Quotulatiousness

November 23, 2023

Clown world is what you get when children run things in the real world

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

Theophilus Chilton on the overgrown children who populate what used to be the adult world in the West:

If you’ve been around dissident Right circles for any length of time, you’re probably seen the term “clown world” used to describe the modern Western world. If you’ve paid any attention at all to the state of the world around us, you know just how apt of a description that term really is. Modernity as it is expressed today transcends the types of degeneracy and corruption that have been seen in previous decadent periods and has plumbed to nadirs of human depravity that previous generations would have literally found unspeakable because they would not have had the vocabulary to even describe them. To any rational adult observer of any previous age, no matter how dissolute, today’s western social, political, and moral situation would seem completely clownish and unserious.

That this would be the case is practically inevitable given the type of people involved within the plethora of left-wing causes and intersectionality factions. As a general rule, the political and cultural Left are very childish, not just in their behaviour, but also in their worldview, demeanor, and mindset. Any normal person who has ever dealt with them on social media (or the real world, if you’ve had the misfortune) can abundantly testify to this. Now, I’m not really talking about the “boss lefties”, the people who really run the show concerning left-wing activism. Rather, I’m describing the rank-and-file lefties who fill out the echelons of “ground level” activism – ranging from the antifa street drek to the college students whining about microaggressions to the HR representatives in multinational corporations.

I sincerely believe that to understand the psychology of those on the Left, one must approach the issue from the standpoint of juvenile behaviourism. Observing how and why children – as in actual children – act as they do will shed light on why those on the Left are the way they are. I want to emphasise that what I’m saying here isn’t meant to be the usual derogation that people on opposite sides of the political divide routinely throw at each other. I am literally saying that, for whatever reason, the stunting of the emotional and rational growth of the minds of those who are drawn to the hard core of the Left results in similarities in psyche and behaviour between the two groups.

The first and most obvious similarity revolves around the acceptance of wishful thinking as a credible alternative to verifiable reality. This manifests itself in two related ways – the willingness to believe fantasies that have no credible claims to being truth, and the concurrent unwillingness to accept legitimate evidences which disagree with those fantasies.

Anyone who has kids knows that when a small child wants to believe something, they’re going to believe it, no matter what you say or show them to the contrary. Children do this because they do not have a firm grasp on the nature of reality, since they’re still essentially learning from the world around them what reality even is. They haven’t quite learned yet “how the world works”, so to speak, hence they’re still open to “other possibilities”, and assume that if they want these possibilities to be, then they can be.

Sadly, left-wing activists and SJWs operate on essentially the same set of basic premises. Despite all evidences to the contrary, they will believe that homosexuality is normal, people can actually change their sexes, adult-child sexual relationships are healthy, large-scale third world immigration is enriching, computer simulations that predict extremes of global warming are credible reflections of actual climatological science, and so forth. Instead of accepting that arguments to the contrary can even exist, much less penetrate their self-contained fact space, leftists will attempt to mold reality to their preferences by dismissing contrary arguments with one of more “signaling phrases” (i.e. racist, sexist, transphobic, etc.). In this way, they believe they have negated the very existence of those contrary arguments, thus preserving their preferred perceptions.

Another area of similarity is seen in the social dynamics of cliquishness, which both children and leftists display in social settings. We should understand that cliquishness involves much more than the mere existence of in-groups and out-groups. Everybody has groups to which they belong and do not belong, and that is a fundamental factor in human sociability. What makes cliquishness different is that it involves the purposeful engineering of social dynamics for the objective of establishing the power of and loyalty to one or a small group of actors within a set which normally would act as a broad in-group. In other words, it functions as a way of destructively dividing a body of people who you would typically find bound together by more commonalities than differences. For children, this could be classmates within a school setting. For adults, it could mean anything from an office or church environment all the way up to the national level. Ostensibly, children at a school are all there for the same purpose. In the corporation, workers are, in theory, all supporting the company’s stated goals. Within a nation, a sense of asabiyya, of social solidarity, is supposed to obtain.

The whole purpose of left-wing activism is to destroy social solidarity, and to do so in an ever-changing and unpredictable manner. Within cliques, the accepted in-group is ever-shifting and individual members can be subject to sudden changes in status among the group based on anything from personal whim to the requirements of a newly imposed ideological orthodoxy. This is seen regularly on the Left and serves to demonstrate the fragility of the Left’s intersectionality alliance.

