasure and good feelings in the aggregate:

So it stands to reason that:

  1. Granny is old and doesn’t have long to live, so she can’t experience much pleasure even under the best circumstances.
  2. But the sex traffickers could use Granny to increase the pleasure of many of their customers.
  3. Hence …

I’m not going to spell it out for you, but you can guess where this is heading.

You just better hope that, if you’re ever a grandparent, your progeny aren’t Effective Altruists.

Justin Trudeau’s (latest) very bad week

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

Paul Wells wonders if Justin Trudeau would even want to stay on as Liberal Party leader for the next election after the more recent awful week he’s had:

That was fun of Justin Trudeau to act out the message that somebody who spends his days in the Senate is a nobody. Of course, the kind of year he’s having, his bit of theatre came two days after he appointed five new senators. Welcome to the upper chamber, suckers. If you’re really lucky, a flailing prime minister might use you for a punchline.

This felt like the week that Trudeau’s hold on his leadership became precarious. I’ve had people asking me all week whether Trudeau will run again. Of course I don’t know. I guess the only thing that’s new is that if he does stay until the next election, and lead the Liberals into it, I’ll wonder — more keenly than before — why he bothered.

The decision still feels like his alone. The headline-making assaults on his power this week fell well short of what it would take to remove him if he doesn’t want removing. I find Percy Downe a serious and likable man, but he is not gregarious, he doesn’t have networks of people ready to do his bidding, and the truth is that the Senate isn’t a base for getting anything done within the Liberal Party. Hasn’t been for a decade.

As a good Liberal who was working hard long before “hard work” became a Trudeauite slogan, Downe has never forgiven Trudeau for kicking senators out of the Liberal caucus. As a good Prince Edward Islander, he has never forgiven Trudeau for maintaining tolls on the Confederation Bridge between the Island and the mainland while removing tolls on the Champlain Bridge into Montreal. This was a straightforward transfer of wealth from PEI to Central Canada, and turned out to be foreshadowing for last week’s fuel-oil transfer in the other direction. So Downe has a grudge or two to motivate him, and no army to deliver his desired outcome. His preference for Trudeau’s political future is widely shared in the country but he lacks a mechanism for delivering it in real life.

At least Downe has been expressing a clear preference in coherent language. In this he contrasts nicely with Mark Carney. Carney was a successful central-bank governor in two countries, a feat without obvious precedent. But politics is a different line of work. Reading Carney’s interview with the Globe was like watching somebody shake a Ziploc bag full of fridge magnets. In fact I’m pretty sure that when he started talking, he wasn’t planning to deliver any message about party politics.

He’ll “lean in where I can”. He has a list of things he hasn’t ruled out: becoming the next Liberal leader; running for Parliament. Running for Parliament is also on his list of things he hasn’t ruled in. Not ruling things out is, notoriously, not how you actually get into Parliament. I haven’t ruled out becoming a backup dancer for Taylor Swift, and yet I’m not in the new concert film. I checked.

The Army Door Knocker | Pak 35/36 | Anti-Tank Chats

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Tank Museum
Published 14 Jul 2023

In this video, we look at the Pak 35/36, the German Army’s first anti-tank gun. Obsolete by 1941, it picked up the nickname Heeresanklopfgerat – the army door knocker – after its inability to penetrate tank armour. In spite of this, it carried on in service until 1945. Chris Copson talks you through the gun and its history.
(more…)

QotD: The “German Catastrophe”

Filed under: Books, Germany, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger.

Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive.

And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars.

This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers.

These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went.

Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake.

This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went.

Anonymous, “Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs”, Astral Codex Ten, 2023-07-28.

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