Quotulatiousness

January 16, 2024

Mark Twain’s Huck Finn

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

In Quillette, Tim DeRoche re-reads Huck Finn after finally engaging with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and finds the two books are not in opposition but should be read as complementing each other:

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884.
Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Twain scholar Laura Trombley (now the President of Southwestern University in Texas) once told me that Huck Finn isn’t about slavery. “It’s about an abused boy looking for a safe haven,” she said. It was daring for Twain to give a voice to the untutored, unwashed son of the town drunk.

    You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another …

Huck’s voice, often described as “realistic”, is actually a highly stylized literary device and a brilliant riff on how real boys talk. In these first few sentences, Twain inserts himself into the story and sets his protagonist up to be an unreliable narrator, as Huck admits that there will be “stretchers” of his own along the way.

Huck Finn is our national epic, much like The Odyssey is for Greece or the Nibelungenlied is for Germany. Like those older epics, Huck Finn can be read as version of a Jungian myth, in which the hero descends into the Underworld, undergoes trials and tribulations, and returns to us reborn. This story of two travelers on an epic journey is an archetype of our culture, which is why it is retold with such frequency. It’s possible to read every American road novel or movie as a reworking of Huck Finn.

Twain may not have written in verse, but Huck’s narration is beautiful and lyrical and so distinctively American that it has influenced generations of American writers, both popular and literary. That indelible voice, at once innocent and highly perceptive, is the fixed moral point from which Twain can then satirize so many different segments of his beloved country — preachers, con men, politicians, actors, and ordinary gullible Americans.

The book has been criticized as one of the first “white savior” narratives, but this gets it exactly backwards. Huck doesn’t save anyone in the novel. (One of Jane Smiley’s criticisms, in fact, is that Huck doesn’t “act” to save his friend.) It is actually Jim, the slave, who saves Huck — both literally and figuratively. It is Jim who provides Huck with a safe haven, and it is Jim who calls Huck to account when Huck treats him as less than human: “En all you wuz thinkin ’bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is trash, en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er de fren’s en makes ’em ashamed.”

Huck eventually humbles himself before Jim and tells us, “I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d a knowed it would make him feel that way.” Huck may be the protagonist of this story, but the slave Jim is its moral hero. It is Jim who reveals himself to be a fugitive slave so that Tom Sawyer can get medical attention for his gunshot wound. And after he is freed from slavery, Jim heads home to assume his responsibilities as a husband and father.

In contrast to Jim, Huck yearns for adventure and escape. Forced to live with the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson at the start of the book, he resents their attempts to “sivilize” him. He feels “all cramped up” by the clothes they make him wear, and he dismisses their Biblical teaching because he “don’t take no stock in dead people”. Instead of returning home with Jim, Huck tells us that he intends to “light out for the territory”. He represents one aspect of the American spirit — ironic, secular, individualistic.

January 15, 2024

QotD: Beyond mere superstition, moderns believe in literal magic

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

Stern’s “intellectual Luddites” wrote a whole lot of supercharged, Sturm und Drang hooey about “national souls” and “blood spirits” and whatnot, but even their most Romantic fantasies about the Aryan Übermenschen of yore paled in comparison to stuff like “Critical Race Theory”. Heinrich Himmler may have been the spiritual heir of Stern’s “intellectual Luddites”, but even he, playing with his live-action Castle Wolfenstein playset while the world burned, was a paragon of reason compared to people like Robin DeAngelo. Himmler thought “Nordic” runes were spiritual conduits to the mythic past, but our modern Elites believe, quite literally, in magic.

Magic dirt: There’s something about the Rio Grande, or the Ellis Island ferry, such that crossing it transforms 70-IQ campesinos into bourgie app developers. Magic shapes: Mold plastic into something that looks like a Glock, and anyone who sees it will be compelled to start shooting people. And of course the granddaddy of them all, magic words: Race, sex, these are all “social constructions”, such that a persyn who says xzhey are a woman really IS a woman, physiology be damned. Within the space of a generation, the same people who were smugly slapping Darwin fish on the bumpers of their Subaru Outbacks have declared the very basics of biology rank heresy.

Everyone knows that Karl Marx called religion “the opium of the masses”. It’s a fun quote, but it wasn’t particularly effective rhetoric back in the 19th century, since drug addiction wasn’t really a thing back then.1 Far more effective was David Hume’s description — “sick men’s dreams” — but even that paled in comparison to the 19th century’s go-to tactic: Implied infancy. If religious belief developed naturally, in a predictable pattern — and who could deny it, having read the formidable logic of E.B. Tylor? — then anyone who still clung to his belief in a Magic Sky Fairy must belong, despite his physical presence here in this best of all possible worlds, to Mankind’s intellectual infancy. Of course we’re not saying that the religion of Aquinas and Galileo, of Newton and Boyle, was all piffle … but come now, old sock, you must admit that the Thirty Nine Articles can only be understood “in a non-natural sense”, as Cardinal Newman (of all people!) put it. Are we not, in the face of all-triumphing science, all Robert Elsmere? Surely no one as obviously intelligent as yourself could possibly still …

Marx had that other quote that fits this situation much better, the one about “second time as farce”. Our Postmodern Elite, the I-Fucking-Love-Science crowd, has gone way past intellectual Luddism. They’re digital infants, chanting their hosannas to magic dirt, watching the same cartoon play out over and over again in Minnesota, in Chicago, soon enough in a neighborhood near you (infants love repetition). Tantrums, nom noms, and whee! A shiny!!