November 19, 2023

QotD: Defining “social justice”

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

Despite the term being used frequently and ostentatiously, clear definitions are rarely volunteered. That’s the first warning sign.

As you say, “social justice” entails treating people not as individuals but as mascots and categories. And judging a person and their actions based on which Designated Victim Group they supposedly belong to and then assigning various exemptions and indulgences depending on that notional group identity and whatever presumptuous baggage can be attached to it, with varying degrees of perversity. And conversely, assigning imaginary sins and “privilege” to someone else based on whatever Designated Oppressor Group they can be said to belong to, however fatuously, and regardless of the particulars of the actual person.

Which is to say, “social justice” is largely about judging people tribally, cartoonishly, and by different and contradictory standards, based on some supposed group identity, which apparently — and conveniently — overrides all else. It’s glib, question-begging and instantly pernicious. Morality for the mediocre. As you say, viewed rationally, it’s something close to the opposite of justice. And yet, among our self-imagined betters, it’s the latest must-have.

In much the same way, “equity” — another word favoured by both educators and campus activists — is defined, if at all, only in the woolliest and most evasive of terms. And which, when used by those same educators and activists, seems to mean something like “equality of outcome regardless of inputs.” Inputs including diligence and punctuality. And that isn’t fair either.

David Thompson, commenting on “Everything It Touches”, davidthompson, 2019-04-22.

November 15, 2023

QotD: Enid Blyton not considered worthy of a commemorative coin

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

… the discovery by the Mail on Sunday that Enid Blyton — one of Britain’s most enduringly popular and influential children’s authors, creator of Noddy and the Famous Five series — was denied a commemorative 50p coin on the 50th anniversary of her death because a Royal Mint “advisory committee” declared that “she is known to have been a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer”.

Enid Blyton was born in 1897. Pretty much everyone of that generation — and of every one preceding it — would qualify as a “racist, sexist, homophobe” by the standards of the modern left.

As for “not very well-regarded”, well she has sold over 600 million books — which probably counts for something, no?

We do not know the identities of this Royal Mint “advisory committee” but we know exactly what type of person they are. They are the same type of people who make up the committee of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) which has decided to make adverts that promote “gender stereotypes” effectively illegal in the UK.

[…]

There is no shortage of similar examples of the “political correctness gone mad” which has hijacked British culture. But the people enforcing it are a tiny minority of committed Social Justice Warriors — most of them educated in some worthless degree subject like gender studies, often “working” either in the human resources department or one with “diversity”, “equality”, or “sustainability” in their title — entirely at odds with the way most of the country still thinks.

Like the Soviet Politburo or China’s Central Committee, they are the very few who exert extraordinary — indeed, terrifying — power over the many.

True to Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s call for a “long march through the institutions”, these people have gained key positions of power the length and breadth of British culture.

James Delingpole, “From ‘Sexist’ Advert Bans to ‘Racist’ Enid Blyton, the Left Has Ruined Britain”, Breitbart, 2018-08-27.

November 9, 2023

Remembering Weimar

Filed under: Books, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Critic, Darren O’Byrne reviews some recent books on German society between the Armistice of 1918 and the rise of Hitler, including Frank McDonough’s The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933.

One of the latest additions to the canon is Frank McDonough’s The Weimar Years (1918–33). A prequel to his two-volume narrative history of the Third Reich, The Hitler Years, it sets out to explain the Nazis’ rise to power by examining the reasons why democracy failed in Germany. Like the earliest histories of the period, the Republic is not examined on its own terms but rather as a kind of backstory to what followed, the numerous crises that befell it being used to explain the ultimate catastrophe.

Structured chronologically, the book provides a devastating, play-by-play account of why, for McDonough, democracy stood little chance in Germany. Defeat in World War I, the Kaiser’s abdication and the humiliating terms of the Versailles treaties challenged the legitimacy of the Republic from the start, as did its failure to contain political violence. Crippling inflation and mounting government debt, exacerbated by the obligation to pay reparations to the Allies, hampered German economic recovery from the start and threatened to wipe out the middle classes.

A degree of economic stability did return in the mid-1920s, but the country experienced its second “once-in-a-lifetime” economic crisis in the early 1930s, causing further instability and ultimately paving the way for Hitler. It’s a well-known story, skilfully retold for a contemporary audience by one of the foremost authorities on modern German history.

Does McDonough tell us anything we didn’t already know? The answer, in short, is no. In comparison to other recent histories of the period, more attention is paid here to high politics than Weimar’s cultural achievements, which are mentioned, but this tends to disrupt the flow of what is otherwise a high-paced, edge-of-the-seat political history of Germany’s first democracy. Despite being nearly 600 pages in length, the book’s focus is quite narrow, with little attention paid to what was happening below the national level in the federal states.

This may seem like an inane criticism. Who, after all, would demand to read more about Buckinghamshire in a political history of interwar Britain? However, the Weimar Republic, like Germany today, was a federation. Understanding what was happening in states like Prussia, which contained three-fifths of Germany’s population, is crucial to understanding the country as a whole.

Indeed, McDonough places some of the blame for Weimar’s collapse on the Social Democrats, who he argues should have participated in more national governments. Prussia was governed by an SPD-led coalition for most of the Weimar years, though, yet the Republic still fell. McDonough sees another reason for this fall in the failure to purge the military and civil service of hostile elements.

Again, Prussia replaced a considerable number of these officials with others loyal to the new democratic order, yet the Republic still fell. The book’s rigid focus on high politics, in short, obscures an understanding of the more structural reasons why democracy failed.

Unlike most history books, however, The Weimar Years is a genuine page-turner, full of lessons for those who want to learn something about the present from the past. It’s also a beautiful book to hold, full of period photos that help bring the story alive. This all makes the book worth reading, even if there’s not much in it that can’t be found in other histories of the period.

November 8, 2023

Mel Blanc on How He Created His Iconic Voices | Carson Tonight Show

Filed under: Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Johnny Carson
Published 27 Jun 2023

Original Airdate: May 26, 1983
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November 6, 2023

QotD: The “German Catastrophe”

Filed under: Books, Germany, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis — the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger.

Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Commoners had negligible political influence. They did get social insurance, but not through their own political power but granted top-down, as an appeasement to undermine socialist movements. Civil marriage, secularized state education, prospering state universities and a long series of modernizing laws kept increasing state power. And that meant executive power. There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive.

And this entire development was accompanied by a lot of theorizing about this new German nation. Much of this theorizing ended up justifying authoritarianism, by making quickly-spreading myths about how obedience to authority, respect for aristocracy and love for tradition were uniquely German traits that set Germans apart from the French and the Jews and other dubious foreigners. Such myths, and opposition to them, colored the German population’s hard work to get accustomed to industrialization, urbanization, education, rapid population growth, militarization, national media and various culture wars.

This had seemed to work okay-ish while Bismarck, wielding both enormous ruthlessness and enormous political acumen, had navigated Germany through the trials and tribulations of the late 19th century, largely at the expense of France. But in 1890, Emperor Wilhelm II had taken over authority with less ruthlessness and much less political acumen. While his populace remained nearly unable to influence politics, Wilhelm II made critical political mistakes, especially in dealing with other European powers.

These mistakes culminated in the first World War. You know how that one went.

Germany’s defeat led into Germany’s first real democracy. Everyone was very obviously new to this. The right attacked the new state, falsely claiming it had needlessly capitulated. The left also attacked the new state, because it wasn’t Soviet-Union-like enough. There was a lot of political violence. The massive damage incurred in the war, and the restrictions and reparations Germany had accepted in the peace settlement, put massive strains on an already fragile political system. Elections were tumultuous and frequent. Hyperinflation caused a huge crisis in 1923, and the Great Depression of 1929 was another huge disaster for Germany. Overall, the abolition of authoritarianism was widely felt to be a mistake.

This seeming mistake was fixed when Hitler stepped in. And you know how that one went.

Anonymous, “Your Book Review: On the Marble Cliffs”, Astral Codex Ten, 2023-07-28.

November 2, 2023

Keeping Clean in Rome

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, Health, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 2 Jul 2023

A lecture, given in June 2023, about bathing and keeping clean in the Roman World — plus an overview of depilation and going to the toilet.
(more…)

October 31, 2023

The “better than average” effect versus the suspicion that everyone is partying without you

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

Rob Henderson considers the friendship paradox and the illusion of loneliness:

Generally, people hold a high opinion of themselves.

A large body of research has found that people tend to believe they are more intelligent, trustworthy, and have a better sense of humor than others. A recent study found that people believe they use ChatGPT more critically, ethically and efficiently than others.

People think they are better drivers than average, students think they are better students than average, professors think they are better professors than average. This is known as the “better than average” effect.

Intriguingly, people are selectively overconfident in their abilities that will garner higher status in their specific social environment. For example, people in individualistic cultures like the U.S. overestimate their ability to lead. But people in collectivistic cultures in Asia overestimate their ability to listen.

We even think we are better than ourselves.

One study asked participants how often they engaged in kind and cooperative acts to help others. A month and a half later, researchers showed these same people their own scores. But the researchers told them that these scores were provided by “their average peer”. So the participants didn’t know they were looking at their own scores.

The researchers asked them to rate themselves again. People rated themselves as higher than the score they were shown, claiming they were superior to themselves.

People also believe others are more susceptible to mass media influence than they themselves are. We overestimate the influence media has on others and underestimate the influence media has on ourselves. This tendency increases people’s support for censorship, because we think others are sheep who can’t handle certain information (or “misinformation”) while we are independent thinkers who can critically evaluate the information we encounter.

Likewise, people believe they are more immune to social biases than others. A recent study found that people think others are more likely than themselves to make decisions based on their preconceived notions and preexisting beliefs. And people believe others are less willing than themselves to update their views in light of new information.

The researchers concluded, “The more strongly people believed that biases widely existed, the more inclined they were to ascribe biases to others but not themselves”.

October 29, 2023

“Citizens of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your illusions!”

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

Sarah Hoyt addresses the people who think of themselves not as Americans, Canadians, Brits, or Germans, but as “Citizens of the world”:

One of the funniest conceit of our age has to be the idea that the sophisticated and “bien pensant” are “citizens of the world”.

I was profoundly amused that Alvin Toffler fell for his in his last book I read sometime in the 90s. Keep in mind that, despite everything else, I believe his Future Shock is brilliant and explains a lot of life in the US in the last fifty years. (Note in the US. I’m not sure about the rest of the world. And I could explain why, but it would sidetrack us a lot more than this.) However the book about how the most powerful were the ones who had the most information (arguable) also pushed the “citizens of the world, not a country” thing as being the one for most powerful people.

I was amused because, though I agree this is the CONCEIT of most self-styled international elites, it is also in practicality, a load of stinking Hooey. (Or as we call it around here, #2 son’s pre-school teacher. Yes, that really was her last name.)

Part of the reason the “elites” believe themselves multinational or “citizens of the world” is oikophobia. They believe themselves to have risen above their co-citizens in their lands of origin, who are … well, in their minds, stupid and uneducated, which is a way to say “less rich” than the “elites”.

Therefore, in the same way that the nobility of old had more in common with other nobility from other lands than with their own country, they think they are a caste set aside and by reason of existing or having money inherently superior to all those who are loyal in and interested in their homelands.

Part of it is the belief that “nationalism” is bad and it led to WWI and WWII. Having been taught that (at this point it, drank it with mother’s milk) the richest and “best” (Most expensively) educated want to get as far away from that as possible, and be at a level when they’re free from that irrational passion, since it’s their conceit that they can rule “impartially” and from above for the good of all.

The problem with it is that not only is none of it true, but they are in fact both more provincial and less well educated than their countrymen. And also that what they aspire to is not only impossible, but really easy to manipulate.

So, the long war of the 20th century was not because of nationalism. In fact, the only explanation I have found for its being assumed to be so is that the international socialists who dominated intellectual discourse for the rest of the century despised the fact that, against their theory, workers of the world didn’t unite, but rather rallied to defend their homeland.

However, if you do a deep dive into the reasons for the first war, ignoring the opinions of those writing about it — which I did, because I was profoundly unsatisfied with the reasons given and none of it made sense — the war’s causation was attempts at internationalism. yes, the internationalism wasn’t of the “supra-national, pseudo worldwide” type (Actually the mask worn by Russian national imperialism) but of the “extended noble family trying to grab the entire world” type. But it was still internationalism, with all the problems of internationalism. (More on that later.)

And the current elites are not “better educated” and don’t rise above much of anything. In fact the world-renowned establishments most of them attend take so many “legacy” and “endowed an entire specialty” students, not to mention “admitted because diversity of skin color or origin” that their meritocratic requirements (I.E. knows or gives a damn about the subject), might be lower than your average state university. Also, once admitted, these people are guaranteed to graduate. Or at least will, barring some particularly egregious violation of code of “everybody knows”.

[…]

But more importantly, these “Citizens of the world” have no clue how their country is constituted, nor how many miles of miles and miles with the occasional house there are in this country. Or that each state has a different culture. Or –

In fact, these people who by and large don’t mix with local populations have a vague idea that the country has a lot more cities/apartments than it does, and that people act more compliant than they do. Because like Europeans, what they know about America is what they see in movies, not realizing movies are made by people like them and are feeding their assumptions back to them.

They also have a vague idea most of the country is easily led, because of course the only reason to disagree with them is that we’re being lied to by extremely persuasive evil people. (That it never occurs to them this might be happening to them, is a measure of [their] lack of self awareness.) Hence their reason to try to get Trump. Because without his evil persuasion, we’d be fully on board with their crazy-cakes insanity.

As for the European elites, I don’t know. I used to hobnob with them, in the sense that I tended to hobnob with the over-educated which were, definitionally, better off than I, but it’s been a minute. However, judging from that and what I see now, my belief is they’re not really “citizens of the world” so much as citizens of their homeland which they secretly believe should rule all nations due to the “nationality” — race/breed being obviously superior.

What I do know is that there is no such a thing as a citizen of the world, no matter the level of self delusion that induces people to believe they are such.

We are all members of our culture. While we can believe everything about our culture is bad and evil, we still project it on everything else we see. Therefore, you know, well to do Americans keep believing criminals and terrorists don’t really exist, and must be decent people driven to extremes by need or oppression. (The results of these beliefs would be hilarious, if they didn’t more or less break everything.) Heck, they keep believing the LAZY or lacking ambition don’t exist, and if people aren’t working hard to succeed it must be because of a terrible condition. (Look up “Bee sting” theory of poverty sometime.)
When the various international elites meet abroad, they each read in the other what they themselves would do, but don’t actually understand each other beyond vague fashion sense, and spending money like water.

Ultimately their entire attempt to be “international” seems to consist of an idea that if they just become the people of the song “Imagine” and don’t believe in or care about anything, they can lead people better.

They are wrong because it’s not only impossible to divest yourself of all passion and interest (well, without offing yourself or doing a lot of drugs) but also because it’s impossible to totally divest yourself of your basic culture. (You can acculturate, but that involves a lot of work, and ACQUIRING another culture, which defeats their purpose. The “citizen of the world” culture doesn’t exist, beyond some shibboleths like “humans are killing the Earth” and “The proles are really stupid, eh?”). MORE IMPORTANTLY, even if they managed it, that wouldn’t make them impartial or able to lead anyone to utopia. What it would make them is very, very people-stupid and unable to realize why certain people do certain things, and others don’t. Or why certain countries are the way they are.

In fact, to the extent they’ve managed to shed their culture and replace it with Marxism, all they’ve done is become an unreasoning cult, unable to realize the population isn’t in fact exploding — because people lie in census, and so do nations — but also that there is not only no necessity but no benefit in “eating bugs”.

October 21, 2023

QotD: The US Army’s Korean War blooding

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

There is much to military training that seems childish, stultifying, and even brutal. But one essential part of breaking men into military life is the removal of misfits — and in the service a man is a misfit who cannot obey orders, any orders, and who cannot stand immense and searing mental and physical pressure.

For his own sake and for that of those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles from home, and that he may be killed in the next second.

The young men of America, from whatever strata, are raised in a permissive society. The increasing alienation of their education from the harsher realities of life makes their reorientation, once enlisted, doubly important.

Prior to 1950 they got no reorientation. They put on the uniform, but continued to get by, doing things rather more or less. They had no time for sergeants.

As discipline deteriorated, the generals themselves were hardly affected. They still had their position, their pomp and ceremonies. Surrounded by professionals of the old school, largely field rank, they still thought their rod was iron, for, seemingly, their own orders were obeyed.

But ground battle is a series of platoon actions. No longer can a field commander stand on a hill, like Lee or Grant, and oversee his formations. Orders in combat — the orders that kill men or get them killed, are not given by generals, or even by majors. They are given by lieutenants and sergeants, and sometimes by PFC’s.

When a sergeant gives a soldier an order in battle, it must have the same weight as that of a four-star general.

Such orders cannot be given by men who are some of the boys. Men willingly take orders to die only from those they are trained to regard as superior beings.

It was not until the summer of 1950, when the legions went forth, that the generals realized what they had agreed to, and what they had wrought.

The Old Army, outcast and alien and remote from the warm bosom of society, officer and man alike, ordered into Korea, would have gone without questioning. It would have died without counting. As on Bataan, it would not have listened for the angel’s trumpet or the clarion call. It would have heard the hard sound of its own bugles, and hard-bitten, cynical, wise in bitter ways, it would have kept its eyes on its sergeants.

It would have died. It would have retreated, or surrendered, only in the last extremity. In the enemy prison camps, exhausted, sick, it would have spat upon its captors, despising them to the last.

It would have died, but it might have held.

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

October 18, 2023

George Orwell’s views on Rudyard Kipling’s worldview

Filed under: Britain, History, India — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman comments on Orwell’s essay “Rudyard Kipling“, published a few years after the poet’s death in Horizon, September 1941:

Portrait of Rudyard Kipling from the biography Rudyard Kipling by John Palmer, 1895.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

    During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.

Orwell’s essay on Rudyard Kipling in the Letters and Essays is both more favorable and more perceptive than one would expect of a discussion of Kipling by a British left-wing intellectual c. 1940. Orwell recognizes Kipling’s intelligence and his talent as a writer, pointing out how often people, including people who loath Kipling, use his phrases, sometimes without knowing their source. And Orwell argues, I think correctly, that Kipling not only was not a fascist but was further from a fascist than almost any of Orwell’s contemporaries, left or right, since he believed that there were things that mattered beyond power, that pride comes before a fall, that there is a fundamental mistake in

    heathen heart that puts her trust
    In reeking tube and iron shard,
    All valiant dust that builds on dust,
    And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

But while there is a good deal of truth in Orwell’s discussion of Kipling it is mistaken in two different ways, one having to do with Kipling’s view of the world, one with his art.

Orwell writes:

    It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a ‘nigger’ with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes. There is not the slightest sign anywhere in Kipling’s work that he disapproves of that kind of conduct — on the contrary, there is a definite strain of sadism in him, over and above the brutality which a writer of that type has to have.

There are passages in Kipling, not “Loot“, the poem Orwell quotes but bits of Stalky and Company, which support the charge of a “strain of sadism”. But the central element which Orwell is misreading is not sadism but realism. Soldiers loot when given the opportunity and there is no point to pretending they don’t. School boys beat each other up. Schoolmasters puff up their own importance by abusing their authority to ridicule the boys they are supposed to be teaching. Life is not fair. And Kipling’s attitude, I think made quite clear in Stalky and Company, is that complaining about it is not only a waste of time but a confession of weakness. You should shut up and deal with it instead.

A more important error in Orwell’s essay is his underestimate of Kipling as an artist, both poet and short story writer. Responding to Elliot’s claim that Kipling wrote verse rather than poetry, Orwell claims that Kipling was actually a good bad poet:

    What (Elliot) does not say, and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face, AND yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced.

I am left with the suspicion that Orwell is basing his opinion almost entirely on Kipling’s best known poems, such as the two he cites here, both written when he was 24. He was a popular writer, hence his best known pieces are those most accessible to a wide range of readers. He did indeed use his very considerable talents to tell stories and to make simple and compelling arguments, but that is not all he did. There is no way to objectively prove that Kipling wrote quite a lot of good poetry and neither Orwell nor Elliot, unfortunately, is still alive to prove it to, but I can at least offer a few examples …

October 12, 2023

QotD: America before identity politics

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

Lest we’re tempted to make excuses for Leftists by putting all this down to their goldfish-like attention spans, note how fast they can change. I remember the Gay Nineties, when the one true way to be queer was to have as much anonymous sex as possible. […] And yet, by 2015, “gay marriage” was a sacred constitutional right because, we were told, all gay men really want to do is settle down in a strictly monogamous relationship. I found myself asking “Have you ever actually met any gays?” to actual gays, so bizarre was this sudden flip – surely you, of all people, know …1

Pick even minor items of their catechism (if so all-encompassing a creed as Leftism can be said to have “minor” items). It’s an article of the One True Faith, for instance, that seven out of every five college girls are raped the minute they set foot on campus. And yet … free college! Yeah, Bernie, let’s march a whole bunch of new rape victims straight into the frat house, on the taxpayer’s dime. Makes sense. And speaking of free college, y’all know how you love to wave your degrees around, because that’s how you win at Internet? How’s that going to work, now that everyone has a Gender Studies degree?

Yeah, ok, I know, if they could see the obvious consequences of their actions, they wouldn’t be Liberals in the first place. But still — all of this is so obvious, so determinedly cattywampus to reality, that it has to be by design. T.S. Eliot was right — it’s “gesture without motion”, but I’ll be damned if I can figure out how they pull that off. Which is why I suspect it’s actual, neurological changes in their brains, brought about by too much soy.

Severian, “The Hollow Men”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-19.

    1. Gosh, wasn’t The America That Was a hoot? If you’re under 35 you’ll just have to trust me on this, but there was a point in American history when homosexuals didn’t have to be 1000% gay all the time, to the exclusion of everything else. I know, I know, and it gets weirder – back then, you could even be friends with a homosexual and not have homosexuality come up for days, weeks, even months at a time! You and Steve went to different bars on Saturday night, but other than that, you pretty much just carried on treating each other like, you know, people. And I know this sounds crazy, but even when talking about relationships it wasn’t a big deal. “Hey, Sev, how are things with Becky?” “Pretty good, man, how’s it going with Todd?” And … that was pretty much it. Sounds like life on Mars now, but I swear to you, it happened.

October 10, 2023

Sarah Hoyt – “Shut your Kumbaya”

Filed under: Education, History, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt isn’t normally one to mince her words or conceal her true feelings, and she certainly doesn’t do that here:

The world is full of pretty lies. And normally, I’m able to scroll past them and go “oh, idiocy, more idiocy”.

Today is not that day. No, listen to me. Today is not that day.

I was scrolling through twitter looking for an update on the war in Israel, and I came across this:

And I stopped. And I read that post. Every single word of it is a lie. A lot of it are pernicious lies. And they’re told by well-intentioned people who can’t or won’t look at the world without the rose-colored glasses.

It’s not just these things are lies. It’s “they’ve been proven to be lies, over and over again”. But a lot of, perhaps the majority of “educated” people in the west piously believe them. Because they want them to be true.

Start therefore with that “Education” — education can be many things, but some of the best educated people in the world at the time led World War I. And while on that, do you realize the cultures fighting knew each other very, very well. Heck, most of the nobility was related to each other across Europe. Which did not stand in the way of turning Europe into one vast abattoir.

In fact, most of the vicious wars were civil, or between neighboring countries that knew each other’s cultures intimately. So this “Get to know the other culture better” is utter and complete poppycock. Or as the British say “Bollocks”. And smelly bollocks, at that.

As for all cultures, all systems, all value systems being equally worthy of respect?

Oh, really? So, a culture that enslaves women is the same as one that values women? A culture that protects and takes care of the weak is the same as one that tortures and kills them? A culture that welcomes difference is the same as one that pounds down the nail that sticks up? A system where — as in all communist systems — a small elite lives very well while others starve is the same as one where private property allows even the poor to suffer from obesity? And a culture that doesn’t believe it has to exterminate its neighbors is the same as one that does?

Don’t be ridiculous.

And as for not stigmatizing, dividing, etc? Pernicious bullshit. Pernicious bullshit on stilts. The horrible savages who kidnapped innocent people at a rave and raped women to death are not the same as people who are breaking themselves trying to spare the innocent. There is no comparison.

October 8, 2023

QotD: Internet – pro and con

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

I hate to say “it’s a generational thing”, but it’s a generational thing.

Those of us who came of age before Endless September still regard the Internet as a tool. I can do online in two minutes what used to take me two hours in meatspace. For instance, when I first started working full time, I’d have to waste my entire lunch break on the first Monday of every month taking my physical paycheck down to the brick-and-mortar bank, where I’d fill out a bunch of paper to move money around, which I’d hand to a real person who took her sweet goddamn time filing it, and so on. Fight traffic all the way there, fight traffic all the way back, and yeah, that’s a full hour, even when the bank is relatively close. If that bank is closed, or there’s road construction or something, I’d have to spend all Saturday morning doing it, because banks kept bankers’ hours and so I’d better get there and get it done during the three-hour window the brick-and-mortar place was open. And since everyone else on earth was in the same situation …

These days, I’m hard pressed to remember the last time I stepped a real foot inside a physical bank. There’s simply no need. Everything is automatic. Which is convenient, no doubt, but that’s ALL it is: I’ve saved X minutes / hours in my day, which I can use to do other stuff. Other stuff like “see my friends” or “take a walk” or “read a book”. You know, real person stuff. I might read the book online; I might check my email if there’s nothing else to do; but there too the Internet is just a boredom-alleviation tool; something conveniently to hand that passes the time when there’s no other easily accessible way to pass the time.

I would find it inconvenient, sometimes extremely so, to throw the Pocket Moloch in the nearest lake, but the thought doesn’t fill me with dread. Oh, the Net’s down? Shrug.

Not so with the younger generations. I have friends I haven’t seen in weeks, months, years, but when we get together again, it’s like we were never apart, because we met in meatspace and have so much real, personal interaction to fall back on. Younger generations have “friends” they’ve never met in the flesh. Not once. Tell me “Hey, you’re not going to be able to see Tim for a few months” and it’s no big thing. I can still call Tim, or write Tim a letter, or just catch up with him when he gets back, to hear all the cool stories he has. Tell the younger folks “Tim is offline” and they freak the fuck out. Tim is inseparable from the Pocket Moloch in a way we oldsters can only dimly grasp.

They would, I’m sadly sure, prefer to interact with Tim entirely digitally. If you haven’t done it yet, try to find some young people hanging out in a group. It’s actually not the easiest thing to do – which should tell you something right there – but if you manage it, you’ll notice that they spend more time texting than they do talking to each other. And here’s the real kicker: Half the time, they’re texting each other. The same people who are physically right there.

That’s a mentality I can’t begin to grasp. I wonder if it can be broken. I’m not optimistic.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-07-07.

October 5, 2023

From Hilaire Belloc’s sailboat to your nearest international airport terminal

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

The most recent review at Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf considers Hilaire Belloc’s The Cruise of the “Nona”:

Late in the May of 1925, around midnight, Hilaire Belloc climbed into a tiny boat and put out to sea so that he would have some time to think. The sea gives ample time to think, especially if like Belloc you disdain the use of a motor. Some wag once jested that sailing is like being at war: long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of abject terror. I suppose in some sense that’s correct, but give me the boredom of the sailboat any day over the boredom of the trench, the boredom of the cubicle, the boredom of endless doomscrolling.

Sailing is productive boredom, and seems unusually well calibrated for causing the mind to wander in interesting or delightful or just plain ridiculous directions. Maybe it’s the stimulating effects of the wind in your face and the smell of salt in the air, or maybe it’s the weird altered state of consciousness that comes from staring at the ocean. I think it’s because sailing is the human condition in miniature. It places you perfectly-balanced on a knife’s edge between agency and helplessness, and in so doing it both spurs the mind to activity and gives it space to relax and reflect.1

[…]

Anybody who’s travelled extensively in the third world has seen the modern version of this. There’s nothing intrinsic to being a reformer or a liberalizer that makes you an agent of American power, and yet … there’s a better than even chance that you are. After a while these people all blend together — the idealistic students, the LGBT activists, the NGO staffers, the embassy employees recruited from amongst the locals. They come from a hundred nations, from every conceivable race and religion, and yet something invisibly and inexorably molds them all into the same shape, like iron filings lining themselves up in the presence of a powerful magnet.

Soon they have American souls, and divided loyalties to match. The local regime panics and views them as an internal enemy, which only furthers their alienation from their motherland and their flight into the bosom of Global America. Most empires rule primarily though influence, not coercion, and this class of people is one of America’s most powerful weapons for maintaining and extending its hegemony.

A related phenomenon is the awful sameness that is slowly taking over the whole world. Perhaps your cruise ship docks at a dozen ports over the course of its journey, and every one of them looks exactly the same — the same tiki bar with the same sign, the same shops selling the same ornamental kitsch probably all made in the same factory. You aren’t visiting a place, you’re visiting a psychic manifestation of the Buffetverse, another outpost of Margaritaville, a Potemkin seaport with frozen daiquiris. You all know what I’m talking about. We make fun of it all the time, because cruise ships are for chuds. But it doesn’t just happen with cruise ships.

The cancer usually starts in an international airport. Form follows function, so it’s superficially reasonable that every airport on earth should look and feel exactly the same. But the real reason is that it follows in the wake of the kinds of people who fly into those airports, praising the broadening effects of foreign travel whilst terraforming everything they touch until it resembles the “arts district” of a midsize American city, replete with distressed wood finishes, gravid with craft beers. Real foreignness would cause these people to recoil in shock, or to demand a peacekeeping intervention. It’s not unusual for the imperial functionary class to be parochial, but what’s surreal about ours is how they combine the blinkered innocence of a farm boy with an ideology of weary cosmopolitanism.

None of this was as far along when Belloc took his little cruise, but the seeds had been planted, and he could feel in his bones that something horrible lay across the horizon. So he fights it the only way he knows how — by noticing and celebrating everything distinctive and local and weird about every place he visits. No island is too small for him to mention by name and recall a ghost story or two associated with it. No village is too commonplace for him to remark on the habits, physiognomy, and vices of the people who live in it. It’s the same spirit as that which animates Chesterton’s essay on cheese, but applied to a hundred hamlets and fishing ports, a paean to the regional diversity and distinctiveness that was already slipping away.

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