Quotulatiousness

September 24, 2022

The end of crisis culture – “[Y]ou can’t go on having a culture of crisis if people stop showing up for it”

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

Chris Bray on the inevitable endgame of “all crisis, all the time” culture:

The journalist John Tierney has described the Crisis Crisis, “the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians”. What we’re experiencing now is the Crisis Crisis crisis, the emerging crisis caused by the Crisis Crisis. Over and over again, interventions in some invented or overhyped form of the crisis, undertaken in the hysterical spirit of the Crisis Crisis, cause a form of the Crisis Crisis crisis, which eventually results in a course correction that may or may not be fully apparent for a while. Skip right over the next paragraph if you don’t need to see examples again.

The Sri Lankan government intervenes in climate change by instantly ending the use of commercial fertilizers in agriculture, which causes a dangerous decline in the production of food. The German government intervenes in climate change by declaring a commitment to 100% clean energy, which causes dangerous instability in the availability of actual energy (“committing national suicide“), with some help from the Nord Stream shut-off valve, which nobody ever could have seen coming. The Dutch government intervenes in climate change by declaring an intention to limit agricultural production, which doesn’t cause anything yet, because Dutch farmers won’t stand for it, but final outcome TBD.

All over the world, things that work stop working because of excessive and unwarranted interventions led by people who cry crisis and throw sand in functioning gears. Dutch agriculture was just fine; then the government decided to help end the crisis. The interventions — the interveners, the people who get in the way — are harming us, when their harm could be prevented by literal nothing, by the simple choice to not perform the interventions. What we need is for the interveners to go play Risk in their basement or something, and forget their important duty to help.

The entertainment industry has had its own intervention, famously described on Substack, in woke-facing talent purges and narrative shifts and insulting “It’s Ghostbusters … but with WOMEN!” reboots. And now some hint about the endgame of the one big cycle of fraud comes from woke Hollywood — which has pounded audiences with The Message for years, resulting in a catastrophic loss of audience. The result is starting to look like this:

The social justice intervention in Hollywood storytelling is harming Hollywood; the intervention in that industry is causing the decline of the industry. At some point, people stop eating shit.

September 21, 2022

QotD: Why postwar western economic and humanitarian “interventions” almost always failed

Filed under: Africa, Americas, Asia, Economics, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… it is a general truism that the majority of persons who run for office in North America and various European countries do so because they sincerely want to help and improve their communities/countries. However, in all of Africa and most of Asia, persons who seek public office do so for one purpose, and one purpose only: to steal everything that they can get away with. So when some ignorant, naïve, American shows up with buckets full of money, oblivious of the culture and the longstanding, entrenched, corruption, and with an announced intention to make the local community more like an American community, they are welcomed with open arms while suppressing their snickering. This also explains something where Americans exhibit willful blindness: other cultures don’t play fair. Honesty is seen as the trait of fools. Fools are to be taken advantage of. Especially in trade and diplomacy. Just look at China.

Prior to the Cold War, America’s interference in other countries’ internal affairs was practically nonexistent outside of the Caribbean where America’s preoccupation was with the stability in the region. What went on in Egypt, Thailand, Argentina, or Greece was none of our business, nor did we frankly care. However, having just survived the cataclysm of WWII, and the realization that Communism was a danger bent on world domination, and that each country that became Communist made that possibility much more likely changed that laissez faire attitude 180 degrees. Whereas NATO was formed for the purpose of deterring a military attack on Western Europe by the Soviet Union (the generals mentally fighting the last war as is always the case, not realizing that the war now was ideological and propagandistic rather than military), diplomats began to question how to best combat Communist insurgencies in the Third World. The arrived (wrong) conclusion was that the reason a country became Communist was because the dirt-poor people were so desperate that they became Marxists in order to improve their lives, so if the West helped poor countries economically Communists could not gain a foothold. As such, they ignored the fact that most Communist movements are organized and headed not by poor people, but by a cadre of power-hungry middle-class intellectuals.

As has been mentioned, the first approach was with foreign aid. The second was with military intervention, in Korea, Vietnam, Santo Domingo, Grenada, and Lebanon. Although such interventions were mostly successful, they carried a heavy price as American blood was spilled in foreign countries. America’s supposed allies hardly helped at all, including the citizens of the countries (Korea and Vietnam) that themselves were in danger of being conquered by Communist forces.

Armando Simón, “Schlimmbesserung“, New English Review, 2022-06-16.

September 19, 2022

There’s a difference between “caring what kids think” and “pandering for kids’ attention and affection”

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

Rob Henderson wonders why so many adults these days are clearly desperate for the approval of young people:

During my recent re-watch of the entirety of Mad Men, which takes place in the 1960s, a recurring thought entered my mind: This was the last generation where young adults behaved like they were older than their real age. Don Draper is around thirty-five at the start of the series, and carries himself in a more adult manner than many 45 year olds today.

Recently, Abigail Shrier quoted a physician and psychologist who stated that “Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys”.

Until the early 1960s, young people acted older than their actual age. Now, older adults pretend to be younger than their actual age.

Which is perhaps one reason why boomers are so easy to mock. They don’t act their age.

