Quotulatiousness

December 3, 2022

The end of the old “WASP” upper class

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

Scott Alexander is reading Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks and summarized the first sixth of the book:

The daring thesis: a 1950s change in Harvard admissions policy destroyed one American aristocracy and created another. Everything else is downstream of the aristocracy, so this changed the whole character of the US.

The pre-1950s aristocracy went by various names; the Episcopacy, the Old Establishment, Boston Brahmins. David Brooks calls them WASPs, which is evocative but ambiguous. He doesn’t just mean Americans who happen to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant — there are tens of millions of those! He means old-money blue-blooded Great-Gatsby-villain WASPs who live in Connecticut, go sailing, play lacrosse, belong to country clubs, and have names like Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III. Everyone in their family has gone to Yale for eight generations; if someone in the ninth generation got rejected, the family patriarch would invite the Chancellor of Yale to a nice game of golf and mention it in a very subtle way, and the Chancellor would very subtly apologize and say that of course a Newbury-Broxham must go to Yale, and whoever is responsible shall be very subtly fired forthwith.

The old-money WASPs were mostly descendants of people who made their fortunes in colonial times (or at worst the 1800s); they were a merchant aristocracy. As the descendants of merchants, they acted as standard-bearers for the bourgeois virtues: punctuality, hard work, self-sufficiency, rationality, pragmatism, conformity, ruthlessness, whatever made your factory out-earn its competitors.

By the 1950s they were several generations removed from any actual hustling entrepreneur. Still, at their best the seed ran strong and they continued to embody some of these principles. Brooks tentatively admires the WASP aristocracy for their ethos of noblesse oblige — many become competent administrators, politicians, and generals. George H. W. Bush, scion of a rich WASP family, served with distinction in World War II — the modern equivalent would be Bill Gates’ or Charles Koch’s kids volunteering as front-line troops in Afghanistan.

At their worst, they mostly held ultra-expensive parties, drifted into alcoholism, and participated in endless “my money is older than your money” dick-measuring contests. And they were jocks — certainly good at lacrosse and crew, but their kids would be much less likely than modern elites’ to become a scientist, professor, doctor, or lawyer. Not only that, they were boring jocks — they stuck to a few standard rich people hobbies (yachting, horseback riding) and distrusted creativity or (God forbid) quirkiness. Their career choices were limited to the family business (probably a boring factory with a name like Newbury-Broxham Goods), becoming a competent civil service administrator, or other things along those lines.

The heart of the WASP aristocracy was the Ivy League. I don’t think there are good statistics, but until the early 1900s many (most?) Ivy League students were WASP aristocrats from a few well-known families. Around 1920 the Jews started doing really well on standardized tests, and the Ivies suspended standardized tests in favor of “holistic admissions” to keep them out and preserve the WASPishness of the elite. All the sons (and later, daughters) of the WASPs met each other in college, played lacrosse together, and forged the sort of bonds that make a well-connected and self-aware aristocracy.

Around 1955 (Brooks writes, building on an earlier book by Nicholas Lemann) Harvard changed their admission policy. Why? Partly a personal decision by Harvard presidents James Conant, and Nathan Pusey, who sincerely believed in meritocracy. And partly because Harvard’s Jewish quota was becoming unpopular, as increased awareness of the Holocaust made anti-Semitism déclassé. Conant and Pusey decided to admit based on academic merit (measured mostly by SAT scores). The thing where Harvard would always admit WASP aristocrats because that was the whole point of Harvard was relegated to occasional “legacy admissions”, a new term for something which was now the exception and not the rule. Other Ivies quickly followed.

Brooks on the consequences:

    In 1952, most freshmen at Harvard were products of … the prep schools of New England (Andover and Exeter alone contributed 10% of the class), the East side of Manhattan, the Main Line of Philadelphia, Shaker Heights in Ohio, the Gold Coast of Chicago, Grosse Pointe of Detroit, Nob Hill in San Francisco, and so on. Two-thirds of all applicants were admitted. Applicants whose fathers had gone to Harvard had a 90% admission rate. The average verbal SAT score for the incoming men was 583, good but not stratospheric. The average score across the Ivy League was closer to 500 at the time.

    Then came the change. By 1960 the average verbal SAT score for incoming freshman at Harvard was 678, and the math score was 695 — these are stratospheric scores. The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10% of the Harvard freshman class of 1960. Moreover, the 1960 class was drawn from a much wider socioeconomic pool. Smart kids from Queens or Iowa or California, who wouldn’t have thought of applying to Harvard a decade earlier, were applying and getting accepted … and this transformation was replicated in almost all elite schools. At Princeton in 1962, for example, only 10 members of the 62-man football team had attended private prep schools. Three decades earlier every member of the Princeton team was a prep school boy.

There was a one-or-two generation interregnum where the new meritocrats silently battled the old WASP aristocracy. This wasn’t a political or economic battle; as a war to occupy the highest position in the class hierarchy, it could only be won through cultural prestige. What was cool? What was out of bounds? What would get printed in the New York Times — previously the WASP aristocracy’s mouthpiece, but now increasingly infiltrated by the more educated newcomers?

November 29, 2022

In a dangerous and insecure world, the EU appears to feel that the greatest enemy is on the other side of the Atlantic

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

CDR Salamander on how the EU’s movers and shakers (i.e., mostly not democratically elected leaders) seem to have decided that their one true enemy is the United States:

If you are an American who lived on the European Continent, specifically Western Europe, you’re very familiar with an exceptionally sharp strain of anti-Americanism that resides in a significant percentage of their ruling elite – an adult version of the middle school mean girls. Though present in all nations to one degree to another, it is especially acute in Germany and France for slightly different reasons but are all working towards the same goal; degrade American influence in Europe.

The best way for this political and corporate anti-Americanism to find a lever of power is through the the trans-national and anti-democratic modern iteration of the European Union – made even more problematic with the departure of Great Britain who once played a balancing role between the Continental powers as she has for centuries.

Why primarily France and Germany? To start with, this is part of the sibling rivalry between the children of Charlemagne for primacy in Europe that has churned Europe over the last thousand years. The Anglo-Saxons on both sides of the Atlantic kept getting in the way of their return to the struggle.

Their armies under various blood-soaked leaders moved across Iberia to Moscow and back for centuries in order to be THE driver of power in influence on the continent. The European Union, once the “trade association” nose was in the tent, is now seen – fairly – as a mechanism to centralize power so The Smartest People in the Room™ no longer have pesky minor powers and – Buddha forgive – voters getting in their way. Without checks, power only seeks more power for itself. The morphing of the EU is just the latest example.

Not unlike their American counterparts who would like the USA to extract itself from foreign entanglements (NB: as I have written through the years, I am sympathetic/supportive of these efforts), many of the strongest proponents of the EU just want the USA to go home.

The Europeans, while benefiting from the WWII/Cold War leftover presence of the USA, want it to end and the influence that comes with it. If any opportunity to push back against the USA appears, they have their talking points ready to dirty up the reputation and standing of the USA. If that can be done while blaming Eurocrat failures on the USA as well, even better.

You know the Americans, citizens of that mongrel nation whose gene pool is full of religious zealots, failed revolutionaries, slaves, economic refugees, grasping second sons, criminals, and their descendants – spoiled with a continent overflowing with food, water, minerals, forests and open land they don’t even appreciate.

Loud. Fat. Pushy. Americans.

The usual snarled insults cobbled together by smug people who get much of their opinions of the USA by reading The Washington Post or The New York Times. “I know America, I read your newspapers.” That is right after, “I’ve been to America. I spent a week in DC/NYC/Boston/Chicago. I studied a semester at Brown.”

[…]

The smaller European nations don’t trust France and Germany all that much, for good historical reasons. Most of the Europeans in the “new territories” in the east like the USA. They see the Americans as a more reliable guarantee of safety from hostile powers in the East, having a few centuries of experience of the Western European Frankish tribes carving them up for fun and profit – irrespective of local desires. Collectively these nations are not that large in GDP or population – not much more than Italy (for now), but that’s OK. They have the correct geography.

If we shape this relationship correctly, we don’t have to permanently garrison this part of Europe. Poland is already establishing a new paradigm of proper levels of security investment. Once NATO’s eastern front calms down a bit, we can rotate through forces for exercises and training. Perhaps even create some combined training and logistics bases ready to scale up in case of trouble in Mordor. A template we should have put in place in Western Europe decades ago.

Reward positive behavior and let the French and Germans continue their millennium-length struggle – peaceful this time – in the west; keep them frothing in Brussels and Strasbourg while the forward-looking nations try to set up the next thousand years of Western progress in a positive direction.

Perhaps.

October 26, 2022

You apparently only need to worry about inflation if you’re one of the “little people”

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

Tom Knighton was angered by a recent comment from a well-to-do type who is frustrated at all the “needless” worry about inflation when there are “bigger concerns” in play:

I really don’t like talking about my personal life too much, but I kind of feel like I have to. It started a couple of days when Never Trumper Tom Nichols tweeted this:

Frankly, I’m still pissed about it three days later.

You see, it must be nice for Nichols to view this as a problem of perspective, that people just aren’t seeing the forest for the trees because gas is a tad high.

I can’t be one of those people.

For the record, I think of myself as a working-class writer. I don’t make those six-figure salaries and socialize with the elite at cocktail parties. I make enough to support my family of four in what many could generously term a modest lifestyle.

And I’m OK with that. While I want more, I love the fact that my work life is what it is and I have tons more freedom to do what I want throughout the day.

These days, though, things are different.

You see, while Nichols pretends it’s just people a little grumpy about gas prices, I see the harsh reality that people like him never will.

I’m the guy looking at the time before the next paycheck and realizing that we might not have food in the house for a day or two. I’m the one trying to decide how to stretch the last $40 in our bank account to cover those couple of days and praying it will. I’m also the one who knows that two years ago, this wasn’t a problem.

Hell, a year ago, it wasn’t an issue.

And I don’t make awful money, all things considered. I can only imagine what it’s like for those whose families don’t bring in what I normally make.

For Nichols to get worked up because people don’t see any existential crisis but do see the harsh reality slapping them in the face day in, day out sounds an awful lot like “Let them eat cake” to me.

Unfortunately, that’s what folks like Nichols think.

Nichols, who seems to believe in expertise based on his previous work, is talking about stuff he knows nothing about, things he lacks the expertise to comprehend.

The current inflation isn’t just some mild inconvenience. It’s not one of those things where we all can just shrug and push through until better times. It’s real and it’s here and it’s hurting people like me.

That gives me a certain amount of expertise because this is my life and my livelihood. This is how my family suffers.

I’m very much with him on this, as rising inflation is already a pretty big concern for us and it doesn’t look like it’ll get better any time soon.

October 24, 2022

QotD: When the “Grand Tour” gave way to the mere “tourists”

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

Few of the many holidaymakers photographing their artisanal breakfast for a sunlit post on Instagram will have heard of Albert Smith. But they owe him a moment’s reflection: for if anyone can be said to have perfected the packaged visuals of a holiday abroad, it is Smith, a showbusiness titan of mid-Victorian London. Smith’s wildly popular panoramic spectaculars of his travels across Europe drew audiences of thousands. He was a prolific journalist, a bestselling novelist, a man-about-town, a mountaineer, and a dandy, but it was Smith’s innovative talent for boiling down his adventures abroad into a collection of vivid and memorable images that proved his biggest crowd-puller. Panoramas — vast paintings showing a 360-degree view of a landscape — had been part of the London scene since the turn of the century, but Smith took the panoramic experience to new levels of immersion: he was the self-appointed star of his own show, dramatising his own adventures against a sliding background of tableaux complete with music and props.

Smith’s most celebrated panorama relived his ascent of Mont Blanc in 1851 — which had been an astonishing physical feat for a clubbable bon viveur (though he had to be dragged to the summit barely conscious, he claimed to have celebrated by drinking a bottle of champagne and smoking a cigar). He pulled out all the stops to recreate Mont Blanc on the stage of the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in 1852, importing woodcarvers from Chamonix to recreate a Swiss chalet. St Bernards roamed the aisles and during the interval hot baked potatoes were dispensed for those in the audience feeling a glacial chill from the buckets of cold water placed around the hall. The stage was decked with alpine plants; there was a waterfall with real water, a mill wheel and a lily pond; the walls of the theatre were hung with chamois skins. “The Ascent of Mont Blanc” ran for six years and 2,000 performances, and on top of the fortune he made in ticket sales, Smith cannily expanded his repertoire by selling colouring books, fans, board games and miniature models of Mont Blanc.

Smith, an unrepentant populist (he liked to shock Thackeray by saying that Shakespeare was “all rot”), knocked the high culture out of the touristic experience. He made the adventure of foreign parts bite-sized and accessible — if not in reality, at least in dreams. He called it “the Alps in a box”. Figuratively speaking, Smith’s panoramas boxed up the great sights of the classical Grand Tour and sold them in miniature form, building them up with a dramatic flourish then cutting them down to size with a knowing dig in the ribs. Smith’s success runs parallel with the emergence of photography, the industrial manufacture of souvenirs, and the “I was here” frame of the postcard. After Smith, it became possible to think of “buying” the travel experience without actually going very far, framing it, and taking it home with you. Antiquarian high-culturists looked for quiddity and oddity when abroad but Smith encouraged a joyful appetite for mass-produced kitsch. His own apartment off Tottenham Court was a riot of knick-knackery from his travels. There was a figure of a Swiss peasant with a clock-face in his waistcoat, Venetian glasses, miniature Swiss chalets, soap from Vienna in the shape of fruit and a working model of a guillotine.

The tourist boom in Chamonix inspired by Smith was viewed with horror by those who thought the mountain were theirs to command. Ruskin found the “white leprosy of hotels” and souvenir shops that followed the visitors into the Alps was a blasphemy against “all the deep and sacred sensations of nature”. Everywhere the new tourists went, reported a journalist in 1856, they brought with them “Cockneyism, Albert Smithery, fun, frolic and vulgarity”. The rise in popular tourism to Europe, sparked most importantly by Thomas Cook, had highlighted a divide which has characterised British travelling ever since. In this paradigm, the tourist is the new bug and the traveller is the old soul. And even when they are gazing at the same view, the latter thinks the former is spoiling the view. The distaste is notable in how often crowds of tourists were, and still are, described in terms of mindless cattle or insects — they come in “herds” and “swarms” and “flocks”.

Lucy Lethbridge, “The snobbery of Brits abroad”, UnHerd, 2022-07-12.

October 19, 2022

Luxury beliefs in action

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

In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank looks at the young vandals, er “activists” who decided that throwing soup on a famous painting was a totally sensible and reasonable thing to do in order to direct our attention to their luxury beliefs:

On Friday Phoebe Plummer, a 21-year-old graduate student and activist, threw a tin of soup over a Van Gogh painting in the National Gallery, before proceeding to glue herself to the wall. “What is worth more, art or life?” she shouted in a manner reminiscent of an especially tiresome student at the Oxford Union. Whilst Phoebe didn’t exactly make it to Oxford, she was the beneficiary of a £15,000 a year boarding school education. Having rich parents probably helps if your lifestyle involves dying your hair pink, covering yourself in glitter and getting glued to a succession of defaced public monuments. The legal fees alone must be a headache.

That said, perhaps the organisation she cheerfully acts in the name of — Just Stop Oil — can foot the bills. After all, it’s a registered charity funded by the US-based organisation The Climate Emergency Fund. The Fund boasts on its website that “We provide a safe and legal means for donors to support disruptive protest that wakes up the public and puts intense pressure on lawmakers”, not to mention “Our robust legal team”. The charity comes with endorsements by high profile organisations such as fashion magazine Marie Claire and the backing of donors like the group’s co-founder, oil heiress Aileen Getty who is quoted as saying, “Don’t we have responsibility to take every means to protect the Earth”.

I can think of other organisations that provide “A safe harbour for donors” and put “intense pressure on lawmakers”, not to mention having “robust legal teams” — though they generally feature rather more Italian accents and bodies dumped in the river, and rather fewer celebrity endorsements (Frank Sinatra could not be reached for comment).

The Just Stop Oil organisation itself is even more explicit about its willingness to countenance potentially illegal means. In its FAQ section it calls for people to “use tactics such as strikes, boycotts, mass protests and disruption to withdraw their cooperation from the state”, and announces that they “are willing to take part in Nonviolent direct action targeting the UK’s oil and gas infrastructure should the Government fail to meet our demand by 14 March 2022”. Well the date has past. “Will there be arrests?” the next section asks. The answer? “Probably”.

