Quotulatiousness

April 11, 2022

Ours is a fundamentally unserious culture, two examples

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

Chris Bray provides some examples of just how decayed western culture has become in our headlong flight toward total unseriousness:

In Europe this month to lead the diplomatic response to a war, the Vice-President of the United States responded to a question about refugees by giggling and cackling and babbling in typical form:

And then the “fact-checkers” at Reuters explained that she actually didn’t giggle and cackle and babble, because, okay, she did cackle and giggle and babble, but she didn’t cackle and giggle and babble specifically about the refugees, so it doesn’t count: “It is clear from viewing the longer video in context that Harris and Duda laughed at the awkwardness of not knowing who should speak first. There is no evidence that Harris was laughing at the refugees or the crisis in Ukraine.” The question was about refugees, and she laughed — she laughed a lot — right after the question, but Reuters apparently called no tagbacks before the play, so no points accrue.

So we have an awkward and ineffective playactor who occupies the position of a political leader, but lacks the stature or ability to go along with it, and we have journalists who labor to protect people in powerful political positions from the possibility that people will notice who they really are and what they really do. We have political leaders who aren’t political leaders, and journalists who aren’t journalists: the form without the substance.

Meanwhile, a recent debate on the topic of free speech at Yale Law School — the nation’s top-ranked law school, which produces presidents and Supreme Court justices — began with law students screaming abuse (“I’ll fight you, bitch”) at one of the panelists, before walking out as a group and continuing to shout and pound on the walls of the adjacent hallway.

Now: The students were angry at the panelist, the bitch they wanted to fight, because she’s an anti-trans social conservative, and couldn’t you just die? But the thing that law students are learning to do is be lawyers — advocates for a position in a formalized exchange of competing views, in controversies that play out in open court. They’re training at the profession of making an argument. The point of sitting through an argument made by a person whose views you despise is that you can learn about something you want to fight against; you can see what the enemy says, and how she says it, and so do a part of the work of preparing yourself to advance a different position. So we have law students, people training for a debate-and-exchange-centered profession, who don’t want to hear things they don’t agree with. It’s like a minor league baseball player saying he refuses to touch a baseball, because baseballs offend him, but anyway, when are you assholes sending me up to the major leagues? We have people who want to occupy the profession of the law without preparing for the substance of professional engagement with competing positions: the form without the substance.

(Doing what journalists do, now, the fact-checkers explain that none of this puts points on the anti-free-speech scoreboard: “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began.” It is precisely the point that 1.) law students 2.) walked out before the conversation began. In ten years, oral argument before the Supreme Court will be that Woke lawyers stand up and scream I’M NOT GONNA LISTEN TO THIS SHIT, YOU ASSHOLES at the justices, then storm out and descend into a long round of day-drinking while waiting for the court to rule in their favor, because oh my god they CAN’T EVEN.)

March 11, 2022

New Rome by Paul Stephenson

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

In The Critic, Daisy Dunn reviews a new history of the Eastern Roman Empire (called the Byzantine Empire by later scholars) that sounds quite interesting:

[Paul] Stephenson, a prolific scholar of Byzantium, has a wonderfully sharp eye for data and detail. His book examines the journey by which the Roman Empire progressed from being ruled from several different cities in the fifth century, among them Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Rome itself, to just Constantinople, home to Procopius, and the “New Rome” of the book’s title.

I sat down expecting a narrative history of the fall of Rome, but was pleasantly surprised to find a portrait of the changing empire populated by statistics and technical hypotheses of a kind one would usually encounter in a copy of the Economist. The first ten pages alone contain references to cosmogenic radionuclides, the Maunder Minimum and the Early Anthropocene. I confess I needed a dictionary.

It is hard to think of another historian who applies such a scientific approach to ancient history, except perhaps the Stanford professor Josiah Ober, who has applied political theory and modern economic modelling to information garnered from classical sources to equally eye-opening effect. The terminology is not off-putting because Stephenson proves able to weave it succinctly and fluidly into his account of how the Late Empire functioned.

Constantinople, formerly Byzantium, was the principal base of the emperors from Theodosius I (“The Great”) in the final quarter of the fourth century onwards. The city was beautified with a wide variety of art and architecture, including the famous Egyptian obelisk, the arrival of which in the late fourth century is seemingly as mysterious as the appearance of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

[…]

Attempts to answer the time-old question of why Rome fell have been characterised in recent years by a new awareness of the role that factors including pollution and climate change played. Anyone who has shrugged at the suggestion that the weather had anything to do with the demise of such a mighty empire will, I think, come away from this book persuaded that climate change and natural disasters provide an important part of the answer. Far from being moralistic and attempting to apply the examples of the past as a warning, Stephenson lays down the evidence unemotionally, and lets it speak for itself.

The causes of change were not purely driven by human behaviour, though smelting and, even more so, heavy warfare in the era of invading Huns and Vandals, had a significant environmental impact. Pollen records reveal a dramatic decline in the growing of cereals in Greece by about 600AD and, from the seventh century, pollination was happening predominantly through nature rather than agriculture.