Such are the fruits of rationalism.

Severian, “Digital Infants”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-16.

    1. Despite the easy availability of all kinds of highly addictive shit like opium and cocaine. Ponder that in the dark watches of the night, if you ever feel like giving yourself insomnia.

January 11, 2024

The Canadian Armed Forces believe “that they – and the country they serve – are irredeemably racist and oppressive”

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

The official journal of the Canadian Armed Forces has a … woke … view of themselves and the nation:

… the latest edition — which was just posted online — contains little to no mention of strategy, geopolitics or the avalanche of contemporary problems facing the Canadian Armed Forces. There’s not a single reference to the recruiting crisis, which has left vacancies of up to 40 per cent in some departments. No mention of the plummeting maintenance standards that recently prompted the commander of the Royal Canadian Navy to declare that his fleet was in a “storm” with no end in sight. No discussion of why Canada is slashing its military budget even as its peer countries do the exact opposite.

Instead — in a signal of just how far the Canadian Armed Forces has embraced far-left “anti-racist” ideology — the entire issue is devoted to how the Canadian military is a racist, patriarchal den of colonialist oppression that needs to be torn down and remade from scratch.

After devoting extended paragraphs to each cultural infraction, Eichler concludes that the Canadian Armed Forces must be remade via an “anti-oppression framework” of “feminist, decolonial, critical race, queer, critical disability, and critical political economy theories”.

Eichler notes this is “not an easy task, but a necessary one if DND/CAF wants to move the yardstick on culture change.”

Another feature, by York University psychotherapist Tammy George, frames the Canadian Armed Forces as being poisoned by “institutional whiteness”.

“In order for meaningful, sustained culture change to occur, there must be a recognition by the white majority of the way in which whiteness organizes lives,” she writes.

Leigh Spanner, a feminist postdoctoral research fellow, wrote that the CAF’s system of supporting military families was anti-feminist and patriarchal.

Ash Grover, a researcher in “feminist anti-militarism”, argues that the military might have fewer instances of post-traumatic stress disorder if they paid closer attention to “anti-oppressive theory” and how “acts of ‘othering’ can result in responses typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder”.

January 7, 2024

QotD: The US Army between 1945 and 1950

Filed under: Asia, History, Military, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One aftermath of the Korean War has been the passionate attempt in some military quarters to prove the softness and decadence of American society as a whole, because in the first six months of that war there were wholesale failures. It has been a pervasive and persuasive argument, and it has raised its own counterargument, equally passionate.

The trouble is, different men live by different myths.

There are men who would have a society pointed wholly to fighting and resistance to Communism, and this would be a very different society from the one Americans now enjoy. It might succeed on the battlefield, but its other failures can be predicted.

But the infantry battlefield also cannot be remade to the order of the prevailing midcentury opinion of American sociologists.

The recommendations of the so-called Doolittle Board of 1945-1946, which destroyed so much of the will — if not the actual power — of the military traditionalists, and left them bitter, and confused as to how to act, was based on experience in World War II. In that war, as in all others, millions of civilians were fitted arbitrarily into a military pattern already centuries old. It had once fitted Western society; it now coincided with American customs and thinking no longer.

What the Doolittle Board tried to do, in small measure, was to bring the professional Army back into the new society. What it could not do, in 1946, was to gauge the future.

By 1947 the United States Army had returned, in large measure, to the pattern it had known prior to 1939. The new teen-agers who now joined it were much the same stripe of men who had joined in the old days. They were not intellectuals, they were not completely fired with patriotism, or motivated by the draft; nor was an aroused public, eager to win a war, breathing down their necks.

A great many of them signed up for three squares and a sack.

Over several thousand years of history, man has found a way to make soldiers out of this kind of man, as he comes, basically unformed, to the colors. It is a way with great stresses and great strains. It cannot be said it is wholly good. Regimentation is not good, completely, for any man.

But no successful army has been able to avoid it. It is an unpleasant necessity, seemingly likely to go on forever, as long as men fight in fields and mud.

One thing should be made clear.

The Army could have fought World War III, just as it could have fought World War II, under the new rules. During 1941-1945 the average age of the United States soldier was in the late twenties, and the ranks were seasoned with maturity from every rank of life, as well as intelligence.

In World War III, or any war with national emotional support, this would have again been true. Soldiers would have brought their motivation with them, firmed by understanding and maturity.

The Army could have fought World War III in 1950, but it could not fight Korea.

T.R. Fehrenbach, This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness, 1963.

January 4, 2024

QotD: Displays of intelligence as a status good

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

… noblemen in France (in the rest of Europe too, but France’s old kingdom was special for how wide the disparity was) were used to being by far the richest in their surroundings. And they were used to the peasants being less than dirt under their feet. Or their chariot wheels.

And then that changed, in what is a cultural eye-blink. Forget the crazy slogan. Humans don’t like change. Particularly they hate change that challenges their status. Unable to actually increase their net worth (within the prescribed realms in which noblemen could do such) or stop spending, the nobility instead went for displays of wealth. Big and extravagant ones. And the wigs were … quite, quite insane.

So what does that have to do with Facebook?

For a few generations, since the left captured the academia, entertainment and the industrial-news complex, aka, the opinion makers, to be a leftist has been synonymous with being smart.

And being smart, since the renaissance, but definitely since the world wars has been the greatest social “good” there is.

No, I’m not saying the left was smart. Increasingly, most of them weren’t, because as it became a matter of social display, the easily led started imitating it.

No, I’m saying that to parrot leftist ideas was to be considered smart. Partly because of the left’s conceit that Marxism was “scientific” there has always been, attached to the modern left the idea that to believe as they do is “rational” and “smart” and that their opponents are stupid.

Not only did they hold onto this while their ideas were proven wrong by reality over and over again, but having captured academia, they pushed leftist ideas as synonymous with being educated. I mean, if you’d attended an elite school, you received these ideas, and the way to signal you’ve attended the school is to parrot it. Thus leftism became the old school tie (mostly around the neck of our economy, but never mind.)

While they had full control of the media, be it entertainment or informational, they could reinforce the message, as well as revile anyone who challenged them as stupid, wrong and illiterate, and GET AWAY WITH IT.

With intelligence being the highest status-good in our society, the left had secure status. Forever, they thought.

The change has been very rapid. The fall of the USSR and [the rise of] talk radio were the beginning, and since the internet took off, they’ve been trying to hold on to the tail of the comet, as it streaks away from them.

I’ve said it before and I maintain it. If Mr. Obama had been president in a country where the information tech was the same as in the 30s, all his failures would have been hidden, and people would believe him a staggering genius, instead of the little man who wasn’t there. Because that’s how the industrial-media complex presented him.

And then … And then they went all in for Hillary! They were “With her” 300%.

Unbelievably, it didn’t work.

I think they’d suspected, before, that things had changed. But they could still tell themselves stories, dismiss the opposition, preen on having all the power. And then … it failed.

Since then they’ve been running scared with social insecurity. They display their “brilliance” for all the world, and it didn’t work? Oh. Must signal louder, larger, crazier.

All the “Wokeness” over everything possible (and mostly imaginary) in the last few years? That’s social signaling by a social group losing power and trying to regain it.

The less it works, the more extravagant it will get. I am in premonitory awe over what will happen should Trump beat the margin of fraud in 2020. You thought the Democratic Socialist meeting was funny? You ain’t seen nothing yet. They won’t be able to open their mouths without announcing “point of personal privilege” and their pronouns, and interrupting each other with ever finer intersectional victimhood.

If you think having a woman who won an SF award malign the person the award is named after with a bunch of ahistorical nonsense, and seeing the institution cave within days was peak wokeness, you’re deluding yourself.

Soon and very soon the “Wokeness” displays will be the equivalent of having live birds in your hair.

Because in their subconscious, if they just signal loud enough they’ll regain their status as “smart” and “educated”.

Meanwhile, we’ll be buying popcorn stocks and saying “Is that a ship on your head, or are you that insecure?”

Sarah Hoyt, “Is That A Ship On Your Head?”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-09-01.

January 1, 2024

QotD: The Panto

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

One of the worst things my parents ever did was force me to go to the panto. It was Angela’s Ashes levels of misery memoir fodder.

What made it worse was that I was about 14; I’d almost managed to get through childhood without experiencing this strange British tradition and then, just at the age when you’re most vulnerable to cringe, I got dragged in. Anyway, I think I’m over it now.

Pantomime is one of those very British things that makes me feel a strange sense of alienation from my countrymen, like celebrating the NHS or twee. I’m glad that other people enjoy it, and that it brings a lot of work to actors and to theatres during the Christmas period. I just personally don’t get it.

For those who don’t know about the ins and outs of our island culture, panto is a sort of farcical theatre featuring lots of sexual innuendo and contemporary pop culture references; I think when I watched it there must have been one or two ex-Neighbours stars because they all finished by singing the theme tune.

A key part of this British institution is drag, with men playing the roles of Widow Twankey and the Ugly Sisters. Drag is quite an established tradition in England, such a part of popular entertainment that there is even a photograph of British soldiers in dresses fighting in the Second World War.

Pantomime is thought to have evolved from the medieval Feast of Fools, a day of the year (around the Christmas/New Year period) when social norms would be inverted; laymen would be elected bishops, lords would serve their retainers drinks, and men and women would even swap roles. Social norms could be temporarily broken, which continues today in the often risqué humour incongruously aimed at family audiences (hilariously portrayed in the Les Dennis episode of Extras.)

This kind of drag is obviously humourous, the aim being for the men to look as ridiculous as possible; think of the ungainly Bernard Bresslaw in Carry on Doctor. It is very different to the later pop culture gender fluidity pioneered by David Bowie in which males might be presented as beautifully feminine, even alluring; that was aimed at challenging and disturbing the audience, while panto is aimed at amusing and reassuring. Indeed, the whole point of spending a day inverting social norms is that, by doing so, you are implicitly accepting and defending those social norms.

This form of drag is obviously quite different to the more modern drag queen, a form of entertainment that can be far more explicit and which has in the 21st century become yet another one-of-those-talking-points, chiefly because people seem so keen on letting children watch it.

Ed West, “The last conservative moral panic”, Wrong Side of History, 2023-02-08.

December 30, 2023

Social prosecution … because they can’t send you to the Gulag

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

Theophilus Chilton reposted an older article from 2019 that clearly still has relevance:

For the past few years, we have been seeing a tremendous increase in a phenomenon which I refer to as “social prosecution”. This has taken place as the Left finds itself in a position of increasing power over the culture and the means of cultural discourse (e.g. social media, flow of information on the internet, etc.). Yet, the Left has not been able to establish more than a relative parity with the nominal Right in the formal political arena. As a result, the Left has had to seek alternative means for punishing its enemies since they don’t have much ability to do so formally yet.

Before I proceed to the main discussion about social prosecution, I’d like to lay a little groundwork first. It’s often said that politics is downstream from culture. In other words, as trends, assumptions, mores, and whatnot within a society’s cultural milieu begin to change, these values will begin to be reflected in the political realm after a bit of lag time. However, an equally salient fact is that culture, in turn, is downstream from power – which is not to be confused with politics.

Power is the ability to shape or change your circumstances in a real way, one that is actually effective. As a result of the Left’s long march through the institutions, they have gained significant (and in some cases total) control over most areas of information control and influence – the academy, entertainment, social media, journalism, and much more. This allows them to alter the direction in which western cultures evolve, which then translates into political change on down the road. That is an exercise of real power, no matter how silly we may be tempted to think Clown World is. But, it’s necessarily a slow process.

We all know the Left would love to be able to persecute and destroy its opponents completely, if only it were in a position to be able to. We know this because that’s what the Left always does when it achieves political power. It even does this to the extent of cannibalising itself of those who are not the “right kind” of leftists, the sort of purity spiraling that was observed in the early portion of Solzhenitsin’s Gulag Archipelago, whereby the Bolsheviks were as quick to purge Social Democrats, Anarchists, and other leftists as they were those on the Right. It’s seen even today in the USA on a smaller scale in the form of intra-leftist fighting and virtue signaling between various intersectional special interest groups.

What we all need to understand is that when it comes to the Left, there is really no such thing as a “moderate leftist” or “left-leaning centrist”. There are only leftists who cannot exercise the power they would like, and therefore cannot reveal their radicalness to the extent they would wish to, but who WILL do so as soon as they sense the opportunity. The default setting for the Left is permanent revolution, whether they are currently able to act on that impulse or not. This is why Cthulhu always swims left – apart from nominal rightist opposition (which, let’s face it, has been purposefully tepid in most of the West for over a generation), there really are no brakes checking the Left’s movement in that direction.

So what can the Left do when it finds itself in the position of having “soft” power (through control of institutions, opinion-shaping, etc.) such that it can influence the culture, but their ability to exercise political power has not “caught up” yet?

This is where social prosecution comes in. It is a technique that the Left uses as a “cheat code” to harm its enemies, even though it would seemingly have no formal power available to really be able to do so (through being restrained by residual constitutionalism, control of political offices by political enemies, etc.). It does so by playing to its strength – power over culture dissemination (which is not the same thing as culture creation, we should remember) and the flow of “social information” via social media, “woke capital,” and so forth. It uses these to create social circumstances in which those with the wrong attitudes, who express the wrong opinions, or are even merely representative of the wrong demographic or cultural idea, can be targeted (akin to Alinksy’s Rule 12 – “Pick the target, freeze it, personalise it, and polarise it”) and neutralised.

December 24, 2023

QotD: Dreaming of George Bailey’s world while living in Pottersville

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

George Bailey, the hero of It’s a Wonderful Life, missed the two events that made the ideal man of his time, place, and social class: going to college and serving (as an officer, of course) in the Second World War. Instead of doing those things, either of which would have sent him out into the world beyond the limits of Bedford Falls, he remained at home, taking care of his family, his business, and his community. In other words, the hero of America’s favorite exercise in Yuletide nostalgia epitomized a way of life that, in the season of the film’s cinematic debut (the summer of 1946), was already on its way to the dustbin of history.

This, the most enduring of the many works of Frank Capra, became the Atlantis myth of post-war America. That is, those who, over the course of the last half-century, saw It’s a Wonderful Life on television, knew well that the age of community and connection depicted on their screens had already passed into the realm of legend. Moreover, to add injury to insult, they also knew that, if they wished to enjoy the fruits of a middle-class existence, they would have to live in the manner of vagabonds.

In the movie, slum-lord Henry Potter tries, but fails, to turn the provincial paradise of Bedford Falls into a run-down haunt of spinsters, drunks, and floozies. In the real world, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who put the kibosh on the original Main Street, USA. To be more precise, the principal achievements of America’s greatest tyrant, the Great Depression and the Second World War, undermined the financial, legal, and cultural foundations of the “wonderful life”. Thus, by the time this process had run its course, inflation had made a fool’s game of simple thrift, the replacement of law with regulation had hobbled private enterprise, and people who had left home for the sake of college, work, or military service found themselves lost in a sea of strangers.

In response to these changes, colleges and universities stepped up to the proverbial plate, happy to offer substitutes for the things that had been lost. They gave young people a chance to obtain certificates that would attest to both their suitability for service in the ranks of corporate minions and their social respectability. At the same time, these institutions gave older people a way to convert their value-losing cash into an asset that promised to pay dividends that would benefit their children (and, indeed, their grandchildren) for decades to come.

Thus arose the people I have come to call the MICE (Mobile, Individualistic, College Educated) people. Bereft of regional accents, productive property, and deep connections to friends and relations, they wandered the world, building networks, acquiring degrees, and padding resumés. However, after two generations of such peripatetic solipsism, the age of the MICE people is coming to an end.

Young men of parts, who realize that college has nothing to do with either liberal learning or vocational training, are simultaneously taking up skilled trades and stocking their MP3 players with learned podcasts. At the same time, young women of quality are beginning to think that the traditional troika of Kirche, Küche, und Kinder offers better odds of deep satisfaction than life as a hormone-hobbled, Starbucks swilling, girl boss.

So, if you know young people like the ones I’ve just described, do posterity a favor, and put them in contact with each other. After all, they deserve a life as wonderful as that of George and Mary Bailey.

Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, “College, Class, and Christmas”, Extra Muros, 2023-08-06.

December 22, 2023

QotD: Mathematically inclined people

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

I’ve often said that mathematically inclined people generally get that way because God takes everything in their skulls and pushes it over to the left. Tensor calculus? No problem. Understanding that it’s disturbing for a grown man to speak Klingon? Sorry, the part of the brain that ordinarily handles that is busy thinking about the Pauli Exclusion Principle.

Steve H., “Star Wars Still Sucks: ‘Quick, Someone Put More Minwax on Natalie'”, Hog on Ice, 2005-05-26.

December 15, 2023

How far are we from a final communiqué from Kiev saying that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Ukraine’s advantage”?

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Yeah, I stole the idea for the headline from Severian’s post from a few days ago. So sue me. But seriously, CDR Salamander considers what he calls the cold truth of the Russo-Ukrainian war:

Well, history didn’t fold out as the Russians wanted. There was no 3-day war. No 3-week war. No 3-month war either. Kiev remains in Ukrainian hands … but what about a 3-year war?

Despite all the pre-war metrics, the “expertise” of the Smartest People in the Room™, every wargame that would have been run at all our war colleges would have told us that there would not be a conventional war in Ukraine is finishing up its second and going in to its third year, but here we are.

They were all wrong.

A common problem, one that well pre-dates the invasion of Ukraine, is that we have shockingly well credentialed people of influence from both parties who have an inability to understand that Russians are not Westerners. They don’t think like Westerners, though they may look like them.

The Russians have a distinct culture, history, and view of themselves and their place in history. The underperforming political, military, and diplomatic elite in the West — with few exceptions outside the former Warsaw Pact nations now in NATO — expect Russians to react in the same way and to the same degree to the incentives and disincentives that move needles and preferences in DC and Brussels.

Time is always on the side of Russia, which is one of the reasons the slow rolling of weapons to Ukraine has been an exercise of malpractice of the highest degree. You are either in or out.

Two years on, “we” still are not sending a clear signal. It is amazing, really; in military might, GDP, demographics and a whole host of other reasons, Russia should not be as resilient as they are … which is why DC & Brussels are being played so hard. They still do not understand Russia.

Even after 1,000 years of experience, we have Western leaders who refuse to believe that the Russians are fundamentally different than the West is in the 21st Century. You can’t put the cultural ability to absorb damage and brutal patience you cannot see in some metric that can go on a PPT slide.

What the Russians lack in so many other places, they make up for here. As such, this critical part of understanding Russian motivation keeps being missed. Yes to their economy and apocalyptic demographics. Yes to all that.

For all the reasons Russia continues to fight, so too do their Ukrainian brothers – demonstrating greater resilience and endurance that Western expectations.

The time for leaving Ukraine to its fate is long past. Yes, the West has a short attention span and is suffering under the dead hand of entrenched leaders with a defeatist mindset – but none of this is written.

Ukraine can still win – or at least something that can be called a win. It would help if the Russians had some internal issues that required more attention that Ukraine, but even then – all is not worth shrugging over.

Yes, I’ve seen the math — the metrics — but war is informed by math, but not defined within it.

At a relatively modest cost in our treasure and almost none of our blood, we are wearing down Russia’s ability to project power for a generation, perhaps two. Perhaps many more generations should demographic instability mate with political instability. The Ukrainians – facing the same economic and demographic challenges as the Russians – are up for the fight. There is no reason for more comfortable nations who have supported them so far to go wobbly at half-time.

Of course, as noted yesterday, this ship may already have sailed thanks to Hamas.

December 14, 2023

Whatever it is, it sure ain’t Stoicism …

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

Freddie deBoer doesn’t have a catchy name for this, but you’ll recognize it instantly from the description:

For years now, I’ve written once or twice annually about a phenomenon that I’ve struggled to name but which everyone understands. It’s a particular kind of social and aesthetic culture, not exclusive to Instagram but very heavily associated with it, that merges girlboss feminism with the contemporary therapeutic imperative, a strange syncretic mysticism involving horoscopes and “manifesting”, and a blanket excuse for narcissism and selfishness dressed up in quasi-political and self-help terms. You know what I mean.

Some of these memes are comically ridiculous, most of them are fairly innocuous, and a few of them make me deeply sad. But they all reveal a tangle of conflicting attitudes and ideas that are quite confused. You would never assemble these various impulses into a life philosophy on purpose; they’ve been grafted together mostly thanks to the weird rhythms and path dependence of social media. Either way, I’ve argued that they present an essential problem with any kind of “I can have it all” philosophy — millions of people absorb this stuff, and because many of the things we want in life are zero sum, not all of them in fact can have it all. Almost all of them, in fact, will get very much less than it all. You have this absurd manifesting/The Secret stuff, where grown adults genuinely convince themselves that they can will what they want into being simply through wanting it. Well, alright: what if two people want the same promotion at work, and they’re both manifesting it? The clod philosophy this is all attached to says that whoever wins wanted it more, and since wanting can’t be quantified, no one can ever prove that isn’t true. (Convenient!) Regardless, in the case of the singular promotion and two people manifesting for it, only one of the people who has read endless memes like these actually ends up being self-actualized by success. This is OK; life can be full of contentment and disappointment at the same time. Part of what makes this kind of messaging pernicious, though, is that it suggests that not getting everything you want is always a personal failure you shouldn’t accept.

It is not possible that God promised the whole garden to everyone. (That’s not how fractions work, even for God.) It is not socially responsible to believe that you are entitled to the whole garden. And setting yourself up to see anything short of the whole garden as failure is a recipe for making yourself miserable.

That’s related to another point I’ve made, which is that these memes create an unachievable expectation that healthy, successful women aren’t in possession of ordinary confidence but of lunatic confidence, a kind of confidence rarely seen outside of Michael Jordan or bipolar mania. In a particularly perverse irony of the sort that seems to usually afflict women, this demand for outrageous self-confidence becomes just another bar that women feel like they can’t meet. A whole affirmational culture that ostensibly exists to help and affirm and praise women ends up being just one more on the long list of expectations that our society heaps on them: hard-charging and career-oriented but always putting family first, well put-together but always effortless, sexy but not slutty, Madonna and whore, you know the whole deal. I’m sorry that this stuff is so gendered, but it is, and I’m sorry that I’m the wrong messenger on this topic, but no one else is making these arguments, so I must. Yes, I concede that for most people who indulge in this stuff, it’s a harmless hobby that maybe pushes them to be a little better to themselves. But as time goes on, the messaging has grown more and more deranged, and young people are very susceptible to this sort of thing. And my job is to worry.

Pervasive disrespect for the human form in art (and everything else) is a leading indicator of collapse

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

My headline isn’t exactly what Ted Gioia says here (although this is only the beginning of his article, as the rest is behind a paywall) but it’s definitely an aspect of what he’s seeing:

For thousands of years, flourishing societies treated the human form with love and respect.

The connection is hard to describe with precision. But, it seems, you can’t make much progress promoting human rights if you don’t start with some degree of reverence for the embodied individual.

Even neanderthals knew about ornamentation and figurative art, but paintings of actual people, created by communities along the Nile River, some 8,000 years ago, signaled the rise of more advanced, stable institutions. It’s no coincidence that democracy and personal autonomy in Greece and Rome happened in conjunction with obsessively realistic renderings of the human body.

Much of this was lost in the post-classical world, but Renaissance artists rediscovered this passion for the human figure — which was embedded in its nurturing of science, art, and free inquiry

But something very different is happening in our own time.

I won’t offer any theories today. I’ll just share the facts — in the form of news stories, all about different subjects.

None of these stories have any direct connection with the others. Yet they fit together like the pieces of a strange puzzle. The picture they make is ominous.

Maybe you have some explanations. In the meantime, let’s just plunge in …

1. You can’t hear people talking in movies — because directors prefer to share background sounds.
“I used to be able to understand 99% of the dialogue in Hollywood films. But over the past 10 years or so, I’ve noticed that percentage has dropped significantly — and it’s not due to hearing loss on my end. It’s gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when I watch things at home, I’ve defaulted to turning the subtitles on to make sure I don’t miss anything crucial to the plot.”

2. Lead vocalists are getting quieter while the sound of the instruments become louder.
“Lead vocalists have gotten quieter over the decades, compared with the rest of the band. That’s the conclusion of a new study that analyzes chart-topping pop tunes from 1946 to 2020 …”

3. Anthropophobia — the fear of other people — is on the rise.
“Anthropophobia, or the fear of people, has so far been America’s most searched-for phobia this year. In that study, anthropophobia accounted for 22% of all phobias that people searched for online, a five-fold increase over 2019. And the state-by-state results affirm common stereotypes. New York’s most-searched phobia in 2020, for example, has been “philophobia.” That’s a big word for the fear of intimacy.”

4. Time spent alone is rising for all demographic groups.

“According to data from the American Time Use Survey, the amount of time people spent with their friends, family and other companions was mostly unchanged between 1970 and 2013. Then, after decades of stability, the numbers began falling. By 2019, on average people were spending almost three hours less with their friends than only six years earlier, and four hours less with their family, neighbors and other companions.

“None of that time was transferred to more time with partners, children or others. All of it was swallowed up by time spent alone … Strikingly, the average American teenager today spends 11 hours fewer with their friends than they did only eight years ago, and 12 hours more time alone.”

5. Clothing retailers replace realistic mannequins with abstract forms.
“There were a ton of used mannequins sitting in retailers’ attics and storerooms. Every time they re-merchandised or remodeled, they were bringing in new mannequins to replace the old, increasingly replacing realistics with abstracts. And it wasn’t just full mannequins, it was head forms, leg forms, maternity mannequins, swimwear mannequins and all kinds of props, as well. Retailers would throw these items in the trash.”

6. Social media causes children to dislike their own bodies.
“Three out of four children as young as 12 dislike their bodies and are embarrassed by the way they look, increasing to eight in 10 young people aged 18 to 21 … Nearly half of all children and young people aged from 12 to 21 questioned said they have become withdrawn, started exercising excessively, stopped socialising completely or self-harmed because they are regularly bullied or trolled online about their physical appearance.

December 11, 2023

Roman glossary

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I continue to post QotD entries drawn from Bret Devereaux’s fascinating historical blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (with Dr. Devereaux’s kind permission, I hasten to add), the number of names and specialized terms from the Roman Republic and Empire also expands. As some of these terms pop up in my shorter excerpts without immediate context, I think that a glossary for Rome is called for (similar to the Spartan glossary, as there’s a lot more Roman content coming up, it being Dr. Devereaux’s area of academic specialization) to help explain the terms that I think may need expansion in these excerpts from his longer posts. As usual, most of the information is drawn directly from ACOUP (often from more than one original post) and where I’ve felt the need to interpolate any additional information it will be enclosed in square brackets. Errors and misinterpretations of his original work are purely mine.

(more…)

December 9, 2023

The coming Micro-Macro culture war … and who’s going to win it

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

Ted Gioia outlines the dismal state of the “macro” culture — television, movies, newspapers, book publishing and all the big corporations that control them — with the dynamism of the “micro” culture:

In the beginning, all culture was microculture.

You knew what was happening in your tribe or village. But your knowledge of the wider world was limited.

So you had your own songs and your own stories. You had your own rituals and traditions. You even had your own language.

But all these familiar things disappeared when you went off into the world. That was dangerous, however. That’s why only heroes, in traditional stories, go on journeys.

You learn on the journey. But you might not survive.

But all that changed long before I was born.

In my childhood, everything was controlled by a monoculture. There were only three national TV networks, but they were pretty much the same.

    When I went to the office, back then, we had all watched the same thing on TV the night before. We had all seen the same movie the previous weekend. We had all heard the same song on the radio while driving to work.

The TV shows were so similar that they sometimes moved from CBS to NBC, and you never noticed a change. The newscasters also looked pretty much the same and always talked the same — with that flat Midwestern accent that broadcasters always adopted in the US.

The same monoculture controlled every other creative idiom. Six major studios dominated the film business. And just as Hollywood controlled movies, New York set the rules in publishing. Everything from Broadway musicals to comic books was similarly concentrated and centralized.

The newspaper business was still local, but most cities had 2 or 3 daily newspapers — and much of the coverage they offered was interchangeable. Radio was a little more freewheeling, but eventually deregulation allowed huge corporations to acquire and standardize what happened over the airwaves. [NR: I suspect the “freewheeling” went away once the government started imposing regulations, and the corporate consolidation was enabled when they “deregulated” the radio licensing regime several decades later.]

When I went to work in an office, back then, we had all watched the same thing on TV the night before. We had all seen the same movie the previous weekend. We had all heard the same song on the radio while driving to work.

And that’s why smart people back then paid attention to the counterculture.

The counterculture might be crazy or foolish or even boring. But it was still your only chance to break out of the monolithic macroculture.

Many of the art films I saw at the indie cinema were awful. But I still kept coming back — because I needed the fresh air these oddball movies provided. For the same reason, I read the alt weekly newspapers and kept tabs on alt music.

In fact, whenever I saw the word alt, I paid attention.

That doesn’t mean that I hated the major TV networks, or the large daily newspaper, or 20th Century Fox. But I craved access to creative and investigative work that hadn’t been approved by people in suits working for large organizations.

The Internet should have changed all this. And it did — but not much. Even now the collapse in the monoculture is still in its early stages.

But that’s about to change.

If you don’t pay close attention, the media landscape seems pretty much the same now as it did in the 1990s. The movie business is still controlled in Hollywood. The publishing business is still controlled in New York. The radio stations are still controlled by a few large companies. And instead of three national TV networks plus PBS, we have four dominant streaming platforms — who control almost 70% of the market.

So we still live in a macro culture. But it feels increasingly claustrophobic. Or even worse, it feels dead.

Meanwhile, a handful of Silicon Valley platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.) have become more powerful than the New York Times or Hollywood studios or even Netflix. It’s not even close — the market capitalization of Google’s parent Alphabet is now almost ten times larger than Disney’s.

But here’s the key point — these huge tech companies rely on the microculture for their dominance.

Where is Facebook without users contributing photos, text and video? Where is Google’s YouTube without individual creators?

In terms of economic growth or audience capture, the microculture has already won the war. But it doesn’t feel that way.

Why not?

First and foremost, Silicon Valley is a reluctant home for the microculture. To some extent Alphabet and Facebook are even going to war with microculture creators — they try to make money with them even while they punish them.

  • So Mark Zuckerberg needs creators, but won’t even let them put a live link on Instagram and limits their visibility on Facebook and Threads.
  • Alphabet needs creators to keep YouTube thriving, but gives better search engine visibility to total garbage that pays for placement.
  • Twitter also claims it wants to support independent journalists — but if you’re truly independent from Elon Musk, your links are brutally punished by the algorithm.

This tension won’t go away, and next year it will get worse. The microculture will increasingly find itself at war with the same platforms they rely on today.

And legacy media and non-profits are even more hostile to emerging media. Go see who wins Pulitzer Prizes, and count how many journalists on alternative platforms get honored.

I’ll save you the trouble. They don’t.

December 8, 2023

“When you see the same signs here that characterised collapse in other polities for the last 5000 years, it means collapse is coming here too – we’re not special snowflakes”

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

Feeling good? Happy with your culture and comfortable that major disruptions won’t disturb you? Here’s Theophilus Chilton to harsh your mellow:

There are essentially three basic reasons why those on the American Right haven’t shrugged the same way regular folks in Europe are beginning to (see Spain and France as well as Ireland for recent examples). The first of these is because the American Right still holds onto a residual trust in elections and democracy and the whole “We’ll get ‘em next election!” mentality. Having been fed a decades-long diet of reverence for democracy and voting and whatnot acts as a desensitising agent that keeps many Americans anesthetised to the actual uselessness of such attitudes.

But this will continue to erode as we see more obvious election fraud. Eventually, when the norm becomes “go to bed with the right-wing candidate ahead by 10% and wake up with the left-wing candidate winning by 0.5%,” elections will lose what legitimacy they have left. Further, as “democracy” comes to be increasingly defined as “whatever the Regime wants to do“, more and more normies will start to clue in to the fact that democratic forms are not going to save America, but are in fact what are destroying it.

Second, Heritage Americans and those on the normie Right tend to assume that everybody still plays by the old, traditional set of norms, including FedGov. This “seemed” plausible when the Regime employed incrementalism to gradually acculturate normies to its agenda. But as they accelerate their revolutionary overthrow of everything that normies thought would be sacrosanct like they have over the past few years, this sense of “norms” will go away. And when that happens, there will be a whole lot of people suddenly open to the possibility that something else might become a new set of norms.

Third, because America is so BIG – especially in the geographical sense – Heritage Americans have been able to self-mitigate many of the worse aspects of the Regime agenda. They could get away from the slums. Federalism allowed them to find states in which to prosper despite the Regime’s efforts. And so forth. Regular folks in many places could still plausibly think America was a high trust, high social cohesion society because where they were at locally might well have been. But as the Regime accelerates, this also will stop. $oros DAs will continue to release violent criminals while punishing law-abiding citizens for defending themselves and their property. Immigration and inflation will further erode the economic prosperity that still remains, which is something that fleeing to a Red state can’t fix. And of course, it will all be brought home starkly once 20,000 or so Palestinian “refugees” get relocated into their counties.

Let’s remember that this is what we actually saw in Ireland. Even into the Oughts, Ireland was homogenous, relatively high IQ and high trust, was the Celtic Tiger with lots of prosperity. Then globohomo decided that Ireland needed tons of “refugees” just like the rest of Europe and suddenly that prosperity and safety and high trust went away. What was the response? Riots and continued disorder that Regime attempts to clamp down on are only going to make worse.

This is going to wear out eventually, which is something that FedGov knows. That’s why they’ve been ramping up gun control efforts over the past few years despite constant opposition from the courts. They’re merely trying to prepare for the inevitable by disarming the people they know they need to suppress the most. Unlike most Euro and Anglosphere countries, Americans haven’t allowed themselves to be disarmed — and that’s something that really does vex The Powers That Be.

But the problem is that it isn’t the 1950s anymore, or even the 1990s for that matter. Back in the 1950s, FedGov could literally stick bayonets at the backs of high school students and force unwilling southern states to integrate their schools. Even in the 1990s FedGov could send its agents to besiege and murder dozens of men, women, and children and most people even at an official level wouldn’t say a thing. But now its 2023 and we’re quite a bit further along the decentralisation path in our secular collapse phase. What FedGov had the moral legitimacy and competency to pull off back then isn’t guaranteed for them now anymore.

So what happens when the FBI wants to do another Waco? What happens if Texas decides it doesn’t want to allow the FBI to do another Waco? We’re past the point where we can blithely say, “Well, the Feds can just make Texas go along with it!” Our place in our collapse cycle means that’s not going to fly like it could have 30 years ago.

At this point, the goal should not be to calm people down but to get them riled up so that when (not if) the break comes, it will be so widespread and numerous that it will completely overwhelm the ability of FedGov and its agencies to deal with it. In this vein, I think of Solzhenitsin’s quote from Gulag Archipelago,

    And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? … The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If … if … We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation … We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

So what does this mean practically? It means people need to start organising locally with people they trust, building a network in their town or county, coordinating with friendly local power holders. It means stockpiling the necessary tools for the maintenance of their freedoms. It means training to shoot, learning how to use comms, thinking both strategically and tactically — obtaining the knowledge to use with your organising. Most of all, it means being morally and temperamentally prepared to oppose the enemies of our people, both foreign and domestic.

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