Quite why organisations that openly fund illegal — sorry “disruptive” — protest, and hire teams of lawyers to avoid the legal consequences, are allowed to enjoy charitable status, let alone avoid investigation by the authorities, is beyond me. Nor is it clear to me how attacks on works of art, or stopping traffic in the road, can attract support for environmental causes, or challenge those who profit from ecological destruction.

The answer lies with the nature of the radical environmental movement, which is often starkly at odds with many of the finest traditions of ecological and anti-industrial thought. Early critics of industrial capitalism like Ruskin and Morris were as concerned with the protection of traditional culture as they were with the destruction of the natural world. Their humanist challenge to industrialism was to call for the return of craft, the embrace of localism, a built environment on a human scale, and an economy that fed the spiritual as well as material needs of mankind.

Theodore Dalrymple on the mindset of the perps:

Youth is often said to be an age of idealism, but if my recollection of my own youth is accurate, it could also be characterized as an age of self-righteousness liberally dosed with hypocrisy, at least when it has known no real hardship that isn’t of its own making.

The two girls who threw a tin of soup at a Van Gogh in the National Gallery in London and then glued themselves to the wall certainly evinced a humorless self-righteousness and self-importance: indeed, they seemed almost to secrete it as a physiological product. They were part of a movement of dogmatic and indoctrinated young people called Just Stop Oil that’s currently making a public nuisance of itself in this fashion in Britain, holding up traffic and causing misery to thousands, in what it believes to be the best of all good causes, saving the planet.

[…]

Youth suffers from both fevered over-imagination and a complete absence of imagination. This is the natural consequence of a lack of experience of life, in which limited experience is taken as the total of all possible human experience. Youth accepts uncritically its own wildest projections and doesn’t know the limitations of its own knowledge. It believes itself endowed with moral purity and allows for no ambiguity, let alone tragic choice. It’s sure of itself.

The young women who threw soup at the Van Gogh probably didn’t know that, even if the man-made climate change hypothesis were wholly correct, they lived in a country that produced about 1 to 2 percent of the alleged greenhouse gases in the world, so that even if their action put a complete end to that contribution (a most unlikely outcome) it would make absolutely no difference whatever to the fate of the planet. Their action certainly caused the public irritation and expense, and its most likely long-term outcome is a costly increase in surveillance and security at the gallery because the two of them were able to do what they did with such ease.

However, they were probably dimly aware, or had the good sense to know, that it would have been inadvisable for them to make their gesture in some country responsible for a far greater proportion of the alleged causation of climate change than their own—China, for example. Cowardice, after all, is the better part of self-righteousness.

October 16, 2022

“Musk’s plebeian sense of humor is probably a big part of why the establishment can’t stand him”

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

Patrick Carroll speculates on why Elon Musk is so disliked by the other rich and powerful folks in his 0.01% demographic:

This isn’t the first time Musk has brought his playful, irreverent, meme-culture spirit to the market. A few years ago he launched his car into space because he thought it would be amusing, and some of his companies now accept Dogecoin as payment.

Musk in general seems rather fun, relatable, and laid back. He doesn’t take himself too seriously, and that’s probably a big part of why people like him.

Another reason he’s so likable is that he doesn’t mind poking fun at politicians, executives, and other “blue-check” elites. To the contrary, he seems to enjoy it.

Examples of Musk mocking the elites abound.

[…]

The question then becomes, how do we combat the insistence on political correctness? How do we push back when moral busybodies insert themselves in matters that are none of their business?

At first, it’s tempting to meet them on their own terms, to politely and logically state our case and request that they leave us alone. And sometimes that can be the right move. But often, a much more effective approach is to do what Elon Musk is doing: become the fool.

Rather than taking the elites seriously, the fool uses wit, humor, and satire to highlight how ridiculous the elites have become. He employs clever mockery and a tactful mischievousness to call the authority of the elites into question. When done well, this approach can be brilliantly effective. There’s a reason joking about politicians was banned in the Soviet Union.

The story of the Weasley twins and Professor Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is one of my favorite examples of how mischievousness and mockery can be used to expose and embarrass those who take things too seriously. As you probably know, Umbridge was committed to formality and order, and she imposed stringent limits on fun and games. Now, the Weasley twins — the jesters of Hogwarts, as it were — could have responded with vitriol. They could have written angry letters, signed a petition, and gone through all the proper channels to get her removed. But instead, they threw a party in the middle of exams, making a complete mockery of her seriousness. They gave her the one thing she couldn’t stand: fun. And wasn’t that way more powerful?

If I had to guess, Musk’s plebeian sense of humor is probably a big part of why the establishment can’t stand him. They don’t mind someone who challenges them through the proper channels and in a respectful manner — that’s actually playing into their hand, because it concedes they are deserving of respect in the first place. What they can’t stand is being taken lightly, being teased and ridiculed and ultimately ignored.

Why can’t they stand that? Because our reverence for the elites is actually the source of their power. They win as long as we take them seriously. They lose the moment we don’t.

October 12, 2022

QotD: Luxury beliefs

Filed under: Economics, Education, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes … The way that people used to demonstrate their social class was through material goods, through expensive items … Today, it’s not necessarily the case … [Affluent] students will often downplay their wealth or even lie about how rich their parents are … [Now,] it’s luxury beliefs. It’s the unusual, novel viewpoints that they’re expressing to distinguish themselves. They crave distinction, that’s the key goal here …

An easy way to show that you’re not a member of the riff-raff, the masses, is to hold the opposite opinion, or a strange opinion that maybe doesn’t make sense, because it shows you’re not one of them. It’s not just the opinion itself, but the way that you express it. If you express it using vocabulary that no-one has ever heard of, for example … You often are not paying the price for your luxury beliefs, but even if you do, it’s still not nearly the same as the cost inflicted on the lower classes if they were to adopt those luxury beliefs too. […]

I talked to a friend of mine who was telling me, “When I set my Tinder radius to one mile, just around the university, and I see the bios of the women, a lot of their profiles say things like ‘poly’ or ‘keeping it casual’ – basically, they’re not interested in anything too serious.” He says something like half of them have something like that in their bio. And then he said, “But when I expand the radius on my Tinder to five miles, to include the rest of the city and the more run-down areas beyond the university bubble, half the women are single moms.” And basically, the luxury beliefs of the former group, the educated group, trickled down and ended up having this outsize effect on the people who are less fortunate, who don’t have the [social and] economic capital of the people who can afford that belief.

David Thompson, quoting from the transcript of a TRIGGERnometry interview with Rob Henderson, David Thompson, 2022-07-11.

August 18, 2022

QotD: Nostalgie de la boue

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

TWS suggests we take a hard look at the concept of nostalgie de la boue:

    Nostalgie de la boue (French: “nostalgia for mud”) is the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements … Tom Wolfe described a party in New York in 1970: “It was at this party that a Black Panther field marshal rose up beside the north piano — there was also a south piano — in Leonard Bernstein’s living room and outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program to a roomful of socialites and celebrities, who, giddy with nostalgie de la boue, entertained a vision of the future in which, after the revolution, there would no longer be any such thing as a two-story, thirteen-room apartment on Park Avenue, with twin grand pianos in the living room, for one family.”

I think TWS is right:

    It explains everything from those parties where they pretend to eat people and the Podesta brothers love of pedo-murder art to the Jersey Shore and all rap music. People of Wal-Mart and people who enjoy mocking them. The idea covers everything happening.

Back in the days, they called all that “authenticity”. The Working Man ™ was supposed to have an “authenticity”, a raw experience of life, that the Intelligentsia did not, so the Intelligentsia made it their mission to ape “authentic” proletarian manners and mores. That’s why every self-styled “Intellectual” since Marx has carried on like an unbathed schizophrenic hobo — they think they’re being “authentic”.

It never occurs to them that this is grossly insulting to The Workers they’re supposedly helping, because of course they never ever meet any Workers — they imagine how they think a longshoreman would act, and then go do that.

I have far more respect for “the People of Walmart” than I do for those who make fun of them, because “the People of Walmart” have been beaten down and brutalized by the dominant culture. They’ve had all their self-respect kicked out of them by little college snots with Gender Studies degrees. It’s like the peasantry in pre-Revolution Russia: Everything the intellectuals said about the nobility was true … but everything the nobility said about the serfs was also true. It was a chicken-and-egg problem with no solution save one.

I also have some respect for Walmart as an institution. Yeah, I know, it’s cheap Chinese shit, but trust me: Though I didn’t grow up poor, you could see “poor” from my house for a lot of my childhood. I don’t recall having Walmart back then, but K-Mart’s Blue Light Specials improved our day to day quality of life enormously. And when I first got out on my own, I decorated my entire first apartment in Walmart — it wasn’t fancy, but it worked, and I had a hell of a lot more stuff that I could actually use than I ever could’ve afforded any other way.

You want to make fun of Walmart, and the people who shop there? Ok, fine, motherfucker, but first try living in a trailer where your couch is patched up with duct tape, and go to school wearing your California cousins’ hand me down clothes, so that you’re dressed like a surfer when you’re 500 miles from the nearest ocean.

I will never, ever understand this. You can choose to be ugly, and to surround yourself with ugliness. Or you can choose NOT to do that. Why would anyone pick the former?

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-13.

August 11, 2022

N.S. Lyons offers a Public Service Announcement for folks in class B

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

N.S. Lyons is talking to you. Yes, you in particular:

Hello Friend,

I saw your post on the interweb the other day about that nasty thing Team A did, even though they always completely lose their collective mind with moralistic outrage if Team B (which I understand is your team) even thoughtcrimes about doing something similar. In fact Team A seems to blatantly do things all the time that no one on Team B could ever get away with doing without being universally condemned as the absolute worst sort of immoral criminal/being openly threatened with mob violence/losing their livelihood/having their assets frozen/being rounded up by the state and shipped to a black site somewhere for some extended TLC.

Maybe the latest thing was breaking some very important public health rules, or pillaging and burning down government buildings for fun, or mean tweets, or polluting the planet with a private jet, or using allegedly neutral public institutions against political opponents, or just engaging in a little tax-dodging or corruption while doing, like, a ton of blow in a hotel room with some capital city hookers – I forget the specifics. In fact I forget what country you’re even living in nowadays.

But I did see that slick video you posted on how just pointing out “imagine if someone on Team B did this!” is all it takes to blow the lid off this glaring hypocrisy, thus totally destroying Team A with facts and logic. I’ve noticed you posting a lot of things like this, which is nice, since they are very witty and produce a pleasant buzz of smug superiority, even though this feeling never lasts very long.

However, I suddenly realized that you may not be in on the joke, so to speak, so I figured I’d write this short PSA to help explain what “hypocrisy” in politics actually is, just in case you didn’t know and had been fooled into seriously trying to benefit Team B with your comparative memes.

You see, it’s possible you are under the misapprehension that you are not supposed to notice what you described as the “double-standard” in acceptable behavior between Team A and Team B. And that you think if you point out this double-standard, you are foiling the other team’s plot and holding them accountable. This might be because, in your mind, you are still in high school debate club, where if you finger your opponent for having violated the evenly-applied rules a neutral arbiter of acceptable behavior will recognize this unfairness and penalize them with demerits.

Except in reality you are not holding Team A accountable, and in fact are notably never able to hold them accountable for anything at all. Even though Team A gets to hold you accountable for everything and anything whenever they want. This is because unfortunately there is no neutral arbiter listening to your whining. In fact, currently the only arbiter is Team A, because Team A has consolidated all the power to decide the rules, and to enforce or not enforce those rules as they see fit.

[…]

Much like the Great Khan, Class A has decided the greatest happiness in life is to crush its class enemies, see them driven before it, and hear the lamentations of their pundits.

Fundamentally, Class A believes the purpose of power is to reward its friends and punish its enemies. Which is what it does. That way it can keep its enemies down at the same time as it attracts more friends by offering great perks for class membership. And as a controversial Arab thought-leader once said: everyone prefers a strong horse to a weak horse.

If you, Class B serf, do not enjoy this arrangement, your lamentations about hypocrisy will not change it, no matter how loud and shrill. Only taking back control of the levers of power and then using that power to strike the fear of accountability into the hearts of your ruling class will ever be able to do that.

August 9, 2022

When asking a simple, factual question is treated as a direct personal attack

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray explains why just asking for [certain] facts is enough to trigger people who think you’re somehow saying that they’re not “good people”:

Come back to the cultural sewer with me, just for a moment, because here’s the last time I’ll lay a quote on you from Klaus Schwab’s COVID-19: The Great Reset, from a discussion about public health measures to contain the pandemic:

    This is ultimately a moral choice about whether to prioritize the qualities of individualism or those that favour the destiny of the community. It is an individual as well as a collective choice (that can be expressed through elections), but the example of the pandemic shows that highly individualistic societies are not very good at expressing solidarity.

Now: Pharmaceutical products sometimes fail, and sometimes cause serious harm, and it frequently takes a while for reality to get out of the dugout and take the field, so keep taking your FDA-approved Vioxx. It’s safe and effective! I rarely give up on books, but I gave up on Ben Goldacre’s 2012 book Bad Pharma about halfway through — for the same reason you’d stop eating a skillfully prepared shit sandwich. I felt like, yes, I get the point: Sometimes a drug is ineffective, sometimes a drug is outright harmful, and the manipulation of science and of regulatory agencies is more common than you would ever have wanted to know.

But it’s different this time, even while “this time” fits a very long pattern. As much as Big Pharma course corrections are always hard, this one will be infinitely harder. We’re not currently debating the efficacy of a pharmaceutical product, or of a class of pharmaceutical products; instead, we’re debating self-conception, social status, and cultural position. The claim “I don’t think these mRNA injections are as safe as they’ve been made out to be” is a character attack that threatens to take people out at the core like dynamite under a bridge: Are you saying I’m not a good person?

Bad Cattitude has been on fire lately on the topic of elite self-hypnosis and the descent into an “entirely hallucinatory landscape”. Consistent with this shrewd feline analysis, look again at what Klaus Schwab said about lockdowns and the suppression of economic activity in the name of public health: He said that shutting down our open societies was a “moral choice” about “expressing solidarity”. (My mask is for you, your mask is for me!) The discussion isn’t about what works, and has never been about what works. It has never been a discussion about the efficacy of anything; it’s a posture about social character, and always has been. Are you a bad, selfish person, or are you a good person who believes in kindness? The subtext about social class strikes me as too obvious to explicate, because mean people belong in their trailer parks in flyover country, and kind people are high-status. Review the lawn signs if you doubt this.

So when you question the little vial of fluid that goes into a syringe to be injected into your body, you’re not asking questions about the way a medical product works — or at least, you’re not asking questions that are perceived, by advocates of the injections (or the lockdowns, or the masks), as a discussion about safety and efficacy. You say, “Does it work? Is it safe?” — but they process it as an attack on their moral choice to express solidarity:

Are you saying we should have stood up for selfishness? Which means, if we bring the subtext to the surface, Are you saying we should have engaged in low-status behavior?

August 7, 2022

You will own nothing … and we don’t care if you like it or not, prole

Filed under: Economics, Food, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Solway, reposted at Brian Peckford’s site, gives us a glimpse of the future the Davos crowd want for all us lesser beings:

The much-circulated slogan “You will own nothing, and you will be happy” was coined by Danish MP Ida Auken in 2016 and included in a 2016 essay published by the purveyors of the so-called “Great Reset” at the World Economic Forum (WEF) headquartered in Davos, Switzerland. It is, of course, only half true. Nonetheless, the phrase is certainly apt and should be taken seriously. For once the Great Reset has been put in place, we will indeed own nothing except our compelled compliance.

The world’s farmers and cattle raisers, deprived of their livelihoods on the pretext of reducing nitrogenic fertilizers and livestock-produced methane, will own next to nothing. Meat and grain will become increasingly rare and we will be dining on cricket goulash and mealworm mash, an entomorphagic feast. We will be driving distance-limited electric vehicles rented from the local Commissariat and digitally monitored by Cyber Central — assuming we will still be allowed to drive. Overseen by a cadre of empowered financial managers who can “freeze” our assets at any time, we will possess bank accounts and credit ratings, but they will not be really ours.

Subject to a conceptual misnomer that is nothing but a vacuous abstraction, we will have become “stakeholders” — the WEF’s Klaus Schwab’s favorite word — with no real stake to hold apart from a crutch. In fact, what Schwab’s “stakeholder capitalism” really means, as Andrew Stuttaford explains at Capital Matters, is “transferring the power that capitalism should confer from its owners and into the hands of those who administer it.”

Should the Great Reset ever be fully implemented, we will have been diminished, as Joel Kotkin cogently argues in The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, to the condition of medieval serfs, or reduced to the status of febrile invalids, like those in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, which, as it happens, was also set in Davos. As Mann ends his novel, addressing his main character Hans Castorp: “Farewell, Hans … Your chances are not good. The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last many a little sinful year yet, and we will not wager much that you will come out whole.”

Modern-day Castorps, we will indeed own nothing, and most assuredly, we will not be happy. As Schwab writes in his co-authored Covid-19: The Great Reset, people will have to accept “limited consumption”, “responsible eating”, and, on the whole, sacrificing “what we do not need” — this latter to be determined by our betters.

What strikes me with considerable force is the pervasive indifference or cultivated ignorance of the general population respecting what the Davos cabal has in store for them. A substantial number of people have never heard of it. Others regard it as just another internet conspiracy — though it is not so much a conspiracy since it is being organized in full sight. The majority of “fact-checkers” and hireling intellectuals wave it away as a right-wing delusion.

July 26, 2022

What’s worse than having a nepotistic elite running the country? Having an incompetent nepotistic elite running the country

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

Kurt Schlichter isn’t a fan of the kakistocratic “elite” running most of the western world at the moment:

The things we took for granted decades ago are uncertain, and there’s always an excuse — inevitably one that blames us. Like the new take on air conditioners, which is that they are an extravagance we should learn to live without. What the hell? Why?

And don’t get me started on the bizarre insistence of the resetters that we all need to give up beef and start eating bugs. I have a better idea. How about we eat ribeyes and burgers like Americans instead of crickets and locust like Third World famine victims?

A proper ruling class would see the problems and move to solve them, because the proper relationship between the ruling class and the rest of us is that the ruling class provides prosperity and security and the rest of us let them skim some cream off the top. If they were doing a decent job, their riches and luxuries would not bother us much; but when they have failed yet still expect full pay and benefits anyway, that grates. It is unsustainable.

So why doesn’t the ruling class try to get America moving again instead of telling us that we should settle for less and less? For one thing, because our ruling class is not competent. Joe Biden is, in a way, the perfect president for the resetters — stupid and getting seniler, corrupt, yet absolutely sure of his own genius despite literally no basis for that self-regard. Look, the solutions are there. Want to fix crime? Do what Giuliani did in New York City in the nineties. Want energy independence? Do what Trump did in 2016. Want the economy roaring? Do what Reagan and Trump did. These tactics are not secrets, yet they seem to be too hard for our elite to pull off. Our reset revolt will be to embrace someone who can.

Of course, the incompetence issue assumes that our elite wants to succeed in doing what elites should do. Does it really? Does it really want us prosperous, secure and free? Oh, the elite wants to succeed for itself, and it sure has. The elite is richer than ever. And it intends to stay that way even after you are reset to “Peasant” mode. The elite won’t be taking public transportation among the hobos like you. They will be safe behind armed guards while you are disarmed and victimized — defend yourself at your peril! And they will keep eating steak tartar while you slurp up beetle paste. Yum yum, proles!

The ruling caste has no intention of you living like a civilized citizen. No, you are their sacrifice, to Gaia, the angry weather goddess or whatever other pagan idol that empty void inside them worships. Your pain is the point. Remember, bullies love the raw exercise of power. Making you miserable is a manifestation of their urge to dominate and crush. That’s the genesis of those seemingly insane moves around the world like Sri Lanka giving up fertilizer or agricultural powerhouse Holland evicting farmers. But these moves — including the destruction of our own energy industry — only seem insane if you refuse to accept their ultimate goal. They want to hurt you. Your pain is a feature, not a bug — which will be your next meal if they get their way.

July 23, 2022

QotD: “The New Journalism” and “narrative journalism”

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

Most of what we consider public life in modern societies is public reactions to things done by the powerful. The New York Times makes up a new hoax and the week is spent on the hoax. The usual suspects swear by the obvious lies and normal people spend days picking apart the lies. Occasionally, we get the reverse where some uncomfortable truth gets loose and the usual suspect go bananas trying to “debunk” it while normal people cling to it as blessed relief.

This is the news cycle in a nutshell. There is very little news. It has been at least a generation since the major news outlets in America have done reporting. Most of it is just stenography. The “journalist” copies what a government spokesbot has sent to them and dresses it up with some commentary. Then there are the narratives that are designed to give the public a way to repeat the official truth that sounds convincing to them and their acquaintances.

The source of this is the “new journalism” that emerged in the 1960’s. The late British reporter Chris Munnion chronicled this in his book Banana Sunday. He spent most of his life covering Africa for the Telegraph. In the 1960’s he noticed Americans showing up with pre-written narratives. They would seek out quotes and pictures to fill out the story they had prepared for the trip. Even if the facts contradicted the narrative, they stuck with the narrative because that was the new journalism.

Narrative journalism is just accepted these days. The “news” has always been a form of passive-aggressive political activism so its evolution into story telling on behalf of powerful interests seems natural. When you think of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal as propaganda arms of their respective clients in the managerial elite, it all makes sense. Instead of the Ministry of Truth we have the mainstream media “speaking truth to power”.

That last bit gets mocked by normal people on this side of the great divide because they have woken up to the reality of this age. As if often the case, however, there is a kernel of truth locked in this media fabrication. The people inside these disinformation operations genuinely fear the public. When they say “speak truth to power” they mean broadcast their truth to you in the hopes that you will buy it. Modern mass media is mostly a defensive weapon of the elites.

The Z Man, “The Lying Liars”, The Z Blog, 2022-04-20.

June 28, 2022

Pierre Poilievre … not the Canadian Trump?

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

Allan Stratton points out to sheltered central Canadian urban voters that populism has a long history in Canadian politics, and didn’t need to be imported from the US:

Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre at a Manning Centre event, 1 March 2014.
Manning Centre photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Conservative leadership candidate Pierre Poilievre is oft accused of importing divisive American right-wing populism to our politics. His endorsement of the trucker protest against vaccine mandates — though not the legal violations of its organizers — has been portrayed as a play for Christian nationalists, racists and fascists. Likewise, his attacks on Davos and the World Economic Forum are said to welcome Trumpian conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites and Great Replacement nativists.

Common wisdom suggests that this strategy may win Poilievre the Conservative party leadership, but will render his party toxic to respectable, mainstream Canadian voters.

There’s a lot of smoke and at least some fire to this critique: The People’s Party of Canada will find it hard to tag Poilievre as a centrist squish.

But thanks to our constitution, the Supreme Court and our general political culture, all more liberal than their American counterparts, social conservative attacks on abortion and LGBT rights seem off the table.

Further, far from a Trumpian nativist, Poilievre is in favour of immigration and wants to cut the red tape that blocks immigrants from employment in their fields, something the current federal government has failed to accomplish into its third mandate.

My fear, as someone who shares many concerns about the prospect of a Poilievre government, is that commentators are misreading the broad appeal of his populism, leading Liberals to unwarranted overconfidence.

Sure, Poilievre’s strategy shares some Trumpian elements, but it’s equally rooted in a progressive Canadian tradition that dates back to the early 19th century and was prominent in the last half of the 20th.

If the Liberals don’t course correct, they may discover that while they are attacking Poilievre as a far-right extremist, he is eating their traditional liberal, working-class lunch.

In broad strokes, I imagine Poilievre channelling Louis-Joseph Papineau and William Lyon Mackenzie during the Rebellions of 1837-38. Instead of the Château Clique and the Family Compact, I see him fighting the Laurentian Consensus, another powerful, unelected group, this time composed of academics, bureaucrats, media apparatchiks and Central Canada think-tankers who dominate our culture and financial establishment — and who arrogate to themselves the right to determine Canadian values and the ways in which we are allowed to describe and think about ourselves as a nation.

For those of us who grew up on the left under Mike Pearson, Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau and David Lewis, it is hard to stomach the recent illiberal turn in elite liberal discourse. It once assumed the importance of free speech, understanding that censorship has always been used by the powerful to suppress the powerless. Yet today, in academia and the arts, free speech has been recast as “hate speech”, and our Liberal government is passing C-11, which seeks to regulate what we read and how we express ourselves online.

June 24, 2022

What happens when the proles stop listening to elite Chicken Littles?

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

Chris Bray suggests that we should call it “class formation psychosis” instead of “mass”, because it’s the kakistocrats who are doing everything they can to induce “the masses” to feel the fear and obey:

… here’s a picture of a recent panel discussion among public health experts in Los Angeles County, which I wrote about here:

So the normals are just living their lives, and appearing to enjoy it, while the status-projecting elite are engaged in an effort to signal fear and control.

I encourage you to read [Mattias Desmet’s new book] The Psychology of Totalitarianism, especially as an account from an early adopter of the view that our pandemic hysteria has been irrational. But I’m surprised to find myself not buying the argument. Desmet gets the dynamic, but misses the subject: He sees what’s happening, but not who’s doing it. The book is about “the masses”, as in this passage from Chapter 6:

    We have to add one more important characteristic to the problematic psychological properties of mass formation: radical intolerance of other opinions and a strong tendency toward authoritarianism. To the masses, dissident voices appear 1) antisocial and devoid of solidarity, because they refuse to participate in the solidarity that the mass formation creates; 2) completely unfounded, as critical arguments are not assigned any cognitive or emotional weight within the narrow circle of attention of the masses; 3) extremely aversive because they threaten to break the intoxication, and in this way confront the masses again with the negative situation that preceded the mass formation (lack of social bond and meaning, indefinable fear and unease); 4) extremely frustrating because they threaten to remove the venting of latent aggression.

    This radical intolerance ensures that the masses are convinced of their superior ethical and moral intentions and of the reprehensibility of everything and everyone who resists them: Whoever does not participate is a traitor of the collective.

As someone who spent every moment of the pandemic traveling all over the place, family camping our way through a dozen states and visiting national parks and other tourist-centered destinations, I’ve never met the masses who were consumed with this fearful aggression. In South Dakota in the summer of 2020, I was sitting next to my tent in a state park when some dads on another campsite saw my license plate, then marched over and said that holy shit, man, did you really drive all the way here from California? I hadn’t seen a mask in days, and no one maintained six feet of social distance. As I experienced all over the state, we shook hands and talked. A few days before, at a state park in eastern Wyoming, the couple in the neighboring campsite walked over and offered us dinner, then got trashed on Bud Light — which I didn’t know was possible, on the grounds of “making love in a canoe” — while they hung out by our campfire.

But where we found intolerance and enforced fearfulness was in space controlled by government, as when we got in line outside the Jenny Lake store and quickly drew the attention of the, I am not making this up, line monitor. Masks! Masks! Masks! she helpfully explained, pointing at her masked face to show us what a mask was. Maskless people swarmed around us on all sides, a fact I mentioned to her. “But they’re not in line,” she explained, finding the explanation complete.

Our mass formation psychosis didn’t form in the masses; it formed in policy, and as a social performance among people who wish to be perceived as cultural elites, sniffing at the trash who don’t believe in science. Professors and politicians were highly mask-compliant, and wanted you to know it. My impression is that a quarter to a third of the population locked arms with them and fought proudly for their fear performance, while another third-plus went along to get along, and the balance — especially outside the Blue Zones — just completely ignored the whole mess.

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