The root cause of this was the destruction of arable land following invasions and the decline in human settlements. Add to this diminishing sunlight — measurements of “deposited radionuclides” indicate a significant reduction of light between the midfourth and late seventh centuries — and we are looking at a radically different landscape in this period from that of the High Empire.

Natural disasters (or were they?) also played a part. The later fifth and early sixth centuries witnessed a number of major volcanic eruptions. Vesuvius, which famously buried Pompeii when it awoke from seven centuries of dormancy in 79AD, erupted in 472 and 512, bookending, as Stephenson notes, the overthrow of the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus.

March 4, 2022

QotD: “Avoid New York City”

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

It [NYC] smells terrible, the people are rude, and everything costs at least three times more than it should, for no discernible increase in quality. Most activities are crowded and overrated (e.g. Broadway plays such as Les Miz), food in the “best” restaurants is no better than you’ll get in any good restaurant in your home town, and walking in the streets of Manhattan is as close to a contact sport as you’ll get off a rugby field. Don’t buy into the hype; New York sucks. If you can make it there, you probably have organized crime ties (just like Sinatra did).

Kim du Toit, “Don’t Do That”, Splendid Isolation, 2019-01-28.

February 22, 2022

QotD: Architecture’s crisis of confidence

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

Architecture is suffering a crisis of confidence. More and more mainstream figures in the field are admitting that the profession has lost its way. […] Frank Gehry, the world’s most famous architect, recently said that “98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure sh*t. There’s no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else.” Architectural thought-leaders seconded and thirded him. And he’s since been fourthed by another.

Last year, recognizing general public’s low opinion of architects, the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the trade organization for the profession, launched an effort to “reposition” the industry by hiring marketing and brand-identity firms.

And now The New York Times, the ultimate arbiter of elite opinion, recently published an op-ed that declared, “For too long, our profession [architecture] has flatly dismissed the general public’s take on our work, even as we talk about making that work more relevant with worthy ideas like sustainability, smart growth and ‘resilience planning’.” The authors are not kooks on the fringe but architect Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen, former executive editor of Metropolis magazine, both of them very much in the establishment.

The authors observe that self-congratulatory, insulated architects are “increasingly incapable … of creating artful, harmonious work that resonates with a broad swath of the general population, the very people we are, at least theoretically, meant to serve.” Bingler and Pedersen note that this has been a problem for over forty years (my emphasis), and that things are even worse today.

Justin Shubow, “Architecture Continues To Implode: More Insiders Admit The Profession Is Failing”, Forbes, 2015-01-06.

February 17, 2022

P.J. O’Rourke’s Holidays in Hell

Filed under: Books, Europe, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Arthur Chrenkoff remembers the first of P.J. O’Rourke’s books he discovered in Australia after his family emigrated from Poland:

I haven’t heard of this O’Rourke fellow, but Holidays in Hell is a great title. I’ve always enjoyed reading about other countries, and the concept of travelling to war zones and other shitholes seems like a fertile territory for satire. Plus, as I see in the table of contents, O’Rourke had travelled to Poland a year before my family had left it. We were roughly in the same place at the same time. Now I just have to find out what this zany American thought of my homeland. I’m sold. So is the book.

It was a 50 cents well spent. I have the book next to my keyboard as I’m typing these words. It’s the first British edition, printed in in 1989 by Picador, so it would have been four or five years old when I bought it. It doesn’t look like it has aged at all since then. Maybe the paper is a tad more yellow but that’s about it. “What do they do for fun in Warsaw” is on page 83 (in the table of contents, the city is misspelled “Warshaw”, which actually makes it closer to the original Warszawa, the English “sh” being the same as the Polish “sz” sound – don’t say you didn’t learn anything new today). It was glorious, capturing with all of O’Rourke’s sardonic majesty the death rattles of the system that would collapse only three years later (not that any of us foresaw it). “I didn’t see any Evil Empire,” wrote P J, “that would have been too interesting. Communism doesn’t really starve or execute that many people. Mostly it just bores them to death”.

I enjoyed the rest of the book too, from civil war-torn Lebanon to divided Central America – the rightist El Salvador and the commie Nicaragua. Over the next few years I feasted on Republican Party Reptile. Parliament of Whores and Give War a Chance. I even managed to get to O’Rourke’s original non-political writing, Modern Manners and The Bachelor Home Companion, which I found just as funny if also less depressing than politics. Then I read all the new books as they came out. While it’s impolite to speak ill of the dead, I have found P J O’Rourke after 2000 increasingly struggling to be funny. His last output over the past six or so years as this “Republican Party reptile” and arch-libertarian ended up voting for Hillary Clinton because he didn’t like Donald Trump was cringeworthy and sad to read, which is did less and less of, until I did none at all. But it doesn’t change the fact that when P J was good – in the 1980s and 90s – he was a god. There was no one and nothing like him. He singlehandedly made right-of-centre sensibilities hip and the left ridiculous, which is the best weapon against those who fancy themselves too much.

