Quotulatiousness

August 5, 2022

“… what explains the growing enthusiasm for ‘Drag Queen Story Hour'”?

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

In UnHerd, Andrew Doyle considers the deep weirdness of how not just “Drag Queen Story Hour” but all things drag are being pushed on children at any cost:

“One thing that drag queens don’t get on FLICKR is tips” by kennethkonica is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 .

One Easter Sunday, many years ago, some friends and I attended a showcase of performances in a network of dank subterranean vaults. The event was self-consciously avant-garde, and many of the artists were drag queens who were exploring the more subversive aspects of their craft. This involved a great deal of screaming, bloodletting and carnal depravity. At one point I wandered into a chamber in which two naked performers were engaged in full penetrative sex. Around them a cluster of middle-class hipsters had formed, pensively observing them as though they were connoisseurs contemplating a Henry Moore.

These days we are accustomed to a somewhat tamed version of drag. But the best performers have always pushed the limits of acceptability: I once appeared at a comedy night at the Edinburgh fringe hosted by a drag queen whose interaction with the punters was not so much waspish as downright libellous. At another, I remember a drag artist smoking liberally during the performance, blowing smoke at a pregnant woman on the front row and saying “I hope you have a miscarriage”. It was a far cry from RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Traditional drag is clearly meant for adults. So what explains the growing enthusiasm for “Drag Queen Story Hour”, in which drag queens visit schools, libraries and other council venues to read to young children? For whatever reason, this bizarre subgenre has been championed by celebrities and politicians who wish to be seen as being on “the right side of history”. Last week the MP for Walthamstow, Stella Creasy, tweeted about taking her infant son to a show in which a drag queen called Greta Tude “put so much energy into story telling and entertaining local children”. Her colleague Nadia Whittome replied, describing the event as “so wholesome”.

But do fans of drag really want it to become “wholesome”? The appeal of drag shows is that they revel in sexual dissidence, as the American drag queen Kitty Demure has pointed out:

    I have no idea why you want drag queens to read books to your children … Would you want a stripper or a porn star to influence your child? It makes no sense at all. A drag queen performs in a nightclub for adults. There is a lot of filth that goes on, a lot of sexual stuff that goes on, and backstage there’s a lot of nudity and sex and drugs. Okay? So I don’t think this is an avenue that you would want your child to explore.

The sexual element of drag is impossible to deny. Even the more tepid drag queens, whose repertoire extends no further than lip-synching to Donna Summer, tend to interlace their performances with suggestive gestures, provocative quips and the occasional slut-drop.

That’s not to say drag queens can’t adapt to a younger audience — they are actors after all. It’s perfectly possible for performers of Drag Queen Story Hour to read stories to children without all the eroticised preening and pouting we have come to expect from them. But why would any self-respecting artist want to do it? There is something deeply mystifying about drag queens who choose to anaesthetise their art form in order to regale infants with tales of teddy bears and picnics.

August 2, 2022

QotD: Basic College Girl (aka “Becky”)

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

What’s the point of being a Metalhead these days? At best, you’ll get a gold sticker and a participation trophy like everyone else. At worst, you’ll get diagnosed with some bullshit “learning disorder” and they’ll zombie you out on powerful prescription psychotropics. The only lesson this teaches is: Come to the attention of the authorities at your peril.

That’s the effect on guys, at any rate. Bad as that is, it’s far worse on girls. Guys establish social hierarchy through conflict; when they can’t compete with each other, they drop out and embrace the Ritalin Zombie lifestyle of video games and onanism. Girls compete through approval-seeking, which, since nowadays nobody’s different from anybody and everyone’s the best at everything, is easily channeled into conspicuous consumption. Hence all the items on that list.

For the Basic College Girl, then, conformism is a virtue. In fact, it’s the highest virtue — the “winner” is the one who does nothing, says nothing, thinks nothing but that which gets upvoted on social media …

… or downvoted on social media, as the case may be. Self-esteem culture has completely bypassed the normal feedback loops. Back in the days of meatspace-only communication, strong signals of disapproval from your peers were, 99 times out of 100, clear indicators that you’re doing it wrong. If the kids are making fun of your personal hygiene, then unless your name really is “Dick Smelley”, you need to take a long hard look at your showering habits. Kids can be horribly cruel, but most of the time they’re not wrong. And yes, bullying can (and often did) go overboard, but generally “stop being such a dork!” is great life advice, and the process of figuring out just what you’re doing that’s so dorky, and how to stop it, is crucial for one’s social development.

Social media changes all that. Anyone who has ever written a blog post — really, anyone who has ever made a substantive comment on a blog post — has had the experience of some drive-by troll shitting on you. As functional adults who grew up in meatspace we recognize this for what it is, and ignore it. But imagine that you hadn’t grown up in meatspace. What if you mistake this for substantive criticism? As it’s not psychologically sustainable to take it that way for long, you do what the Basic College Girl does: You call the commenter a “h8r” and, crucially, you consider having “h8rs” as confirmation that whatever you’re doing is right. After all, they couldn’t “h8” if they weren’t thinking about you.

Thus “approval-seeking”, a.k.a. chick competition, curdles into an attitude where you actively seek out “h8rs” to annoy.

This is where Normals grossly underestimate women like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I’m personally terrified of AOC, because she is the embodiment of the Basic College Girl. Basic College Girls can’t be bargained with, they can’t be reasoned with, and the reason for both is: Both “bargaining” and “reasoning” imply that you think she’s doing something wrong, which is “h8”. And since “ur h8in”, that means you’re thinking about her more than she’s thinking about you, which means she’s validated, which means she wins. Which means she’s not only going to keep on doing what she’s doing, but will crank it up past 11, in order get more h8, to attract more h8rz.

This is our future. Since the only way to deal with a Basic College Girl is to say “no” — all the time, to everything, unconditionally — and we as a society have lost the ability to do that, we’re screwed. Get to know your new mistress. Xzhyr name is Becky, and she’s everywhere.

Severian, “The Basic College Girl”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-24.

July 28, 2022

The History of American Chip Flavors

Filed under: Business, Food, History, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

J.J. McCullough
Published 2 Apr 2022

The story of chips is the story of America.
(more…)

July 27, 2022

QotD: Sex and the young Zoomer

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

I bring this up because we seem to have entered one of those moments, not infrequent in American history, when the keepers of our culture have decided sex should be taboo. The word itself is now indecent and unmentionable: We’re supposed to say “gender”. But gender pertains to linguistics, not biology. In Spanish, for example, the moon is feminine in gender: la luna. The sun is masculine: el sol. This sets up all kinds of interesting possibilities during sunrise and sunset, but that’s not the point here. The point is that some moralistic souls think you can somehow detach the sex act from sexuality. But why?

Apparently, many in the zoomer generation find sex scary. I get that. When I was 13 and contemplated the mechanics of the thing, I pretty much became reconciled to a life of despondent celibacy. But at what point was our culture handed over to clueless 13-year-old kids? The zoomers mate later, less and with fewer reproductive consequences than their parents and grandparents. They get triggered by 50 Shades of Grey and suffer a permanent headache from climate change. I mean, can anyone conjure up a romantic vision of Greta Thunberg?

There’s also the idea that sex is fluid — that one can be born into a biological “gender” then pick among dozens of other flavors, like scoops at the gelato store. But weren’t we told, not so long ago, that being gay was a matter of genetic destiny? Evidently, everyone else is free to choose. You can be transgender, of course, and cisgender, which I think is what I am. But there are 70 more buckets to pick from, such as abimegender, aerogender, cassgender — even cloudgender, which means one’s gender “cannot be comprehended or understood due to depersonalization and derealization disorder”.

If you believe there are 72 sexes, you’re overthinking. You’re also likely to be online 22 hours a day and paddling toward a digitally reinforced narcissism. “You may say you’re cassgender. Fine. Big deal. But I am cloudgender and can’t be fully comprehended or understood!” That’s the stuff of social media. It feels like millions are listening to your magnificently baroque sexual identity, even if you’re only talking to yourself.

Martin Gurri, “Get the Kids Out of the Room — We’re Going To Talk About Sex”, Discourse, 2022-04-25.

July 25, 2022

QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte, the Great Man’s Great Man

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

The point is, a culture can survive an incompetent elite for quite a while; it can’t survive a self-loathing one. This is because the Great Man theory of History, like everything in history, always comes back around. History is full of men whose society doesn’t acknowledge them as elite, but who know themselves to be such. Napoleon, for instance, and isn’t it odd that as much as both sides, Left and Right, seem to be convinced that some kind of Revolution is coming, you can scour all their writings in vain for one single mention of Bonaparte?

That’s because Napoleon was a Great Man, possibly the Great Man — a singularly talented genius, preternaturally lucky, whose very particular set of skills so perfectly matched the needs of the moment. There’s no “social” explanation for Napoleon, and that’s why nobody mentions him — the French Revolution ends with the Concert of Europe, and in between was mumble mumble something War and Peace. The hour really did call forth the man, in large part, I argue, because the Directory was full of men who were philosophically opposed to the very idea of elitism, and couldn’t bear to face the fact that they themselves were the elite.

Since our elite can’t produce able leaders of itself, it will be replaced by one that can. When our hour comes — and it is coming, far faster than we realize — what kind of man will it call forth?

Severian, “The Man of the Hour”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-22.

July 22, 2022

Sexual liberation to sexual revolution to … today’s sexual desert

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

Chris Bray thinks that the sexual revolution “missed a turn, somewhere out in the desert”:

The discussion of what we didn’t mean to do is becoming an interesting one:

After decades of sexual liberation — Mattachine, Stonewall, Loving v. Virginia, Griswold v. Connecticut, Second Wave feminism and the Sexual Revolution, Lawrence v. Texas, Obergefell v. Hodges, and whatever else I’m missing in there (and I’m not sure Roe belongs on the list, but maybe) — we somehow arrive at a moment in which we merge a sexualized display of childhood and a relentless media-driven commodification of sexuality with the very clear reality that nobody’s having any sex:

    One of the most comprehensive sex studies to date — the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior — found evidence of declines in all types of partnered sexual activity in the U.S. Over the course of the study from 2009 to 2018, those surveyed reported declines in penile-vaginal intercourse, anal sex and partnered masturbation …

    Over the last 22 years, Herbenick has co-authored several studies about our sexual activity. Her most recent research finds that all of us, regardless of age, are having less sex, with the most dramatic decline among teenagers.

    At the start of the study in 2009, 79% of those ages 14 to 17, revealed they were not having sex. By 2018, that number rose to 89%.

Liberation stabbed pleasure in the heart; we emptied sex. Hypersexualization turns out to be desexualization. The unrelenting joylessness and death odor of contemporary sexual culture emerges from seventy years of growing openness and freedom. How?

There’s no way to fully cover a question of that scope in a single post — but I refer, as a start, to the earlier posts I wrote about the sexualization of childhood and the way Jim Jones used sex as a weapon. Breaking barriers and repressive anchors broke connections and reference points: Yes, some people were trapped in oppressive societal norms, and it’s not at all my view that all the sexual liberation in our past wasn’t really liberating. But we broke marriage to set people free, and whoops. Some people experienced bourgeois heteronormativity as a prison, and so set out to release everybody from their cages, which seem to have not been cages for a whole lot of people. Congratulations, we’ve freed you from being part of a family.

July 15, 2022

QotD: Modern and historical multiculturalism

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

For history’s rare multiracial and multiethnic republics, an “e pluribus unum” cohesion is essential. Each particular tribe must owe greater allegiance to the commonwealth than to those who superficially look or worship alike.

Yet over the last 20 years we have deprecated “unity” and championed “diversity”. Americans are being urged by popular culture, universities, schools and government to emphasize their innate differences rather than their common similarities.

Sometimes the strained effort turns comical. Some hyphenate or add accents or foreign pronunciations to their names. Others fabricate phony ethnic pedigrees in hopes of gaining an edge in job-seeking or admissions.

The common theme is to be anything other than just normal Americans for whom race, gender and ethnicity are incidental rather than essential to their character.

But unchecked tribalism historically leads to nihilism. Meritocracy is abandoned as bureaucrats select their own rather than the best-qualified. A Tower of Babel chaos ensues as the common language is replaced by myriad local tongues, in the fashion of fifth century imperial Rome. Class differences are subordinated to tribal animosities. Almost every contentious issue is distilled into racial or ethnic victims and victimizers.

History always offers guidance to the eventual end game when people are unwilling to give up their chauvinism. Vicious tribal war can break out as in contemporary Syria. The nation can fragment into ethnic enclaves as seen in the Balkans. Or factions can stake out regional no-go zones of power as we seen in Iraq and Libya.

In sum, the present identity-politics divisiveness is not a sustainable model for a multiracial nation, and it will soon reach its natural limits one way or another. On a number of fronts, if Americans do not address these growing crises, history will. And it won’t be pretty.

Victor Davis Hanson, “Things That Can’t Go on Forever Simply Don’t”, PJ Media, 2019-04-17.

July 1, 2022

Trust “the experts”

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

Chris Bray on the appalling track record of so many of our modern-day “experts”:

So the public health experts are baffled by the consistent failure of their predictive models, and the economic experts are baffled by the consistent failure of their predictive models. It’s like a chef who keeps trying to grill a steak, only to find that he’s burnt another lemon pie. “I SWEAR TO GOD I THOUGHT THIS ONE WAS A BEEF THING.”

These people aren’t stupid, but they’re stupid in practice because they show up to the game with the weight of what they know people in their position are supposed to say and think. Fashionable experts, in-group leaders in their status-compliant position in a field, aren’t reviewing the evidence — ever — but are instead reviewing a performative checklist dotted with social status land mines.

They’re on a team, so they say the team slogans.

[…]

If that’s how expertise works, we no longer have have any. We have actors who play the brow-furrowing expert role, but have no real job beyond intoning the message of the day. It says on this card that we recommend even more Covid vaccines for everyone. Let’s break for lunch!

But, mercifully, that’s not invariably how expertise works. And this is why politicians and trend-policing media figures are so completely baffled by experts like Robert Malone or Ryan Cole, or Geert Vanden Bossche or Clare Craig or Peter McCullough, experts who follow the evidence wherever it goes. Tone and social reception tells you a lot: Does an expert say things that aren’t comforting, that sound a little … not on the team? That person clears the first barrier, and you can start assessing the specifics of what they say. Look for journalists who are offended and triggered, and try to find the person who hurt their feelings. That person may turn out to be wrong, but he won’t turn out to be Paul Krugman wrong.

June 25, 2022

QotD: The Left’s long march through the institutions

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

Old-school Commies were consummate players of the long game. They knew they’d have to completely undermine bourgeois society before they could carry off The Revolution, so they did. Antonio Gramsci laid it all out theoretically, if you feel like slogging through that gunk, but the Commies had been doing it in practice for decades before that. Starting with the educational “reformers” surrounding John Dewey at the turn of the 20th century, they took over our grade schools. Then they took over the universities, working their way up from the community colleges (often Commie fronts from the get-go; there’s a reason the number of jucos nationwide went from 20 to 170 in just ten years, from 1909 to 1919).

Once they were in, they of course credentialized everything, such that the cultural-transmission professions — journalism, education, even art and music — suddenly required college training … and all the trainers were Reds. Ever wonder why you seemingly have to have a fucking Master’s Degree to get your lit-wank novel published? Seriously: read the author bio of any of the flavor-of-the-minute wunderkinder that get their painfully quirky dreck blurbed in the New York Times Review of Books — every blessed one of them has some kind of advanced degree in “creative writing”. All those graduate-level “creative writing” programs aren’t just make-work for otherwise unemployable Eng-Lit PhDs, in other words. They’re what the Union of Soviet Writers was in the USSR: The guarantors of politically-reliable content.

That’s the setup. Ready for the twist?

They won, but they don’t know it. Not only was the Revolution televised, it’s still being televised, 24 hours a day, on 587+ satellite cable channels and umpteen digital streaming services. Eugene V. Debs’s wettest wet dream couldn’t compare to Current Year America. The SJWs are like the Seekers, out there desperately trying to prepare the world for the UFOs … but the UFO already landed in their backyard, and they were too busy trying to save the world to see it.

That’s why widespread political violence is inevitable, and damn soon. Nancy Pelosi may be the nastiest evil old bitch to ever slime through the halls of Congress, but she’s not stupid. She’s just in an impossible situation. She’s the leader of an organization that didn’t manage its True Believers, and now she’s fucked either way. […]

That’s what the old-school Commies didn’t see coming. Those poor deluded fools really thought that “intellectual” was an adjective. The Russian word for the noun version is intelligentsia, and they gave the Soviet Union no end of trouble — Stalin had to send boxcars of them to Siberia fairly regularly to keep them in line. In the West, though, they really thought that you can have an “intellectual” steelworker, or dockhand, or farmer, and the like. They were counting on it, in fact — see “community colleges were all Red fronts”, above.

Instead, “intellectual” is the True Believer’s self-chosen job description. You can meet some fearsomely learned people in your day-to-day, but the only people you’ll ever meet who use the word “intellectual” without sneering are Media types and their panty-sniffers in the ivory tower. They’re extremely useful idiots, which is why none of Palsy Pelosi’s predecessors sent them to Siberia like they should’ve. And now it’s too late.

Severian, “If the UFO Actually Comes, Part II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-26.

June 24, 2022

The Guardians of Free Speech

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 23 Jun 2022

Because of the social media circus surrounding the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard defamation trial, it was easy to overlook one of the principal — yet least likely — actors in the courtroom drama: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which ghostwrote and placed the 2018 Washington Post op-ed by Heard about surviving domestic abuse that was the basis of the trial.

——————-

It’s only the latest example of how the group has in recent years strayed from its original mission of defending speech, no matter how vile. Awash with money after former President Donald Trump was elected, the ACLU transformed into an organization that championed progressive causes, undermining the principled neutrality that helped make it a powerful advocate for the rights of clients ranging from Nazis to socialists.

It questioned the due process rights of college students accused of sexual assault and harassment under Title IX rules. It ran partisan ads against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, a move that current Executive Director Anthony Romero told The New York Times was a mistake. The ACLU also called for the federal government to forgive $50,000 per borrower in student loans.

As the ACLU recedes from its mission, enter another free speech organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE. Founded in 1999 to combat speech codes on college campuses, FIRE is expanding to go well beyond the university and changing its name to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The group has raised $29 million toward a three-year “litigation, opinion research and public education campaign aimed at boosting and solidifying support for free-speech values.”

“I think there have been better moments for freedom of speech when it comes to the culture,” says FIRE’s president, Greg Lukianoff. “When it comes to the law, the law is about as good as it’s ever been. But when it comes to the culture, our argument is that it’s gotten a lot worse and that we don’t have to accept it.”

Lukianoff tells Reason that FIRE’s new initiatives have been in the works for years, but gained urgency during the COVID lockdowns. “Pretty much from day one, people have been asking us to take our advocacy off campus to an extent nationally,” he says. “But 2020 was such a scarily bad year for freedom of speech on campus and off, we decided to accelerate that process.” Despite 80 percent of campuses being closed and doing instruction remotely, Lukianoff says that FIRE received 50 percent more requests for help from college students and faculty. He also points to The New York Times‘ editorial page editor, James Bennet, getting squeezed out after running an article by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.) and high-profile journalists such as Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and Matt Yglesias “stepping away from [their publications], saying that the environment was too intolerant.”

FIRE is also expanding its efforts beyond legal advocacy and into promoting what Lukianoff calls “the culture of free speech.” As Politico reports, it will spend $10 million “in planned national cable and billboard advertising featuring activists on both ends of the political spectrum extolling the virtues of free speech.”

He says that people in their 40s and 50s grew up in a country where the culture of free speech was embedded in colloquial sayings and common attitudes. “Things like everyone’s entitled to their opinion, which is something you heard all the time when we were kids. It’s a free country, to each their own, statements of deep pluralism, like the idea that [you should] walk a mile in a man’s shoes,” he explains. “All of these things are great principles for taking advantage of pluralism, but they’ve largely sort of fallen out of usage due to a growing skepticism about freedom of speech, particularly on campus, that’s been about 40 years in the making.”

Lukianoff has nothing negative to say about the ACLU (in fact, he used to work there) and stresses that FIRE has worked with the organization since “day one” and continues to do so. But unlike the ACLU, FIRE isn’t at risk of turning into a progressive advocacy organization, partly because its staff is truly bipartisan.

That pluralistic pride extends to the groups funding FIRE, too. Lukianoff thinks that despite the rise of cancel culture, most Americans still understand the value of free speech, but they need to be encouraged to stand up for it. FIRE’s polling, he says, reveals that “it’s really a pretty small minority, particularly pronounced on Twitter, that is anti-free-speech philosophically and thinks that people should shut up and conform.”

For that reason, he’s upbeat that FIRE will succeed in helping to restore belief in the value and function of free speech.

Interview by Nick Gillespie. Edited by Regan Taylor.

June 23, 2022

QotD: Mis-preparing our kids for the future

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

I think that’s part of the issue, with our civilization at large. You see, the world is very complicated, and people are given the impression that it’s never been this complicated — which is a lie — and know for a fact that things are changing very fast. They no more find a path, than it dissolves and crumbles under them.

We’re preparing the new generation rottenly for this, too. Look, every generation is educated according to what their grandparents thought was desirable. Which is why I had the education that would have helped an upper class Portuguese Lady in the mid 19th century to make a good marriage and shine in society. For practical purposes, other than diplomacy […] the only use for my degree was academia by the time I took it. Though business desperately needed translators, we weren’t being taught office skills, or the terminology we needed to translate science or industrial stuff. (I learned those on my own, through running into them head first, as I learn practically anything.)

Kids now are being educated to the dreams of the early twentieth elites: for a communitarian world with a strong central government. They’re being told this is the future and what to expect, because when that idea made it into academia, and slowly worked itself through to curriculum and expectations, that was the future everyone EXPECTED. Even conservatives thought that the future would involve central planning. They just wanted to keep a little more individual freedom with it.

I remember blowing the world of Robert’s third grade teacher apart when we informed her that no, in the future there wouldn’t be a need for MORE group work, and that all creativity wouldn’t be communal (which frankly is funny. Creativity doesn’t work that way) but that it would be more individual, probably with people working on their piece of the project miles and miles away from the rest of the “team” and having to pull their weight alone. Dan and I explained why based on tech and trends, and all the poor woman kept saying is “that’s not what we were taught.”

Our kids were prepared not only for a world that doesn’t exist, but the world that idiot intellectuals (all intellectuals are idiots. They mostly don’t know a thing of the real world or real people) thought would come about, somehow, automagically. Think of Brave New World, but everyone is happy and doesn’t need the soma. (rolls eyes.)

And then we sneer at millenials for not finding their way, when people my age, who are self-directed and battlers, and have vocations, find ourselves caught in the grinding gears of change and get our goals and work broken over and over again, and yeah, also don’t find it easier to find our way.

Talk to the kids. Help them find something they’re “meant” to do (that’s not how it works, so make sure they know there isn’t only one goal and only one vocation, but there’s almost always something that their skills and ability are useful for RIGHT NOW. And the ability to learn more to change.) If needed, hook them on multiple streams of income. Help them see it’s possible. Dispel their illusions that life was ever easy.

Sure, in the past there were people who got “the one job” and stuck to it through thick and thin to the golden watch at the end. But I don’t think they were ever the majority. And by the time I came along, you couldn’t have any loyalty to your company, because it would have none to you.

Sarah Hoyt, “Finding Your Way”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-18.

June 20, 2022

The blight of the 21st century – the dictatorship of the experts

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

Oliver Traldi considers the role of experts in the modern world:

Click to see full-size image at The New Yorker.

A few weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration as President, the New Yorker published a cartoon depicting a mustached, mostly bald man, hand raised high, mouth open in a sort of improbable rhombus, tongue flapping wildly within, saying: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” The tableau surely elicited many a self-satisfied chuckle from readers disgusted by the populist energy and establishment distrust that they perceived in Trump’s supporters.

But what exactly is the joke here? Citizens in a democracy are not akin to airline passengers, buckled quietly into their seats and powerless to affect change, their destinations and very lives placed in the hands of professionals guarded by a reinforced door up front. Even brief reflection reveals the cartoonist’s analogy to be comparing like to unlike.

That none of us thinks we know better than a plane’s captain, yet we often think we know better than experts in matters of politics, suggests differences between those domains. And it highlights a vexing problem for modern political discourse and deliberation: We need and value expertise, yet we have no foolproof means for qualifying it. To the contrary, our public square tends to amplify precisely those least worthy of our trust. How should we decide who counts an expert, what topics their expertise properly addresses, and which claims deserve deference?

* * *

We all rely upon experts. When something hurts, we consult a doctor, unless it’s a toothache, in which case we go to a dentist. We trust plumbers, electricians, and roofers to build and repair our homes, and we prefer that our lawyers and accountants be properly accredited. Some people attain expertise through training, others through experience or talent. I defer to someone who’s lived in a city to tell me what to do when I visit, and to a colleague who’s studied a particular topic at length even though we have the same mastery of our field overall. A friend with good fashion sense is an invaluable aid in times of sartorial crisis.

In all these cases, our reliance on expertise means suspending our own judgment and placing our trust in another — that is, giving deference. But we defer in different ways and for different reasons. The pilot we choose not to vote out of the cockpit has skill, what philosophers sometimes call “knowledge how”. We need the pilot to do something for us, but if all goes well we need not alter our own beliefs or behaviors on his say so. At the other extreme, a history teacher might do nothing but express claims, the philosopher’s “knowledge that”, which students are meant to adopt as their own beliefs. Within the medical profession, performing surgery is knowledge-how while diagnosing a headache and recommending two aspirin as the treatment is closer to knowledge-that.

But how are those without expertise to determine who has it? Generally, we leave that determination to each individual. A free society and the free market allow for widely differing judgments about who to trust about what, with credentialing mechanisms in place to facilitate signaling and legal consequences for outright fraud. Speculative bubbles notwithstanding, the market also helps to aggregate countless individual judgments in ways that yield socially valuable outcomes. Two New York City diners may have signs promising the “World’s Best Cup of Coffee”, but the one that actually has good coffee is more likely to be bustling on any given day and to thrive in the long run.

H/T to Ed West’s weekly round-up post for the link.

June 18, 2022

QotD: Celebrities “came up out of the lagoon and helped themselves to all the culture they could find. They just ate everything.”

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

SO YOU’RE SAYING CELEBRITIES ARE A CULTURE PROBLEM?

Well, actually, I’m asking.

Are celebrities one of the reasons our culture is now so chaotic and unstable?

There is a strong case for “yes”.

For starters, celebrities have many flaws.

They can be self centered, as when Madonna was asked to celebrate Aretha Franklin. She referenced herself more than 50 times, and Ms. Franklin 4 times.

They can be naive, as when Gal Gadot lead a sing-along with fellow celebrities from the comfort and protection of their beautiful homes. She now agrees this was “in poor taste”.

Celebrities are not durable. That’s our our fault. We raise them up and we strike them down. And because we have the attention span of a French monarch, their moment in the spot light is fleeting. But it means our relationship with them is often fleeting.

Celebrities are vulnerable. Being a celebrity is incredibly perilous. Living in the very thin air up there, no mortal should wish for this. So celebrities suffer. They have break downs. They slide into drug dependency and bad relationships. At this point it is hard for them to be exemplars. Unless of course we are struggling too.

But here’s the key reason to treat celebrities as a culture problem.

In the course of the 20th century, celebrities ate their way through Western society, consuming or discrediting any and every elite that dared compete with them.

In this period, people still cared about scientists and other experts. They saw editors, publishers, judges, and professors as figures of authority. They admired and sought to emulate people of exalted social standing. They looked to religious leaders to address the big issues of the day. Artists, a few of them, were consulted. Designers, some of them, were gods.

This is mostly gone. Celebrities brought them low. It’s not clear that they meant to. It’s more likely that the simply won the popularity contest of contemporary culture.

We could choose between (nearly) dead white males, cranky, pipe smoking, vest wearing, utterly pompous creatures who would occasionally stoop to correct us. Or we could go with the effortlessly charismatic, blindingly beautiful, funny, endearing, eager-to-please people. I mean just look at the people in the “selfie” above. You can’t help but be wowed. Game, set and match to the movie star.

Celebrities remind me of the Rem Koolhaas library in Seattle.

This never fails to make me think of a mechanical monster that’s just crawled out of Seattle’s Elliot Bay and climbed the hill looking for lunch.

That’s what celebrities did. They came up out of the lagoon and helped themselves to all the culture they could find. They just ate everything.

It started with children’s books. They had to write em. Then it was lines of perfume and clothing. They had to design em. Then of course it was politics. How could we possibly do without em? Most of the people running for office in the US are now strikingly attractive. Some of them could actually be part-time models. This is the celebrity effect.

But here’s the other reason that the celebrity influence might be a cause of our instability. It is that they have colonized our young. There are lots of ways of making this argument, but I think “exhibit A” is probably TikTok. This platform matters because it mints celebrity. And that matters because a fifteen year old typically believes he or she matters in exact proportion to his or her fame.

Grant McCracken, “Culture Problem: celebrities”, Future Watch: an anthropological pov, 2022-03-17.

June 16, 2022

Paul Wells takes in a current movie … and likes it

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

I’ve never been much of a movie-goer, even before the neverending pandemic lockdown theatre landed on us in 2020, so the chances of me going to see something like Top Gun: Maverick were pretty low (especially as I never bothered to watch the original, back in the day). Paul Wells is in the middle of a European trip, so he did what every travelling North American would do somewhere on the continent of history and culture: he watched a current-release American movie:

The mystery of Maverick is why, by next weekend, it will pass Doctor Strange in the Convolution of Fan Service as the year’s biggest movie, why it is the biggest film of Tom Cruise’s charmed life — why it strikes such a chord in this moment, even though its premises, visual vocabulary and soundtrack are 36 years old. In terms of chronological distance from the original Top Gun, it’s as though the top-grossing movie of 1986 had been a sequel to 1950’s Annie Get Your Gun. (“And there has never been a star as sensational as Betty Hutton!” Annie‘s trailer proclaims. Switch Tom Cruise in for poor Betty and suddenly the claim may actually be true.)

The simplest hypothesis is that Maverick is just big and loud, so you can leave your brain at home and enjoy the spectacle. But lots of lousy movies nobody watched were big and loud, including Matrix: Resolutions and Ghostbusters: Afterlife, so there must be some fuller explanation.

This being a Substack newsletter, I suspect I’m contractually encouraged to argue that Maverick wins because it isn’t woke. I’m afraid I can’t oblige. I mean, the movie definitely makes only the barest acknowledgment of taking place in the 21st century. None of the hotshot young recruits pauses from the action to specify their pronouns. None decorates their flight helmets with empty square brackets to acknowledge their privilege. The film’s few concessions to cultural change since the MTV era have the effect, not of engaging today’s fights on provocatively old-fashioned terms, but of declining to engage. Joseph Kosinski, the journeyman special-effects technician brought in to direct this film in note-perfect homage to the style of the original Top Gun director Tony Scott, doesn’t even bother to make the film’s racial politics as minimally complex as Scott did in 1995’s Crimson Tide. Maverick‘s young recruits, diverse in gender and ethnicity, are awesomely interchangeable in every other way. One smirks, one has a moustache; the others have no identifying characteristics. (When half the recruits get cut from the big mission at the 90-minute mark, there is no dramatic payoff because it’s impossible to tell these people apart. “Sorry, Component A, I’ve decided to go with Component B.”) Nobody under 30 in this film has sex for either pleasure or procreation. Yearning for intimate touch is plainly something only old people do, like writing in cursive script or owning books.

As a cultural argument, Maverick is so close to being tabula rasa that there’s no real point interrogating it. But on another front, it succeeds resoundingly in popular art’s primary function of tantalizing simplification. It started to make sense when I realized that Cruise’s character, despite the denial inherent in his call sign, is a career civil servant.

This is a movie about the action of a large modern state. It’s a film about public policy. Its central claim is a cathartic feat of Avengers-level denial. Just as the superhero movies offer us a made-up universe in which we have any hope of telling the good characters and the evil characters apart, Maverick posits a world in which modern governments can get anything done at all.

I may be influenced in this reading by the fact that I work in contemporary Ottawa. I’ve been writing variations on a simple question — Can Justin Trudeau get big things built? — since 2017. I’m hardly alone. And it’s hardly just a question about Trudeau, Ottawa or Canada. It’s been fun reading about chaos at Toronto’s Pearson airport, but last week the Financial Times ran a “big read” feature story about global airport chaos that didn’t even mention Pearson, Toronto or Canada. Joe Biden promised to Build Back Better. It’s not going great. Here in France, Emmanuel Macron is the first president to be re-elected in 20 years, a genuine feat, but it’s not going great. Brexit? Don’t ask.

A generic term for the ability of governments to do stuff is “state capacity”, and there’s a vague sense in the quasi-academic literature that it’s in decline, although, the real world being the real world, every element of this claim — that state capacity is declining, that it can be measured, that it even exists in any measurable form — is open to dispute. Still, it feels true, don’t it? The world was never great. In important ways it was worse than today. But it used to feel like it was possible to improve the thing, and now it just feels like everyone’s just firing blind and hoping for the best. COVID is a dynamite demonstration of this. Three successive Canadian federal health ministers were told, by a prime minister who prides himself on his ability to read the room, to get cracking on plain-paper packaging for tobacco products. And then the biggest public-health disaster of our lifetimes opened up its jumbo can of whup-ass, and it wasn’t even in the mandate letters. And it’s hard to blame anyone involved. All the chaos that has ensued had its roots in the original chaos. Real life doesn’t have a plot. As Homer Simpson said, it’s just a bunch of stuff that happens.

June 15, 2022

When adult responsibilities become overwhelming, the retreat into childish things beckons … hence the cultural dominance of “British Twee”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ed West isn’t a fan of Britain’s universal adoption of “British Twee” as an escape from the burdens of “adulting” (as the Millenials call it):

James Marriott wrote about the phenomenon in the Times last week; noting the strangeness of seeing a drone corgi in the sky at the Jubilee, he felt “awe at this almost imperial triumph of twee”.

    “Once culturally marginal — a series of aesthetic mannerisms associated with greetings cards and downmarket children’s books — twee is now the establishment style”, he wrote: “When the Queen was presented to her subjects at the coronation 70 years ago, the emphasis was on dignity and mystery: uniformed soldiers, a naval review, the BBC’s cameras forbidden from capturing the sovereign’s face in close-up. In the 1950s, this was still the language of power: formal, pompous, sternly detached. Parading for the Queen in 2022 were Teletubbies, a man in a Shaun the Sheep costume, women dressed as afternoon tea, a towering motorised cake.

    “Twee is now a cultural default; the distinctive style of our age. Our emojis, gifs and memes will mark us as surely to the generations of the future as the wing collars, tailcoats and elaborate ceremonies of social deference marked our ancestors. Grown-up men and women love Disney and Harry Potter.”

Twee is egalitarian, anti-highbrow and obsessed with childhood, he says. “A love of childish things is a mark of democratic taste and an aversion to pomposity. Britain, with its long (often admirable) tradition of anti-intellectualism is especially vulnerable.”

Marriott concludes that “I can’t bring myself to hate Paddington and corgis but twee can be as oppressive as the formal, serious culture that preceded it. If our ancestors denied themselves the silly, child-like side of human nature, we now ourselves deny its solemn and difficult aspects. Twee is an aesthetic for an age uninterested in ethical complexity, which prefers good and bad as neatly separated as they are at Hogwarts. It fits the childish behaviour of social media’s most active users who swing between condemnatory temper tantrums and cooing over anthropomorphised animal.”

He also notes how twee has been “appropriated by powerful corporations” because “it’s easier to rip someone off with a smiling wide-eyed chatbot.” In my experience, the more informal and “I’m yer mate” a service provider is, the worse it treats its customers.

And that applies to social classes, too; the more informal a ruling elite behaves, the less they care about boring old customs, the less they can be trusted to do the right thing for the people they’re supposed to lead.

Tweeness is terrible, but there’s a particular indefinable, British kind of twee, which is infuriating but hard to articulate. British Twee, or British Cringe, is not so much a definable illness as more like a cluster of symptoms.

Cockwomble, as explained by Ben Sixsmith, is British Twee. Needless posh swearing is very British Twee; used sparsely, swearing is very effective, especially by people with RP accents; used liberally, it’s cringeworthy, especially when discussing politics. The post-referendum anti-Brexit campaign was filled with British Twee, mixing both a loathing of the country with an assumption of cultural superiority, all done in a self-consciously frivolous way.

This kind of Twee British Cringe, because it’s at once both self-hating and also uniquely self-obsessed, seems to suppose that certain British things are uniquely terrible — the awfulness of our government, or the prejudice of our great unwashed — but certain British things are uniquely brilliant and envied, such as the BBC and NHS, not to mention our famous sense of humour.

British Twee is the patriotism of the soft-left. While consciously anti-nationalist, this kind of tweeness is obsessed with defining British national character and values. This reaches its peak with pride about Britain’s universal healthcare, something enjoyed by literally every developed country except the United States.

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