Quotulatiousness

August 14, 2018

Sean Gabb’s view of Anglo-American relations from 1945 to today

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

He seems such a nice, mild-mannered chap but who else but a virtual bomb-chucking anarchist could title an article “Death to America?”

My view of America is tinged with a paranoia born from jealousy and resentment. I believe that American self-respect has, for at least the past hundred years, required the destruction of England as a great and independent nation. The Americans speak a language that did not emerge among themselves. They live within a system of law and within a set of constitutional assumptions that are also not co-existent with their nation. If their country were a minor power, they could, like Haiti, or Australia, or America before the 1870s, accept the fact of inferiority. If it were to vanish from the earth, they could look on the originator of their language and institutions with sentimental affection, as the Byzantines did on Athens and Rome.

Their problem is that, before 1940, England was a strong competitor. Since then, it has been generally subordinate, but never with full willingness. Therefore, the Americans have mixed occasional humiliation, as at Suez, with continual meddling in our politics. Our foreign policy has, since 1945, been largely set by Washington. Our leaders are mostly American Quislings, and these have systematically promoted American culture at the expense of our own. It may be that the accumulation of blocking powers by our new Supreme Court is an imitation to be welcomed. But the importation of American political correctness is not to be welcomed. Nor, I suggest, should we welcome the official replacement of English with American words and expressions — see, for example, the use of “train station” for “railway station”. This may appear, in itself, a trivial complaint. Repeated across the whole administrative and educational machinery, it has the effect of making our own recent past into a foreign country.

What the Americans want is for England to be discussed mainly in the past tense. They will study our literature, and sometimes our history. Some of their higher classes will put on Anglicised airs and graces, much as the Romans turned hellenophile after they had plundered and enslaved Greece. But to see their preferred model for living Englishmen, look at the characters played by Wilfred Hyde-Whyte, or the character of Alfred in Batman — polite, reliable, elderly, and, above all, ineffectual.

Though I dislike the European Union, I believe that the long term interests of my country lie in a close relationship with France and Germany, and in an amicable working arrangement with Russia. We have an obvious commonality with France and Germany of economic and strategic interests. We are of approximately equal weight. None is able to dominate the others. Each must work in compromise with the others. Any talk of “hands across the Atlantic” is either self-deception or a lie. Except perhaps between 1922 and 1940, there has never been an equality between England and America. Any close relationship between these countries has otherwise rested on the domination of one by the other — a domination with at best a limited overlap of interests. Though roles have changed, so it was at times before 1914, and so it has been since 1940.

July 29, 2018

QotD: The third Great Awakening

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

We are now — in the Me Decade — seeing the upward roll (and not yet the crest, by any means) of the third great religious wave in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening. Like the others it has begun in a flood of ecstasy, achieved through LSD and other psychedelics, orgy, dancing (the New Sufi and the Hare Krishna), meditation, and psychic frenzy (the marathon encounter). This third wave has built up from more diverse and exotic sources than the first two, from therapeutic movements as well as overtly religious movements, from hippies and students of “psi phenomena” and Flying Saucerites as well as charismatic Christians. But other than that, what will historians say about it?

The historian Perry Miller credited the First Great Awakening with helping to pave the way for the American Revolution through its assault on the colonies’ religious establishment and, thereby, on British colonial authority generally. The sociologist Thomas O’Dea credited the Second Great Awakening with creating the atmosphere of Christian asceticism (known as “bleak” on the East Coast) that swept through the Midwest and the West during the nineteenth century and helped make it possible to build communities in the face of great hardship. And the Third Great Awakening? Journalists (historians have not yet tackled the subject) have shown a morbid tendency to regard the various movements in this wave as “fascist.” The hippie movement was often attacked as “fascist” in the late 1960s. Over the past several years a barrage of articles has attacked Scientology, the est movement, and “the Moonies” (followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon) along the same lines.

Frankly, this tells us nothing except that journalists bring the same conventional Grim Slide concepts to every subject. The word fascism derives from the old Roman symbol of power and authority, the fasces, a bundle of sticks bound together by thongs (with an ax head protruding from one end). One by one the sticks would be easy to break. Bound together they are invincible Fascist ideology called for binding all classes, all levels, all elements of an entire nation together into a single organization with a single will.

The various movements of the current religious wave attempt very nearly the opposite. They begin with … “Let’s talk about Me.” They begin with the most delicious look inward; with considerable narcissism, in short. When the believers bind together into religions, it is always with a sense of splitting off from the rest of society. We, the enlightened (lit by the sparks at the apexes of our souls), hereby separate ourselves from the lost souls around us. Like all religions before them, they proselytize — but always on promising the opposite of nationalism: a City of Light that is above it all. There is no ecumenical spirit within this Third Great Awakening. If anything, there is a spirit of schism. The contempt the various seers have for one another is breathtaking. One has only to ask, say, Oscar Ichazo of Arica about Carlos Castaneda or Werner Erhard of est to learn that Castaneda is a fake and Erhard is a shallow sloganeer. It’s exhilarating! — to watch the faithful split off from one another to seek ever more perfect and refined crucibles in which to fan the Divine spark … and to talk about Me.

Whatever the Third Great Awakening amounts to, for better or for worse, will have to do with this unprecedented post-World War II American development: the luxury, enjoyed by so many millions of middling folk, of dwelling upon the self. At first glance, Shirley Polykoff’s slogan — “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde!” — seems like merely another example of a superficial and irritating rhetorical trope (antanaclasis) that now happens to be fashionable among advertising copywriters. But in fact the notion of “If I’ve only one life” challenges one of those assumptions of society that are so deep-rooted and ancient, they have no name — they are simply lived by. In this case: man’s age-old belief in serial immortality.

Tom Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening”, New York Magazine, 1976-08-23.

July 23, 2018

QotD: The revolution of the proletariat wouldn’t play out the way Marx imagined

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

I remember a friend telling me that multi-culti was knocked out of his young skull when he got a job as a construction worker for the summer. Marxism too. He said if revolution came from the proletariat, the resulting society would view wife beating as a sort of little hobby, on the side, nothing bad, just a little indulgence on Saturday night. (Mind you this was not in the US. The US working class is by and large better than this.) And all those prejudices against other races/sexual orientations/etc? Yeah, the working class had no problems with those. Only a privileged twit like Marx could think that the working class all over the world wanted to unite. They tend to be rather more nationalistic than their “betters” after all. More all sorts of “ists” too (racist, sexist and homophobic[ist for completism]). It’s what works at their level, and virtue signaling buys them nothing.

Sarah Hoyt, “A Very Diverse Cake”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-31.

July 12, 2018

“And that is how the Flat Century dies. Upstairs, downstairs isn’t just our past, it’s our future”

Filed under: Economics, History, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

ESR looks in his crystal ball and finds a much less egalitarian future lurking just ahead of us:

I think we all better hope we get germ-line genetic engineering and really effective nootropics real soon now. Because I think I have seen what the future looks like without these technologies, and it sucks.

A hundred years ago, 1918, marked the approximate end of the period when even middle-class families in the U.S. and Great Britain routinely had servants. During the inter-war years availability of domestic servants became an acute problem further and further up the SES scale, nearly highlighted by the National Council on Household Employment’s 1928 report on the problem. The institution of the servant class was in collapse; would-be masters were priced out of the market by rising wages for factory jobs and wider working opportunities for women (notably as typists).

But there was a supply-side factor as well; potential hires were unwilling to be servants and have masters – increasingly reluctant to be in service even when such jobs were still the best return they could get on their labor. The economic collapse of personal service coincided with an increasing rejection of the social stratification that had gone with it. Society as a whole became flatter and much more meritocratic.

There are unwelcome but powerful reasons to expect that this trend has already begun to reverse.

[…]

But now it’s 2018. Poverty cultures are reaching down to unprecedented levels of self-degradation; indicators of this are out-of-wedlock births, rates of drug abuse, and levels of interpersonal violence and suicide. Even as American society as a whole is getting steadily richer, more peaceful and less crime-ridden, its lowest SES tiers are going to hell in a handbasket. And not just the usual urban minority suspects, either, but poor whites as well; this is the burden of books like Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, and the opioid-abuse statistics.

It’s hard not to look at this and not see the prophecies of The Bell Curve, a quarter century ago, coming hideously true. We have assorted ourselves into increasing cognitive inequality by class. and the poor are paying an ever heavier price for this. Furthermore, the natural outcome of the process is average IQ and other class differentiating abilities abilities are on their way to becoming genetically locked in.

The last jaw of the trap is the implosion of jobs for unskilled and semi-skilled labor. Retail, a traditional entry ramp into the workforce, has been badly hit by e-commerce, and that’s going to get worse. Fast-food chains are automating as fast as political morons pass “living wage” laws; that’s going to have an especially hard impact on minorities.

But we ain’t seen nothing yet; there’s a huge disruption coming when driverless cars and trucks wipe out an entire tier of the economy related to commercial transport. That’s 1 in 15 workers in the U.S., overwhelmingly from lower SES tiers. What are they going to do in the brave new world? What are their increasingly genetically disadvantaged children going to do?

Here’s where we jump into science fiction, because the only answer I can see is: become servants. And that is how the Flat Century dies. Upstairs, downstairs isn’t just our past, it’s our future. Because in a world where production of goods and routinized service is increasingly dominated by robots and AI, the social role of servant as a person who takes orders will increasingly be the only thing that an unskilled person has left to offer above the economic level of digging ditches or picking fruit.

July 7, 2018

The Incel Rebellion will (almost certainly) be streamed

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

Fraser Myers looks at the incel ?movement? (not quite sure if that’s the right word to encapsulate that group of people, honestly) and explains some of the more commonly used terms by and about incels:

Incels are ‘involuntary celibates’ – men frustrated with their inability to find a sexual partner. Estimates on the size of the incel community vary from thousands to hundreds of thousands. The forum ‘r/incels’ on Reddit had 41,000 members when it was banned in November 2017 for violating the site’s rules on violent content.

Incel forums, like the website incel.me and the message board /r9k/ on 4chan, are awash with anonymous declarations of self-pity, self-loathing and, at times, a violent misogyny directed at the women deemed responsible for their loneliness. Behind a great deal of mindless chatter and ‘shitposting’ is a shared understanding of how they came to be despised by the opposite sex, alongside a bewildering array of slang terms to describe and explain the various states of ‘inceldom’.

According to the incels, there is a ruthless sexual hierarchy, and as ‘beta males’, they find themselves at the bottom. The foil to the incel is a ‘Chad’ – a confident, attractive man with multiple sexual partners, comprising usually attractive but supposedly shallow women, known as ‘Stacys’. Chads are envied and despised in equal measure. Then there are the ‘normies’ (normal people), hated for their herd-like mentality and mocked for their ignorance of incel culture. ‘Blackpilling’ refers to the acceptance that the traits you are born with mean you are destined to be romantically unsuccessful. The term is a play on the moral dilemma presented by the 1999 film, The Matrix, in which Neo is offered a blue pill to remain in a world of illusion and a red pill to see the world as it truly is – ‘redpilling’ is a central trope in online men’s rights’ activism, while blackpilling is the incel equivalent. Physical traits such as height, facial features or penis size (sometimes posted with accompanying pictures), are said to play a big role in the incels’ low status, while a large number of them also blame self-diagnosed mental-health problems, particularly autism-spectrum disorders.

But while many incels are open about their flaws, ultimately the blame is laid on the women who overlook them. Women are seen as effectively slaves to their biology, guided by so-called ‘hypergamy’: an attraction to higher-status men linked to evolutionary psychology. Some parts of the so-called manosphere – a loose constellation of male-dominated online subcultures, including men’s rights activists and pick-up artists – believe that evolutionary psychology can be used to a man’s advantage, that certain techniques can be deployed to overcome a lack of attractiveness and confidence to manipulate women into bed or into a relationship. Incels reject even this bleak view and insist that beta males accept their place in the social-pecking order.

This belief in a rigid social hierarchy inevitably produces problems when it comes to race. ‘Ricecels’ (incels of Chinese and South East Asian origin) and ‘currycels’ (of South Asian descent) are often found posting photos of ‘proof’ of a theory called ‘JBW’, that in order for them to be successful with women they should ‘just be white’. Some white incels look upon black men with envy for their perceived sexual success, while a minority rail against any kind of ‘race mixing’ – even as a form of escape from inceldom.

In addition, incels speak of an ‘80:20 rule’ when it comes to sexual competition: the most attractive 20 per cent of men are said to be sought after by the most attractive 80 per cent of women, with the least attractive 80 per cent of men left to compete for the remaining 20 per cent of women. In previous eras, this situation would have supposedly been prevented by institutionalised monogamy. Some incels call explicitly for a return to a patriarchal society. Today’s world of relative sexual freedom, contraception, no-fault divorce and dating apps, on the other hand, is blamed for offering an abundance of opportunities for Chads and women, at the expense of incels.

June 23, 2018

“An extraordinary thing happened in internet culture this week: Godwin repealed Godwin’s Law”

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

Mike Godwin obliterates his own legacy:

An extraordinary thing happened in internet culture this week: Godwin repealed Godwin’s Law. Godwin’s Law is the idea that the longer an internet discussion thread drags on, the more likely it is that one of the discussants will mention Hitler. Rashly and inappropriately. They’ll compare their opponent to Der Fuhrer or say, ‘This is how Nazism started!!!!’. Reductio ad Hitlerum, as some call it. The law was invented by Professor Mike Godwin, an American attorney. And this week he scrapped it. To the delight of virtual leftists and Trump-bashers who are chomping at the bit to say ‘TRUMP IS LITERALLY A NAZI’, Godwin tweeted in relation to the Trump administration and its child-migrant policy: ‘By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I’m with you.’

The response was one of glee. ‘Godwin has officially suspended Godwin’s Law’, tweeters crowed. The ‘actual, literal creator of Godwin’s Law’ has okayed Hitler comparisons, they whooped. They could now crack on with their hysterical likening of Trump to Hitler, and everything he does to what happened in 1930s Europe, without having to worry about someone shouting, ‘Godwin’s Law!’ at them. It so perfectly sums up the arrogance of the Twitterati and opinion-forming set: for years they mocked the Hitler-obsessed ‘below the line’ (BTL) commenters on their Tumblr blogs or Guardian columns, and even instituted an internet law to paint them as vulgar idiots, and now they themselves embrace mad Hitler blather and have scrapped the law that said such online talk was wrong. One online law for thee, another for me.

They can dress up their adoption of the Reductio ad Hitlerum worldview as a legitimate political position as much as they like. They can carry on saying, ‘Ah, but Trump’s policies really are like Hitler’s, which means my Nazi comparisons carry more weight than those of the non-Oxford-educated blowhard I had to block on Twitter because he kept saying “Hillary is Hitler”’. But they’re not fooling anyone. Except themselves. The rest of us know they are now just like the BTL people they once slagged off: confused, angry, rash and willing to exploit the greatest crime in history if it helps them to register and advertise their emotional fury with political developments. They are BTL people now, though they’re above the line, still all over the media, busily making it acceptable to talk shit about the Holocaust in public.

This week, with the controversy over Trump’s separation of families arriving illegally from Mexico, has represented a turning point in their popularisation of the Hitler comparisons they once chided. They refer to the places in which the children of illegal migrants are being housed as ‘concentration camps’. The former director of the CIA, Michael Hayden, tweeted a photo of Auschwitz with the words, ‘Other governments have separated mothers and children’. Pre-empting the suspension of Godwin’s Law, a writer for the New Statesman said: ‘Stop talking about Godwin’s Law – real Nazis are back.’ Twitter buzzes with Trump-as-Hitler talk. ‘This is how the Holocaust started’, they all say.

I’m not a Trump fan … for the first few months of his administration (and during the election campaign), I labelled him as Il Donalduce, but I mostly meant that as a visual reference: watch any of Mussolini’s speeches and you’ll see some resonances with how Donald Trump speaks. The Hitler equivalence is wish-fulfilment by those who oppose him … it’s not an accurate or useful way to portray him, unless your goal is to make Adolf Hitler seem less demonic. I literally do not understand why anyone in pursuit of a modern political goal would try to make Hitler’s crimes seem more acceptable in an attempt to blacken the reputation of a living politician, unless you are clinically insane.

As a libertarian, Trump is far, far from my ideal of the “leader of the free world” (as the western media tends to portray the US president), but he’s not even close to the evil genius that created the “Thousand-year Reich“, and any attempt to portray him that way is historically illiterate and politically tone-deaf.

June 20, 2018

QotD: Changing cultural views

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

The way to deal with institutionalized discrimination is to disprove it. THAT is the way to change things, too. Over time, if people of x group who are assumed to be lazy and stupid prove they are excellent and high achievers, the culture changes to [accommodate] the new fact.

Is it fair to have to work against expectation? Well, there you have me cupcake. It certainly ISN’T fair. You know what else isn’t fair? Being born mortal, in a body that starts falling apart at around 40. If you were expecting fair, you were born in the wrong world. In this world we don’t have fair or ideal. We have what works, and what doesn’t.

Working really hard to show prejudice is wrong WORKS. It takes a few generations and is unfair as hell to the people who do it, but overtime the culture changes. At least if it’s a healthy culture that doesn’t kill you just for being different.

What doesn’t work is whining about how men don’t get out of your way when you’re walking (what are you? The Roman emperor? I’m sure if you play chicken they WILL get out of the way, unless they too are in a novel-writing funk. Which is when I’ve walked into people, male and female both.)

And if you go around saying bullshit like we live in a white supremacist society, you’re just going to cause me to laugh till my head falls off. Because I’ve been in one white supremacist society and guess what they didn’t have: lawsuits for discrimination; set asides for minorities; etc. In fact their laws de facto discriminated against people based on their skin color.

Running into the occasional asshole (look, I tan, and younger son tans much more than I. If you think we don’t run into assholes on a regular basis you’re nuts) who thinks you’re inferior, or tells you to go back to Mexico/Africa/the desert, is not a supremacist society. It’s a DIVERSE society, where people are allowed to think any damn crazy thing they want to. Some people in a diverse society WILL be assholes. It’s not a crime, as such. And some assholes obsess on race, or sex, or sexual orientation. Don’t make no difference which or how. They’re just ASSHOLES.

The thing to do with assholes is not to embrace them to your chest as a precious that proves you can’t get ahead because everyone is against you. It’s to go “oh, asshole” and move on.

That is ultimately the point. Sure there are micro and macro aggressions in society. They exist for everyone, yes, including white males (because some are ugly, and some are poor, and some are overweight and none of them is perfect and someone will find a reason to pick on them too.) It’s part of living in the world and not in paradise.

The diversity you claim to love comes with the ability to be many different varieties of asshole.

Sarah Hoyt, “A Very Diverse Cake”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-31.

June 19, 2018

QotD: Homophobia and racism in the USA and in Europe

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

Outside the very privileged top of society, feminism doesn’t get the traction it gets in the US ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD. Not even in England. In fact every other country in the world is far more “ist” than the US, because being “ist” (racist, sexist and homophobic[ist for completism]) is the way things are done. I find it mildly amusing whenever gay friends think that the US is worse than Europe “because of all the religious stuff.” Uh. No. The US is more tolerant than Europe because we’re richer and more vast and we can ignore that which annoys us more easily. In Europe they live in each other’s pockets on what is for us tight resources. They have no “give” and cohesion and conformity is enforced, which means if you stick out, you get it. Not publicly and certainly not if you’re a tourist, but if you live there among the people you’ll find you don’t need to hunt for microaggressions.

And before people from Europe say it isn’t so — you don’t know. Anymore than Americans do who’ve never lived there as locals. You don’t know how much LESS of the racism and sexism and homophobia there is in the US than in your area. Hint, what you see in our movies and read in our papers is the greatest bullshit around. Those PRACTICALLY don’t exist in the US, for any functional purpose. I mean, sure, people might think women are inferior, or might hate gays, but unlike the internet sites colonized by the alt.right (and how many of those are Russian agent accounts no one knows) people expressing such feelings (actual hostility not imaginary micro-aggressions) are likely to be laughed at or mocked. Not so in Europe.

And then there’s the more tan areas of Europe, and what we’ll term the first world minus a quarter.

I’m not ragging on my birthplace. It has some admirable qualities. But if you think that it is more tolerant or laid back than the US you haven’t lived there. Sexism is internalized at such a level people don’t see it. They give lip service to women having jobs, etc, but those women still have to be “good housewives” no matter what their job is. Men still get the choice seats in cars (be fair, they are so tiny most men have to sit up front to fit, but it has become internalized, too), men still take pride of place without a thoughts. No, not everywhere, not in every family. BUT at a cultural level, it exists at a point that feminists here would have a heart attack. Again no time to look for micro aggressions, you’re too busy working through the macro ones.

But here is the thing that these people forget: They’re not AGGRESSIONS. They’re just culture. When a man as a matter of course takes the best seat, he’s not making a comment on YOU. Hell, he’s not making a comment at all. He’s just doing something so deeply ingrained that he didn’t think about it. If you think that’s enough to make it so that you can’t succeed or that you need to run around saying you live in a patriarchal or male-supremacist society, let me tell you, cupcake, you wouldn’t have succeeded anyway.

Sarah Hoyt, “A Very Diverse Cake”, According to Hoyt, 2016-08-31.

June 18, 2018

How Georgian wine survived the Soviet Union and its central planners

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

Last week, Atlas Obscura posted a fascinating story by Nickolaus Hines on how Georgian winemakers somehow managed to keep their craft alive during the Soviet period of mass production and mandated conformity:

Georgian Kvevri or Qvevri wine fermentation vessels. They are typically buried in the ground and grapes are fermented, then the resulting wine is scooped or suctioned out and the qvevri will be cleaned and sterilized for the next year’s vintage.
Photo by Levan Totosashvili, via Wikimedia Commons.

Qvevri are cultural metaphors, writes Keto Ninidze, Kiknavelidze’s great-granddaughter and a Georgian winemaker, in an email. Much like how someone might give birth to a child, she says, qvevri give birth to wine. And after many years of giving life, the qvevri were used as a burial place. “So in Georgian cultural perception, [qvevri are] regarded as the cycle of life and death,” she says.

Georgia has the oldest wine culture in the world, and little changed from the earliest qvevri to Ninidze’s qvevri. Everything — down to the shape of the clay pots, the method of burying the qvevri, and letting crushed grapes ferment naturally inside — is passed down from generation to generation. When the Soviet Union took control of the country in 1921, this ancient winemaking tradition was pushed underground, where it almost disappeared. During these years, Georgian winemakers lost their land or had to give over all of their grapes every harvest. If they wanted to make their own wine, they’d have to forage grapes from wild vines on hillsides, in forests, and sometimes on the sides of village streets.

Before the Soviet Union imposed their rule on Georgia, though, more than 500 different grape varieties flourished in the country’s moderate climate, tempered by its proximity to the Black Sea. Thanks to the environment, wine grapes grow without much intervention. Back then, most grapes were picked by hand and crushed by foot. The juice, skins and stems and all, were then put into qvevri.

[…]

For around six months, natural yeasts ferment the juice inside the pots. The solid parts of the grapes filter the liquid, which funnels naturally towards the bottom. Once fermentation is over, the wine is suctioned or scooped out and bottled. Or, more likely, it’s stored in smaller pots. Then the cleaning process begins. The tools of the trade have upgraded, Ninidze says, and winemakers now wash qvevri with high pressure water, ash, and citric acid, then disinfect the vessels with sulphur smoke. What hasn’t changed is the immovability. Qvevri is “something you can’t take from one place to another,” Ninidze says, adding that once a winemaker chooses a spot for their qvevri, they’re rooted there until they pass it on or buy new qvevri.

This process didn’t budge for years. Then, the Soviet Union invaded and annexed Georgia in 1921. The slow, natural qvevri cycle — an extension of the Georgian lifestyle — didn’t fit Joseph Stalin’s five-year economic plans. These plans set economic goals and called for industrializing industries, including wine. Rural winemaking would need to be mechanized, and the wild-looking vines would need to be tamed. In the region of Kakheti, officials uprooted more than 500 native varieties. Steel tanks replaced the storied underground clay pots, too.

The government then redistributed and repurposed the annexed land previously used for wine, and built sterile buildings on top of them. “You see these Soviet buildings everywhere that are sturdy cement and nothing beautiful about them, but very practical,” Railsback says. “And then the Georgian [buildings] are more beautiful, and the architecture is really unique with hand-carved woodworking on the front of houses. There’s the Georgian look, and there’s the Soviet [look] that tried to demolish the culture and vibe — you feel that literally everywhere.”

During that time, families were given a single acre of land compared to the full vineyards they once tended to alongside their homes. Vines were ripped out and replaced with tidy rows of hardy, high-yielding varieties such as Saperavi and Rkatskeli. While they were plentiful and certainly sweet, they were bland and lacked the character of traditional Georgian vines. “There was one or two state factories that [processed] the whole yield of the country,” Ninidze says. “The production policy was of course industrial (especially after Stalin’s period), based on the five-year plans and neither the factories nor the farmers cared [about] the quality of the grape.”

June 12, 2018

QotD: How to create and perpetuate an apartheid state

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

The usual way to remove inferior races from public spaces is to price them out. Municipal and regional governments are the guiding hand, through their planning departments. The “gentrification” process is done overtly through tight by-laws, licencing, and commercial regulation, all arranged on the Clintonian principle of “pay to play.” This makes the respectable zones too expensive for the lesser breeds, and assists in the development of their underclass-consciousness.

On the other side, more subtly at first, it is done by such as public housing projects, which remove the poor to a greater distance from respectable neighbourhoods, and confine them in camps, where their criminality and poor table manners can be offensive only to themselves. They become, by increments, wards of the state — and may be easily manipulated to provide voting blocks for the “progressive” parties, on whom they now depend for their rent, food stamps, and modest cash doles.

Compulsory attendance in state schools seals the bargain, by which the young of the underclass species are indoctrinated and trained to know their place in the social and political order. They can see that they are victims of “discrimination”; their resentments can be shaped in the interest of the governing liberal elites, and directed instead at people who have no idea what they are yammering and rioting about.

Who do not see that the poor have been “unpersoned.” And that, having little to lose, they are now playing the unpersonable part.

The superior races principally benefit from this system of apartheid, in which the unwashed are kept out of view, except through the selective camera angles of the media voyeurs. Without this isolation, the liberals’ smugness would be hard to maintain, and their commitment to various hygienic and environmental causes would suffer. They, for their part, are taught in their much better appointed government schools that the welfare-state redistribution of income exists to promote “equality”; when in fact it exists to promote the division of society into manageable cells, walled both visibly and invisibly to prevent the respective inmates from mixing and meeting. Now, even if they see, they cannot smell each other.

David Warren, “The common man”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-08-29.

June 7, 2018

Faith Moore explains how to avoid sexually objectifying women

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

It’s apparently very simple and straightforward, once you double-check the feminist cheat sheet:

Apparently feminism has become so confusing that even feminists don’t know what’s feminist anymore. But Everyday feminists apparently do — and they’ve provided us with a handy cheat sheet so we don’t accidentally objectify someone who was trying to be empowered, or empower someone who was trying to be objectified.

The way to tell the difference, according to Everyday Feminism, is to figure out who has the power. “If the person being ‘looked at,’ or sexualized, has the power in the situation, then they are sexually empowered.” Here’s an example: “if someone puts on ‘sexy’ clothing and goes out in public or takes a selfie and shares it, they have the power because they chose themselves to put on those clothes.”

Oh, okay, I get it. So, if a woman chooses to put on “sexy” clothes and go out in public then all the catcalls and inappropriate comments and unwanted marriage proposals are empowering because she chose to put on those clothes. Oh, and also if she takes a “sexy” selfie and posts it on Instagram, all the comments about how she’s a “slut” and a “whore” and should “put her clothes on” are also empowering because she chose to share that photo. (I’m learning so much!)

But wait! Apparently beauty standards “compel” some people to wear sexy clothing “because they believe that they won’t be beautiful” otherwise. And there are even some people who feel they must not wear sexy clothing “because they are shamed if they do.”

So even if you think you put on those clothes of your own free will, it’s possible that society was actually hiding in your closet handing you things to put on (which is creepy) and that’s why you dressed all sexy (or not sexy). Which means that even though you thought you were empowered, it turns out you’re actually being objectified. And if you choose not to dress in the way you wanted to dress because society tells you that society was telling you it was wrong, then you’re empowered because you’re doing what someone else told you not to do about what someone else told you to do. (This makes total sense. I’m such a good feminist!)

But what about people who don’t dress “sexy”? Don’t worry, they can be objectified too. “Even a person who is ‘modestly’ dressed can objectified if the ‘looking’ person makes a non-sexual situation sexual without the ‘looked at’ person’s consent.” Oh good, for a minute there I thought “modestly dressed” people were being excluded from objectification and was worried because I know exclusion is wrong and we shouldn’t do it. Phew! Glad that even people who don’t want to be objectified still can be.

June 5, 2018

Down with the experts!

Filed under: Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Alex Smith explores the limits of expertise and why so many people today would eagerly agree with the sentiments in my headline:

“People are sick of experts.” These infamous and much-derided words uttered by UK Conservative parliamentarian Michael Gove express a sentiment with which we are now probably all familiar. It has come to represent a sign of the times — either an indictment or a celebration (depending on one’s political point of view) of our current age.

Certainly, the disdain for expertise and its promised consequences have been highly alarming for many people. They are woven through various controversial and destabilising phenomena from Trump, to Brexit, to fake news, to the generally ‘anti-elitist’ tone that characterises populist politics and much contemporary discourse. And this attitude stands in stark contrast to the unspoken but assumed Obama-era doctrine of “let the experts figure it out”; an idea that had a palpable End of History feeling about it, and that makes this abrupt reversion to ignorance all the more startling.

The majority of educated people are fairly unequivocal in their belief that this rebound is a bad thing, and as such many influential voices — Quillette‘s included — have been doing their best to restore the value of expertise to our society. The nobility of this ambition is quite obvious. Why on earth would we not want to take decisions informed by the most qualified opinions? However, it is within this obviousness that the danger lies.

I want to propose that high expertise, whilst generally beneficial, also has the capacity in certain circumstances to be pathological as well — and that if we don’t recognise this and correct for it, then we will continue down our current path of drowning its benefits with its problems. In short, if you want to profit from expertise, you must tame it first.

[…]

However, it is worth drawing a distinction between these two types of expertise — the kind people question, and the kind people don’t. In short, people value expertise in closed systems, but are distrustful of expertise in open systems. A typical example of a closed system would be a car engine or a knee joint. These are semi-complex systems with ‘walls’ — that is to say, they are self-contained and are relatively incubated from the chaos of the outside world. As such, human beings are generally capable of wrapping their heads around the possible variables within them, and can therefore control them to a largely predictable degree. Engineers, surgeons, pilots, all these kinds of ‘trusted’ experts operate in closed systems.

Open systems, on the other hand, are those that are ‘exposed to the elements,’ so to speak. They have no walls and are therefore essentially chaotic, with far more variables than any person could ever hope to grasp. The economy is an open system. So is climate. So are politics. No matter how much you know about these things, there is not only always more to know, but there is also an utterly unpredictable slide towards chaos as these things interact.

The erosion of trust in expertise has arisen exclusively from experts in open systems mistakenly believing that they know enough to either predict those systems or — worse — control them. This is an almost perfect definition of hubris, an idea as old as consciousness itself. Man cannot control nature, and open systems are by definition natural systems. No master of open systems has ever succeeded — they have only failed less catastrophically than their counterparts.

May 27, 2018

Woke-ism, the new religion of progressives

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

John McWhorter notes the strong parallels between Christianity and woke-ness:

Over the past several years, for instance, whites across the country have been taught that it isn’t enough to understand that racism exists. Rather, the good white person views themselves as the bearer of an unearned “privilege” because of their color. Not long ago, I attended an event where a black man spoke of him and his black colleagues dressing in suits at work even on Casual Fridays, out of a sense that whites would look down on black men dressed down. The mostly white audience laughed and applauded warmly—at a story accusing people precisely like them of being racists.

This brand of self-flagellation has become the new form of enlightenment on race issues. It qualifies as a kind of worship; the parallels with Christianity are almost uncannily rich. White privilege is the secular white person’s Original Sin, present at birth and ultimately ineradicable. One does one’s penance by endlessly attesting to this privilege in hope of some kind of forgiveness. After the black man I mentioned above spoke, the next speaker was a middle-aged white man who spoke of having a coach come to his office each week to talk to him about his white privilege. The audience, of course, applauded warmly at this man’s description of having what an anthropologist observer would recognize not as a “coach” but as a pastor.

I have seen whites owning up to their white privilege using the hand-in-the-air-palm-out gesture typically associated with testifying in church. After the event I have been describing, all concerned deemed it “wonderful” even though nothing new had been learned. The purpose of the event was to remind the parishioners of the prevalence of the racist sin and its reflection in themselves, and to offer a kind of forgiveness, this latter being essentially the function of the black people on the panel and in the audience. Amen.

[…]

The self-affirming part is the rub. This new cult of atonement is less about black people than white people. Fifty years ago, a white person learning about the race problem came away asking “How can I help?” Today the same person too often comes away asking, “How can I show that I’m a moral person?” That isn’t what the Civil Rights revolution was about; it is the product of decades of mission creep aided by the emergence of social media.

What gets lost is that all of this awareness was supposed to be about helping black people, especially poor ones. We are too often distracted from this by a race awareness that has come to be largely about white people seeking grace. For example, one reads often of studies showing that black boys are punished and suspended in school more often than other kids. But then one reads equally often that poverty makes boys, in particular, more likely to be aggressive and have a harder time concentrating. We are taught to assume that the punishments and suspensions are due to racism, and to somehow ignore the data showing that the conditions too many black boys grow up in unfortunately makes them indeed more likely to act up in school. Might the poverty be the key problem to address? But, try this purely logical reasoning in polite company only at the risk of being treated as a moral reprobate. Our conversation is to be solely about racism, not solutions — other than looking to a vaguely defined future time when racism somehow disappears, America having “come to terms” with it: i.e. Judgment Day. As to what exactly this coming to terms would consist of, I suppose only our Pastor of White Privilege knows.

May 22, 2018

A variant factor in Chinese economic statistics

Filed under: China, Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve long been on the record as not trusting Chinese government statistics (some examples here, here here, here, here, here, here, here, here here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here), but this is a twist I hadn’t previously noticed:

A useful and basic rule of thumb about international economic statistics. Never, but just never, believe nor pay attention to anything about the Chinese economy for the first quarter of the year. No, this isn’t because our inscrutable bretheren dissemble more or less at this time of year, it’s not because their statisticians spend January drunk or hungover (unlike our own), it’s because the Chinese New Year obeys its own little calendar.

The modern Chinese New Year begins on the first new moon between January 21st and February 20th. Earlier calendar systems were more complicated:

Chinese five phases and four seasons calendar, used during the Zhou dynasty (c. 1046 BC-256 BC).
Image by Orienomesh-w, via Wikimedia Commons.

Well, OK, so if this was a western country that really celebrated the New Year (say, Scotland) then everyone would be back at work 48 hours later. However, the Chinese New Year is also the start of the two week holiday. Sorta a mixture between American Thanksgiving (you WILL eat at your mother’s table or a close simulacrum of it) plus a Wakes Week (English industrial towns would shut every single factory so that all could get away to the beach for a week. Well, beach not so much, Skegness maybe). The combination of the two means that near every factory in the country shuts for a couple of weeks as the largest migration in history takes place. All those migrant workers heading back to Mom’s dumplings.

If this all took place at the same time each year then our economic statistics would take account of it just fine with our seasonal adjustments. Just like we do with Christmas. We know very well that hundreds of thousands get hired for temporary jobs packing and delivering just before, get laid off immediately afterwards. We don’t see that reflected in the unemployment numbers because we’re not interested. We want to see trends, not known seasonal variations. So too with output and all that – many European factories do close in that week after Christmas. We don’t measure a drop in GDP then because we know about it therefore ignore it.

So Chinese official economic statistics are even less likely to correspond to reality during the first quarter than at any other time of the year.

May 21, 2018

Work in high tech? You’ll instantly recognize this office

Filed under: Business, Humour, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Alistair Dabbs on the utterly interchangeable (except for the bogs) modern high tech office suite:

As an itinerant freelancer, my work takes me to a variety of tech-savvy business premises. And while small companies each have their own style of office layout, every larger organisation from mid-size to corporate looks almost exactly the same as another.

Except for the toilets. You can learn a lot about a business by its bogs.

So as I turn up for an on-site booking and sit for a short while in a reception space that has been arranged identically to those depicted in every business furniture catalogue ever printed, later to stride through yet another open-plan office of the same old rows of grey desks and the same old blue carpet tiles, I am overwhelmed by the tedium of déjà vu.

So on arriving at the designated meeting room – always featuring a frosted glass wall, a boardroom-style table with a faux teak effect surface and luxury adjustable chairs that refuse to be adjusted unless you violently bounce up and down on them like an over-excited child on a Space Hopper – I drop my things in the corner furthest from the door and enquire about using the washroom facilities.

As I am given verbal directions for the nearest toilet, I make a cursory check under the table which has been designed for up to 20 persons and confirm, yes, there are just TWO power sockets, as per usual, and no extension cable of any description. A quick glance behind the massively undersized TV at the end of the room reveals another six wall sockets that are, as I confidently expected, all occupied by plugs already – one for the TV and the other five for various components of the impossibly complicated video conferencing system that no one knows how to use, least of all the IT department that had lobbied strongly against its purchase in the first place.

So far, so identical. Now let’s find out what this place is really like.

[…]

Unlike this particular unfortunate, I return from the grunting rooms this day refreshed and with a spring in my step. My face smarts invigoratingly with aftershave and creamy odours waft from my gesticulating soft palms – vanilla from the left, coconut from the right.

Back in the meeting room, I am soon brought back to Earth and my surroundings merge into the amorphous generic semblance of every other office building in the western world.

A large cupboard that does not match the rest of the furniture has been installed in the most awkward place to squeeze past; it is locked but almost certainly contains nothing but a layer of dust, a torn corner from a Post-It note and a single paperclip. The aircon has just two settings: Arctic or Sahara. Everyone is forced to use a Guest Wi-Fi login whose permissions have been devised by a recent graduate of a free Cyber Security MOOC to prevent access to personal emails, cloud drives and the internet in general. A ceiling light flickers every two minutes. Halfway into the meeting, the room begins to vibrate to the intense scream of a workman’s drill on the other side of a wall, and continues for the next six hours.

I could be anywhere.

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