At this point in time I should probably apologise for lying – P J O’Rourke did not save my life, though that sounded a lot sexier than any other title I could think of. What P J had done for me, however, was just as important: he set me on the right path.
The line from growing up in communist Poland forty years ago to The Daily Chrenk today might seem pretty straightforward in hindsight, but for a while in the early 1990s it got somewhat twisted and crooked, as lines tend to do when you attend university. Not only was I suddenly exposed in my Arts degree (majoring in Government, or political science, with a minor in History) to 50 Shades of Left, but I had embarked on wide-ranging reading spree of my own (nothing wrong with that; I still do), involving writers and topics as diverse as Noam Chomsky, the JFK assassination conspiracy theories, Robert Anton Wilson and Edmund Burke. Being a late developer, I went through the teenage phase of hating everyone and everything while in my early 20s. I was alone and homeless; not really angry but cynical and disenchanted.

At Samizdata, Johnathan Pearce also regrets O’Rourke’s death:

I met Mr O’Rourke about a decade ago, in what was the aftermath of the 2008 financial smash. He was charming company (my wife was bowled over by him – you have to watch these silver-tongued Irishmen) and retained the fizz that I recall from his coruscating book, Republican Party Reptile. I read that, I think, in around 1989, and then got my hands on anything he wrote. When he became a traveling correspondent for Rolling Stone magazine (a fact that today strikes one as impossible, such is the tribalism of our culture), I followed his columns closely. Parliament of Whores, written in the early 1990s and on the cusp of the Bill Clinton decade, stands the test of time as a brilliantly funny takedown of Big Government. Then came classics such as Eat The Rich and All The Trouble In The World.

I don’t quite think he kept the standard of searing wit + commentary at that level into the later 90s and into the current century. He did “serious stuff” with an amusing turn, such as a fine book about Adam Smith […] and could turn on the brilliance, but I think some of the energy had fallen off. He was a Dad with all the responsibilities that brings, and younger and less funny and more aggressive voices began to dominate the noise level in the public square. (Or maybe that is a sign that I am getting old, ahem.) O’Rourke, to the anger of some, wasn’t a Trump fan, and said so. He moved quite more explicitly libertarian, having a gig at the CATO Institute think tank. By his early 70s, I did not read or hear much of his doings, and that was a shame in the age of Greta, Cancel Culture, “Save the NHS”, Great Resets, Chinese nastiness and the Keto Diet. (I am kidding slightly about the last point.)

P J O’Rourke’s death saddens me as much as did that of two other fine men whom I met over the years and who died from cancer over the past couple of years: Brian Micklethwait and Sir Roger Scruton. They were all very different men, but they shared a common love of liberty, a mischievous wit and a hatred of cant.

I think the first of his books I ever read was Republican Party Reptile, and my copy got a bit dog-eared from being lent out to many friends and acquaintances over the next few years. As I understand it, O’Rourke had children late in life, and it may have been one of the reasons that some of the character and energy of his earlier works are somewhat lacking in writings from the last fifteen years or so … there are few activities that can absorb energy like caring for young children (I love seeing my grand-nieces when they visit, but I’m totally knackered by the time we’re waving goodbye).

QotD: What your book collection says about you

Filed under: Books, Humour, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One tweet noted that the loss of prominent book collections meant you couldn’t judge someone as easily as before. Another noted that book collections are a way of reminding ourselves of our own constructed identities — you look at the spines, note the authors and topics, and you are reminded of who you are, or rather who you wish to be at your best.

Both are correct. It has been my experience over the years that if people have explicitly political / social books in abundance, they are not really interested in contrary observations, no matter how genially offered; criticize the citizens of the shelves and you are criticizing them in an intimate fashion. The oft-expressed desire for a “conversation” on these matters rarely results in such.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2019-01-30.

February 5, 2022

QotD: I get a faint sense that he’s not a fan …

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I was up all night, between here and watching the telly. It was a wee small hours, musical interlude, on Channel Four, firstly a film of Liam Gallagher’s new ensemble, Beardy Eye, playing their new album in the Abbey Road studios. Liam is the truly neanderthal, younger brother from Oasis, a thick, grunting Manchester-Irish fuckpig, dumb as shit, you can hear the wind whistling between his ears, if he was any more stupid he’d have to be watered twice a week; makes Manchester United’s Wayne Potato look like a full Mensa meeting, does Liam. Nothing wrong with stupid. There’s lots of people like Liam, their oil just doesn’t reach the dipstick. He’s not as stupid as he looks, mind, because he looks like he was beaten with the Ugly stick and then ate it, ugly as fucking sin, is Liam Gallagher, ugly as a hatfull of arseholes; if your dog had a face like Liam’s, you’d shave its arse and teach it to walk backwards. Stupid, ugly and nasty, that’s Liam Gallagher, a truculent moron, charmless, graceless and entirely without discernible musical talent, a sign, in fact, of Ruin’s corrosion.

His new band, anyway, consists of four competent but unimaginative player-songwriters, and him. And the album’s a turgid lukewarm brew of reworked Oasis numbers which Liam’s brother Noel, every bit as ugly, every bit as unpleasant but a fraction less stupid would have rejected; the band switch between a dazzling selection of Rickenbaker and Gretsch guitars — funny, isn’t it, how a fiddler will manage with one Stradivarius, Robert Johnson played only a two-dollar guitar, Rory Gallagher the same battered old Strat and yet the current lot switch from one expensive instrument to another between songs, maybe even during songs, the rock’n’roll of Consumerism — to produce the same sounds, the same chords, the same figures over and over, to sing the same harmonies, the same shouty, angry, miserable, hateful, retarded adolescent drivel, tripe, every fucking bar of it; Liam, stooped inside his ugliness, howling and frothing his whining, meaningless doggerel; forty year old men, there oughta be a law against them doing this shit. Liam, rock hero caricature posturing, grunts at one point that this is whaditsallabout knoworramean, fucking keeping on playing and touring, selling the albums, to the kids, otherwise I’d end up working in fucking McDonalds, knoworramean; setting his sights way too high, there, overestimating his personal qualities, I mean, Billy Bragg might get a job in McD’s, on the mop bucket, Paul Weller, maybe, but they wouldn’t let Gallagher within a hundred yards.

Ishmael, “The Sunday Ishmael 31/10/2021”, Call Me Ishmael, 2021-10-31.

January 31, 2022

QotD: Weird attempts to violate the Efficient Markets Hypothesis

Filed under: Books, Business, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s a lot more to this book, but it all seems to be pointing at the same central, hard-to-describe idea. Something like “All progress comes from violations of the efficient market hypothesis, so you had better believe these are possible, and you had better get good at finding them.”

The book begins and ends with a celebration of contrarianism. Contrarians are the only people who will ever be able to violate the EMH. Not every weird thing nobody else is doing will earn you a billion dollars, but every billion-dollar plan has to involve a weird thing nobody else is doing.

Unfortunately, “attempt to find violations of the EMH” is not a weird thing nobody else is doing. Half of Silicon Valley has read Zero To One by now. Weirdness is anti-inductive. If everyone else knows weirdness wins, good luck being weirder than everyone else.

Thiel describes how his venture capital firm would auto-reject anyone who came in wearing a suit. He explains this was a cultural indicator: MBAs wear suits, techies dress casually, and the best tech companies are built by techies coming out of tech culture. This all seems reasonable enough.

But I have heard other people take this strategy too far. They say suit-wearers are boring conformist people who think they have to look good; T-shirt-wearers are bold contrarians who expect to be judged by their ideas alone. Obviously this doesn’t work. Obviously as soon as this gets out – and it must have gotten out, I’ve never been within a mile of the tech industry and even I know it – every conformist putting image over substance starts wearing a t-shirt and jeans.

When everybody is already trying to be weird, who wins?

Part of the answer is must be that being weird is a skill like any other skill. Or rather, it’s very easy to go to an interview with Peter Thiel wearing a clown suit, and it will certainly make you stand out. But will it be “contrarian”? Or will it just be random? Anyone can conceive of the idea of wearing a clown suit; it doesn’t demonstrate anything out of the ordinary except perhaps unusual courage. The real difficulty is to be interestingly contrarian and, if possible, correct.

(I wrote that paragraph, and then I remembered that I know one person high up in Peter Thiel’s organization, and he dresses like a pirate during random non-pirate-related social situations. I always assumed he didn’t do this in front of Peter Thiel, but I just realized I have no evidence for that. If this advice lands you a job at Thiel Capital, please remember me after you’ve made your first million.)

Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Zero to One”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-01-31.

January 14, 2022

QotD: The stagnant field of theoretical physics

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

Physicists used to be serious and bloody minded people who understood reality by doing experiments. Somehow this sort of bloody minded seriousness has faded out into a tower of wanking theorists who only occasionally have anything to do with actual matter. I trace the disease to the rise of the “meritocracy” out of cow colleges in the 1960s. The post WW2 neoliberal idea was that geniuses like Einstein could be mass produced out of peasants using agricultural schools. The reality is, the peasants are still peasants, and the total number of Einsteins in the world, or even merely serious thinkers about physics is probably something like a fixed number. It’s really easy, though, to create a bunch of crackpot narcissists who have the egos of Einstein without the exceptional work output. All you need to do there is teach them how to do some impressive looking mathematical Cargo Cult science, and keep their “results” away from any practical men doing experiments.

The manufacture of a large caste of such boobs has made any real progress in physics impossible without killing off a few generations of them. The vast, looming, important questions of physics; the kinds that a once in a lifetime physicist might answer — those haven’t budged since the early 60s. John Horgan wrote a book observing that science (physics in particular) has pretty much ended any observable forward progress since the time of cow collitches. He also noticed that instead of making progress down fruitful lanes or improving detailed knowledge of important areas, most develop enthusiasms for the latest non-experimental wank fest; complexity theory, network theory, noodle theory. He thinks it’s because it’s too difficult to make further progress. I think it’s because the craft is now overrun with corrupt welfare queens who are play-acting cargo cultists.

Physicists worthy of the name are freebooters; Vikings of the Mind, intellectual adventurers who torture nature into giving up its secrets and risk their reputation in the real world. Modern physicists are … careerist ding dongs who grub out a meagre living sucking on the government teat, working their social networks, giving their friends reach arounds and doing PR to make themselves look like they’re working on something important. It is terrible and sad what happened to the king of sciences. While there are honest and productive physicists, the mainstream of it is lost, possibly forever to a caste of grifters and apple polishing dingbats.

Scott Locklin, “Quantum computing as a field is obvious bullshit”, Locklin on Science, 2019-01-15.

January 6, 2022

“When speaking to a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil, don’t call them a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil! Many contemptible idiots find that language insulting”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Health, Politics, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tom Chivers reviews a recent book from Lee McIntyre, How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason:

Imagine you bought a book with the title How to Talk to A Contemptible Idiot Who Is Kind of Evil. You open the book, and read the author earnestly telling you how important it is that you listen, and show empathy, and acknowledge why the people you’re talking to might believe the things they believe. If you want to persuade them, he says, you need to treat them with respect! But all the way through the book, the author continues to refer to the people he wants to persuade as “contemptible idiots who are kind of evil”.

At one stage he even says: “When speaking to a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil, don’t call them a contemptible idiot who is kind of evil! Many contemptible idiots find that language insulting.” But he continues to do it, and frequently segues into lengthy digressions about how stupid and harmful the idiots’ beliefs are. Presumably you would not feel that the author had really taken his own advice on board

This is very much how I feel about How to Talk to A Science Denier, by the Harvard philosopher Lee McIntyre.

McIntyre wants to help us change people’s minds. Specifically, to help us change the minds of these strange, incomprehensible people called “science deniers”. He addresses five main groups of “deniers”: flat earthers; climate deniers; anti-vaxxers; GMO sceptics; and Covid deniers.

This is, on the face of it, an important project. It’s a truism that the world is polarised, and our sense of shared reality is under attack. If there is some way of learning how to talk across difference, and to persuade without attacking, that might go a long way to bridging our various divides, not just the five he discusses.

The framing is that McIntyre goes and meets representatives of these groups and tries to persuade them out of their wrong beliefs. He goes armed with social-psychology research about how best to persuade people. His big trick (which I think is a good, if limited, one) is asking: what evidence would it take to make you change your mind?

But the whole book is premised on one idea: McIntyre is right, and the people he is “talking to” are wrong.

[…]

McIntyre constantly wants to make a clean distinction between “science deniers” and non-deniers. So, for instance, he says that there are five “common reasoning errors made by all science deniers” [my emphasis]. They are: cherrypicking, a belief in conspiracy theories, a reliance on fake experts, illogical reasoning and an insistence that science must be perfect. If you don’t make all five of those errors, you’re not an official McIntyre-accredited science denier.

Hang on, though. A “belief in conspiracy theories”? McIntyre spends a lot of time talking about the tobacco firms who manufactured doubt in the smoking/lung cancer link, and the oil firms who did the same with the fossil fuel/climate change link. He says that the spread of Covid denialism through the US government was driven by Republican desire to keep the economy open and win the election. Aren’t these conspiracy theories?

Ah, but for McIntyre these aren’t conspiracy theories, they’re conspiracies. The distinction is “between actual conspiracies (for which there should be some evidence) and conspiracy theories (which customarily have no credible evidence).”

January 4, 2022

J.K. Rowling’s subversive tale of a government “controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

No, it’s not a new work by Rowling … it’s a deeply embedded thread of her best-known books in the Harry Potter series (as related in a 2005 article by Benjamin H. Barton for the Michigan Law Review):

J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books include a very strong anti-authoritarian thread.

This Essay examines what the Harry Potter series (and particularly the most recent book, The Half-Blood Prince) tells us about government and bureaucracy. There are two short answers. The first is that Rowling presents a government (The Ministry of Magic) that is 100% bureaucracy. There is no discernable executive or legislative branch, and no elections. There is a modified judicial function, but it appears to be completely dominated by the bureaucracy, and certainly does not serve as an independent check on governmental excess.

Second, government is controlled by and for the benefit of the self-interested bureaucrat. The most cold-blooded public choice theorist could not present a bleaker portrait of a government captured by special interests and motivated solely by a desire to increase bureaucratic power and influence. Consider this partial list of government activities: a) torturing children for lying; b) utilizing a prison designed and staffed specifically to suck all life and hope out of the inmates; c) placing citizens in that prison without a hearing; d) allows the death penalty without a trial; e) allowing the powerful, rich or famous to control policy and practice; f) selective prosecution (the powerful go unpunished and the unpopular face trumped-up charges); g) conducting criminal trials without independent defense counsel; h) using truth serum to force confessions; i) maintaining constant surveillance over all citizens; j) allowing no elections whatsoever and no democratic lawmaking process; k) controlling the press.

This partial list of activities brings home just how bleak Rowling’s portrait of government is. The critique is even more devastating because the governmental actors and actions in the book look and feel so authentic and familiar. Cornelius Fudge, the original Minister of Magic, perfectly fits our notion of a bumbling politician just trying to hang onto his job. Delores Umbridge is the classic small-minded bureaucrat who only cares about rules, discipline, and her own power. Rufus Scrimgeour is a George Bush-like war leader, inspiring confidence through his steely resolve. The Ministry itself is made up of various sub-ministries with goofy names (e.g., The Goblin Liaison Office or the Ludicrous Patents Office) enforcing silly sounding regulations (e.g., The Decree for the Treatment of Non-Wizard Part-Humans or The Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery). These descriptions of government jibe with our own sarcastic views of bureaucracy and bureaucrats: bureaucrats tend to be amusing characters that propagate and enforce laws of limited utility with unwieldy names. When you combine the light-hearted satire with the above list of government activities, however, Rowling’s critique of government becomes substantially darker and more powerful. Furthermore, Rowling eliminates many of the progressive defenses of bureaucracy. The most obvious omission is the elimination of the democratic defense. The first line of attack against public choice theory is always that bureaucrats must answer to elected officials, who must in turn answer to the voters. Rowling eliminates this defense by presenting a wholly unelected government.

H/T to Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds for the link.

January 2, 2022

In 1978, E.O. Wilson was “the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea”

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

In the current year, I suspect many, many scientists have been physically attacked for advocating unpopular ideas. In Quillette, Alice Dreger publishes an interview she had with Wilson in 2009:

Edward O. Wilson in February 2003.
PLoS image by Jim Harrison via Wikimedia Commons.

Alice Dreger: I know you’ve spoken about it many times before, but I would like to begin by asking you about the session at the 1978 AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] conference during which you were rushed on the stage and a protester emptied a pitcher of water onto your head. By all accounts, the talk you then gave was very measured. How on Earth were you able to remain so calm after being physically assaulted?

Edward O. Wilson: I think I may have been the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea. The idea of a biological human nature was abhorrent to the demonstrators and was, in fact, too radical at the time for a lot of people — probably most social scientists and certainly many on the far-Left. They just accepted as dogma the blank-slate view of the human mind — that everything we do and think is due to contingency, rather than based upon instinct like bodily functions and the urge to keep reproducing. These people believe that everything we do is the result of historical accidents, the events of history, the development of personality through experience.

That was firmly believed in 1978 by a wide part of the population, but particularly by the political Left. And it was thought at the time that raising the specter of a biological basis for human behavior was not only wrong, but a justification for war, sexism, and racism. Biological gender differences could justify sexism, and any imputation that we evolved a human nature, or that human qualities might differ from one race to another, was dangerously racist.

So, furious ideologically based opposition had built up in 1978. That opposition had been fanned by a small number of academics including [paleontologist] Stephen Jay Gould and [evolutionary biologist] Richard Lewontin and two or three others on the Harvard faculty who thought this was a very dangerous idea and said so. These people helped organize the so-called “Science for the People” movement, or the branch of it called the “Sociobiology Study Group”. Their purpose was to discredit me personally for having brought up such a dangerous and destructive idea.

In fact, at that meeting, InCAR — the International Committee Against Racism — held up signs condemning me and sociobiology and racism in general. Of course, racism never even entered my thinking in developing these ideas. Anyway, after they dumped the water on me, amazingly, they returned to their seats while I was drying myself off. A couple of people then made short speeches — most notably Stephen Gould, of all people, the guy whose agitation and inflammatory essays had been partly responsible for all this. He addressed the demonstrators and said, in effect, that while he fully understood their motivation, violence was not the right way to achieve their goals.

As for me, I don’t know why, but I just get calm under a lot of stress. I’ve been in that sort of stressful situation many times, especially in the field. I started thinking to myself, this is probably going to be an historical moment, and it is very interesting. I wasn’t in the least doubt that my science was correct. I knew this was a kind of aberration. I understood the source because I knew the people who had been the chief thinkers, the ideological leaders. An astonishingly good percentage of them were on the faculty at Harvard. I wasn’t concerned this would come to anything in the long term.

So, someone found a paper towel and I dried my head. As soon as things settled down, I just read my talk. I knew things were going to work out — there was so much evidence accumulated already for a somewhat programmed human brain. By then, it was already coming from many directions, including genetics and neuroscience. There was no doubt about where things would go. There may be hold-outs but the inevitable conclusion from neuroscience and anthropology and genetics is for this way of thinking. [American anthropologist] Nap[oleon] Chagnon was present and he was certainly a leader in thinking about human nature and how valuable it is, and what its motivations are, by studying groups like the Yanomamö.

I knew history was on my side. I was young enough that I thought I would live through a good part of it. I was annoyed! But I wasn’t under stress in an extreme way. Before going home, I went to the next session, at which an anthropologist made the mistake of stating that I believe every cultural difference has a genetic basis, so that I am a racist. Of course, I rebutted that, but that was the kind of thing being exchanged at that meeting.

December 29, 2021

Theodore Dalrymple reviews the latest work from Thomas Piketty, Time for Socialism

Filed under: Books, Economics, Europe, France, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Thomas Piketty has been a big name among progressives since his first book hit the bestseller lists, so the release of his latest work calls for some consideration from Theodore Dalrymple:

Piketty still writes clearly, though without much imaginative verve, and he has obviously consulted a lot of data. He is intelligent, knowledgeable, and decent, with a very firm grasp of unreality. He believes in a world in which economic levers act frictionlessly, or to borrow the description a doctor of my acquaintance has used with regard to his own medico-legal reports: “You turn the handle and the sausage comes out.”

There is no difference in his world between investment and expenditure. Thus, when he correctly ascribes low productivity in Britain to the low educational level of the general population (such that, in a predominantly service economy, much of it is unable even to answer the telephone properly or with reasonable courtesy), he ascribes it to lack of expenditure on education. If only this were the case! But lack of expenditure cannot possibly explain why about a fifth of children leave school barely literate. Incidentally, France seems to be progressing, if that is quite the word, in this direction.

We read that “Research in the social sciences, of which economics is an integral part, whatever some may think, is and always will be hesitant and imperfect. It is not designed to produce ready-made certainties … we have to examine patiently to endeavour to draw some provisional and uncertain lessons.” Amen to that! But modesty or tentativeness is not Professor Piketty’s main characteristic, nor does prudence once enter into his proposals.

There is no awareness that deterioration is possible as well as improvement, or of the fragility of things. Nothing counts for him but equality. He is to taxation policy what Le Corbusier was to architecture: he wants to prescribe (and proscribe) for the whole world. Above all, no variation! He would tell us how much we may possess, how much we may leave to our descendants or receive from our ancestors, how much we may earn in a year.

As an egalitarian and firm anti-nationalist, he does not explain why redistribution should stop at national borders. But try telling the average Frenchman that from now on he must forgo half his wealth in order to raise up Somalia or South Sudan! The book sometimes reads as if it were written by an electoral propagandist for Éric Zemmour, acting as an agent provocateur.

Uniformity is for him the price of unity (his countryman, Frédéric Bastiat, did not make the same mistake). He has little regard for, or even awareness of, the potential political consequences of some of his proposals. In his European Assembly, for example, which would have real power (unlike the current European Parliament), France, Spain, and Italy could and probably would outvote Germany with regard to economic policy. It does not occur to him that there could be few better ways of arousing dormant German nationalism than this. Nothing is certain, but much is possible; and while he mentions the internationalism of Jean-Luc Mélanchon, the left-wing French politician, he might also have mentioned that M. Mélenchon wrote a book about Germany and Germans that could easily have been written by a patriotic Frenchman in 1916.

Piketty is a strong believer in taxes as tools to make people more equal, and objects to the elimination of the wealth tax by the French government recently. Were he given the power, he would not only re-implement it, but vastly expand the taxes demanded of the wealthy.

[…] To all this, Professor Piketty has one sovereign remedy: tax the rich.

He thinks this is democratic because many, perhaps a majority, would vote for it. He has no problems with majoritarian democracy (provided the majority agrees with him): How can democracy be tyrannous? Thus, he sees no drawbacks in Senator Warren’s proposal to set a wealth tax and to provide — provide! — “an exit tax equal to 40% of total wealth for those who choose to leave the country and relinquish American citizenship.” Moreover, “the tax would apply to all assets, with no exemptions, with dissuasive sanctions for persons and governments who do not transmit appropriate information on assets held abroad.” Not only is this tyrannous with regard to individuals, but it is tyrannous with regard to international relations, providing a justification for American jurisdiction over the whole world. Needless to say, China, Russia, and India would never accept this, and might find allies. Conflict could become endless.

The answer to this little problem is obvious to Professor Piketty: a wealth tax worldwide, such that there would be nowhere for anyone to hide. There might be a few little teething problems with implementation — for example, who is to oversee it all — but think of the benefits: lie back and think of England! Professor Piketty has found the elixir of life, and it is taxation.

December 15, 2021

Christopher Hitchens, ten years gone

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

In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith laments our loss of the “last cool columnist”:

Christopher Hitchens speaking at The Amaz!ng Meeting held at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada on 20 January 2007.
Photo detail by ensceptico via Wikimedia Commons.