[…]

About two years later, I was at a breakfast gathering with some other students on campus. Our guest was a former governor and presidential candidate. He was gracious, and spent most of the time answering questions from students.

And in his answers, he continually returned to variations of the same response: “We screwed up, and it’s up to you guys to fix it. I’m so happy to see how bright you all are and how sharp your questions have been, because you will fix the mistakes my generation made.”

This mystified me. This guy was well into his sixties, with a lifetime of unique experiences in leadership roles, was telling a bunch of 20-year-olds (though I was a little older) that older adults are relying on them.

In the military, we thought of those senior to us as the leaders. It was okay to give feedback, of course. Commanding officers would regularly consult lower ranking and enlisted members to see what was working and what could be improved. But that happens only after getting through the filter of the initial training endeavors.

I remember in the first week of basic training, our instructor declared, “I don’t want any of you [expletive] thinking you are doing anyone a favor being here. I could get rid of all of you clowns and have your replacements here within the hour.” (This was 2007, well before the recruitment crisis).

My 17-year-old brain heard that thought, yeah, he’s probably right. I thought of the bus loads of other ungainly young guys I saw stepping off and being confronted with “Pick ’em up, and put ’em down” and other mind games from the instructors while waiting in the endless in-processing lines.

So then I got to college and learned that even though any seat, at least at selective schools, can be filled immediately with a bright applicant (top colleges reject thousands of them each year), students are never ejected for disrespecting professors or anyone else. In the military the first message was, you are a peon and less than nothing and we can easily have you replaced (this changes as you advance in rank, of course — at least to some degree). In college, the first message was, you are amazing and privileged and a future leader (and marginalized and erased) and you will never lose your position here among the future ruling class. That feeling of whiplash will forever linger in my mind.

[…]

Older adults crave validation from the youth, which is one reason they are mocked. Young people sense their desire to be seen as cool and deprive them of this by taunting them.

This desire for esteem may be why older adults won’t exert any authority in response to energetic young conflict entrepreneurs who yell at them or threaten them.

Older adults want to be on the side of youth. So desperate to pencil themselves out of the “old” category. Every parent wants to be the “cool parent”, every professor wants to be the “cool” professor. You can be cool and still be an authority figure. Maybe decades of imbibing the worst of U.S. pop culture made everyone forget this.

September 13, 2022

Society would be happier if we all paid even less attention to “the tossers of Tinsel Town”

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

Ian O’Doherty on the malign influence pretty people who mouth other people’s words for the cameras still exude in our popular culture:

Tucker Carlson … the man from Jennifer Lawrence’s nightmares, apparently.

They never learn, do they? If the tumultuous events we have all watched with growing horror over the past few years taught us one thing, it is this – people don’t care what the pampered starlets of Hollywood have to say about politics. If we did, then Hillary Clinton would be comfortably enjoying her second term as the pantsuit POTUS, Jeremy Corbyn would be prime minister of the UK and we would all be driving electric cars.

But regular people are smarter than actors, which seems to drive the luvvies wild with fury. Rather than accepting that maybe, just maybe, there is another side to the argument, the tossers of Tinsel Town insist that anyone who doesn’t fully embrace the so-called progressive agenda is simply a monster.

We saw this recently when Jennifer Lawrence, who used to be quite refreshingly down to Earth, proudly admitted that she had to “work so hard … to forgive my dad and my family” for voting Republican. She also, quite wonderfully, spoke about having “recurring nightmares” about Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson.

In the course of her interview for the cover issue of Vogue magazine – that renowned bastion of proletarian agitation – the Hunger Games actress claimed that she was born a Kentucky Republican, was raised as a Kentucky Republican and had considered herself to be a Kentucky Republican, until she watched an episode of 30 Rock. And then her worldview completely changed.

Now most of us would agree that 30 Rock was a brilliant sitcom. After all, it was so ingenious in its construction that it even managed to make Alec Baldwin look likeable. But would anyone think that Liz Lemon’s line, “I’m not a crazy liberal – I just think people should drive hybrid cars”, would be enough to utterly transform someone’s political beliefs?

Apparently, this is what changed everything for Lawrence. She even seemed proud of the fact that a throwaway line in a sitcom triggered some sort of Damascene conversion to what is now so tediously known as “the right side of history”.

Predictably, following the Vogue interview, Lawrence was hailed as a modern-day Joan of Arc – for refusing to be “passive about politics”. But there is no real bravery involved in simply having the courage of other people’s convictions – she knows which way the political wind is blowing and is bending to it. That’s not all that brave, is it?

September 5, 2022

We’ve somehow moved from “women who want to have it all” to “the servant problem” in less than a generation

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

In Ed West’s weekly round-up post, he links to this article by Helen Andrews about the cultural shift for women since the sexual revolution:

People are always more likely to believe a lie if it’s plausible. The lie that women can have it all has as many adherents today as it does because it’s not obvious why it should be a lie. Have a career and a family: why not? There are enough hours in the day. The challenge of refuting the lie that women can have it all — that is, that they can prioritize career and family equally — lies in the fact that the trade-offs that make it impossible are hidden, not obvious, because mathematically it’s not something that should be impossible.

If only employers would do more to accommodate working women, if alternatives could be found to fulfill duties at home that mothers used to do for themselves, like childcare and housework. But the more you start thinking about those accommodations and thinking not just about what it means for any one woman to have it all, but for society to be restructured around women having it all, the more impossible those trade-offs start to seem.

Obviously there are women today in America who are trying to have it all, and many appear to be doing so successfully, at least insofar as they have both demanding careers and children. But look more closely at those households, and almost invariably you’ll see that behind every woman who is balancing work and family, there is an army of low-paid labor, immigrant cleaning ladies, nannies who are paid cash under the table, Door Dash delivery men who deliver the meals that mom never had time to cook. It’s no coincidence that the vast increase in female workforce participation has coincided with the reappearance of something that the more egalitarian America of the early 20th century did not have, and that is a servant class.

America today is more prosperous than it was 70 years ago, and yet it is no longer possible for an ordinary worker to support a middle-class family on a single income. The story of how that happened is bound up into a lie that has become gospel today, which is the lie that women can have it all. Undergirding that lie is a further lie that the Republican Party can have it all. The GOP has very much hitched itself to the idea that it can be the party of stay-at-home moms and girl bosses equally. Again, superficially this seems like it ought to be possible. Live and let live, it’s a free country. But this bargain is unsustainable in practice. We only have to look at the last 30 years to understand why.

The official position of the Republican Party today is that the government’s job is to make it possible for everyone to make the right choice for their family. This rhetoric of maximizing choice requires politicians to talk as if some women will choose to be moms and some will choose to be girl bosses, and it’s really 50/50 which one you end up being. You know, both are equally valid. Who’s to say one is better? But that’s just false, and it’s false according to women’s own preferences. The number of women who say they do not want to have children is very low, in the single digits, around 5% — and that’s just the number who will tell surveys that they predict they won’t have kids when their childbearing years are over. The number of women who actually reach old age and feel satisfied with their life, being just a girl boss with no children to keep them company, is even lower.

Squaring away all this family happiness is and ought to be a higher priority than maximizing women’s career success. It is also a more urgent priority. A woman cannot simply wake up at age 35 and decide she wants to have a family. Everyone says that the sexual revolution was brought about by the advent of the contraceptive pill, which was supposedly ushered in at an amazing new age of a new human experience thanks to science. But it actually changed a lot less than we think. We’ve gotten quite good at not having children when we don’t want to have them, but the science that gave us the pill has not made us very much better at making children arrive when we do.

“In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice”

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

Chris Bray uses the example of a new Disney show featuring the literal daughter of Satan — for the LULs — to illustrate just how unhinged our culture has become:

Give me a minute, and let me show you something without framing or a narrative. Then I’ll talk about it, but first just notice it. The company founded by Walt Disney has a new show about a middle school girl who has an awkward dilemma: She’s the Antichrist (as her mom reveals to her one day, after a weird day at school), and her Cool Dad is Satan, who has lots of funny lines about what a wild guy he is. Funny teen girl dilemmas follow, like this one time her parents show up to a party — which, like, super bummer and everything, but it’s even funnier when your dad is actually, literally Satan.

[…]

But no lines are being crossed, because there are no lines. Satan is a television character; immorality is impossible in a culture without morality, without a moral framework and moral anchors. Lacking principles, no one in power can violate any. They’re completely adrift, completely free, and completely ruined. They can go anywhere, and they often do. You can’t sin when nothing is a sin. Well, except for using the wrong pronouns, but more or less.

Now: There are people who are not adrift, who have moral reference points. I continue to believe they’re the majority, geographically prevalent and often thick on the ground, morally attuned as communities and families in a global and national milieu of amoral disconnectedness.

So we have people who see no lines, traveling freely across discarded boundaries, watched by people who are appalled by line-crossing that the line-crossers don’t perceive at all.

See also this essay from Dr. Robert Yoho, “Guess Who Passes the Psychopath Test?”

    Psychopathic lying is successful because normal people do not believe that anyone lies as a routine. Debates with sociopaths are useless. No matter what we say, no matter how much evidence is given, it has no meaning for them. Their sole goal is to fool us into classifying them as normal so they can continue to deceive, control, and use us …

    When major positions of power in business, government, industry, and society are filled by sociopaths, a downward spiral begins. The normal people eventually recognize what their leaders are and devise survival strategies.

We’re there, though it’s hard to place “there” on a map. We can see that a significant share of power and status — in politics, in economics, and in culture — belongs to people who have no perception of social rules or moral limits at all. And we see that some lines need to be reimposed, urgently and firmly.

After a few years of, “but these are the experts, right?” it feels like the beginning of the phase in which everybody finally knows the game and the stakes. In this version of the story, the little boy points out that the naked emperor has no soul, and the people begin to notice. And then?

September 4, 2022

QotD: Sparta’s fatal problem – oliganthropia

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The consequence of the Spartan system – the mess contributions, the inheritance, the diminishing number of kleroi in circulation and the apparently rising numbers of mothakes and hypomeiones – was catastrophic, and once the downhill spiral started, it picked up speed very fast. From the ideal of 8,000 male spartiates in 480, the number fell to 3,500 by 418 (Thuc. 5.68) – there would be no recovery from the great earthquake. The drop continued to just 2,500 in 394 (Xen. Hell. 4.2.16). Cinadon – the leader of the above quoted conspiracy against the spartiates – supposedly brought a man to the market square in the center of the village of Sparta and asked him to count – out of a crowd of 4,000! – the number of spartiates, probably c. 390. The man counted the kings, the gerontes and ephors (that’s around 35 men) and 40 more homoioi besides (Xen. Hell. 3.3.5). The decline continued – just 1,500 in 371 (Xen. Hell. 6.1.1; 4.15.17) and finally just around 700 with only 100 families with full citizen status and a kleros, according to Plutarch by 254 B.C. (Plut. Agis. 5.4).

This is is the problem of oliganthropia (“people-shortage” – literally “too-few-people-ness”) in Sparta: the decline of the spartiate population. This is a huge and contentious area of scholarship – no surprise, since it directly concerns the decline of one of the more powerful states in Classical Greece – with a fair bit of debate to it (there’s a decent rundown by Figueira of the demography behind it available online here). What I want to note here is that a phrase like “oliganthropia” makes it sound like there was an absolute decline in population, but the evidence argues against that. At two junctures in the third century, under Agis IV and then later Cleomenes III (so around 241 and 227) attempts were made to revive Sparta by pulling thousands of members of the underclass back up into the spartiates (the first effort fails and the second effort was around a century too late to matter). That, of course, means that there were thousands of individuals – presumably mostly hypomeiones, but perhaps some mothakes or perioikoi – around to be so considered.

Xenophon says as much with Cinadon’s observation about the market at Sparta. Now obviously, we can’t take that statement as a demographic survey, but as a general sense, 40 homoioi, plus a handful of higher figures, in a crowd of 4,000 speaks volumes about the growth of Sparta’s underclass. And that is in Laconia, the region of the Spartan state (in contrast to Messenia, the other half of Sparta’s territory), where the Spartans live and where the density of helots is lowest.

This isn’t a decline in the population of Sparta, merely a decline in the population of spartiates – the tiny, closed class of citizen-elites at the top.

So we come back to the standard assertion about Sparta: its system lasted a long time, maintaining very high cohesion – at least among the citizens class and its descendants. This is a terribly low bar – a society cohesive only among its tiny aristocracy. And yet, as low of a bar as this is, Sparta still manages to slink below it. Economic cohesion was a mirage created by the exclusion of any individual who fell below it. Sparta maintained the illusion of cohesion by systematically removing anyone who was not wealthy from the citizen body.

If we really want to gauge this society’s cohesion, we ought to track households, one generation after the next, regardless of changes in status. If we do that, what do we find? A society with an increasingly tiny elite – and a majority which, I will again quote Xenophon, “would eat them raw“. Hardly a model of social cohesion.

Moreover, this system wasn’t that stable. The core labor force – the enslaved helots – are brutally subjugated by Sparta no earlier than 680 (even this is overly generous – the consolidation process in Messenia seems to have continued into the 500s). The austerity which supposedly underlined cohesion among the spartiates by banishing overt displays of wealth is only visible archaeologically beginning in 550, which may mark the real beginning of the Spartan system as a complete unit with all of its parts functioning. And by 464 – scarcely a century later – terminal and irreversible decline had set in. Spartan power at last breaks permanently and irretrievably in 371 when Messenia is lost to them […]

This is a system that at the most generous possible reading, lasted three centuries. In practice, we are probably better in saying it lasts just 170 or so – from c. 550 (the completion of the consolidation of Messenia, and the beginning of both the Peloponnesian League and the famed Spartan austerity) to 371.

To modern ears, 170 years still sounds impressive. Compared to the remarkably unstable internal politics of Greek poleis, it probably seemed so. But we are not ancient Greeks – we have a wider frame of reference. The Roman Republic ticked on, making one compromise after another, for four centuries (509 to 133; Roman enthusiasts will note that I have cut that ending date quite early) before it even began its spiral into violence. Carthage’s republic was about as long lived as Rome. We might date constitutional monarchy in Britain as beginning in 1688 or perhaps 1721 – that system has managed around 300 years.

While we’re here – although it was interrupted briefly, the bracket dates for the notoriously unstable Athenian democracy, usually dated from the Cleisthenic reforms 508/7 to the suppresion of the fourth-century democracy in 322, are actually longer, 185 years, give or take, with just two major breaks, consisting of just four months and one year. Sparta had more years with major, active helot revolts controlling significant territory than Athens had oligarchic coups. And yet Athens – rightly, I’d argue – has a reputation for chronic instability, while Sparta has a reputation for placid regularity. Might I suggest that stable regimes do not suffer repeated, existential slave revolts?

In short, the Spartan social system ought not be described as cohesive, and while it was relatively stable by Greek standards (not a high bar!) it is hardly exceptionally stable and certainly not uniquely so. So much for cohesion and stability.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part IV: Spartan Wealth”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.

September 1, 2022

Rotherham Borough Council proudly announces they will be the first “Children’s Capital of Culture”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Honest to God, you can’t parody the real world harder than it parodies itself:

The news that the South Yorkshire market town of Rotherham would be the world’s first “Children’s Capital of Culture” in 2025 has been greeted by many as some kind of sick joke.

Rotherham is at the heart of England’s group-based child sexual exploitation crisis. In 2012, The Times revealed that a confidential 2010 police report had warned that vast numbers of underaged girls were being sexually exploited in South Yorkshire each year by organised networks of men “largely of Pakistani heritage”. South Yorkshire Police and local child-protection agencies were shown to have knowledge of widespread, organised child sexual abuse — but failed to act on this on-the-ground intelligence.

Rotherham borough council, South Yorkshire Police and other public agencies responded by setting up a team of specialists to investigate the reports. In 2013, an independent inquiry spearheaded by Professor Alexis Jay was launched. Her subsequent report into child sexual exploitation in Rotherham, published in 2014, made for awfully grim reading. It found that at least 1,400 children had been subjected to appalling forms of group-based sexual exploitation between 1997 and 2013. The report detailed how girls as young as eleven years of age — either in Year 6 or Year 7 of school — had been intimidated, trafficked, abducted, beaten and raped by men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.

Jay was also deeply critical of the institutional failures that had allowed organised child sexual abuse to flourish in Rotherham. The report concluded that there had been “blatant” collective failures on the part, firstly, of the local council, which consistently downplayed the scale of the problem; and secondly, on the part of South Yorkshire Police, which failed to prioritise investigating the abuse allegations. Indeed, the Jay Report found that the police had “regarded many child victims with contempt”. The inquiry discovered cases involving “children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally violent rapes and threatened they would be next if they told anyone”. One young person told the inquiry that gang rape was a normal part of growing up in Rotherham. Just let that sink in — groups of adult-male rapists preying on vulnerable girls was normalised in an English minster town.

The Jay Report also took the local authorities to task for elevating concerns about racial sensitivities over the protection of the children in their care — an all-too-familiar element of the nationwide grooming-gangs scandal in England. As the Jay Report put it: “Several [council] staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so”.

The safety and protection of the most vulnerable girls in society was sacrificed on the altar of state-backed multiculturalism and diversity politics. A recent report published after a series of investigations carried out by the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) under “Operation Linden”, found there were “systemic problems” within South Yorkshire Police that meant “like other agencies in Rotherham … it was simply not equipped to deal with the abuse and organised grooming of young girls on the scale we encountered”. South Yorkshire Police recently landed itself in further hot water after it was revealed by The Times that the police force was failing to routinely record the ethnic background of suspected child sexual abusers. For Rotherham, suspect ethnicity was missing for two in three cases.

August 30, 2022

QotD: The secret language of tattoos

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

There’s a fascinating old book called Codes of the Underworld, that discusses things like face tattoos on convicts. He makes an obvious — yet almost entirely unobserved — point: The kind of folks who do things like that have totally given up on “straight” society. Those tattoos, and other mob-type behaviors, aren’t intended to communicate with normal folks; they’re signals to other lowlifes. To normal society, they convey only one message: “I am dangerous; stay away.” But to their fellow scumbags, prison tattoos and the like contain a wealth of vital information. Only people who are part of that world can understand.

We normal folks have the same problem when confronted with Leftists. Just to stick with a theme, consider tattoos. A quick googling suggests that something like 20% of Americans ages 18 and older have at least one tattoo. This Federalist piece doesn’t cite its source, but the claim that 40% (!!!) of those aged 18-29 are tatted up sure feels right — anecdotes aren’t data, of course, but I taught college for years; I’ve got lots of anecdotes. Kids these days are slathered in garish, gaudy ink.

Now, it’s probably safe to assume that those tats don’t mean anything criminal … but how would you know? Back when only sailors and military types had tattoos — you know, those dim dark days before about 1994 — tats had fairly obvious meanings. Globe and anchor — Semper Fi, buddy. But these days they seem entirely random. Which is the point — if you catch yourself wondering “What kind of idiot would get that permanently etched into his flesh?”, then by definition the message isn’t for you. But think about how much time, effort, and money is expended on tattoos. They mean something, I promise you.

Dealing with Liberals is like that. Every element of every tattoo is recognizable, but the meaning of the whole is utterly opaque. So it goes with Leftist language, Leftist gestures. We understand all the words that they say, and they do all the things normal people do, but not for any reason any normal person can figure out. We don’t live in their world.

Actually it’s worse than that. We think we know what they’re doing. We’ve got a cute label for it: “Virtue-signaling”. But that doesn’t go far enough. What virtue, specifically, are they signalling? Figure that out, and we might be able to find a way to break it.

I suggest that the key to understanding Leftism is: Conspicuous consumption. I think it’s the point of all those weird college-kid tattoos, too. The whole point of the exercise is to show that you have the resources — the money, tight young skin, and above all time — to undergo such a laborious process. Time is the most precious commodity of all. All the money in the world won’t buy you a single second more. Every second you spend worrying about your pronouns is a second you can’t spend doing anything productive … which is, I submit, the entire point of worrying about your pronouns. Only the young, or those stuck in permanent adolescence, can be so profligate with time.

Severian, “Skin in the Game”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-10-28.

August 25, 2022

Louise Perry – “It’s precisely because I’m a feminist that I’ve changed my mind on sexual liberalism”

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

Guest-posting at Bari Weiss’s Substack, Louise Perry explains what drove her to write her new book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century:

I used to believe the liberal narrative on the sexual revolution. As a younger woman, I held the same opinions as most other millennial urban graduates in the West. I conformed to the beliefs of my class.

Of course freedom is the goal, I thought. What women need is the freedom to behave as men have always behaved, enjoying all the pleasures of casual sex, porn, BDSM, and indeed any other sexual delight that the human mind can dream up. As long as everyone is consenting, what’s the problem?

I no longer believe any of this.

[…]

The problem is the differences aren’t trivial. Sexual asymmetry is profoundly important: One half of the population is smaller and weaker than the other half, making it much more vulnerable to violence. This half of the population also carries all of the risks associated with pregnancy. It is also much less interested in enjoying all of the delights now on offer in the post-sexual revolution era.

The research is clear. Men are (on average) far more interested than women are in casual sex, buying sex, watching porn, and experimenting with unusual fetishes. It’s not that women never enjoy such things. But, on average, they enjoy them much less than men do.

Remove the progressive goggles, and the history of the last 60 years looks different. The sexual revolution isn’t only a story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood. It is also a story about the triumph of the playboy.

It would have been impossible to imagine a self-described feminist offering advice like this to other young women even a few years ago:

This is the advice I would offer my own daughter:

• Distrust any person or ideology that pressures you to ignore your moral intuition.

• Chivalry is actually a good thing. We all have to control our sexual desires, and men particularly so, given their greater physical strength and average higher sex drives.

• Sometimes (though not always) you can readily spot sexually aggressive men. There are a handful of personality traits that are common to them: impulsivity, promiscuity, hyper-masculinity and disagreeableness. These traits in combination should put you on your guard.

• A man who is aroused by violence is a man to steer well clear of, whether or not he uses the vocabulary of BDSM to excuse his behavior. If he can maintain an erection while beating a woman, he isn’t safe to be alone with.

• Consent workshops are mostly useless. The best way of reducing the incidence of rape is by reducing the opportunities for would-be rapists to offend. This can be done either by keeping convicted rapists in prison or by limiting their access to potential victims.

• The category of people most likely to become victims of these men are young women between the ages of 13 and 25. All girls and women, but particularly those in this age category, should avoid being alone with men they don’t know or men who give them the creeps. Gut instinct is not to be ignored: It’s usually triggered by a red flag that’s well worth noticing.

• Get drunk or high in private and with female friends, rather than in public or in mixed company.

• Don’t use dating apps. They offer a large pool of options, but at a severe cost. It is far better to meet a partner through mutual friends, since they can vet histories and punish bad behavior. Dating apps can’t.

• Holding off on having sex with a new boyfriend for at least a few months is a good way of discovering whether or not he’s serious about you or just looking for a hook-up.

• Only have sex with a man if you think he would make a good father to your children — not because you necessarily intend to have children with him, but because this is a good rule of thumb in deciding whether he’s worthy of your trust.

• Monogamous marriage is by far the most stable and reliable foundation on which to build a family.

None of this advice is groundbreaking. It’s all informed by peer-reviewed research, but it shouldn’t have to be, since this is what pretty much most mothers would tell their daughters, if only they were willing to listen.

QotD: Scandinavian women

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

On my trips to this part of the world, I’ve noticed that women here are what we in America would call high maintenance. The men seem to put a lot of effort into doting on their women, while the women act like they deserve it plus more. In Copenhagen, I saw men pushing a cart in which their date would ride. Contrary to the Viking image, men in this part of the world seem almost henpecked. Given what we see with their politics, it’s clear that the culture veered into matriarchy at some point and politics followed.

Even if this is just a superficial affectation, it is interesting because of what we think caused the variety of eye colors, hair textures and hair colors in Northern European people. The most common explanation is that there was an imbalance between the sexes, as the males needed to engage in high risk activity like hunting large animals and fishing cold waters. The result was more girls than boys, which gave an edge to women with unusual eye and hair color, as far as the sexual marketplace.

A trait that offers an edge in terms of attracting a mate, especially for women in a world short of eligible men, is going to spread quickly. It would follow that women would be the pursuers, while the men could be indifferent. If things are the reverse today, then it suggests something important changed over the last many generations. Perhaps enough cads were killed off in wars to turn the tables, giving the doting males an edge. That would have changed the dynamic among women, making them high maintenance …

The Z Man, “Travelogue: Talinn”, The Z Blog, 2019-04-03.

August 23, 2022

QotD: The fate of suddenly poor Spartiates

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What are affairs like for poor spartiates?

First, we need to reiterate that a “poor” spartiate was still quite well off compared to the average citizen in many Greek poleis – we talk about “poor” spartiates the same way we talk about the “poor” gentry in a Jane Austen novel. None of them are actually poor in an absolute sense, they are only poor in the sense that they are the poorest of the rich, clinging to the bottom rung of the upper class.

Nevertheless, we should talk about them, because the consequences of falling off of that bottom rung of the economic ladder in Sparta were extremely severe because of the closed nature of the spartiate system. Here is the rub: membership in a syssition was a requirement of spartiate status, so failure to be a member in a syssition – either because of failure in the agoge or because a spartiate could no longer keep up the required mess contributions – that meant not being a spartiate anymore.

The term we have for ex-spartiates is hypomeiones (literally “the inferiors”), which seems to have been an informal term covering a range of individuals who were (or whose family were) spartiates, but had ceased to be so. The hypomeiones were, by all accounts, mostly despised by the spartiates and the hatred seems to have been mutual (Xen. Hell. 3.3.6). Interestingly in that passage there – Xenophon’s Hellenica 3.3.6 – he lists the Spartan underclasses in what appears to be rising order of status – first the helots (at the bottom), then the neodamodes (freed helots, one step up), then the hypomeiones, and then finally the perioikoi. The implication is that falling off of the bottom of the spartiate class due to cowardice, failure – or just poverty – meant falling below the largest group of free non-citizens, the perioikoi.

Herodotus gives some sense of the treatment of men who failed at being spartiates when he details the two survivors of Thermopylae – Aristodemus and Pantites. Both had been absent from the battle under orders – Pantites had been sent carrying a message and Aristodemus had suffered an infection. When they returned to Sparta, both were ostracized by the spartiates for failing to have died – Pantites hanged himself (Hdt. 7.232) while Aristodemus was held to have “redeemed” himself with a suicidal charge at Plataea which cost his life (Hdt. 7.231). And as a side note: Aristodemus is the model for 300’s narrator, Dilios – so when you see him in the movie, remember: the Spartan system drove these men to pointless suicide because they followed an order.

But my main point here is that falling out of the spartiate system meant social death. Remember that the spartiates are a closed class – failing at being a spartiate because your kleros is too poor to maintain the mess contribution means losing citizen status; it means your children cannot attend the agoge or become spartiates themselves. It means you, your wife, your entire family forever are shamed, their status as full members of society forever revoked and your social orbit collapses on you, since you are cut off from the very ties that bind you to your friends. No wonder Pantites preferred to hang himself.

In essence then, the core of the problem here is not that these poor spartiates were poor in any absolute sense – they weren’t. It was that the difference between being rich and being merely affluent in Sparta was a social abyss completely unlike any other Greek state. And that abyss was completely one way. As we’ll see – there was no way back.

Our sources are, unfortunately, profoundly uninterested in answering some crucial questions about the hypomeiones: did they keep their kleroi? What happened to the status of their children? What happened to the status of the women in their families? We can say one thing: it is clear that there was no “on-ramp” for hypomeiones to get back into the spartiate system. This is made quite clear, if by nothing else, by the collapsing number of spartiates (we’ll get to it), but also at the inability of extremely successful non-Spartan citizens – men like Gylippus and Lysander – to ever join the homoioi. Once a spartiate was a hypomeiones, they appear to have been so forever – along with any descendants they may have had. Once out, out for good.

All of that loops back to the impact of the great earthquake in 464. It is likely there were always spartiates who – because their kleroi were just a bit poorer, or were hit a bit harder by helot resistance, or for whatever reason – clung to the bottom of the spartiate system financially, struggling to make the contributions to the common mess. When the earthquake hit, the death of so many helots – on whom they relied for their economic basis – combined with the overall disruption seems to have pushed many of these men beyond the point where they could sustain themselves. Unlike in a normal Greek polis, they could not just take up some productive work to survive and continue as citizens, because that was forbidden to the spartiates, so they collapsed out of the class entirely.

(As an aside – the fact that wealthy spartiates, as mentioned, seemed to prefer each other’s company over the rest probably also meant that the social safety-net of the poor spartiates likely consisted of other poor spartiates. Perhaps in normal circumstances they remained stable by relying on each other (you help me in my bad year, I help you in yours – this is very common survival behavior in subsistence agriculture societies), but the earthquake – by hitting them all at once – may well have caused a downward spiral, as each spartiate who fell out of the system made the remainder more vulnerable, culminating in entire social groups falling out.)

As I said, our sources are uninterested in poor spartiates, so we can only imagine what it must have felt like, clinging desperately to the bottom of that social system, knowing how deep the hole was beneath you. One imagines the mounting despair of the spartiate wife whose job it is to manage the household trying to scrounge up the mess contributions out of an ever-shrinking pool of labor and produce, the increasing despair of her husband who because of the laws cannot do anything but watch as his household slides into oblivion. We cannot know for certain, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a particularly happy existence.

As for those who did fall out of the system we do not need to imagine because Xenophon – in a rare moment of candor – leaves us in no doubt what they felt. He puts it this way: “they [the leaders of a conspiracy against the spartiates] knew the secret of all of the others – the helots, the neodamodes, the hypomeiones, the perioikoi – for whenever mention was made of the spartiates among these men, not one of them could hide that he would gladly eat them raw” (Xen. Hell. 3.3.6; emphasis mine).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part IV: Spartan Wealth”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.

August 21, 2022

The pandemic lockdowns heralded the “worldwide end of the Nuremburg code”

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

At Samizdata, Perry de Havilland considers how British culture has been impacted by many of the worst notions coming out of American culture in the last few years:

… support for Brexit, by no means confined to the lumpenproletariat of Guardian reader’s imagination, might not indicate what purveyors of the high status opinion fondly imagine. The conflation of Brexit with the “Trump phenomenon” was always overblown, given the deep social and structural differences between UK and USA. Yes, we are influenced by America, but we are not the same in oh so many ways.

But western civilisation, not just Britain, is undeniably going through a very strange phase. The insane and demonstrably pointless covid lockdowns seem to have had a pressure cooker effect, with every -ism being dialled up several notches. The mainstreaming of transsexuality, a largely harmless hobby until a lunatic fringe grabbed hold of it, indicates the world is not running in well-oiled grooves. An inability to define “what is a woman?”, by sages and politicians who nevertheless expect to be treated as serious people, would have seemed implausible just a few years ago.

But the covid lockdowns, that is the “biggie”: an egregious abridgement of liberty & common sense that placed the global economy into repeated bouts of cardiac arrest. The worldwide end of the Nuremburg code.

The lockdowns were an even more polarising issue that Brexit or Trump or indeed anything else. Why? Because there was no opt-out, you could not just go to work, or visit granny, no ability to ignore the whole thing and just head down the pub or retire for a macha latte in some café. The effects of that will be enduring. That was the issue that taught a lot of people to fear what other people believe to be true, and people always hate what they fear.

Now just wait to see what happens when the green lunacy that stopped investment in reliable power supply and new reservoirs means we start running out of power and water. I suspect that will be what makes the cork finally blow off.

August 19, 2022

“This is her advice: Get Married and Make Sure You Stay Married”

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

Elizabeth Nickson was a feminist entrepreneur (although I’m sure she would not have used that word to describe herself) in her early 20s, earning money to support herself by pushing feminist ideology through theatrical performance and running consciousness raising sessions. It was, as she says, “fashionable”. She now realizes that the changes to sexual belief and behaviour led directly to the modern “hook-up” culture young people now have to navigate to find relationships:

A new book, the Case Against Sexual Revolution, A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, written by Louise Perry, a young writer for the New Statesman is published at the end of this month. Perry volunteers in rape centers, and works for the campaign group We Can’t Consent To This, which documents cases in which UK women have been killed and defendants have claimed in court that they died as a result of ‘rough sex’.

This is her advice: Get Married and Make Sure You Stay Married.

Dramatically well-argued and sourced, Perry goes through every “innovation” in the sexual space and demonstrates without flinching, that all of it, all of it, privileges a particular subset of male, the sociosexual male – the kind that preferences quantity over quality – and not only that the worst kind of sociosexual male. The kind who like choking women, the rapists, abusers, serial womanizers, the pedophiles, the pimps, and the traffickers.

Decades later, says Perry, the mothers and grandmothers of 2nd and 3rd stage feminism have created hook-up culture as the near exclusive method of finding a mate. She details the unassailable fact that women, by their very nature, by their evolutionary history, and their specific biology are victimized in every move of hook-up culture, which ruthlessly uses their femininity, their gentleness, kindness, and agreeableness against them. It coarsens men, inflames their worst natures and has turned the netherworld of the sexual marketplace into a vicious free-for-all, a Darwinian thrash-hunt of the most vulnerable.

Everyone is hurt by it. Without exception.

I live in a place socially advanced, jokingly known as the end of the hippie trail. It is prosperous because it is one of the most beautiful places in the world. But, because it is environmentally advanced, our population is aging. The young and busy cannot start businesses or families here, because the environmental regulation is so strict, they cannot afford it. The human wreckage of the sexual revolution, therefore, is on full display. The streets and markets are littered with broken older men and women, long divorced or separated, the women especially living on crumbs, alone and destined to die alone, many without family. Hey, but their 20s and 30s were free. They got to have sex with dozens, if not hundreds of gorgeous men or women. And they used all the drugs.

If you look hard enough, you will see the same people drifting along the margins of every city and town. Break sexual norms, you break the family, and then you break the culture. What is left is pitiable.

Perry makes the point that I have tried to make hundreds of times in the past 20 years. So many of the political aims of upper-middle-class work for them, but for no one else. They are luxury beliefs. Upper-middle-class mothers do not send their gorgeous teens away to college now without very stern warnings about what might happen to them. Without a full delineating of the horrors that attend hooking up. But the less advantaged, those who swallow the propaganda of the culture do not.

August 8, 2022

Barbarian Europe: Part 6 – The Birth of England

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

seangabb
Published 4 Aug 2021

In 400 AD, the Roman Empire covered roughly the same area as it had in 100 AD. By 500 AD, all the Western Provinces of the Empire had been overrun by barbarians. Between April and July 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
(more…)

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress