Quotulatiousness

October 29, 2021

Ten years after After America, how are Mark Steyn’s predictions going?

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

Mark Steyn published his book After America ten years ago:

Speaking of which, we are marking the tenth anniversary of my bestselling book After America. The observances are muted because, from the underpass at Del Rio to the school board meetings of Loudoun County, it has proved too accurate. Nonetheless, I remind you of the book’s opening chapter:

    Look around you. From now on, it gets worse. In ten years’ time, there will be no American Dream, any more than there’s a Greek or Portuguese Dream. In twenty, you’ll be living the American Nightmare, with large tracts of the country reduced to the favelas of Latin America, the rich fleeing for Bermuda or New Zealand or wherever on the planet they can buy a little time, and the rest trapped in the impoverished, violent, diseased ruins of utopian vanity.

    ‘After America’? Yes. It will linger awhile in a twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia, unable to keep pace with what’s happening and with an ever more tenuous grip on its own past. For a while, there may still be an entity called ‘the United States’, but it will have fewer stars in the flag, there will be nothing to ‘unite’ it, and it will bear no relation to the republic of limited government the first generation of Americans fought for. And life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness will be conspicuous by their absence.

    On the other hand:

    The United States is still different. In the wake of the economic meltdown, the decadent youth of France rioted over the most modest of proposals to increase the retirement age. Elderly ‘students’ in Britain attacked the heir to the throne’s car over footling attempts to constrain bloated, wasteful and pointless ‘university’ costs. Everywhere from Iceland to Bulgaria angry mobs besieged their parliaments demanding the same thing: Why didn’t you the government do more for me? America was the only nation in the developed world where millions of people took to the streets to tell the state: I can do just fine if you control-freak statists would shove your non-stimulating stimulus, your jobless jobs bill and your multi-trillion-dollar porkathons, and just stay the hell out of my life, and my pocket.

On the world stage, Joe Biden is the literal embodiment of America’s “twilight existence, arthritic and ineffectual, declining into a kind of societal dementia”. The favelas are here in many American cities, and I see that the citizens of what only a quarter-century ago alleged conservative David Brooks hailed as the future — Burlington, Vermont, the chichi post-political latte town of do-gooder liberalism – is now getting used to routine stabbings on Main Street.

I miss the Tea Party because their grievances were mainly economic. Today’s dissatisfactions are more profound and primal: We are not arguing about socialized health care, but about the agreed meaning of America, and whether it will come to more blood than it’s already coming to.

October 26, 2021

QotD: Blogging

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

That’s the big problem with blogs, of course: who cares what X thinks? It all depends on the quality of the thought, the uniqueness of the product, the value added. In the blogworld, a celebrity name adds no value whatsoever. If the blog’s good, the celebrity may earn some blogcred (oh, Lord, shoot me now for that one) for not sounding like someone who just emerged from the isolation tank of LA culture. But I really don’t care what Larry David thinks about John Bolton. I care what Larry David thinks about the itchy tags on shirts that scrape your neck, because I know that he can make a 12-part TV series that revolves around that detail, and George Will can’t.

We’ll see. In a way blogs are the refutation of the old joke: “The food’s so bad here.” “Yes, and such small portions.” Dole out crap in large amounts all day and you don’t guarantee traffic; eventually people will tired of poking through the heap with a stick looking for diamonds.

Somewhere in there, there’s a metaphor.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2005-05-10.

October 11, 2021

The Line responds to charges that their reporting on China is “anti-Asian racism”

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

As an impoverished cheapskate, I can’t afford to subscribe to The Line‘s full service, but they do allow a sub-set of their work to appear to non-paying subscribers, like this response to a former subscriber who accused them of “anti-Asian racism” in their posts involving the People’s Republic of China:

China’s emergence as a global power is going to be one of the defining stories of the first half of the 21st century. We probably aren’t reading and writing about it enough. Late this week, however, we received a note from a now-former reader, who said that the pieces we had run, and the overall focus on China, reflected anti-Asian racism, and they would not be supporting us going forward.

Look, it’s your money, folks. We want more and more of you to subscribe all the time. But we certainly respect your right to decline, or to unsubscribe if you don’t like the offerings. However, we do have a word of reply to those who would suggest that publishing articles about China is racist: get bent.

There is indeed anti-Asian racism out there. We have seen a lot of disturbing signs of it during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Asians of any description have been subjected to harassment and even random acts of violence. In the United States, some of the more fiery anti-Chinese rhetoric favoured by the former president also undoubtedly contributed to that wave, and that has spilled over here. Further, the problem of anti-Asian racism of course isn’t new. We have a long history of anti-Asian discrimination in North America. This must be acknowledged. Anti-Asian hate was real before Trump and COVID, and it’ll remain long after both are finished.

But writing critically about the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese armed forces, the policies of the Chinese government, the actions of the Chinese government, and the increasingly overt meddling in the affairs of other nations by Chinese intelligence operations, does not reflect any discredit upon Asian-Canadians, or any Asian in general. The policies of the Chinese government are exactly that: policies of a government. Criticizing policies and governments is not just acceptable, it’s absolutely necessary.

Indeed, we noted with grim amusement during a recent conversation with a colleague, who is comfortably nestled within the left-leaning progressive side of Canada’s political spectrum, that progressives in particular ought to be 100 per cent comfortable criticizing Chinese government policy. After all, progressives have been loudly and correctly noting for generations that there is a difference between rank antisemitism and warranted criticism of Israeli government policy. We find it fascinating that some of the very same people who would be horrified to be accused of antisemitism for criticizing Israel get tongue-tied when the Chinese government starts throwing religious minority women into rape camps.

We suspect some of it is simply rooted in the rampant identitarian obsessions of Western political discourse. People who criticize white supremacist Western imperialism a dozen times before breakfast might find it intellectually discombobulating to acknowledge that Western liberal democracies are not the only big baddies on the global stage. We’ve witnessed the many mental gymnastics that have been deployed to minimize or wish away credible reports of genocide and concentration camps, as if they were merely a Western fantasy being used to concoct a pretext for war. This is an ahistoric argument, by the way. The West has not been angling for war with one of its most lucrative suppliers and customers, quite the opposite. Until recently, we’ve operated under a Fukuyama delusion: the ironclad belief that China would moderate and liberalize as it grew more prosperous. This was predicated on the arrogant assumption that the liberal democratic West was the end state of history and that China would eventually meet us here, thus allowing peace and profit for all. That optimism hasn’t panned out, and many Western countries — Canada among them — have spent the last few years trying to reconcile our economic interdependence with our collective “oh shit” epiphany.

September 22, 2021

QotD: Urban bohemians

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

[C]onsider the inchoate American gang identified as “Bohemian” in New York Times rock critic Ann Powers’ new book, Weird Like Me: My Bohemian America. Powers casually links rock music with her version of bohemia, that world of young and not-so-young hipsters living and behaving in nontraditional ways. Rock, she writes, “inspires fans to dye their hair green and wear thigh-high leather boots; to defy their parents, skip school, and tell off the boss; or even, sometimes, to take a new turn and change their lives completely.” Her bohemia is inexorably linked with progressive politics, not holding down a decent job, being kind to gays and minorities, and all else that’s “cool.”

Powers fails to recognize that her bohemia is predicated upon a market liberalism that throws off so much wealth that you can live like a Pharaoh just by scavenging what other people throw out — as she and her slacker buddies did in San Francisco in the ’80s and early ’90s. Her bohemian lifestyle is part of the same system that underwrites free markets, consumerism, and tolerance for all sorts of offensive speech and alternative lifestyles. In other words, the liberty to be bohemian is a glorious result of the very capitalist reality that Powers says a real bohemian must be against.

Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason Online, 2000-10.

Update: Broken link fixed, thanks to “somercet1” for the heads-up.

September 18, 2021

“Martin Gurri’s The Revolt Of The Public is from 2014, which means you might as well read the Epic of Gilgamesh“

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

In another of his interesting series of book reviews, Scott Alexander looks at a book from 2014 that seems to have done a great job of predicting the situation today, but doesn’t help in looking forward from today:

… It has a second-edition-update-chapter from 2017, which means it might as well be Beowulf. The book is about how social-media-connected masses are revolting against elites, but the revolt has moved forward so quickly that a lot of what Gurri considers wild speculation is now obvious fact. I picked up the book on its “accurately predicted the present moment” cred, but it predicted the present moment so accurately that it’s barely worth reading anymore. It might as well just say “open your eyes and look around”.

In fact, I can’t even really confirm whether it predicted anything accurately or not. Certainly everything it says is true. Anyone who wrote it in 2000 would have been a prophet. Anyone who wrote it in 2020 would have been stating the obvious. Was writing it in 2014 a boring chronicle of clear truths, or an achievement for the ages? I find my memories are insufficiently precise to be sure. It’s like that thing where someone who warned about the coronavirus on March 1 2020 was a bold visionary, but someone who warned about it on March 20 was a conformist bandwagoner — except about the entire history of the 21st century so far. Maybe the best we can do with it is read it backwards, as an artifact of the era when the public was only ambiguously revolting, to see how the knowledge of the coming age arose and spread.

We remember the Arab Spring, those few months in 2011 when revolts spread across various Arab countries and longstanding regimes were toppled by protesters with smartphones and Twitter accounts. Gurri hits the relevant beats, but doesn’t limit himself to the Middle East.

In Spain, a vague formless group called the indignados (or Real Democracy Now, or Youth Without A Future) took to the streets. For months, they filled public squares, streets, and tent cities. Some protests attracted tens of thousands of participants; a few, hundreds of thousands. Some of them were vaguely socialist, but it wasn’t exactly a socialist protest; in fact, the government they were protesting was dominated by the Socialist Workers Party. They were just sort of vaguely angry. From their manifesto:

    Some of us consider ourselves more progressive, others more conservative. Some are believers, others not. Some have well-defined ideologies, others consider ourselves apolitical … but all of us are worried and outraged by the political, economic, and social landscape we see about us. By the corruption of the politicians, businessmen, bankers …

And so on.

At the same moment, hundreds of thousands of people were marching through the streets of Israel. The apparent trigger was a 25-year-old video editor named Daphni Leef who couldn’t afford an apartment near her job. She started a Facebook page saying people should protest the cost of living, one thing led to another, and soon 300,000 people were marching through the streets of Israel and Leef was a national hero.

[…]

Gurri argues all of this was connected, and all of it was a sharp break from what came before. These movements were essentially leaderless. Some had charismatic spokespeople, like Daphni Leef in Israel or Tahrir-Square-Facebook-page-admin Wael Ghonim in Egypt, but these people were at best the trigger that caused a viral movement to coalesce out of nothing. When Martin Luther King marched on Washington, he built an alliance of various civil rights groups, unions, churches, and other large organizations who could turn out their members. He planned the agenda, got funding, ran through an official program of speakers, met with politicians, told them the legislation they wanted, then went home. The protests of 2011 were nothing like that. They were just a bunch of people who read about protests on Twitter and decided to show up.

Also, they were mostly well-off. Gurri hammers this in again and again. Daphni Leef had just graduated from film school, hardly the sort of thing that puts her among the wretched of the earth. All of these movements were mostly their respective countries’ upper-middle classes; well-connected, web-savvy during an age when that meant something. Mostly young, mostly university-educated, mostly part of their countries’ most privileged ethnic groups. Not the kind of people you usually see taking to the streets or building tent cities.

Some of the protests were more socialist and anarchist than others, but none were successfully captured by establishment strains of Marxism or existing movements. Many successfully combined conservative and liberal elements. Gurri calls them nihilists. They believed that the existing order was entirely rotten, that everyone involved was corrupt and irredeemable, and that some sort of apocalyptic transformation was needed. All existing institutions were illegitimate, everyone needed to be kicked out, that kind of thing. But so few specifics that socialists and reactionaries could march under the same banner, with no need to agree on anything besides “not this”.

September 15, 2021

Narendra Modi apparently doesn’t inspire mere biographies … he gets hagiographies

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

Scott Alexander reviews Andy Marino’s gushingly admiring Modi: A Political Biography:

The author begins by writing about how Modi let him ride with him in his private helicopter and gave him unprecedented access to have “open-ended conversations” about “every aspect of his life”. The cover promises an objective evaluation, but on page 2, the author notes that “Objectivity does not mean flying in the face of incontrovertible evidence”, adding that “Modi has been the subject of the longest, most intense — and probably the most vituperative — campaign of vilification.” Marino promises to replace this campaign with “a narrative that is balanced, objective, and fair — but also unsparingly critical of [Modi’s] foibles” — which is an interesting construction, given how it contrasts criticism with fairness — and also pre-emptively declares the flaws he will be criticizing “foibles”. I’m not sure we ever get around to the criticism anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.

I am still going to summarize and review this book, but I recommend thinking of it as Modi’s autobiography, ghost-written by Andy Marino. I hope to eventually find another book which presents a different perspective, and an update for the past six years (M:APB ends in 2014, right when Modi was elected PM). Until then, think of M:ABP as a look into how Modi sees himself, and how he wants you to see him.

[…]

In 1975 the Emergency happened.

For thirty years, since its independence, India had been a socialist state. Not the cool kind of socialist where you hold May Day parades and build ten zillion steel mills. The boring kind of socialist where the government makes you get lots of permits, then taxes you really heavily, and nothing really ever gets done. “Even today the Representation of the People Act requires all Indian political parties to pledge allegiance not only to the Constitution but also to socialism.” The RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] and its collection of associated right-wing nationalist parties supported Hindu nationalism plus socialism. Their arch-enemy, the center-left-to-confused-mishmash Congress Party, supported secularism plus socialism. Non-socialism was off the table.

In unrelated news, there was a food shortage. Indians took to the streets protesting Prime Minister Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi). Gandhi was heavy-handed in crushing the protests, which caused more protests, one thing led to another, and finally Gandhi declared martial law, a period which has gone down in history as the Emergency.

Gandhi immediately moved to arrest all her political enemies and shut down all newspapers that criticized her. The RSS was one of Gandhi’s main enemies and had to go underground quickly. Gujarat became a center for the resistance. So Modi, as an official in Gujarat’s RSS, ended up right in the middle of this. He remained a paper-pusher, but now he was a paper-pusher for freedom, scheduling meetings of resistance leaders, maintaining a master list of safe houses and trusted operatives, and keeping lines of communication open.

During a capital-e Emergency even paper-pushers can have greatness thrust upon them, and Modi ended up with responsibilities way outside his formal job description:

    Chhayanak Mehta tells of how, after Deshmukh’s arrest, it was discovered that the papers he was carrying were still with him. These contained plans for the future actions of the [resistance], and it was essential to somehow retrieve them. To this end, Modi planned a distraction with the help of a female swayamsevak from Maningar. They went to the police station where Deshmukh was being held. While she posed as a relative and contrived a meeting with the prisoner, Modi somehow took the documents from under the noses of the police.

Or:

    Modi was also responsible for transportation and travel to Gujarat of those opponents of Indra still at liberty … Modi too, in the course of his duties, was compelled to travel, often with pamphlets that could have got him arrested. To minimize the risk he became a master of disguise, something that came naturally to one who always paid attention to his appearance. On one outing, he would appear as a saffron-robed sanyasi; on another, as a turbaned Sikh. One time he was sitting in a railway carriage, hiding behind a thick black beard, when his old schoolteacher sat down next to the grown-up “urchin”. The disguise worked perfectly, but some years afterwards the teacher attested that as Narendra disembarked, he introduced himself and offered a hearty saluation.

Still, the Emergency ground on. One aspect the book doesn’t stress, but which I was surprised to read about when Googling the period, was the forced sterilizations. Under pressure from the US and UN to control exponentially rising populations, Indira had started various population control efforts in the 60s, all ambiguously voluntary. Over time, the level of pressure ratcheted up, and during the Emergency the previously-ambiguous coercion became naked and violent. “In 1976-1977, the programme led to 8.3 million sterilisations, most of them forced”.

How did this end? Gandhi called an election — during which she was predictably voted out completely and her party lost more thoroughly than any party has ever lost anything before. Her opponents’ campaign was based on things like “she just forceably sterilized 8 million people and you could be next”, which is honestly a pretty compelling platform. The real question is why she gave up her emergency dictatorship and called an election at all. According to the book:

    It is more likely that in ending the Emergency Indira was thinking of herself, not India. She was aware of her growing international reputation as a tyrant, the daughter of a great democratic leader whose legacy she had damaged. As the journalist Tavleen Singh points out, the pressure to end the Emergency came simply from Indira Gandhi finding it unbearable that “the Western media had taken to calling her a dictator.”

(but before you interpret this as too inspiring a story of the victory of good over evil, Indira Gandhi was voted back in as prime minister three years later. We’ll get to that.)

Modi came out of the Emergency a rising star, appreciated by all for his logistical role in the Resistance. In the newly open political climate, the RSS was devoting more attention to their political wing and asked Modi to come on as a sort of campaign-manager-at-large, who would travel all around India and help friendly politicians get elected. He turned out to be really good at this, and rose through the ranks until he was one of the leading lights of the new BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, “Indian People’s Party”). He spent the next two decades running campaigns, traveling the country, and getting involved in internal backstabbing (which he had a habit of losing in ways that got him kicked out of the party just before something terrible happened, leaving him as the only person untarnished by the terrible thing when they inevitably invited him back). Finally some of Modi’s political enemies failed badly in the leadership of Gujarat — one was expelled for corruption, another suffered several natural disasters which he responded to poorly. Modi had been accepted back into the party. He was beloved by Gujaratis, who still remembered his heroic work during the Resistance. He was the only person untarnished by various terrible things. By the rules of Indian politics, it was the party’s choice who would replace the resigning incumbent as Chief Minister of Gujarat, and as Modi tells it, everyone else just kind of agreed he was the natural choice (his enemies say he did various scheming and backstabbing at this point). So on October 7 2001, Narendra Modi was sworn in as Chief Minister of Gujarat, India’s fifth-largest state.

September 11, 2021

QotD: Racism, anti-racism, and cognitive dissonance

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

In a little while, our chattering classes are going to have a field day roasting Charles Murray over a spit for his next book, which will openly argue that it has been scientifically proven that black people are, on the average, not as cognitively nimble as other people. For about a month, the usual suspects will jostle for space condemning the very address of this subject as racism incarnate.

Okay – but any public discussion that both reviles the idea that black people are less intelligent than others while also lustily demanding that it’s “racist” to submit black people to cognitive challenges is hopelessly incoherent. We disparage rape culture, diet culture – this exemption culture is premised on a basic assumption that it’s unsavory to require serious challenge of black students Because Racism.

No. You don’t get past racism by creating new forms of it. Scrapping traditional challenges should only be on the table after black kids have mastered the challenge anyway. Zora Neale Hurston gets the final word:

    It seems to me that if I say a whole system must be upset for me to win, I am saying that I cannot sit in the game, and that safer rules must be made to give me a chance. I repudiate that. If others are in there, deal me a hand and let me see what I can make of it, even though I know some in there are dealing from the bottom and cheating like hell in other ways.

The current “woke” consensus is that Hurston was wrong on this, that she was expecting too much. I would just love to see one of today’s Elect in a room with Hurston trying to tell her where she was going wrong.

John McWhorter, “Revisiting Classics at Princeton”, It Bears Mentioning, 2021-06-09.

September 8, 2021

QotD: Wine Ratings

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

… to the average Frenchman “wine” means “French wine.” And in a country where truckers buy splits of Bordeaux at highway rest-stops, golfers chug Burgundy, not Bud, and a glass of red costs less than a medium Coke, face it, they drink a lot more and know what they like.

But Americans, the kind who don’t collect vintage-chart flash-cards, are faced with a paralyzing array of choices. They can resolve never to venture beyond the few, usually well-advertised, brands they know. Or they can check the ratings. Not just Parker’s. Numbers from Wine Spectator, Wine Enthusiast and Wine & Spirits all appear on the shelf-talkers. And what’s wrong with that? Doesn’t knowing that SOMEONE considered it a Best Buy make you feel a little less in-the-dark when coughing up $15-$20 for an unfamiliar bottle?

Perhaps your local movie critic weeps over female bonding, while your tastes run more to female bondage. At least you can read his opinion, even as you take it through a filter. You won’t agree with all wine critics, either, but that’s no reason to knock the whole concept.

In the best of worlds, you would always have a trusted œno-professional or wine-geek friend help you. Otherwise, letting someone else plough through the business of comparing hundreds of wines for you makes sense, even if the result is rating an artistic creation with a number. Not perfect, but certainly helpful.

Jennifer “Chotzi” Rosen, “The Rating Game”, Rocky Mountain News, 2002-07-02.

September 3, 2021

QotD: Drama critics

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

There is one thing that 99 percent of all critics share with one another: they are failures. I don’t mean failures as critics — my God, that’s understood. I don’t even mean they are failures as people; I mean something more painful by far: These people are failures in life.

It’s a second-rate job, folks. Being a drama critic on Broadway wouldn’t keep a decent mind occupied 10% of the time. So you don’t even get second-raters. You get the dregs, the stage-struck but untalented neurotic who eventually drifts into criticism as a means of clinging peripherally to the arts. And most of your cruel critics come this way: they are getting their own back.

William Goldman, The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, 1969.

August 30, 2021

QotD: “Veneer theory” of human nature

Filed under: Books, Britain, Germany, Health, History, Pacific, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Before the Blitz the consensus was that a little light bombing was all it took to make the wheels come off civilisation. This is based on veneer theory — our good behaviour is a thin veneer laid on our fundamentally selfish, violent nature, and that under pressure our true nature will out.

This turned out not to be true. So spectacularly untrue that we still talk about the Blitz Spirit. With our trademark humility, the British concluded that this was due to our exceptional moral fibre and, with help from the Americans, set about bombing German civilians to hell and back. Regrettably the Germans too responded by pulling together, and working harder in the war effort. Literally no one thinks this was due to their exceptional moral fibre. Instead, it seemed that crisis led to teamwork. Bregman is able to quote similar behaviour on the Titanic, on September 11th and in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Despite this mountain of evidence, veneer theory is still overwhelmingly believed. In 1951 William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies — a book about how a group of British boys crash-landed on a Pacific island would really behave. They start with ideals of co-operation, but quickly descend to violence and anarchy. Weeks later when they’re rescued half of them are dead. The book became a massive best seller, and a much-studied classic. For those who lived through World War I, World War II, and were now watching communism demonstrate that you didn’t even need an enemy to slaughter tens of millions, you can see the appeal of a cynical view of human nature. However it is pure fiction. In 1966 Lord of the Flies happened for real — 6 teenagers went for a joy ride in a fishing boat, got swept out by a storm and washed up on an inhospitable island in the Pacific. When they were found 11 months later, they were all alive and healthy. They had survived by fortitude, resourcefulness and above all, teamwork.

An anonymous reviewer, “Your Book Review: Humankind”, Astral Codex Ten, 2021-05-28.

August 13, 2021

QotD: Whisky, whiskey, and Canadian whiskey

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

I’m from Kentucky, and people tell me I should be loyal to Bourbon, but I see the whiskey hierarchy sort of like this:

  1. Scotch. Nectar of the Gods. Complex, smooth, and just the right thing to fill yourself up on before painting yourself blue and riding off to kick the crap out of a bunch of English gits. Lagavulin and Macallan (16 years) are the reason people have been able to tolerate life in the scrubby, bleak landscape of northern Great Britain. Or whatever the island that contains Scotland is called. For all I know, “Great Britain” includes the Falklands.
  2. Bourbon and sour mash. Only good for mixing, unless you spend at least forty dollars, because Bourbon is usually harsh. And that includes Wild Turkey. But the better ones are smooth and full-flavored, albeit about as complex as a Kool Pop. I like Blanton’s. Maker’s Mark gold is okay, but only if your friends are serving it free of charge. People holler about Knob Creek all the time. I’m suspicious of old-timey-looking products that didn’t seem to exist until 1985. I suspect that it’s a gimmick aimed at yuppie suckers, but I have not actually tried it.
  3. Irish whiskey. Wonderfully smooth; especially Black Bush, which is my favorite. Great subtle flavor. Even the cheaper brands are pretty good. But zero complexity.
  4. Canadian. This makes a good substitute for windshield-washer fluid. Absolutely the most boring whisky (with no “E”) in the universe. Tastes like brown water. Alcoholics love Canadian whisky, because there’s not much to it, and you can drink it day after day without much effort. I can’t believe Canadians waste their time driving to the distillery to make this garbage. Laughable.

I guess now I’ll get flames from the unfortunate people who enjoy Jack Daniel’s, and from pedantic losers who drink obscure distilled beverages made in Wales.

Canadian Club and Crown Royal drinkers won’t flame me until at least noon, because they are all alcoholics and won’t be done with their morning retching until then.

I still need to find some really bad Scotch on a par with Jack Daniel’s. Something packed in plastic bottles or even cans. You need a good cheap harsh whisky to marinate BBQ. The good stuff, I reserve for marinating myself.

Steve H., “Booze and Birds: My Stressful Life”, Hog On Ice, 2005-03-20

August 8, 2021

Presidential biographies

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

As I’m not an American, I haven’t read many biographies of US Presidents (just Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Grant, and Coolidge if I remember correctly), so I can’t really comment on this project by a man who read and ranked 240 of them:

In 2012, an investment banker and avid history reader named Stephen Floyd began making his way through the American presidents, one biography at a time. It was a way to fill time while commuting to Hong Kong on twelve-hour flights. “I got tired of drinking free wine and watching cheap movies,” he says. Starting with George Washington, he read 240 titles (123,000 pages) in six years or, to be precise, 2,243 days, bringing him up to Obama. (Floyd is not alone in this pursuit: as the Washington Post reports, reading biographies of all the presidents is a thing).

Along the way, Floyd blogged about the books he read at bestpresidentialbios.com where fellow enthusiasts commented on his reviews, sometimes challenged his opinions, and suggested additional biographies to read. His blog posts improved to the point where he became a reliable and knowledgeable reviewer, as good as most professionals. When Stephen Floyd says David McCullough’s much-celebrated biography of John Adams is the second-best biography of John Adams, you need to listen. He can back it up.

Floyd, who continues to review biographies he overlooked in his initial journey, as well as new releases, has covered a dozen volumes on George Washington alone, including all four volumes and 1,800 pages of James Flexner. He rates Ron Chernow’s Washington: A Life the best of the bunch, by far. Chernow is the only biography of the 270-some Floyd has reviewed to earn a five-star rating. Only sixteen authors have 4.5 stars or better. (In case you’re wondering, Floyd gave Hoover one of the worst reviews it got anywhere, but still placed it among the dozen or so biographies with 4.25 stars, and seeing as it’s keeping company with Edmund Morris’s magnificent Theodore Roosevelt series, I won’t complain.)

Of course, one can quibble with Floyd’s judgments, as with those of any reviewer. He has 4.5 stars for Doris Kearns Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, notwithstanding the padding and the plagiarism (it has been taken out of print by its publisher). He found a lot more to like in Peggy Noonan’s Reagan biography than I did. Also in H. Wayne Morgan’s McKinley, which is nowhere near as fine as Margaret Leech’s lower-rated effort. But Floyd knows what he likes and why.

Going back to the Adams biographies, he celebrates Ferling for his judicious details and careful opinions. “The author’s descriptive capability is on consistent display and he sets the context in most scenes magnificently.” He appreciates that Ferling finds Adams’ relationship with his wife, Abigail, more complicated than the perfect romance portrayed in other biographies.

Floyd is less charmed by McCullough’s “enormously sympathetic” biography of Adams. It is “incontrovertibly excellent,” and firmly rooted in the abundant Adams source material, but the author’s tendency to end every scene with a remark favorable to the subject irks after a while. McCullough comes across as “a mother doting on a favorite child.”

It’s a fair point, and Ferling gets the higher mark.

Bestpresidentialbios.com has all of Floyd’s reviews, and summaries of his reviews broken down by president. It’s a great resource and, as mentioned, he’s still adding to it.

August 1, 2021

Gresham’s Law, as applied to photography

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

In economics, Gresham’s Law states that “bad money drives out good”, that may need to be reformulated as it applies to modern standards of photography in a formulation something like: “bad photos drive out good photos“:

“Art is like a joke, either you get it or you don’t.” So it was explained to me in the late 1970s by photographer Randy Eriksen, whose cheeky observation about the importance of context to one’s appreciation of either comedy or art could have been a parenthetical second subtitle for author and educator Kim Beil’s Good Pictures: A History of Popular Photography (Stanford University Press, 2020).

Beil’s episodic and highly readable book identifies 50 photographic trends — illustrated by hundreds of vintage and contemporary photographs — that have guided the aesthetics of photography since 1851, when a group of American daguerreotypes made a splash at the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London. Back in 1851, context mostly equaled 1851, as the latest photo technology of the day played a major role in how Victorians decided that one picture was good and another was not.

[…]

Beil’s own context began in Albany, New York, where she grew up. “My mom was into photography,” Beil tells me over the phone. “She was the one who took the pictures in my family. When my parents got me my first camera, a Nikon FE, they made me attend a class offered by the camera store. I remember it was held in this dark ballroom at an Albany hotel. It was me and a bunch of middle-aged men. That’s where I learned about 35mm cameras, f-stops, and shutter speeds.”

“How To Make Good Pictures” (Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak Co., 1943).
Source: Collection of the Prelinger Library, via Collectors Weekly.

Beil also learned from various “How to Make Good Pictures” manuals published by Kodak, which also hailed from upstate New York. “I’m pretty sure I internalized the advice I read in ‘How to Make Good Pictures’,” Beil says of her early aesthetic indoctrination, “things like avoiding centering your subject in the frame, the rule of thirds, shooting during ‘golden hour’, all that conventional wisdom.”

[…]

“Intention is central to the way I think about art, and maybe even how we define it,” Beil agrees. “Take lens flare: I think the power of lens flare comes from its initial unintentional use by people who were just taking casual pictures without any premeditation, without much intention.” In these sorts of photographs, Beil says, lens flare was an amateur mistake that conferred “a kind of authenticity to an image.” That’s why advertisers find lens flare so appealing. “Because we still associate it with authenticity,” Beil says, “it makes an advertising photo seem more real, maybe even spontaneous.”

Today, lens flare is so widely used, so intentional, that billions of smartphone cameras offer multiple variations of this former failing in the form of filters, which can be activated with a click or a swipe. “Everything can be achieved and there are no more accidents,” Beil says of photography in the 2020s, “so photographers look to things that happened before to reinsert some kind of authenticity into their pictures.” Thanks to technology, photographers can now pretend to take pictures as if they lacked the tools to make their pictures, well, good.

The problem, of course, is that technology is intrusive, inserting itself into aesthetics and even cultural paradigms without being invited to do so. “We have a situation today,” Beil says, “in which our smartphone cameras are producing pictures according to the criteria of software designers, who have made a lot of egregious assumptions about the tonality of skin color.” According the Beil, because the sample sets used by software designers have historically included more pictures of light skin tones than dark skin tones, the colors captured by our smartphone cameras do a better job of reproducing the lighter skin tones. “People with darker skin aren’t represented in the way that they want to be,” she says, “or even in the way that’s accurate. Google has promised that the Pixel 6 camera coming out in October 2021 is going to deal with that problem,” she adds, but Beil doesn’t sound like she’s expecting much more than an incremental improvement.

July 14, 2021

Instead of economics, how about “humanomics”?

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

In City Journal, Allison Schrager reviews Bettering Humanomics: A New, and Old, Approach to Economic Science by Deirdre McCloskey:

I thoroughly enjoyed Deirdre McCloskey’s Bettering Humanomics, but I may be a glutton for feelings of intellectual inadequacy. Truth be told, I only understood about 60 percent of the book. It contains countless references to great works of the humanities, economics, and the history of economic thought. A casual reader cannot possibly be familiar with a fraction of them, even within his own field. But McCloskey expects you to know them.

At first this book frustrated and confused me. Then I suspected this reaction was by design. I am, after all, an economist myself: I have dedicated my life to learning my craft and benefited from many years of training at great institutions from important thinkers. But reading Humanomics, I became fully aware of how little I know. I now believe that becoming a fully formed economist requires that I stop watching trash TV in my free time and read the Theory of Moral Sentiments instead. McCloskey pulls no punches, whether on her intellectual opponents or on the reader. Here is one example, where she defends herself from a critic, philosopher Gerald Gaus:

    Aside from these textual matters, I must say I find myself repelled by Gaus’s vision of people as cynical conformists: “we are such deeply social normative creatures, in the sense that we are so attuned to the normative expectations of others, that we can achieve a stable rule-based system of cooperation even when many are not enthusiastic about the moral attitudes and virtues that the rules express.” I invite him to reread Thucydides’s dialogue between the Athenian diplomats and the Melians, and repent.

McCloskey argues that economics would be better if we listened to people — in controlled experiments, chat rooms, meetings, surveys, and at the Rotary. We need to absorb the lessons from art and culture (perhaps trash TV has value, after all). She does not believe that economists need to ditch math and data, but our overreliance on these tools encourages us to view people as abstractions and leads us astray. Such tendencies also help explain the rise of behaviorism, which assumes that humans are flawed creatures who must be nudged by a wise bureaucrat into better choices; recent flirtations with industrial policy; and the belief that, if we just get our government and laws right, growth will follow.

We must consider how individuals see and experience the world around them, and we must recognize that humans are malleable in ways that we don’t account for. For example, McCloskey estimates a quarter of all income comes from “Sweet Talk” — not lies or trickery, but the ability to be persuasive and compelling, a crucial aspect of sales and advertising. It influences how we perceive the world and can be an important part of motivation.

We economists have lost our appreciation for the humanities, and that means that we underestimate the importance of human dignity. This is no small oversight. McCloskey spends about a third of her book arguing that understanding the humanity of the northwestern European population can explain why it industrialized first. Other countries around the world had wealth, strong institutions, and well-trained mathematicians and engineers (perhaps better ones), but industrialization happened in Britain first because it treated its people with dignity and empowered them with both rhetoric and knowledge.

QotD: The unlikely hermaphrodites in The Left Hand of Darkness

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

I’m strange only in that I was very young and that the book that caused this reaction was a classic of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness.

Let me start by saying that I LIKED the book. Loved it even. Mostly because it was different and it made me think. (Like other books of the time, it didn’t age well, mostly on language, but also structure, which I guess was innovative and daring at the time, but strikes me as “too early seventies” for words. Now this might be JUST ME but there’s a whole batch of books — one Heinlein — I can’t stand to re-read. I came of age in the seventies and eventually grew to loathe that false-craft feel of art at that time. No one else is forced to agree with me.)

But part of what made me think — because my relaxing reads are books on evolution and animals and their biology and behavior (guys, I read Konrad Lorenz for fun) is that the left (and at the time anyone with even vague intellectual pretensions was at the very least soft left, because the zeitgeist was) was very funny about humans.

They often opened their books on humans by gesticulating broadly at imaginary religious fanatics and rubbing said fanatics’ noses in the fact that “we are animals. No, we’re really animals.” And then proceeded to go a little bananas, sometimes in supposed non-fiction, like Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape, which assured us only humans killed their own species, or something equally ridiculous (I read it at around 14 or 15, I just remember his thesis that humans were uniquely vile made me snort-giggle at the time. Because, you know, you can sustain that if you’re religious, and say humans should aspire to the divine image, but if we’re really just animals, there is NO vile. We do what instinct and nature tell us, no judgement, right?)

But mostly this dysfunction showed in science fiction, particularly at the time. “We’re just animals. If we just changed/removed/tweaked x y z we’d be communitarian, sharing, no war animals.”

The way hermaphrodites behave in TLHOD made me snort/giggle too for various reasons, the first being that hermaphrodite species on Earth (granted mostly very small) have some of the most violent mating behaviors in the world. Makes sense since at least in live-bearing, or for that matter those who care for eggs, species, the cost falls on the one who carries young or sits on eggs. The other one just goes off, whistling his merry way and lives to mate another day. So in a species where either of the couple can bear, there would be a “war” (There are several books on war of the sexes in various species, which has led to things like praying mantises and duck penises.) to determine who bears. And yes, she did get right that in an intelligent species, value would have to be put on children-of-the-body or no one would want to do it. (Or most children would be conceived by rape. Which to be fair, is most hermaphrodite species on Earth.)

What she got wrong, related to that, is then having the kids raised in some sort of hippie dippie commune.

In fact, the whole setup makes perfect sense as a professional woman’s fantasy. “I want to have kids, but someone else raises them, and it will be the perfect communitarian family and no one will think it’s bad if I’m not there, or take no more interest in them than in any of the family kids.”

In point of fact, from evolutionary POV, an hermaphrodite species would have a hell of an attachment to their own biological “of the body” kids, for the simple reason that otherwise, being intelligent and able to circumvent instinct, no one would have kids “of the body” and those born of rape would be abandoned to die. World’s shortest species/race/breed.

Yes, I’m sure that some human (and these were supposed to be modified humans) tribes have done the communitarian child raising, but it’s not the norm, it’s not usually as communitarian as it looks and … oh, heck, even extended family raising the kids, which it sort of is, is nowhere nearly what US leftists think it is. There’s squabbles, politics, and the mothers very much care and “pull” for their own kid.

Anyway, it amused me because it was nowhere near the only. There was this trend back then for hermaphrodite modified humans that somehow made them more cooperative/better at not warring, etc, which I found absolutely mind bogglingly bizarre and made me wonder why people thought injecting the fierce young-protecting instinct of the female into a species at large would make it more sharing and caring, not the other way around. (And lord, study any society with multiple concubines and wives. Women protect THEIR children, there is no sisterhood or love all babies, when yours is in the mix. Some of the most horrific tales of mankind are the vengeance wrought by a woman on rival women AND THEIR BABIES.)

Sarah A. Hoyt, “Remaking People”, According to Hoyt, 2018-11-19.

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