The ten year anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens (15 December) brings to mind two questions. Firstly, has it really been ten years since Christopher Hitchens died? Secondly, has it only been ten years since Christopher Hitchens died? The vivid nature of his prose and rhetoric makes him feel like our contemporary. His obsessions, though, — like atheistic evangelism and Middle Eastern nation building — feel as dated as a Roman artifact.

Columnists have a short cultural lifespan. Once, millions of Britons read Bernard Levin every week. Now? I doubt that most young writers have even heard of him. Classic books are reprinted. Newspapers gather dust. Hitchens’s name does not have all the weight it had ten years ago but it has stayed alive, because the Internet archives essays and appearances and because of the esteem that he is held in by his peers.

Janan Ganesh, writing for the Financial Times, believes that Hitchens would have thrived if he had lived to comment on 2021. “He was made for our time, not his own,” Ganesh writes, “The great vacancy in today’s public life is for an equal scourge of the censorious left and the feral right … Hitchens would have been in his element.”

This is bunkum. Hitchens would have been hopelessly out of sorts in the 2020s. How, for example, would he have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? It is as implausible to imagine that a man with such a lust for life would have endorsed long-term restrictions as it is to imagine that a man with such cheerful faith in the scientific establishment would have had time for COVID sceptics and vaccine hesitancy. Anybody hoping that Hitchens would have carved out some kind of nuanced middle ground, meanwhile, must have forgotten who we are dealing with. No, the plain truth is that the high moralism and rhetorical fury of “the Hitch” were perfectly suited to the heydays of the War on Terror and cable TV.

Liberal commentators like Ganesh miss Hitchens not so much because of his opinions as because he was cool. Ross Douthat mentions Mark Lilla, Anne Applebaum and Andrew Sullivan as other liberals who criticise the left and the right. But while I respect Lilla and Applebaum’s accomplishments and enjoy Sullivan’s writing, how many people do you think have fantasised about having a few drinks with them — or, indeed, with any other political commentator not named “Hitchens”?

December 12, 2021

“Say what you will about Rand, nobody ever described her as a light read”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, David Cohen notes that we’re coming up on the 40th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s death, which will almost certainly help expose her work to a renewed audience of disaffected teens and freshman university students:

More than a half-century ago the great — and, alas, irreplaceable — American scholar Allan Bloom became aware of the spell she could cast. He first started noticing it around the time he became aware of a decline in serious reading among his students. As the University of Chicago professor later recounted in The Closing of the American Mind, it became particularly evident whenever he asked his large introductory classes which authors and books really mattered to them. Most of the undergrads fell silent, he wrote, or else were puzzled by the question. There was generally no text to which they looked “for counsel, inspiration or joy,” he remarked. But one exception kept popping up.

There always seemed to be, he marvelled, a student who mentioned Atlas Shrugged, a work “although hardly literature, which, with its sub-Nietzschean assertiveness, excites somewhat eccentric youngsters to a new way of life.” And rather more of them than did Allan Bloom or, indeed, pretty much anyone else in the United States who has ever tried to hawk philosophy to the masses. Rand’s book sales overall stand at around 30 million, with hundreds of thousands more each year, and probably rather more this coming year.

Not only is she sought-after for her two best-known novels — the other being The Fountainhead — but also for her nonfiction. Her slim volumes of collected essays and old newspaper columns and other outtakes comprise an apparently fathomless vault from which the Ayn Rand Institute routinely cobbles together regular offerings for the lucky kids. One survey by the Library of Congress listed Atlas Shrugged as second only to the Bible in terms of campus popularity; an incredible accomplishment. All the more so in an era of Twitter, Facebook, and all the other intimations of the shortened attention-span. Say what you will about Rand, nobody ever described her as a light read.

A random internet search throws up an impressive litany of fans from the entertainment world, including Oliver Stone, Rob Lowe, Jim Carrey, and Sandra Bullock. Even the late professional wrestler James Hellwig, better known as The Ultimate Warrior, bellowed her praises, which might add some context to those rollickingly individualistic pre-fight interviews he used to do back in the WWE glory days. Oh, and let’s not forget Brad Pitt and Vince Vaughn. Which is particularly interesting, I think, since Jennifer Aniston (also a Rand fan) replaced the first with the second after Pitt ran off with Angelina Jolie, who’s also on record enthusing about Rand’s “very interesting” take on the good life.

In politics and economics, Rand had her youthful followers, too, and here again one sees the youth-appeal angle. Probably her best-known disciple is the former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who is rather ancient now. But back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, Greenspan declared that the high empress of the libertarian Right “taught me that capitalism is not only practical and efficient but also moral.” Like the young and philosophically restless undergrads in Allan Bloom’s classes, the British health secretary Sajid Javid also discovered her early on, and apparently still reads the courtroom scene in The Fountainhead every year. Or rather, as the cool libertarian kids in the black jeans might prefer to put it, it still reads him.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress