Quotulatiousness

July 15, 2013

Going north to gawp at the natives

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:11

Brendan O’Neill on a modern phenomenon:

Normally when a white, middle-class, well-educated Brit wants to rub shoulders with a noble savage, he heads off to Kenya to gawk at the Masai dutifully dancing for his chin-stroking entertainment, or he spends a couple of weeks in Palestine to watch brown people picking olives under the yoke of Israeli intimidation. Not Owen Jones. The Independent’s Left-wing columnist has found an altogether cheaper way to mix with earthy, “authentic” tribes: by hopping on a train to Durham and spending a few hours in the company of that grizzled, largely defeated caste of people known as Miners.

At the weekend Mr Jones spoke at the Durham Miners’ Gala, and the whole thing revealed how anthropological the modern radical Left has become, the extent to which youthful Leftists now treat working-class people as exotic creatures in a political zoo to be photographed and patted. The gala was embarrassingly described by that high priest of chattering-class values, Giles Fraser, as being all about “the banners, the bands and the beer”, a means for former mining communities “colourfully to proclaim [their] nobility”. They’re the salt of the earth, these rough-handed northerners, and no mistake! According to a Sky News report, Mr Jones “spoke for the people”. What people? The London-based media professionals he hobnobs with?

Mr Jones and his media friends treated Durham’s miners the same way other middle-class youngsters treat villagers they happen upon in a rural bit of Rwanda: as intriguingly and effortlessly decent, noble creatures who one must simply be photographed standing next to. They tweeted pics of themselves with these cute creatures. In his speech, Mr Jones referred to the miners as “ordinary working people” (ordinary: “regular, normal, customary” — OED) and said these poor, grafting folk are often “faceless, forgotten, ignored”. Not any more — now they’re all over Twitter and Facebook and are having their nobility celebrated in the Guardian, courtesy of their middle-class, Dickensian patrons down in London.

It’s so extraordinarily patronising. To these anthropological daytrippers, Durham is little more than a Potemkin village, existing primarily as a symbol of something or other rather than as a real place. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Mr Jones takes this borderline caring/haughty approach to working people. After all, by his own admission his entire career in radical journalism was triggered by feelings of pity for the working classes, or, as he calls them, “the vulnerable” who inhabit “conquered” communities.

July 9, 2013

NYT writer files classic “First World Problem” article

Filed under: Business, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:35

In yesterday’s “Morning Jolt” email, Jim Geraghty made some sport of a New York Times article by James Atlas:

The comments section underneath the article raises the fairly glaring point that Atlas’s rose-colored memories of flying before these harsh Darwinist times (probably to be blamed on Republicans) ignore the fact that once you adjust for inflation, air travel is a lot more accessible to a lot more people today. In the “golden age” of attractive stewardesses that he romanticizes, flying was too expensive for most of middle-class America.

    Come on. Look at the prices (adjusted for inflation) of air travel back in the 60s that you so glorify. In 1972 it cost me about $350 round-trip to fly from Atlanta to Chicago to go to college (so usually I took Greyhound). According to online inflation calculators, that’s the equivalent of $1950 today. If we want the same level of service we got in the 60s and 70s, we’d need to pay equivalent prices. Airline travel in “economy” today is pretty much analogous to what bus travel was in the 70s; cheap enough that many people can afford it but dirty, uncomfortable, crowded, and miserable. Comfortable travel is available now, as it was then, to the more well-to-do — if you can afford to pay for first class, then your flight is far more tolerable than if you’re in economy. In 1972, the one time I flew, it was a lot more enjoyable than taking the bus. But then, as now, one got what one paid for. We expect airfares to be rock-bottom low and accessible to all — but we can’t then expect service levels to match what they would be if the airlines still charged the prices they used to charge.

I would note that higher-end air travel is one of those rare products where a large portion of the consumer base isn’t spending their own money. (How many business class or first-class passengers bought those tickets with personal funds, as opposed to having their employer pay for it?) When it’s somebody else’s money, hey, anything goes, or at least as much as you can get away with. (Of course, that’s at other employers. For the transatlantic flights for the Norway cruise, Jack Fowler has booked me a space in an overhead luggage rack.)

If everyone paid out of his own pocket, those passengers willing to pay $659 to $2,337 for a one-way first-class ticket from D.C. to Los Angeles nonstop would largely disappear. But those folks willing to pay those exorbitant costs — really, those companies willing to pay those costs for their employees — are what make the (relatively) cheap price of $234 for the same flight in coach possible. (I got those figures from plugging in a flight from D.C. to LA with one week’s notice into Expedia.)

Also … did no editor at the Times think it was bad timing to run a column complaining about insufficient legroom and stale ham sandwiches right after the crash at San Francisco airport?

July 3, 2013

We’re just trying to raise your awareness…

Filed under: Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

… because we’re morally and ethically superior to you unwashed plebs:

Last Thursday was Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder Awareness Day. If you missed it, that’s probably because every week there are awareness days. We’re swamped by them. There are literally thousands of organisations whose mission is to raise our awareness. There is also a vast number of politicians, policymakers, experts, professionals, academics and earnest volunteers who are all devoted to the cause of raising awareness.

Those who set themselves up to raise the public’s awareness are not just providing information; they’re also making a statement about themselves, about who they are. They, unlike those who require their support, are aware. Awareness is presented as a state of being all of us should aspire to attain. In its common usage today, the term awareness resists any clear definitions. It is not simply about knowing or understanding. [. . .]

Campaigns designed to raise awareness are as much about advertising the status of the campaigners as they are about changing the outlook of a target audience. For example, advocates of breastfeeding produce literature that affirms the virtuous nature of their own lifestyles while also inviting those who have not seen the light to become aware. The very term ‘raising awareness’ involves drawing a distinction between those who are enlightened, who are aware of something, and those who are not. It draws attention to the fundamental contrast between those who know and those who are ignorant, between the morally superior and the morally inferior. So someone who allows his children to eat junk food is not only unaware and ignorant; he’s also morally questionable.

Awareness-raising campaigns impute to their advocates the values of intelligence, sensitivity, broadmindedness, sophistication and enlightenment. For that reason, the mission of raising awareness has become a key cultural resource for those who want to distinguish themselves from others. Awareness-raisers are invariably drawn towards inflating the behavioural and cultural distinctions between themselves and the rest of society; they are preoccupied with constructing a lifestyle that contrasts as sharply as possible to the lifestyles of their moral inferiors. What is really important about their lifestyles is not so much the values they exhort, but that they are different, in every detail, from the lives led by obese, junk-food eating, gas-guzzling, xenophobic and fundamentalist consumers of the tabloid press and junk culture.

Sociologically speaking, the act of raising awareness is really a claim for moral respect, and more importantly moral authority. The possession of awareness is a marker of superiority — and the absence of awareness is taken as a sign of inferiority. Those who refuse to ‘be aware’ are frequently morally condemned

June 20, 2013

Addressing India’s rape problem

Filed under: India, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Reason, Shikha Dalmia looks at the reality of life in India for far too many women:

… the Indian government has been following the feminist script for nearly half a century with little effect. It would serve the cause of gender equity far better if it simply did its job and provided safe streets, timely justice, and other basic public goods for everyone. The absence of such amenities that are taken for granted in the West is arguably the strongest pillar of patriarchy in India.

India’s official rape statistics — which registered 1.8 rapes per 100,000 people in 2010, compared with the United States’ 27.3 — might suggest that India has no rape problem. But everyone knows that rape is vastly underreported in traditional cultures where women fear stigmatizing themselves and dishonoring their families, especially since the chances of justice are remote. Whatever the correct statistics, they can’t capture a crucial qualitative difference in the rape problem between India and in, say, America.

Setting aside incest and sexual assault by friends and relatives that unfortunately happens in all cultures, in America, a lot of rape is “date rape” that occurs when women exercise their social and sexual freedom. The police rarely have an opportunity to intervene in such situations and the only way of combating this problem is by addressing male attitudes. By contrast, in India far more rapes originate in public settings — parks, streets, and buses — as women go about their daily business. This is eminently preventable, which is why, unlike in America, every new episode triggers fresh protests in India.

The very lack of public safety that allows rape also strengthens patriarchy. For starters, it limits women’s employment options. It is too dangerous for them to take jobs that require evening shifts or long commutes. Some companies offer rides home to women who work late, but this makes women more expensive to hire. Single rural women rarely move to cities, where the bulk of job growth is occurring, as men can. All of this undermines women’s ability to maximize their earning potential and gain financial independence.

Above all, it forces women to rely on their patriarchal families for protection, opening them up to all kinds of restrictions. A woman who has to wait for her father or brother to pick her up from college or work — rather than taking a cab or a bus — can’t just meet whomever she wants, wherever she wants, whenever she wants. Everything she does becomes subject to time, place, and manner restrictions by her family and its moral code.

[. . .]

Feminism will never get rid of patriarchy without first getting rid of the need for it. Patriarchy’s staying power stems not just from backward belief systems but a gritty ground reality. The lack of basic law-and-order means that women have to rely on male physical strength for security making men socially more valuable and more dangerous. This makes men, as feminists point out, both protectors and rapists. Electing female politicians and demanding more gender equality won’t cut this Gordian knot—only good governance that promotes public safety for all will.

May 14, 2013

Time to free the CBC

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

In Maclean’s, James Cowan makes the case for liberating the CBC from the shackles of government subsidy, as it’s now out-competing private business in several fields:

The online success of the CBC should be laudable. Its website received an average of 6.2-million unique visitors last year, making it the most popular Canadian website. Around 4.3-million people visit the CBC News site each month, besting both The Globe and Mail and Huffington Post. Adding to this success is an ambitious five-year plan that will open digital-only news operations in cities like Hamilton and Kamloops and allocate 5 per cent of the overall programming budget to digital content. Once upon a time, it was only private TV and radio broadcasters who had reason to grumble about competing with the Crown corporation; in building its online empire, the CBC is taking on everyone from newspapers to Netflix.

In doing so, the CBC has strayed a long way from its original purpose: to sustain Canadian culture when and where the market cannot. The problem is, the CBC’s traditional funding model now allows it to build its digital empire unfettered by economic reality. In its last quarter, 60 per cent of the company’s expenses were paid by government subsidies while just 21 per cent of its revenue comes from advertising. All media companies are struggling to adapt to shifting consumer and advertising patterns brought about by the digital age; only the CBC had $1.2 billion in government cash to fund its experiments and ease the transition.

Broadcasters would argue the CBC has always operated from an unfair advantage. But the current scenario is different in several respects. For one, the Corp.’s legislated mandate to be “predominantly and distinctly Canadian” arguably placed it at a commercial disadvantage. Further, capital and regulatory requirements made it implausible for commercial broadcasters to serve many areas of the country. But nobody needs to ask the CRTC’s permission to create a website, and the startup costs for a digital service are far less than those of a television or radio station. If small cities like Kamloops need a local digital news service, that’s a need that could be plausibly served by entrepreneurs. The CBC is increasingly no longer complementing the market, but instead meddling within it.

May 12, 2013

Modernizing the “rules for radicals”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:20

James Delingpole suggests that the Saul Alinsky playbook needs a bit of updating for the current radicals (that is, not the broadly left-wing radicals of Alinsky’s day):

Why do we need some new rules? Because the old ones were written in the 70s by a Marxist community organiser called Saul Alinsky. He had some useful ideas, many of which we can steal or adapt. But some of them are ill-expressed or incoherent. Eg Rule 10 “The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” I think he could have omitted that one, don’t you, without jeopardising his place in history as a great revolutionary thinker?

Who are we? Not the same as the radicals of Alinsky’s generation, that’s for sure. Alinsky’s radicals were broadly on the left: Che admirers; Black Panthers; communist revolutionaries; hippies; communitarians; environmentalists; radical feminists. The hegemony which they were trying to destroy was, very loosely, a conservative one.

Today, though, the positions have reversed. We new radicals are broadly — but not exclusively — of the right, not the left. Many of us would describe ourselves as conservatives, classical liberals, libertarians, UKIPers, Tea Partiers. Revolutionaries, yes, but in the traditions of Burke, Wilkes, Cobbett, and, indeed, the Minutemen and the Founding Fathers, rather than of Marx and Lenin. Some of us might not even think of ourselves as righties, but that’s OK, it’s the direction of travel that matters not the labelling.

We’re against: arbitrary authority; big government; high taxes; overregulation; corporatism; cosy stitch ups between the banksters, the lawyers and the political class; the EU; the UN; identity politics; eco-fascists; elf-n-safety; wind turbines; quantitative easing…

We’re for: empiricism; sound money; free markets; liberty; small government; low taxes; deregulation; cheap energy; rigour; meritocracy; integrity; equality of opportunity, perhaps, but most definitely not equality of outcome.

We’re on the right side of a culture war which currently we’re losing. Why are we losing? Not because we’re bad people. Not because we don’t have all the truth, all the logic, all the arguments on our side. We’re losing because, thanks to Alinsky, the enemy has a forty-year head start on us. They’ve got the techniques. All we’ve got is the moral high ground — except, the way Alinsky’s acolytes have brilliantly spun it, we don’t get to enjoy the benefits even of that.

May 6, 2013

The Whole Earth Catalog was “the internet before the internet. It was the book of the future. It was a web in newsprint.”

Filed under: Books, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:27

In the Guardian, Carole Cadwalladr profiles Stewart Brand and his early but vastly influential work, the Whole Earth Catalog:

Stewart Brand didn’t just happen to be around when the personal computer came into being; he’s the one who put “personal” and “computer” together in the same sentence and introduced the concept to the world. He wasn’t just a member of the world’s first open online community, the Well; he co-founded it. And he wasn’t just another of those 60s acid casualties; he was the definitive 60s acid casualty. Well, not casualty exactly, but he was there taking LSD in the days when it was still legal, with the most famous hipster of them all, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters.

For nearly five decades, Stewart Brand has been hanging around the cutting edge of whatever is the most cutting thing of the day. Largely because he’s discovered it and become fascinated with it long before anyone else has even noticed it but, in retrospect, it does make him seem like the west coast’s answer to Zelig, the Woody Allen character who just happens to pop up at key moments in history. Because no one pops up like Stewart Brand pops up, right there, just on the cusp of something momentous.

[. . .]

This year marks its 45th anniversary. I have a slightly later, yellowing and decrepit edition, from 1971, though it’s the same oversized format. It’s the edition that sold 2m copies and won a US National Book award, and the tips on spot welding, home remedies for crabs (not the marine kind, I don’t think), dealing with drug busts, and building your own geodesic dome are rather delightfully quaint. (I especially like an extract from the underground guide to US colleges which states that, at the University of Illinois: “The hip chicks will do it. It is easier to find a chick who will have sex now than it was two years ago when things were extremely difficult.”) But it doesn’t even begin to convey the revolution that the Whole Earth Catalog represented.

But then, it’s almost impossible, to flick through the pages of the Catalog and recapture its newness and radicalism and potentialities. Not least because the very idea of a book changing the world is just so old-fashioned. Books don’t change anything these days. If you want to start a revolution, you’d do it on Facebook. And so many of the ideas that first reached a mainstream audience in the Catalog — organic farming, solar power, recycling, wind power, desktop publishing, mountain bikes, midwife-assisted birth, female masturbation, computers, electronic synthesizers — are now simply part of our world, that the ones that didn’t go mainstream (communes being a prime example) rather stand out.

May 2, 2013

ESR on the true meaning of moral panics

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Eric S. Raymond on the difference between the claimed meaning and the actual, underlying reason for various moral panic incidents:

In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In retrospect it’s easy to understand as a reaction against the gradual breakdown of both legally enforced and de-facto racial segregation in the U.S.

But moral panics are by no means a monopoly of cultural conservatives. These days the most virulent and bogus examples are as likely to arrive from the self-described “left” as the “right”. When they do, they’re just as likely to be about something other than the ostensible subject.

In Lies, Damn Lies, and Rape Statistics a college newspaper does a little digging through U.S. crime statistics and finds that the trendy “anti-rape” movement is exaggerating the rape risk of college women by two full orders of magnitude — as it concludes, “the ‘one in four’ chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400.”

What can explain such gross distortion? I’ve looked into this issue myself and discovered a lot of flim-flam. Still, even the the best-case figures I arrived at apparently overestimated the actual risk on campuses by a factor of 50. (Barbarian zones — like, say, inner-city Detroit — might be a different story.)

If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other. And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.

April 30, 2013

Another incident of hypersentimentality

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

In sp!ked, Brendan O’Neill discusses the latest opportunity for people to ostentatiously display their sentimentality:

I wish Scottish author Iain Banks had kept his cancer to himself. For in making it public, through a statement about being ‘Very Poorly’, he has unwittingly mobilised one of the ugliest mobs of modern times: the death-watchers, the ostentatious grievers, those who like nothing more than to read about another’s physical demise and advertise how moved they are by it.

Almost as soon as Banks announced earlier this month, through the publisher of his entertaining novels, that he was suffering from terminal gall bladder cancer, these professional proxy weepers were doing their thing. Premature mourning was rife. Twitter became a vast virtual pre-death condolences book, as everyone stopped what they were doing for 45 seconds to tweet about how torn apart they were by the news of Banks’ sickness. People seemed keen to out-lament each other. One said Banks’ cancer revelation hit her like ‘a chill blast of sorrow and grief’, which makes you wonder how she’ll cope when he dies.

Friends and fans of Banks set up a website where lovers of his novels can get updates on his condition and sign a ‘guest book’ that is really just another offensively early condolences book. Thousands of messages have been posted. It’s remarkable how many of the message writers admit they ‘don’t know what to say’ yet proceed to say it anyway, at length, clearly feeling weirdly compelled to sign up to the speedily constructed community of online mourners.

We’ve also had pre-death obituaries, articles assessing Banks’ life and work before either has come to an end: his next novel, The Quarry, will be published shortly. Even those who know nothing about Banks felt an urge to write about him, or rather about how they personally felt upon hearing he was sick. Simon Kelner at the Independent admitted ‘I haven’t read any of his books’, before producing a whole column on Banks’ cancer news. The macabre sense of anticipatory mourning is summed up in the way Banks’ wife is referred to on the tribute website: as his ‘chief widow-in-waiting’.

April 23, 2013

The myth of radicalization

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:41

In sp!ked, Frank Furedi examines the recent phenomenon of “nice guys” turning into terrorists:

… homegrown terrorism is viewed as a problem of ‘radicalisation’, where young people are seen as having effectively been warped by some imam or ideology promoter. So within days of the Boston bombers being identified, a local mosque was blamed for radicalising Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Others have looked for alternative sources of radicalisation, such as jihadist courses on YouTube or extremist Islamist websites. The theory of radicalisation is based on the premise that the lure of jihad politicises otherwise disgruntled individuals and transforms them into hardened militants.

Yet it is not clear what exactly constitutes the lure of jihad. Young people who are attracted to jihadist websites rarely adopt a new worldview. In fact, their perspective is very similar to numerous non-Muslim Westerners who visit nihilistic websites and become fascinated by destructive themes and image. Those who visit jihadist sites are choosing a fad rather than a coherent ideological outlook. In this regard, it is worth noting that some radicals arrested for terrorist activities in Europe are neither religious zealots nor political idealists. A study of ‘The Mujahideen Network’, a Swedish internet forum, discovered that its members’ knowledge of Islam was ‘virtually non-existent’ and their ‘fascination with jihad seems to be dictated by their rebellious nature rather than a deep ideological conviction’ (5). In other words, these people seem to have been driven by their estrangement from society rather than being pulled by a vibrant and dynamic alternative.

[. . .]

In fact, there are formidable cultural forces that denigrate the West’s historical achievements and its traditional belief in progress and enlightenment. Some commentators argue that the West, finding it difficult to believe in itself, faces a moral crisis. In such circumstances, is it any wonder that many young people feel deeply estranged from the Western way of life? Fortunately, only a handful opt for the nihilistic course of action taken by the Boston bombers. But the real problem is not to be found in the impressionable minds of youths but in the failure of society to inspire these young people with positive and forward-looking ideals.

Young people are not being seduced by mystical jihadist ideologies; they are being driven away by a society that fails to lead or enthuse or move them. There will, of course, always be a handful of confused and disturbed individuals who opt for acts of violent destruction. But as long as their community believes in itself, the damage they cause will be contained. The experience of the post-9/11 world shows that winning the arguments for an open society is the most effective answer to the threat of terror.

April 18, 2013

Neologism of the week: “Glassholes”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

Jason Perlow explains why Google Glass (or similar devices from other vendors) are inevitably going to be part of the future, and why many already refer to the users of such devices as “Glassholes”:

It could certainly be argued that whenever a new consumer technology enters society, those who are quick to adopt it are typically ridiculed by the have-nots. Eventually, many of these technologies become commonplace and are more accepted by the mainstream, particularly when they become more affordable.

