Quotulatiousness

March 15, 2024

Woke Shakespeare?

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

Andrew Doyle wonders if even the Bard can survive the incessant assaults of the ultra woke, the new Puritans:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

The puritans had it in for Shakespeare. With the exception of the plague, they were perhaps the most persistent threat to his livelihood. As far as these zealots were concerned, the theatre was a realm of “adulterers, adulteresses, whoremasters, whores, bawds, panders, ruffians, roarers, drunkards, prodigals, cheaters, idle, infamous, base, profane, and godless persons”.

These were the words of the polemicist William Prynne from his Histrio-Mastix (1633). He was eventually to get his way in 1642 when the puritan-led parliament shut the theatres down. When the ban was lifted on the accession of Charles II, older plays had to be dusted off to satisfy the public’s appetite for drama. It was Shakespeare’s work that proved to be the most popular, establishing a trend that has never waned.

Now the bard faces another breed of puritan, more censorial than the last. We are living in conformist times, and inexplicably those in the creative arts have turned out to the be most conformist of all. Nowhere is this more evident than the theatre industry, where wrongthink is outlawed and artistic freedom is sacrificed on the altar of identity politics. Virtually all productions of Shakespeare’s plays I have seen in recent years have been mangled to promote the regressive fashions of our time. Today’s audiences are seeing a vague shadow of these masterworks through a narrow and uninspiring prism.

Even so, many of us are reluctant to give up on the theatre altogether. We tolerate the gender-neutral toilets that nobody asked for, the rainbow lanyards worn by ushers, and the little sermons in the programmes by directors who think their job is to educate the masses. One friend remarked that so long as the preaching only amounts to 20% of the show’s content, he is willing to accept it. I suppose it’s like going for dinner in an especially pious household, and having to put up with a long-winded prayer before a delicious meal.

Theatregoers might have a better experience if they opt for productions of plays written many years before this new state religion took hold. Shakespeare, as a playwright who has never been bettered, is surely the safest choice. In his work we find ourselves unmolested by ideology. We know nothing of Shakespeare’s opinions on matters of politics or religion, and attempting to glean any suggestions from his works is futile. I think A. L. Rowse put it best when he pointed out that Shakespeare “saw through everybody equally”. Neither prince nor pauper escapes his sceptical gaze.

Peter Turchin’s notion of the “overproduction of elites”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Severian is on a mini-vacation at the moment, but still managed to find time to share some thoughts about Turchin’s “overproduction of elites”:

University graduation – a large crowd of students at a graduation ceremony in Ottawa, Ontario. This was the thumbnail image used on the “Elite overproduction” Wikimedia page, which seemed quite appropriate.
Photo by Faustin Tuyambaze via Wikimedia Commons.

Let us consider “the overproduction of elites”. Those who love Peter Turchin’s work love this phrase, as it finally gives a name to a phenomenon we’ve all noticed: The creation, promotion, and indeed valorization of what would more properly be called social barnacles — they don’t move, can’t change, and eventually bring whatever they infest to a complete halt. Those who dislike his work often haven’t read it, so they object to the use of the word “elite” — again, these are social barnacles; what’s elite about them?

Which is precisely Turchin’s point — “elite” is a descriptor of their lifestyle, and most importantly their self-image; it is almost perfectly opposed to their actual utility. The modern Ed Biz is set up to do little else but produce these (pseudo) elites, and therefore a kind of Say’s Law takes hold. Say’s Law, you’ll recall, is vulgarly summarized as “Supply creates its own demand,” and that’s what we see with the (pseudo) elites churned out by every college in the land — they expect, indeed they demand, “jobs” commensurate with their “education”, and thus make-work “jobs” in the Apparat are brought into being.

They take out massive student loans to get the “jobs”; they “work” the “jobs” to service the debt, and so on.

But that’s true of most “white-collar” “jobs” these days. What separates the “elites”, in Turchin’s usage, from the rest of them is not their utility, or lack thereof — the economy, such as it is, would function just as well (or not) with far fewer lawyers, accountants, insurance adjusters, and so on. The difference, comrades, is what we must call Revolutionary Class Consciousness, stealing nationalizing socializing liberating a phrase from Lenin.

An accountant, I’d wager, views his work as a technical specialty. They’re “rude mechanicals” (that’s Shakespeare, darlin’; evidently Mr. Ringo is an educated man). Maybe not so “rude” — accountants make good scratch; they’re middle to upper-middle class, economically — but basically technicians. Accounting is a highly-trained, well-compensated job, but that’s all it is: A job. Accounting is what an accountant does; it’s not what an accountant IS. Contrast that to the overproduced “elites”, in Turchin’s sense, and you see what Turchin’s sense really means: An “elite” really IS his job title.

Note the shift: His job title. As we all know, so many of the overproduced “elite” do no meaningful work. How could they? We could easily do this for most any “job” in the Apparat, but one example will suffice. Consider “Journalist”. Formerly called “Reporter”, and back then it required some actual productive output. Some “shoe leather”, as the phrase was. To find out what they were up to at City Hall, you actually had to physically go down to City Hall and follow the Mayor around. These days — the days when Reporters are now Journalists — it’s just stenography. And not even real stenography, Claudine Gay-style stenography — the Mayor’s press secretary (who probably went to college with you) emails you a press release; you change a word or two and then reprint it, basically verbatim, under your byline.

A monkey could be trained to do it. Hell, a chatbot could be trained to do it, and that’s probably a good quick-and-dirty definition of a Turchin-style overproduced “elite”: If whatever “work” he does could easily be replaced by a chatbot, with no appreciable drop-off in either productivity or quality. Because that’s the key to understanding these people: They know damn good and well, at some almost-but-not-quite conscious level, that they’re social barnacles. That is the “base” upon which the “superstructure” — again stealing terms from Onkel Karl — of their Revolutionary Class Consciousness is built.

March 5, 2024

Our “transnational” “elites” naturally hate anything smacking of populism

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Niccolo Soldo’s weekend post discussed some of the reasons western “elites” treat anything that can remotely be considered “populist” as if it were outright armed revolution in the streets:

For around 15 years now, the British have elected Conservatives to govern them, with anti-immigration sentiment the key driver in their choice of parties to rule. #Brexit was powered to victory by this same sentiment.

Instead of getting what they wanted, immigration in the UK has continually increased under each and every Tory Prime Minister. Last week, the ruling Conservatives managed to put out two messages on this same issue:

  1. Putin has “weaponized migration” to harm Europe, including the UK
  2. The massive spike in immigration that the UK has experienced since #Brexit was “unintentional” on the part of the Tories

Throughout the West, citizens are becoming increasingly suspicious of liberal democracy because they realize that no matter who they vote for, they always end up getting the same policies to them (yes, this is a gross generalization … please forgive me). It’s not just that people feel that their interests are not being represented by their elected representatives, but that their ruling elites are becoming increasingly distanced from the people that they purport to represent. The sentiment is growing that we are ruled by managers, and that we, the people, really do not have a say in anything.

For those of us who grew up in the West, democracy is part of our DNA. We live and work under the assumption that government rules on behalf of us, the people, and not lord over us, the peons. All of us now realize that the latter is much more true than the former, which is why you choose to read people like me. Very few of us feel that we have the ability to affect the decisions that impact us on a daily basis and that will direct our futures, and the futures of our families. We all have a stake in our respective societies, but feel powerless to do anything about our present situation.

He then linked to this article by Frank Furedi:

Since the turn of the 21st century populism has emerged as a medium through which the Western Elites recycle their worst fears. In the mainstream media populism serves as a signifier of a dark, potentially dangerous force that undermine the stable political institutions that were carefully nurtured in the post-Second World War Era. That is why terms like extreme, far-right, authoritarian, xenophobic and even fascist are often coupled with the word populist. The semantic strategy for framing populism as the antithesis of democratic and liberal norms is to create a moral distance between it and the rest of society.

The representation of populism as a moral disease is frequently communicated through a hysterical narrative about the scale of the threat it represents. Populism is sometimes medicalised as a virus. The growth of a political movement designated as populist is sometimes likened to an infection. Its growth is described as an epidemic by some of its opponents. “The next epidemic: resurgent populism” warns one analyst. “Populism, racism and xenophobia have infected Europe” asserts a writer in Euractiv. One American academic writes of “Populism as a Cultural Virus”. An essay on the Spanish political party Vox is titled, “A Political Virus? VOX’s Populist Discourse in Timed of Crisis”. A Facebook Post of the Young European Federalist stated that “The virus of populism, racism, xenophobia has affected Europe”.

Otto English, a commentator in Politico wrote hopefully that “Coronavirus’ next victim” would be “Populism”. Others were more circumspect and reported that “Covid-19 has not killed Global Populism”.

The use of a medicalised narrative that diagnosed populism as a form of moral pathology is reminiscent of the use of crowd psychology in the 19th century to de-legitimate the democratic aspiration of the people. The demonisation of the masses in the 19th century anticipates the contemporary pathologisation of populism. Crowd psychologists such as Gustave Le Bon wrote off the people as a mass of irrationality and delusion. Then and now the medicalisation of public life expressed an elite’s hatred of those members of their “social inferiors” who dared to challenge their power.

In recent years optimistic predictions about the demise of populism runs in parallel about doom laden accounts of the threat posed by this supposedly dangerous political force. “Has Europe reached peak populism?” asked Paul Taylor in Politico before hopefully noting that the “tide may have turned against nationalist right”. In recent months such hopes have turned into despair as it becomes evident to all that movements labelled as populist are in ascendant. The June elections to the European Parliament are likely to see a substantial increase in the number of parliamentarians affiliated to populist parties. It is unlikely that the dehumanising language of virology is going to do much to discredit the forward movement of populism.

Anti-populist sentiments are particularly prevalent among the oligarchy that runs the European Union. They refuse to regard populist parties as legitimate political opponents. Instead, they treat them as enemies rather than political opponents, The EU financially supports projects designed to curb the epidemic of populism. One such project titled, “Countering the populist threat: policy recommendations and educational tools” is justified on the ground that “populist sentiments and politics are spreading across Europe, dividing society into ‘Us’ and ‘Them’. It describes itself as an ‘An EU-funded project’, which ‘addresses this challenge, thereby ensuring stability of liberal democracies'”.

February 23, 2024

“Why are the climate fanatics all so posh? The Just Stop Oil activists are always called Cressida or Amy Rugg-Easey or Indigo Rumbelow”

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

Julie Burchill on the wealthy and well-connected eco-loons in organizations like “Just Stop Oil” and other performative nuisances:

“Just Stop Oil Activists Walking Up Whitehall” by Alisdare Hickson is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

[Cressida] Gethin is a 22-year-old music student who, among other things, clambered on to a gantry over the M25 in 2022. In doing so, she ruined the trips of 4,000 airline passengers. Whether swinging from gantries or attempting to destroy great art, these young people have the air of never having heard the word “No”.

Why are the climate fanatics all so posh? The Just Stop Oil activists are always called Cressida or Amy Rugg-Easey or Indigo Rumbelow. (Rumbelow has inspired an amusing Twitter game called Find Your Silly Posh Girl Name “by combining a colour with a defunct shop”.) In this, JSO is simply carrying on the glorious tradition of Extinction Rebellion, the leading lights of which had such names as Robin Ellis-Cockcroft and Robin Boardman-Pattinson.

Infamously, Boardman-Pattinson opined in 2019 that “air travel should only be used in emergencies”, despite having been on a number of skiing trips that very year, which he had foolishly posted on social media. It’s no wonder Cressida Gethin picked on desperate sun-seekers to make her point. Like the dowager countess in Downton Abbey who once asked, “What is a weekend?”, posh people who do nothing find it hard to understand what a holiday means to ordinary folk.

Like aristocrats down the ages, these posh clowns get together and breed new generations of clowns. Trans activist Riz Possnett, who glued her hands to the floor of the Oxford Union to protest against feminist Kathleen Stock last year, is the daughter of Extinction Rebellion activist Robert Posnett. He has been arrested several times for making a nuisance of himself. He once glued himself to a Brexit Party bus. The bananas don’t fall far from the tree in this family’s case.

Posnett was once a member of a “band” called Working Class Broccoli, even though her father is a wealthy businessman and her mother is the chief executive of South Cambridgeshire district council. They live in a five-bedroomed house, complete with a swimming pool, in a Suffolk village. Who could blame Tory MP Sir John Hayes, chairman of the Common Sense Group, for opining to the Telegraph that Riz had “gone off the rails” because she hailed from a “deranged bourgeois liberal family, blinded by privilege”?

The privileged have always been drawn to ecological concerns – as I wrote of King Charles many moons ago: “It’s easy for the rich to be Friends of the Earth – it’s always been a good friend to them.” Environmentalism gives our rulers a new way to corral and control hoi polloi now that the old ways of pushing us around are deemed unprogressive.

It is striking that only white people of a certain class and level of over-education enjoy making commuters’ lives a misery. And it is heartening that the people pleading with them to get out of the way are of every colour, creed and class imaginable. Think of the rousing attempts by a crowd to pull a pair of XR clowns from the roof of a rush-hour commuter train (electric!) in Canning Town back in 2019. Or take the summer of 2023, when Stratford schoolchildren were seen remonstrating with Just Stop Oil for making them late to lessons, in some cases ripping protesters’ banners from their hands.

A hastily deleted tweet by XR, comparing its activists to Rosa Parks, probably wasn’t the cleverest move. Not least as every climate-change protest is so overwhelmingly white that it makes the Lib Dem party conference look like the Notting Hill Carnival.

November 20, 2023

“[W]hen low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie”

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

Rob Henderson explains some of the reasons smart people can believe dumb ideas:

Many have discovered an argument hack. They don’t need to argue that something is false. They just need to show that it’s associated with low status. The converse is also true: You don’t need to argue that something is true. You just need to show that it’s associated with high status. And when low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie.

In the 1980s, the psychologists Richard E. Petty and John T. Cacioppo developed the “Elaboration Likelihood Model” to describe how persuasion works. “Elaboration” here means the extent to which a person carefully thinks about the information. When people’s motivation and ability to engage in careful thinking is present, the “elaboration likelihood” is high. This means people are likely to pay attention to the relevant information and draw conclusions based on the merits of the arguments or the message. When elaboration likelihood is high, a person is willing to expend their cognitive resources to update their views.

Two paths to persuasion

The idea is that there are two paths, or two “routes”, to persuading others. The first type, termed the “central” route, comes from careful and thoughtful consideration of the messages we hear. When the central route is engaged, we actively evaluate the information presented, and try to discern whether or not it’s true.

When the “peripheral” route is engaged, we pay more attention to cues apart from the actual information or content or the message. For example, we might evaluate someone’s argument based on how attractive they are or where they were educated, without considering the actual merits of their message.

When we accept a message through the peripheral route, we tend to be more passive than when we accept a message through the central route. Unfortunately, the peripheral route is more prevalent because we are exposed to an increasingly large amount of information.

The renowned psychologists Susan Fiske and Shelley Taylor have characterized humans as “cognitive misers”. They write, “People are limited in their capacity to process information, so they take shortcuts whenever they can”.

We are lazy creatures who try to expend as little mental energy as possible.

And people are typically less motivated to scrutinize a message if the source is considered to be an expert. We interpret the message through the peripheral route.

This is one reason why media outlets often appoint experts who mirror their political values. These experts lend credibility to the views the outlet espouses. Interestingly, though, expertise appears to influence persuasion only if the individual is identified as an expert before they communicate their message. Research has found that when a person is told the source is an expert after listening to the message, this new information does not increase the person’s likelihood of believing the message.

It works the other way, too. If a person is told that a source is not an expert before the message, the person tends to be more skeptical of the message. If told the source is not an expert after the message, this has no effect on a person’s likelihood of believing the message.

This suggests that knowing a source is an expert reduces our motivation to engage in central processing. We let our guards down.

As motivation and/or ability to process arguments is decreased, peripheral cues become more important for persuasion. Which might not bode well.

However, when we update our beliefs by weighing the actual merits of an argument (central route), our updated beliefs tend to endure and are more robust against counter-persuasion, compared to when we update our beliefs through peripheral processing. If we come to believe something through careful and thoughtful consideration, that belief is more resilient to change.

This means we can be more easily manipulated through the peripheral route. If we are convinced of something via the peripheral route, a manipulator will be more successful at using the peripheral route once again to alter our initial belief.

November 16, 2023

QotD: Infantry soldiers in the age of pike and shot

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

The pike and the musket shifted the center of warfare away from aristocrats on horses towards aristocrats commanding large bodies of non-aristocratic infantry. But, as comes out quite clearly in their writing, those aristocrats were quite confident that the up-jumped peasants in their infantry lacked any in-born courage at all. Instead, they assumed (in their prejudice) that such soldiers would require relentless synchronized drilling in order to render the complex sequence of actions to reload a musket absolutely mechanical. As Lee points out [in Waging War], this training approach wasn’t necessary – other contemporary societies adapted to gunpowder just fine without it – but was a product of the values and prejudices of the European aristocracy of the 1500 and 1600s.

Such soldiers were, in their ideal, to quickly but mechanically reload their weapons, respond to orders and shift formation more or less oblivious to the battle around them. Indeed, uniforms for these soldiers came to favor high, starched collars precisely to limit their field of vision. This is not the man who, in Tyrtaeus’ words (elsewhere in his corpus), “bites on his lip and stands against the foe” but rather a human who, in the perfect form, was so mechanical in motions and habits that their courage or lack thereof, their awareness of the battlefield or lack thereof, didn’t matter at all. But at least, the [Classical] Greek might think, at least such men still ought not quail under fire but instead stood tall in the face of it.

After all, as late as the Second World War, it was thought that good British officers ought not duck or take cover under fire, in order to demonstrate and model good coolness under fire for their soldiers. The impression I get from talking to recent combat veterans (admittedly, American ones rather than British, since I live in the United States) is that an officer who behaved in that same way on today’s battlefield would be thought reckless (or stupid), not brave. Instead, the modern image of courage under fire is the soldier moving fast, staying low, moving to and through cover whenever possible – recklessness is discouraged precisely because it might put a comrade in danger.

Instead, the courage that is valued in many of today’s armies is the courage to stay calm and make cool, rational decisions. It is, to borrow the first line in Rudyard Kipling’s “If-“, “If you can keep your head when all about you/Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” Which is not at all what was expected of the 17th century infantryman, whose officers trusted him to make nearly no decisions at all! But, as we’ve discussed, the modern system of combat demands that lots of decisions be devolved down further and further in the command hierarchy, with senior officers giving subordinates (often down to NCOs) the freedom to alter plans on the fly at the local level so long as they are following the general mission instructions (a system often referred to by its German term, auftragstaktik).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.

September 19, 2023

For some reason, ordinary Londoners don’t seem to appreciate Mayor Khan’s ULEZ initiatives

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

It’s hard to believe that anyone could possibly want to avoid London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) expansion beyond the initial areas of the city, but a quick search of Twit-, er, I mean “X” shows evidence of what Justin Trudeau might characterize as a “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views”:

Weird, isn’t it. All those “decommissioned” cameras. And people physically blocking access to workers:

London has put up with a lot over the centuries, but Mayor Khan’s ULEZ somehow seems to have awakened the resistance in a major way:

Brian Peckford republished this article from Yudi Sherman on the pushback against London’s ULEZ expansion:

London taxpayers are damaging the city’s surveillance vans in an escalating feud between Mayor Sadiq Khan and the city’s residents.

Last month Khan peppered the city with ultra-low emission zones (ULEZs), areas in London accessible only to low-emission vehicles. Cars that do not meet the city’s environmental standards are charged £12.50 ($16) for entering the ULEZ. Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras positioned around the zones read license plates and check them against the vehicles’ make and model in real time. If a vehicle does not meet the environmental threshold, the fine is levied against the car owner. Failure to pay can lead to fines as high as £258 ($331).

The ULEZ climate mandate has drawn heavy protests from residents, including hunger strikes and refusal to pay fines. Taxpayers have also taken to disabling the ANPR surveillance cameras which Transport for London (TfL), the city’s transportation department, said will be used both for climate and law enforcement.

In response, the city deployed mobile surveillance vans mounted with ANPR cameras across London in the hopes of evading attacks, but the vans are being targeted as well. Some have been spotted covered in graffiti with their tires slashed, while others have been completely covered in tarp, reports the Daily Mail.

The activists are said to belong to a group calling itself the Blade Runners and have promised not to rest until every ULEZ camera is removed or destroyed “no matter what”. The group is being widely cheered by its compatriots, including media personality and political commentator Katie Hopkins. Over 4,000 people have joined a Facebook group to report ULEZ van sightings.

Between April 1st and August 31st, police recorded 351 incidents of destruction to ULEZ cameras and 159 removals, reports Sky News, an average of over 100 a month. Of those incidents, 171 reportedly occurred since August 17th alone, just before the ULEZ mandate officially expanded to include all outer London boroughs. Two individuals have been arrested in connection with the incidents, one of whom was charged.
One reported Blade Runner said, “In terms of damage it’s way more than what [London Mayor Saidq Khan and TfL] have stated.”

September 13, 2023

Why Do People In Old Movies Talk Weird?

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

BrainStuff – HowStuffWorks
Published 25 Nov 2014

It’s not quite British, and it’s not quite American – so what gives? Why do all those actors of yesteryear have such a distinct and strange accent?

If you’ve ever heard old movies or newsreels from the thirties or forties, then you’ve probably heard that weird old-timey voice.

It sounds a little like a blend between American English and a form of British English. So what is this cadence, exactly?

This type of pronunciation is called the Transatlantic, or Mid-Atlantic, accent. And it isn’t like most other accents – instead of naturally evolving, the Transatlantic accent was acquired. This means that people in the United States were taught to speak in this voice. Historically Transatlantic speech was the hallmark of aristocratic America and theatre. In upper-class boarding schools across New England, students learned the Transatlantic accent as an international norm for communication, similar to the way posh British society used Received Pronunciation – essentially, the way the Queen and aristocrats are taught to speak.

It has several quasi-British elements, such a lack of rhoticity. This means that Mid-Atlantic speakers dropped their “r’s” at the end of words like “winner” or “clear”. They’ll also use softer, British vowels – “dahnce” instead of “dance”, for instance. Another thing that stands out is the emphasis on clipped, sharp t’s. In American English we often pronounce the “t” in words like “writer” and “water” as d’s. Transatlantic speakers will hit that T like it stole something. “Writer”. “Water”.

But, again, this speech pattern isn’t completely British, nor completely American. Instead, it’s a form of English that’s hard to place … and that’s part of why Hollywood loved it.

There’s also a theory that technological constraints helped Mid-Atlantic’s popularity. According to Professor Jay O’Berski, this nasally, clipped pronunciation is a vestige from the early days of radio. Receivers had very little bass technology at the time, and it was very difficult – if not impossible – to hear bass tones on your home device. Now we live in an age where bass technology booms from the trunks of cars across America.

So what happened to this accent? Linguist William Labov notes that Mid-Atlantic speech fell out of favor after World War II, as fewer teachers continued teaching the pronunciation to their students. That’s one of the reasons this speech sounds so “old-timey” to us today: when people learn it, they’re usually learning it for acting purposes, rather than for everyday use. However, we can still hear the effects of Mid-Atlantic speech in recordings of everyone from Katherine Hepburn to Franklin D. Roosevelt and, of course, countless films, newsreels and radio shows from the 30s and 40s.
(more…)

September 1, 2023

Grassroots protests continue against London’s expanded ULEZ

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

London mayor Sadiq Khan’s “Ultra Low Emission Zone” expansion is not sitting well with the people who see it as an undemocratic imposition on the poorest Londoners:

Nigel Farage at the ULEZ protests in London, 30 August 2023.
Image from JoNova.

This week many Londoners are waking up to the impact of living in an Ultra Low Emission Zone as the £12.50 daily charge for unfashionable cars begins in the outer poorer suburbs.

Normally “climate change” costs are secretly buried in bills, hidden in rising costs and blamed on “old unreliable coal plants”, inflation or foreign wars. Your electricity bill does not have a category for “subsidies for your neighbors’ solar panels”. But the immense pain of NetZero can’t be disguised.

For a pensioner on £186 a week it could be as much as an £87 a week penalty for driving their car — or £4,500 a year. The Daily Mail is full of stories of livid and dismayed people who served in the Navy or worked fifty years, who can’t afford to look after older frail Aunts or shop in their usual stores now, or who will have to give up their cars. People are talking about the “end of Democracy”. The cameras are expected to bring in £2.5 million a day in ULEZ charges to City Hall. But shops inside the zone may also lose customers, and everyone, with and without cars will have to pay more for tradespeople and deliveries to cover the cost of their new car or Ulez fee.

Protests have reached a new level of anger and hooded vigilantes in masks carry long gardening clippers, or spray cans and lasers to disable cameras that record number plates for Ulez. In one photo the whole metal camera pole has been sheared by an electric saw of some sort. There chaos.

Interactive maps have sprung up to report where the cameras are, and help people “plan their trips”. The vigilante group called Blade Runners have vowed to remove or disable every ULEZ camera in London. Nearly nine out of ten cameras have been vandalized in South-east London.

The Transport for London website was overwhelmed with searches from people wondering if their car was compliant and they would have to pay just to drive on the roads their taxes and fees built. Some people have bought old historic cars to get around the fee, but apparently a lot of people hadn’t thought much about what was coming. Sadiq Khan probably didn’t mention this in his election campaign. Presumably there are others in London who will get a nasty surprise bill in the mail.

As Nigel Farage says: “I’ve never seen people so angry about this new tax on working people. “And people are not just furious at Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, they’re angry at the Prime Minister and the Conservatives for not stopping the scheme.

August 17, 2023

QotD: The decline of the British aristocracy

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

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there. One of the dominant facts in English life during the past three quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class.

In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the speed of a chemical reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was in the mid-nineteenth century. After 1832 the old landowning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy ship-owner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus. And considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and considering that they were buying their way into a class which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one might have expected that able rulers could be produced in some such way.

And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden or Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air. The mishandling of England’s domestic problems during the nineteen-twenties had been bad enough, but British foreign policy between 1931 and 1939 is one of the wonders of the world. Why? What had happened? What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an instinct?

The underlying fact was that the whole position of the monied class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large ones robbed more and more of the monied class of their function and turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the “idle rich”, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

August 8, 2023

QotD: The British imperial educational “system”

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

The history of “education”, of the university system, whatever you want to call it, is long and complicated and fascinating, but not really germane. Like all human institutions, “educational” ones grew organically around what were originally very different foundations, the way coral reefs form around shipwrecks. Oversimplifying for clarity: back in the day, “schools” were supposed to handle education […] while universities were for training. That being the case, very few who attended universities emerged with degrees — a man got what training he needed for his future career, and unless that future career was “senior churchman”, the full Bachelor of Arts route was pretty much pointless.

(At the risk of straying too far afield, let’s briefly note that “senior churchman” was a common, indeed almost traditional, career path for the spare sons of the aristocracy. Well into the 18th century, every titled parent’s goal was “an heir and a spare”, with the heir destined for the title and castle and the spare earmarked for the church … but not, of course, as some humble parish priest. It was pretty common for bishops or abbots, and sometimes even cardinals, to be ordained on the day they took over their bishoprics. See, for example, Cesare Borgia. Meanwhile the illiterate, superstitious, brutish parish priest was a figure of satire throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance. A guy like Thomas Wolsey was hated, in no small part, precisely because he was a commoner who leveraged his formal education into a senior church gig, taking a bunch of plum positions away from the aristocracy’s spare sons in the process).

That being the case — that schools were for education, universities for training — the fascinating spectacle of some 18 year old fop fresh out of Eton being sent to govern the Punjab makes a lot more sense. His character, formed by his education (in our sense), was considered sufficient; he’d pick up such technical training as he needed on the job … or employ trained technicians to do it for him. So too, of course, with the army, and the more you know about the British Army before the 20th century, the more you’re amazed that they managed to win anything, much less an empire — the heir’s spare’s spare traditionally went into the army, buying his commission outright, which meant that quite senior commands could, and often did, go to snotnosed teenagers who didn’t know their left flank from their right.

Alas, governments back in the days were severely under-bureaucratized, meaning that the aristocracy lacked sufficient spares to fill all the technician roles the heirs required in a rapidly urbanizing, globalizing world… which meant that talented commoners had to be employed to fill the gaps. See e.g. Wolsey, above. The problem with that, though, is that you can’t have some dirty-arsed commoner, however skilled, wiping his nose on his sleeve while in the presence of His Lordship, so universities took on a socializing function. And so (again, grossly oversimplifying for clarity) the “bachelor of arts” was born, meaning “a technician with the social savvy to work closely with his betters”. A good example is Thomas Hobbes, whose official job title in the Earl of Devonshire’s household was “tutor”, but whose function was basically “intellectual technician” — he was a kind of man-of-all-work for anything white collar …

At that point, if there had been a “system” of any kind, what the system’s designers should’ve done is set up finishing schools. The “universities” of Oxford, Cambridge, etc. are made up of various “colleges” anyway, each with their own rules and traditions and house colors and all that Harry Potter shit. Their Lordships should’ve gotten together and endowed another college for the sole purpose of knocking manners into ambitious commoners on the make (Wolsey might actually have had something like this in mind with Cardinal College … alas).

But they didn’t, and so the professors at the traditional colleges were forced into a role for which they were not designed, and unqualified. That tends to happen a lot — have you noticed? It actually happened to them twice, once with the need for technicians-with-manners became apparent, and then again when the realization dawned — as it did by the 1700s, if not earlier — that some subjects, like chemistry, require not just technicians and technician-trainers, but researchers. Hard to blame the “system” for this, since of course there is no “system”, but also because such a thing would be ruinously expensive.

Hence by the time an actual system came into being — in Prussia, around 1800 — the professors awkwardly inhabited the three roles we started with. The Professor of Chemistry, say, was supposed to conduct research while training technicians-with-manners. As with the pre-machinegun British army, the astounding thing is that they managed to pull it off at all, much less to such consistently high quality. They were real men back then …

Severian, “Education Reform”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-17.

August 5, 2023

In the “New World Order”, China was expected to become more democratic. Instead, the west is rapidly becoming more like China

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

N.S. Lyons discusses the unhappy convergence of Communist China with the post-democratic western world, led by the United States:

Differences and tensions between the United States and China have never been greater. The whole world is dividing itself between the blocs of these two opposing superpowers. A new Cold War is dawning, complete with a global ideological “battle between democracy and autocracy“. Freedom is on the line. The future of global governance will be determined by the winner of this extended competition between two fundamentally opposed political and economic systems – unless a hot war settles the question early with a cataclysmic fight to the death, much as liberal democracy once fought off fascism.

This is the simple and easy narrative of our present moment. In some ways it is accurate: a geopolitical competition really is in the process of boiling over into open confrontation. But it’s also fundamentally shallow and misleading: when it comes to the most fundamental political questions, China and the United States are not diverging but converging to become more alike.

In fact, I can already predict and describe the winner set to prevail in this epochal competition between these two fiercely opposed national systems. In this soon-to-be triumphant system …

Despite a rhetorical commitment to egalitarianism and “democracy”, the elite class deeply distrusts and fears the people over whom it rules. These elites have concentrated themselves into a separate oligarchic political body focused on prioritizing and preserving their rule and their own overlapping set of shared interests. Wracked by anxiety, they strive constantly to maximize their control over the masses, rationalizing a need to forcefully maintain stability in the face of dangerous threats, foreign and domestic. Everything is treated as an emergency. “Safety” and “security” have become be the watchwords of the state, and of society generally.

This elite obsession with control is accelerated by a belief in “scientific management”, or the ability to understand, organize, and run all the complex systems of society like a machine, through scientific principles and technologies. The expert knowledge of how to do so is considered the unique and proprietary possession of the elite vanguard. Ideologically, this elite is deeply materialist, and openly hostile to organized religion, which inhibits and resists state control. They view human beings themselves as machines to be programmed, and, believing the common man to be an unpredictable creature too stupid, irrational, and violent to rule himself, they endeavor to steadily condition and replace him with a better model through engineering, whether social or biological. Complex systems of surveillance, propaganda, and coercion are implemented to help firmly nudge (or shove) the common man into line. Communities and cultural traditions that resist this project are dismantled. Harmfully contrary ideas are systematically censored, lest they lead to dangerous exposure. Governing power has been steadily elevated, centralized, and distributed to a technocratic bureaucracy unconstrained by any accountability to the public.

All of this is justified by a utopian ideological dialectic of historical progress and inevitability. Those more in tune with the tide of history (i.e. elite interests) are held to be morally and intellectually superior, as a class, to backwards reactionary elements. Only certain views are stamped “scientific” and “correct,” although these may change on a political whim. An economism that values only the easily quantifiable reigns as the only moral lodestar, and frictionless efficiency is held up as highest common good; the individual is encouraged to fulfill his assigned role as a docile consumer and cog in the regime’s machine, not that of a self-governing citizen. The state regularly acts to stimulate and manage consumer demand, and to strategically regulate and guide industrial production, and the corporate sector has largely fused itself with the state. Cronyism is rampant.

The relentless political messaging and ideological narrative has come to suffuse every sphere of life, and dissent is policed. Culture is largely stagnant. Uprooted, corralled, and hounded, the people are atomized, and social trust is very low. Reality itself often feels obscured and uncertain. Demoralized, some gratefully accept any security offered by the state as a blessing. At the same time, many citizens automatically assume everything the regime says is a lie. Officialdom in general is a Kafkaesque tragi-comedy of the absurd, something only to be stoically endured by normal people. Yet year by year the pressure to conform only continues to be ratcheted higher…

Which country does this describe? If you can’t quite tell, well, that’s the point. For many citizens of the West, the systems of governance under which we live increasingly feel uncomfortably similar to what appears offer in the People’s Republic of China.

July 12, 2023

“[E]lite colleges are machines for laundering privilege”

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

Scott Alexander ponders the reasons our elite universities operate as they do:

Harvard University Memorial Church.
Photo by Crimson400 via Wikimedia Commons.

We could think of “the best college” as a self-fulfilling prophecy; for whatever reason, one college has gotten a reputation as the one whose signal is most valuable. Everyone naturally tries to get in there; if they fail, they go to the college with the next-best reputation, and so on. The system is stable; the “best” college will keep its reputation (since it gets the best students) and the best students will always want to go to the best college. If, as Matt’s son suggests, all the Ivies started accepting the worst students instead, an Ivy degree would soon become a signal that you’re bad, and employers would stop respecting it.

I heard a fascinating variation of this hypothesis from Matt Christman of Chapo Trap House: elite colleges are machines for laundering privilege.

That is: Harvard accepts (let’s say) 75% smart/talented people, and 25% rich/powerful people. This is a good deal for both sides. The smart people get to network with elites, which is the first step to becoming elite themselves. And the rich people get mixed in so thoroughly with a pool of smart/talented people that everyone assumes they must be smart/talented themselves. After all, they have a degree from Harvard!

The most blatant form of this obfuscation: suppose you own a very successful family business. You can leave your son your fortune, you can leave him the business, you can leave him your mansion, but you can’t (directly) leave him an aura of having deserved all these things. What you can do is make a $10 million donation to Harvard in exchange for them accepting your son. Your son gets a Harvard degree, a universally-recognized sign of being a highly meritorious person. Then when you leave him the business, everyone will agree he deserves it. Who said anything about nepotism? Leaving a Harvard graduate in control of your business is an excellent decision!

This happens a little, but I think it mostly isn’t this obvious. More often the transactions are for abstract goods: prestige, associations, favors. The Maharaja of Whereverstan sends his daughter to Harvard so that she appears meritorious. In exchange, Harvard gets the credibility boost of being the place the Maharaja of Whereverstan sent his daughter. And Harvard’s other students get the advantage of networking with the Princess Of Whereverstan. Twenty years later, when one of them is an oil executive and Whereverstan is handing out oil contracts, she puts in a word with her old college buddy the Princess and gets the deal. It’s obvious what the oil executive has gotten out of this, but what does the Princess get? I think she gets the right to say she went to Harvard, an honor which is known to go mostly to the meritorious.

People ask why Harvard admissions can still be bribed or influenced by the rich or well-connected. This is the wrong question: the right question is why they ever give spots based on merit at all. The answer is: otherwise the scheme wouldn’t work. The point of a money-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty money, then mix them together so thoroughly that nobody can tell which is which. Likewise, the point of a privilege-laundering operation is to take in both fairly-earned and dirty privilege, then stamp both with a Harvard degree. “Fairly-earned privilege” means all the brilliant talented ambitious youngsters admitted on the basis of their SAT scores and grades and impressive accomplishments; “dirty privilege” means the kids of various old-money aristocrats, foreign potentates, and ordinary super-rich people. Colleges mix them together, with advantages for both groups.

Is this good or bad? It’s good insofar as it provides a justification for making some elite positions dependent on merit and accessible to anyone, but bad insofar as it helps defend and obfuscate the ones that aren’t. It’s good if you think it’s good for all the elites (meritocratic and otherwise) to know each other and be on the same page; it’s bad if you don’t want them to be (maybe because it helps them oppress people more efficiently).

I expect that without such a system the elites would do their own thing without any concession to merit whatsoever – so maybe it beats the alternative.

June 27, 2023

“People’s patience in the face of the daily elitist provocations of Just Stop Oil is nothing short of Herculean”

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

The virtue-signalling lunatics of the various Extinction Rebellion sub-groups depend far more than they realize on the patience and tolerance of ordinary Britons who are just trying to get on with their daily lives. Wealthy, highly educated, privileged scions of the well-connected may very quickly learn that the well of tolerance they’re drawing from can run dry extremely quickly. Brendan O’Neill says even some of the movers and shakers of the donor class are starting realize the dangers their protest foot soldiers are running:

“Just Stop Oil Courtauld Gallery 30062022” by Just Stop Oil is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

So even one of Just Stop Oil’s wealthy donors is tiring of its classist stunts. Trevor Neilson, a co-founder of the Climate Emergency Fund, which has pumped money into Just Stop Oil, says the eco-irritants’ funereal, road-blocking marches for Mother Earth increasingly come off as “disruption for the sake of disruption“. You have “working people that are trying to get to their job, get their kid dropped off at school [and] survive a brutal cost-of-living crisis”, he says, and then along comes a “pink-haired, tattooed and pierced protester standing in front of their car”. It pisses people off, he said.

He’s not wrong. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that Just Stop Oil, and its mother movement Extinction Rebellion, is riling the workers of Britain. Imagine you’re trying to get to work to earn a crust in tough times and up pops a privately educated, possibly non-binary loon with multi-coloured hair to tell you in a voice breaking with juvenile emotion that Judgement Day is coming. The fainthearts of the liberal media are always aghast when an angry scaffolder or stressed trucker drags one of the green hysterics off the road, but I’m blown away by the restraint of the British public. People’s patience in the face of the daily elitist provocations of Just Stop Oil is nothing short of Herculean.

It is “counterproductive”, says Mr Neilson, to have pink-haired sons and daughters of privilege inconveniencing workers during a “brutal” economic downturn. Again, he’s not wrong. The class-war streak in eco-activism is undeniable. Many Extinction Rebellion types are descendants of money. Writer Harry Mount calls them “Econians”, a green twist on “Etonians”. They’re the “public-school boys and girls who rule the wokerati world”. A survey of 6,000 XR activists who brought London to a halt in April 2019 found they were “overwhelmingly middle-class [and] highly educated”. Anyone who walked through London that month will have heard “Cut carbon emissions!” being cried in cut-glass tones and understood right away that our great city was under siege by vengeful aristocrats still smarting from the Industrial Revolution.

June 25, 2023

Workers will be forced to stop working to salve the consciences of university-educated elite wankers

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Brendan O’Neill on the Climate Goblin’s latest stunt in Sweden:

Picture the daughter of an opera singer preventing working-class men from doing their jobs. A young woman so well-connected that she probably has presidents on speed-dial physically blocking truck drivers from doing what they do. A child of privilege gathering with her similarly comfortable pals to stop working people from working.

Well, shorn of all the fact-lite bluster about “saving the planet”, that’s exactly what Greta Thunberg’s latest eco-stunt adds up to. The pint-sized prophetess of doom is back in the headlines. This time for getting arrested in Malmo harbour in Sweden, where she and other members of the End is Nigh cult have been holding a sit-down protest to stop oil tankers from leaving and delivering their life-giving cargo to the good people of Sweden and beyond.

The photographs from this temper tantrum disguised as a political protest tell a fascinating tale of the classism and narcissism in green politics. In the middle of the road are the smug-looking youths. One has green hair. Others sport beanie hats. None has ever driven a truck, clearly. Their banners speak of defending Earth from man’s evil burning of the toxic sludge of oil. And in the background are the supposed agents of this evil – the truckers; working men idly standing by their tankers while the world’s media get shots of Greta looking sad for Gaia.

What an apt snapshot of the hierarchy of virtue in what passes for radical politics today. Working-class people reduced to background actors, non-player characters, in a drama feverishly focussed on the jumped-up angst of the privileged. Working men as mere backdrop to the eco-neuroses of the comfortably off. In the moral universe fashioned by eco-influencers and their legion fawners in the political and media elites, the irrational fears of the upper-middle class carry more weight than the living standards of the working class.

It’s a story we see repeated across every act of eco-agitation today. In the UK, the plummy activists of Just Stop Oil, all called Poppy or Edred, block roads and prevent builders, scaffolders, deliverymen, mums and others from carrying out their essential work. The fightback of working men against this imperious imposition on their right to earn a living – witness scaffolders pushing eco-irritants out of the road – has been heartening to see. As a worker at Smithfield meat market in London put it a few years back when Extinction Rebellion types stormed in to speak up for animal rights or something, why should I allow this “happy-clappy mob” to stop me from being “able to pay my bills”?

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