Quotulatiousness

February 6, 2012

America’s boom in “Moocher Culture”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Glenn Harlan Reynolds in the Washington Examiner explains why the growth in something-for-nothing attitudes can and will come to grief:

“Fifty thousand for what you didn’t plant, for what didn’t grow. That’s modern farming — reap what you don’t sow.”

That’s a line from a song about farm subsidies, “Farming The Government,” by the Nebraska Guitar Militia.

But these days it applies to more and more of the U.S. economy, as Charles Sykes points out in his new book, A Nation Of Moochers: America’s Addiction To Getting Something For Nothing.

The problem, Sykes points out, is that you can’t run an economy like that. If you tried to hold a series of potluck dinners where a majority brought nothing to the table, but felt entitled to eat their fill, it would probably work out badly. Yet that’s essentially what we’re doing.

[. . .]

But the damage goes deeper. Sykes writes, “In contemporary America, we now have two parallel cultures: An anachronistic culture of independence and responsibility, and the emerging moocher culture.

“We continually draw on the reserves of that older culture, with the unspoken assumption that it will always be there to mooch from and that responsibility and hard work are simply givens. But to sustain deadbeats, others have to pay their bills on time.”

And, after a while, people who pay their bills on time start to feel like suckers. I think we’ve reached that point now:

  • People who pay their mortgages — often at considerable personal sacrifice — see others who didn’t bother get special assistance.
  • People who took jobs they didn’t particularly want just to pay the bills see others who didn’t getting extended unemployment benefits.
  • People who took risks to build their businesses and succeeded see others, who failed, getting bailouts. It rankles at all levels.

And an important point of Sykes’ book is that moocher-culture isn’t limited to farmers or welfare queens. The moocher-vs-sucker divide isn’t between the rich and poor, but between those who support themselves and those nursing at the government teat.

February 1, 2012

Frank Furedi on the fast-growing “religion” of Atheism

Filed under: Media, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:30

It’s no longer just a lack of belief in a deity: it’s taking on the trappings of an actual religion, complete with high priests, saints, and heretics:

Where atheism was once depicted as a dangerous and subversive creed, today it is often portrayed as an enlightened outlook that perches on the moral highground. But what is often overlooked is that the growing cultural affirmation of atheism has been paralleled by a big transformation in its meaning.

It is important to note that, historically, atheism was not a standalone philosophy. Atheism does not constitute a worldview. It simply signifies non-belief in God or gods. This rejection of the idea of a god could be based on scepticism towards the notion of a higher being, an unwillingness to follow dogma, or a commitment to rationality and science. But whatever the motive, atheism reflected an attitude towards one specific issue, not a perspective on the world. Most atheists defined themselves through an assertive identity, whether they called themselves democrats, liberals, socialists, anarchists, fascists, communists, freethinkers or rationalists. For most serious atheists, their disbelief in god was a relatively insignificant part of their self-identity.

Today, in contrast, atheism takes itself very seriously indeed. With their zealous denunciation of religion, the so-called New Atheists often resemble medieval moral crusaders. They argue that the influence of religion should be fought wherever it rears its ugly head. Although they demand that religion should be countered by rational arguments, their own claims often verge on the irrational and hysterical. Of course, there has always been an honourable atheist tradition of irreverence and irreligious contempt for dogma. But today’s New Atheism often expresses itself through a doctrinaire language of its own. In a simplistic manner it equates religion with fanaticism and fundamentalism. What is striking about its denunciation of fundamentalism is that it is frequently made in the dogmatic, polemical style of those it claims to oppose. The black-and-white world of theological dogma is reproduced in the zealous polemic of the atheist moraliser.

January 24, 2012

Robert Fulford: Nietzsche’s inescapable shadow

Filed under: History, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:07

Writing in the National Post, Robert Fulford traces all the ways we still live with a long-dead madman:

Friedrich Nietzsche is one of those philosophers you just can’t kill.

He’s been in his grave since 1900, having been silenced by insanity many years before. In 1898, The New York Times ran an article headed, “Interesting Revolutionary Theories from a Writer Now in the Madhouse.” He’s read, as he was then, only by a small minority, many of whom it would be flattering to call eccentric.

Nevertheless, he runs through our social bloodstream. Francis Fukuyama’s remark has the sound of truth: Whether we like it or not, “We continue to live within the intellectual shadow cast by Nietzsche.”

[. . .]

We don’t know it but Nietzsche scripted many of our conversations, putting words in our mouths. When we talk about culture (the culture of this, the culture of that) we echo him. Anyone who discusses “values” (instead of, say, ethics) is talking Nietzsche-talk.

People who claim to be in a state of “becoming” are Nietzscheans, knowingly or otherwise. He believed (now everyone believes) that we are all constantly reconstructing ourselves. In Nietzsche there’s no such thing as a permanently stable personality.

He was the original culture warrior. He laid the foundation for the struggle between traditionalism and modernism, an enduring battle. The more important a tradition, the more he wanted to see it challenged.

September 19, 2011

Why are kids using the word “gay” to mean “lame”?

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Brendan O’Neill isn’t going to get letters of love and support for his current column in the Telegraph:

One thing that causes great consternation amongst schoolteachers, commentators and gay-rights activists is that young people use the word gay to mean “rubbish”. Last week it was reported that thousands of schoolchildren, some as young as four, have been reported to their local authorities for using racist or homophobic language, including using “gay” as a stand-in for “naff”. One boy was reprimanded for saying in class: “This work’s gay.” This follows other gay-as-rubbish controversies, including a tsunami of newspaper outrage when, in 2006, BBC Radio 1 presenter Chris Moyles described a mobile phone ringtone as “gay”, and even more outrage when the BBC inquiry into his remark ruled that the word gay is “often now used to mean ‘lame’ or ‘rubbish’. This is widespread current usage… among young people.”

But is it really such a mystery as to why the word gay has come to mean rubbish? It seems obvious to me. It is because gay culture is quite knowingly and resolutely lame. I don’t mean culture that happens to be produced by homosexuals, which includes some of the greatest art in history. No, I mean the stuff that passes for mainstream “gay culture”, foisted upon us by gay TV producers, filmmakers and magazine publishers, which is almost always shallow and camp and kitsch. That is, crap. If young people associate “gay” with “rubbish”, then they’re more perceptive than we give them credit for — they have twigged that, sadly, what is these days packaged up us as “gay culture” is almost always patronising pap.

September 10, 2011

Debunking the notion of “unspoiled nature”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Food, History, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 13:00

ESR has a glowing review of 1493 by Charles C. Mann (a book I’ve been meaning to pick up myself), which includes a wonderful bit of debunking:

According to the romantic view of “unspoiled nature”, there is a natural equilibrium state of any given ecology (or the biosphere as a whole) which changes only on timescales of a kiloyear or longer. This pristine state is what the ecology tends to return to after major shocks such as volcanic eruptions. Humans are not part of this pristine state. Fortunately, pre-industrial humans have neither the power nor the desire to greatly alter it, and walk lightly on the land. Nevertheless, human presence degrades the pristine state into something that is inevitably less complex, valuable, and natural.

This romantic view has dominated Western popular culture since the early 1800s and underpins a great deal of the silliness and anti-human hostility evident in the modern environmental movement. It motivates, as one very current example, hostility to “unnatural” GM crops and intensive agriculture in general.

Without ever announcing the intention to do so, Mann takes a poleaxe to the romantic view of “unspoiled nature” and dispatches it without mercy. First, he shows how pervasive ecoforming is as a cultural practice. Then, he shows how ecoforming or its sudden cessation can lead to rapid, profound transformation of ecosystems on a continental scale. Then he proposes a not-too-implausible coupling between large-scale ecoforming by neolithic-level savages and the entire planetary climate!

In reality, there is no almost “pristine” nature anywhere on Earth humans can survive with pre-industrial technology. When we look at almost any “wilderness”, part of what we are seeing is the results of millenia of ecoforming by the humans that came before us. And, while attempts at ecoforming sometimes have destructive consequences (salinized soils in the Middle East; rabbits in Australia), as often or more often they lead to a net increase in ecological complexity and resource richness. Mann is not afraid to show us that the world is a better place because, for example, capsaicin peppers native to the New World are now naturalized all over Eurasia and have become important to dozens of Old World cuisines.

June 27, 2011

A review of The Declaration of Independents

Filed under: Books, Economics, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:33

Timothy P. Carney talks about the new book by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch:

Libertarians today are mostly considered a variety of conservative — Ronald Reagan with fewer bombs and more pot. But Welch and Gillespie don’t cast libertarianism as one of many political ideolgies. Instead, they portray it as a truce. It’s unpolitics. The authors see evidence of a “libertarian moment,” not so much in public opinion on policy matters (though outrage about bailouts helps), but in cultural trends that spill over into politics.

Younger Americans don’t like being told what to think. Gone is the voice-of-God Walter Cronkite figure. Younger adults assemble their own news feeds a la carte, following trusted voices on Twitter and RSS feeds. Even walking through a shopping mall, the authors argue, shows how we’re much more individualistic as a culture than we used to be. The authors say there’s a proliferation of cliques and types in high schools and among adults, too. The Internet has helped people find kindred spirits both near and far, making it less necessary to modify your interests to match an existing group. Americans, increasingly, choose their own way.

And there, in a nutshell, is the traditionalist’s core argument against the internet (grounded in their remembered high school experience): it allows geeks and nerds and other unpopular kids to find solace, support and fellow feeling outside their immediate physical surroundings. That undermines the traditional rule of the jocks and the beautiful people.

Welch and Gillespie see our cultural trends as evidence that “decentralization and democratization” are taking territory from “the forces of control and centralization.” The political corollary, naturally, would be a movement that creates more space for individuality. It would be almost an anti-political movement.

But this is where every dream of an independent or libertarian uprising crashes into reality. You don’t win at politics without being good at politics. The people who are best at politics are the people who stand to gain a lot from it — special interests and people who get like to play the political game. Neither group is likely to include many anti-political decentralizers.

What about the libertarians who are already caught up in politics? The think-tankers, the activists, the journalists? Well, they’re another obstacle to a libertarian revolution. For one thing, this is a group famous for infighting. The Libertarian Party has been racked with strife, splits and feuds for its entire existence. Welch and Gillespie want to pitch a big tent, but Beltway libertarians are famous for imposing “purity tests.” (Q: Should vending machines marketing heroin to children be allowed on public sidewalks? A: There shouldn’t be public sidewalks.)

That last quip is quite true: the very first time I walked in to a libertarian gathering, I was besieged with purity testing of that sort. I nearly walked right back out without a backward glance.

June 24, 2011

“Damn! Another cursed Mordecai!”

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Barbara Kay takes issue with the token that Montreal has chosen to commemorate Mordecai Richler:

Mordecai Richler is Canada’s biggest claim to literary fame. If he had been born and lived in any other province but Quebec there would have been an outpouring of ideas on how to commemorate his life and achievements: perhaps renaming streets in his honour, building schools bearing his name, or erecting a statue featuring the disheveled genius wryly peering over his pince-nez at a smoked meat sandwich on wry…er, rye.

Instead Montreal’s political mandarins have decided he is getting a gazebo — a crummy little open pavilion at the foot of Mount Royal, with no known connection to the author. A place for people to come in out of the rain. Not quite a public toilet, but close.

That’s like naming the change house at an outdoor skating rink after Margaret Atwood, a pellet dispenser at the zoo after Yann Martel, or a maintenance shed after Margaret Laurence. But then, if Mordecai Richler had been born outside Quebec, maybe he wouldn’t have been inspired to the kind of savage indignation that made him such a household word (and often not in a good way) in his native Montreal.

She provides a rather more appropriate memorial gesture:

Here’s an idea: Montreal is riddled with potholes. The French for “pothole” is “nid-de-poule,” literally a chicken’s nest. How about if the word is officially changed to “mort-de-caille(ou)” which means “death of stone” (well, death of pebble, close enough). Henceforth let all Montreal potholes be called Mordecais. In this way, his name will forever be on every Montrealer’s lips, because Montreal potholes are ubiquitous and eternal, and yet not in a good way – “Damn! Another cursed Mordecai!” I think Richler himself would have appreciated the irony, and approved.

June 15, 2011

Fight that natural urge to (over-) protect your children

Filed under: Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

An interesting article by Lori Gottlieb on the perils of over-protective parenting styles:

Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”

“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle. I know parents who call up the school to complain if their kid doesn’t get to be in the school play or make the cut for the baseball team. I know of one kid who said that he didn’t like another kid in the carpool, so instead of having their child learn to tolerate the other kid, they offered to drive him to school themselves. By the time they’re teenagers, they have no experience with hardship. Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”

Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee a decade ago, became an adviser to schools all over the country. When I talked to her this spring, she said that over the past few years, college deans have reported receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they’ve dubbed “teacups” because they’re so fragile that they break down anytime things don’t go their way. “Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them their entire childhoods,” Mogel said of these kids, “so they don’t know how to deal with it when they grow up.”

Oh, and for those of you who regularly utter phrases like “Good job, buddy!” every time your kid manages to do something trivial, you can just knock that right off:

A few months ago, I called up Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem. She told me she wasn’t surprised that some of my patients reported having very happy childhoods but felt dissatisfied and lost as adults. When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his performance. (All failures are reframed as “good tries.”) According to Twenge, indicators of self-esteem have risen consistently since the 1980s among middle-school, high-school, and college students. But, she says, what starts off as healthy self-esteem can quickly morph into an inflated view of oneself—a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self-esteem.

Meanwhile, rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandem with self-esteem. Why is this? “Narcissists are happy when they’re younger, because they’re the center of the universe,” Twenge explains. “Their parents act like their servants, shuttling them to any activity they choose and catering to their every desire. Parents are constantly telling their children how special and talented they are. This gives them an inflated view of their specialness compared to other human beings. Instead of feeling good about themselves, they feel better than everyone else.”

May 14, 2011

“Fair trade” coffee may make you feel virtuous, but it harms poor coffee producers

Filed under: Africa, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:34

Lots of people are scrupulous about selecting coffee that boasts that it’s “Fair Trade”, implying that other coffee is less ethical and more damaging to third world economies. This may be a dangerous misconception:

Saturday, on World Fair Trade Day, we have something else to feel guilty about. That fair-trade cup of coffee we savour may not only fail to ease the lot of poor farmers, it may actually help to impoverish them, according to a study out recently from Germany’s University of Hohenheim.

The study, which followed hundreds of Nicaraguan coffee farmers over a decade, concluded that farmers producing for the fair-trade market “are more often found below the absolute poverty line than conventional producers.

“Over a period of 10 years, our analysis shows that organic and organic-fair trade farmers have become poorer relative to conventional producers.”

How could an organization devoted to producing better results for poor coffee producers make their situation worse?

For starters, it discriminates against the very poorest of the world’s coffee farmers, most of whom are African, by requiring them to pay high certification fees. These fees — one of the factors that the German study cites as contributing to the farmers’ impoverishment — are especially perverse, given that the majority of Third World farmers are not only too poor to pay the certification fees, they’re also too poor to pay for the fertilizers and the pesticides that would disqualify coffee as certified organic.

Even worse, there’s also imposition of conditions on the farmers which violates local customs:

Most merchants of certified coffees are aware of these contradictions, but most won’t be aware of other problems in the certification business. For Third World farmers to qualify as fair-trade producers, and thus obtain higher prices for their coffee, farmers must join co-operatives. In some Third World societies, farmers readily accept the compromises of communal enterprise. In others, they balk. In patriarchal African societies, for example, the small coffee farm is the family business, its management a source of pride to the male head of the household. Joining a co-operative, and being told when and what and how to plant entails loss of dignity.

The cultural imperialist isn’t dead — he’s merely changed organizations.

April 20, 2011

“British private schools are really good. But they’re the only institutions left in Britain that are really world class”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:39

Niall Ferguson tries to find some nice things to say about Britain, as he packs up to head back to Harvard:

The first thing everyone always says about Niall Ferguson is that he’s far too glamorous to be an academic. So the surprise, when we meet, is his miserable little office — a bleak sliver of the London School of Economics, surely nowhere near sumptuous enough for the dashing professor. Lined with rows of empty bookshelves, it looks semi-vacated — but that’s because it sort of is. “I’ll be out of here in July,” Ferguson says quickly, with the air of a man for whom July cannot come soon enough. “This has been great fun, but . . . well, you know . . .”

The historian has been living back in the UK for almost a year, the first time since leaving for the US in 2002, where he now teaches at Harvard. From the outside, it’s looked like quite a successful stay; his Channel 4 series, Civilization, was broadly well-received, and the accompanying book is another dollop of vintage Ferguson history, devoted to the superiority of western civilisation. While here he’s also been advising Michael Gove on the history curriculum in secondary schools, and now that the Tories, of whom he approves, are back in charge of the country, he must have found the political climate more to his tastes. But when I ask him for the single biggest change he’s observed since leaving Britain, he replies with a kind of theatrical despair,

“I think the situation in British universities has gone from being parlous to being catastrophic. When you look at where British universities are going, and where Harvard’s going, you’d have to really love other things about England to take the hit.”

January 19, 2011

Hollywood gets exposed to “the nihilism of the British way”

Filed under: Britain, Humour, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:55

Did you watch the Golden Globes awards the other night? I didn’t, but I rather enjoyed watching Ricky Gervais do his introduction (courtesy of YouTube and literally hundreds of contributors). It may be one of the larger gaps between image and reality . . . the way Americans think Brits talk and how they slag one another off:

Anyone from anywhere can be cruel, anyone from anywhere can be witty, but there is something particularly British about cruel wit. John Lennon, with his withering remarks about Ringo Starr (“Not even the best drummer in The Beatles”) and the avant-garde (“French for bullshit”), had it. Writers past (Evelyn Waugh) and present (AA Gill) have it. George Osborne, the chancellor of the exchequer, has it, and gets into political scrapes when he flaunts it.

The anything-goes approach applies as much to everyday conversation as it does to comedy, where the subject of British irreverence has been analysed to death (and where America has plenty of acid-tongued geniuses itself). It feels natural to those of us who grew up with it, but British banter — the playfully barbed conversational style adopted by groups of friends in bars, offices and even classrooms up and down the country — can baffle and perturb foreigners. It is especially jarring when set against the popular image of Britain as a more decorous and civil place than most. Even tamer badinage in this country can, to a foreign ear, sound like enmity. The moment the ice is truly broken between two newly acquainted Britons is when one teases the other about something. Reginald D Hunter, an American comedian who does most of his work over here, says Britain is the only country where people will introduce you to a friend by saying “This is my mate Barry, he’s a bit of a twat.”

America is a land of Regency etiquette in comparison. So much so that it pays any Briton to be a bit more mindful of what he says and how he says it when enjoying the company of Americans (with the exception of fervently Anglophile Americans who, judging by friends of mine who fit that description, are caustic conversationalists). The rules are just different. For example, the c-word, which in Britain has lost much of its toxicity, remains a no-no.

January 12, 2011

“Tiger mother”: Chinese-style parenting

Filed under: China, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:38

If you think typical western parenting styles have not served children well, you might be interested in Amy Chua’s new book:

The Tiger, Chua explains, is “the living symbol of strength and power”, inspiring fear and respect. And as a “Tiger mother” herself, she assumed the absolute right to dictate her children’s activities and demand rigorous academic standards of them at all times, ridiculing them if necessary to spur them on to greater efforts.

Her children were never allowed to attend a sleepover, have a playdate, watch TV or choose their own extracurricular activities. They were also expected to be top in every subject (except gym and drama) and never get anything other than A-grades — because, Chua explains, Chinese parents believe it is their responsibility to ensure their children’s academic achievement above everything else.

Chua argues that western parents. with their emphasis on nurturing their children’s self-esteem and allowing free expression, have set their children up to accept mediocrity. “Western parents are concerned about their children’s psyches. Chinese parents aren’t. They assume strength, not fragility, and as a result they behave very differently,” she says. If their child doesn’t achieve perfect exam results, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because he or she didn’t work hard enough. “That’s why the solution to substandard performance is always to excoriate, punish and shame the child,” Chua says. And it is crucial for a mother to have the “fortitude” to override her children’s preferences, because to enjoy anything you have to be good at it, to be good at it you have to work, and children on their own never wish to work, she adds.

Update: Barbara Kay disagrees with Chua about the need to oppress your children to get them to excel:

This article and the book will spark furious discussion in the media. Coincidentally, in today’s Post, Dan Gardner’s column, “From Haiti to Harvard, culture matters,” bolsters the idea that culture is the single greatest predictor for academic success, and it is well worth reading in tandem with “Why Chinese mothers are superior.” He is right, of course, even though political correctness forbids us to say so, and even though Ms Chua’s extreme methods are unnecessary, as the Jewish experience — high expectations, high sensitivity to children’s psychic needs — proves.

It’s too bad Ms Chua’s extremism will become the focus of interest. The larger issue is worthy of respectful attention. As Gardner notes, the reason Asian students are so wildly disproportionately represented in universities (3% of the population, about 25% on campus) is because they came from homes in which “Chinese mothers” ruled the roost. It isn’t racism to say so.

Update, 23 January: Lawrence Solomon thinks the threat of “Tiger Mothers” is overstated:

The statistics seem to bear her out — Asians disproportionately make it to elite schools in the West — they represent 5% of the U.S. population but 20% of the student body at Ivy League schools, for example. No one can but marvel at the uniformly successful students turned out by the “tenacious practice, practice, practice” and “rote repetition” that she considers “crucial for excellence.”

But such statistics don’t tell the whole story. In truth, Chinese Mothers fare poorly in achieving excellence compared with western mothers, even western mothers burdened by political correctness.

[. . .]

Practice and rote learning have their limits. While imposing single-minded discipline on children will dramatically raise test scores and technical proficiency, and for most children may represent the best strategy for accomplishment and satisfaction, it can come at the cost of curbing the creativity necessary for true excellence. Chinese Mothers make great moms, as evidenced by the unusual cohesiveness of the Chinese family: Chinese kids clearly understand whatever berating they absorb as the tough love intended. Chua is justified in saying western parents are doing their underperforming kids no favours in failing to confront them.

But Western parents retain the edge in producing the next generation of creators — those whose breakthroughs will cure cancer or supplant the Internet. Here, too, Chua may be pointing to the right balance in her personal life, by choosing as her husband and father of her children someone who is anything but single-minded. Jed Rubenfeld, an American Jew determined to avoid a career in academia, waffled as a student, starting with philosophy and psychology at Princeton, switching to acting at Julliard, then moving to law at Harvard before accepting an academic position at Yale, where he is now professor and assistant dean of law.

Update, 2 February: Bryan Caplan (who has an upcoming book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids) addresses the downside of the Tiger Mother approach:

No wonder Chua confesses that, “For the first few weeks after Lulu’s decision [to radically reduce her musical practice time], I wandered around the house like person who’d lost their mission, their reason for living.” If I’d lived through thousands of hours of drudgery and cruelty for nothing, I’d be despondent, too.

But hasn’t all the musical practice indelibly shaped Chua’s children’s characters? Highly unlikely. Behavioral genetics finds roughly zero effect of parents on personality. And contrary to teachers’ fantasies about changing their students’ lives, learning is highly specific. Practicing X makes you better at X — and little else. Furthermore, the effects of environmental intervention erode over time — that’s fade-out for you. Chua seems to know this on some level: She favorably quotes a music teacher who says that, “Every day you don’t practice is a day that you’re getting worse.”

But all social science aside, Chua’s own life history raises severe doubts about the character-shaping power of mastering an instrument. Yes, she practiced piano as a child, but not to excellence. And what became of her? She became a Yale professor and best-selling author anyway!

In the most insightful passage in Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, cost-benefit analysis finally makes an appearance:

Why torture yourself and your child? What’s the point? If your child doesn’t like something — hates it — what good is forcing her to do it?

But Chua immediately represses her thought crime: “As a Chinese mother I could never give in to that way of thinking.” My response: You can and should give in, because this way of thinking is true. Cost-benefit analysis is not a Western prejudice. “Give up when the costs exceed the benefits” is one of the universally-valid maxims that allows millions of Chinese businesses to survive and thrive. Why shouldn’t Chinese mothers use it too?

January 10, 2011

QotD: Geeks and Hackers defined

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:29

One of the interesting things about being a participant-observer anthropologist, as I am, is that you often develop implicit knowledge that doesn’t become explicit until someone challenges you on it. The seed of this post was on a recent comment thread where I was challenged to specify the difference between a geek and a hacker. And I found that I knew the answer. Geeks are consumers of culture; hackers are producers.

Thus, one doesn’t expect a “gaming geek” or a “computer geek” or a “physics geek” to actually produce games or software or original physics — but a “computer hacker” is expected to produce software, or (less commonly) hardware customizations or homebrewing. I cannot attest to the use of the terms “gaming hacker” or “physics hacker”, but I am as certain as of what I had for breakfast that computer hackers would expect a person so labeled to originate games or physics rather than merely being a connoisseur of such things.

[. . .]

All hackers are, almost by definition, geeks — but the reverse is not true.

Eric S. Raymond, “Geeks, hackers, nerds, and crackers: on language boundaries”, Armed and Dangerous, 2011-01-09

January 1, 2011

QotD: The end of nerd subculture

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:14

That was the year the final issue of Watchmen came out, in October. After that, it seemed like everything that was part of my otaku world was out in the open and up for grabs, if only out of context. I wasn’t seeing the hard line between “nerds” and “normals” anymore. It was the last year that a T-shirt or music preference or pastime (Dungeons & Dragons had long since lost its dangerous, Satanic, suicide-inducing street cred) could set you apart from the surface dwellers. Pretty soon, being the only person who was into something didn’t make you outcast; it made you ahead of the curve and someone people were quicker to befriend than shun. Ironically, surface dwellers began repurposing the symbols and phrases and tokens of the erstwhile outcast underground.

Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Toad the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python riff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at Bennigan’s. Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun. The Lord of the Rings used to be ours and only ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books. Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the One Ring would be sold as bling.

The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet. Everyone considers themselves otaku about something — whether it’s the mythology of Lost or the minor intrigues of Top Chef. American Idol inspires — if not in depth, at least in length and passion — the same number of conversations as does The Wire. There are no more hidden thought-palaces — they’re easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages with thousands of fans. And I’m not going to bore you with the step-by-step specifics of how it happened. In the timeline of the upheaval, part of the graph should be interrupted by the words the Internet. And now here we are.

Patton Oswalt, “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die”, Wired, 2010-12-27

December 16, 2010

Japan tries to restrict adult-oriented manga

Filed under: Economics, Japan, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Having solved all other problems, the Japanese government is now attempting to impose stricter controls on the thriving Manga book industry:

A battle has erupted between the normally placid manga community and Tokyo’s conservative governor over a new law that heavily restricts sales in the city of manga comic books with what the ordinance calls “extreme” depictions of sex.

The brouhaha has become so big that even Prime Minister Naoto Kan is attempting to bridge the divide between the industry, producer of one of Japan’s most cherished cultural exports, and Tokyo’s metropolitan government. A group of manga artists and publishers has said it will boycott Tokyo’s massive International Anime Fair in March.

That threat could hobble sales of the country’s beloved comic books. As Japan’s economic star continues to be eclipsed by China, cultural exports remain one of Japan’s few globally robust sectors.

Of course, there’s more to the story than the headlines indicate, as not all manga produced finds markets overseas:

The vast majority of manga in Japan aren’t pornographic, with internationally known titles such as “Dragon Ball,” “Naruto” and “Sailor Moon” attracting global readers of all ages.

But what sets Japan apart from much of the West is that here it is considered socially acceptable to read manga depicting sexually explicit acts. It is common to sit next to a suit-wearing Japanese commuter who is nonchalantly paging through cartoon sex scenes. Pornographic magazines with women dressed as Japanese schoolgirls on the cover are available at convenience stores around Tokyo, without anything obscuring the cover.

The only concession is that such publications are labeled “adult-only” and sealed shut, preventing browsers from peeking inside.

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