This has pretty much always been the case, starting with the radio pager, then the cellular phone, text capable handsets, and then, of course, Bluetooth headsets, the smartphone and the tablet.

People who first used these things were once seen very much as elitist and not part of the mainstream, and they were considered disruptive.

To some extent, even with their popularity, they are still considered disruptive when used in various social contexts.

[. . .]

With Glass, because the device is being worn and there’s no indication of when it is being used, one has to assume that the wearer is recording everyone all of the time.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I have serious issues with the notion that I could be recorded by everyone at any time.

Look, I am aware that law enforcement and government agencies have us under surveillance, and it’s not uncommon for people to be photographed and videoed hundreds of times per day, particularly if you live in a major city.

The growth of public surveillance has all kinds of civil liberties concerns, but it’s a done deal … you probably can’t avoid being recorded many times per day unless you stay at home with the blinds down (and turn off your cell phone, and avoid the internet, and …). The social and cultural issues around private surveillance will provide some fascinating legal wrangles in the very near future: where does my right to record (“lifelog”) all of my activities conflict with your right not to be so recorded? Will the concept of privacy be one of the first things jettisoned over the side?

Governments and law enforcement agencies will want maximum opportunity to use their surveillance tools — both for specific investigations and for general purpose Big Brothering — and if that means abandoning any pretense of protecting your privacy against invasion by non-government agencies, they’ll take it. They’re already 9/10ths of the way there as it is.

There are things you only say and do with close friends in confidence, others which may be revealed in private business meetings, et cetera. We all know and have seen what happens when supposedly “private” or unauthorized recordings are made behind closed doors and then leaked to the general public, either intentionally or accidentally.

It can cost someone their career. It can destroy one’s personal reputation. It will most certainly cause one strife with one’s friends and family. And as we have most recently seen, it can also cost you a Presidential Election.

He also discusses the possibility of social and technical controls to provide anti-lifelogging zones, which I strongly suspect will be simultaneously introduced almost immediately when Google Glass or similar technology is released to the public, and almost certainly more of a hassle for non-users of the technology for little or no actual benefit. It will be the usual politician’s syllogism: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.” As for the technical side, there is almost nothing more tempting to a certain kind of hacker than the technical equivalent of a “Do not touch” sign.

Obviously, for this type of anti-lifelogging tech to work, there has to be an agreed upon API or programmatic trigger signals that cannot easily be defeated by hackers.

But if it cannot be made to work, or if the effectiveness of the tech cannot be guaranteed, then I forsee situations where people will be forced to remove and surrender their devices in order to prevent the possibility of recording, as well as a change in our culture to be much more careful about what one says, even in very intimate situations.

And that is an Orwellian chilling effect that I think could be very harmful to the development of our society as a whole.

This chilling effect was evident in decades past in East Germany while the country was in fear of the ever-watching eyes and ears of the Stasi, which had perhaps the largest informant and surveillance network of any nation per capita in the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, the USSR included.

April 13, 2013

This from the country that invented hypersentimentality?

Filed under: Britain, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

BBC America has what they call a list of 10 things about America that Brits will never understand. A few of them seem likely to be true, but this one is just not right:

6. Compulsive sentimentality
Gushing public displays are usually meant well but give Brits the creeps. For instance, my husband and I recently checked out of a B&B after a two-night stay. Instead of bidding us farewell with a firm handshake and a receipt, the owner — a man in his 50s — latched on to me, then my man, for a prolonged hug. Just when we thought it was over, he announced, “I’ll miss you guys!” No, actually. You won’t.

I can refute the notion that Americans are more embarrassingly sentimental with two words: Princess Diana. Did any country ever show more ridiculous sentimentality than Britain in their “grief” over a former royal person? The old notion of British reserve may still be true in some parts of the country, but most Brits these days seem to take extreme joy in wallowing in sentimentality.

April 11, 2013

QotD: An underclass that’s too rich

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:05

I hear quite a bit of that these days — almost like a local version of East German “ostalgie“. Old British friends say to me, well, say what you like about the 1970s — nothing worked; if you wanted to buy a new car, it was as if post-war rationing was still in effect — but all the same life in the village seemed a lot more pleasant back then. There’s something to this: the benign side of oppressive statism is often a kind of public restraint. And more than a few folks seem to feel, with the benefit of hindsight, that it’s better to have unionised thugs nutting scabs on the picket line than freelance yobs in hideous leisurewear infesting ersatz-American high streets catering to their every frightful whim from one end to the other. For the modern liberal, this is a new dilemma: an underclass that’s too rich.

Mark Steyn, “The Unfinished Revolution”, Daily Telegraph, 2004-05-04 (link goes to Steyn’s own site)

April 10, 2013

ESR asks “What if it really was like that?”

Filed under: History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

An interesting jaunt along the byways of human perception and social organization:

I think the book that taught me to ask “What if it really was like that?” systematically might have been Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jaynes observed that Bronze Age literary sources take for granted the routine presence of god-voices in peoples’ heads. Instead of dismissing this as fantasy, he developed a theory that until around 1000BC it really was like that — humans had a bicameral consciousness in which one chamber or operating subsystem, programmed by culture, manifested to the other as the voice of God or some dominant authority figure (“my ka is the ka of the king”). Jaynes’s ideas were long dismissed as brilliant but speculative and untestable; however, some of his predictions are now being borne out by neuroimaging techniques not available when he was writing.

A recent comment on this blog pointed out that many cultures — including our own until around the time of the Industrial Revolution — constructed many of their customs around the belief that women are nigh-uncontrollably lustful creatures whose sexuality has to be restrained by strict social controls and even the amputation of the clitoris (still routine in large parts of the Islamic world). Of course today our reflex is to dismiss this as pure fantasy with no other function than keeping half the human species in perpetual subjection. But some years ago I found myself asking “What if it really was like that?”

Let’s be explicit about the underlying assumptions here and their consequences. It used to be believed (and still is over much of the planet) that a woman in her fertile period left alone with any remotely presentable man not a close relative would probably (as my commenter put it) be banging him like a barn door in five minutes. Thus, as one consequence, the extremely high value traditionally placed on physical evidence of virginity at time of marriage.

Could it really have been like that? Could it still be like that in the Islamic world and elsewhere today? One reason I think this question demands some attention is that the costs of the customs required to restrain female sexuality under this model are quite high on many levels. At minimum you have to prevent sex mixing, which is not merely unpleasant for both men and women but requires everybody to invest lots of effort in the system of control (wives and daughters cannot travel or in extreme cases even go outside without male escort, homes have to be built with zenanahs). At the extreme you find yourself mutilating the genitalia of your own daughters as they scream under the knife.

April 6, 2013

The old class system and the modern welfare state

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

A majority of Britons who are on state assistance now believe that the system is too generous and discourages recipients from seeking jobs:

In 2003, 40 per cent of benefits recipients agreed that ‘unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work’; in 2011, 59 per cent agreed. So a majority of actual benefits recipients now think the welfare state is too generous and fosters worklessness. Surely those well-off welfare cheerleaders, when shown these figures, would accept that perhaps they don’t know what they’re talking about. But no, they have simply come up with a theory for why the poor are anti-welfare: because they’re stupid.

Even more resented than those who abuse the system are those who run it:

Working-class mothers hated the way that signing up for welfare meant having to throw one’s home and life open to inspection by snooty officials, community health workers and even family budget advisers.

They didn’t want ‘middle-class strangers’, as they called welfare providers, ‘questioning them about their children’. They felt such intrusions ‘broke a cultural taboo’.

And the use of welfare as a way of allowing society’s ‘betters’ to govern the lives of the poor continues now. Indeed, today’s welfare state is even more annoyingly nannyish than it was 80 years ago.

As the writer Ferdinand Mount says, the post-war welfare state is like a form of ‘domestic imperialism’, through which the state treats the poor as ‘natives’ who must be fed and kept on the moral straight-and-narrow by their superiors.

Mount describes modern welfarism as ‘benign managerialism’, which ‘pacifies’ the lower orders.

Working-class communities feel this patronising welfarist control very acutely. They recognise that signing up for a lifetime of state charity means sacrificing your pride and your independence; it means being unproductive and also unfree.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress