Quotulatiousness

March 29, 2025

“Spending time with his family” palled remarkably quickly for Liberal minister Sean Fraser

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

Now that we’re officially in an election period, The Line has revived their “Bullshit Bulletin”, covering what it says on the label: the obvious bull crap excreted by all the parties during the campaign. One of the easier targets in this week’s roundup was a Liberal cabinet minister who announced he would not be seeking re-election as he felt he needed to spend more time with his family, only to change his mind once the writ dropped:

The 2026 Poutine
The Line.

You might remember the now-former member of the Trudeau cabinet announcing some months ago that he was leaving politics to spend more time with his young family. “Today is a decision I’ve made for personal reasons”, he said, “because my kids aren’t getting any younger and deserve to have their dad around”. You might also remember the number of Liberals who rushed to his defence, insisting that he was totally sincere and that the then-grim fortunes pollsters were forecasting for the Liberals had nothing to do with Fraser deciding to tap out. He’s a family man, we were told. That’s all this is. Leaving politics to spend more time with the family.

Well, anyway, he’s decided to run again.

It’s all about public service, you see. It’s about standing up for Canada.

Sure. Just like bowing out was all about his kids.

Fraser insists he and Carney had a talk and he’s been assured he’ll be able to spend more time with his family, which is a weird thing for someone who’s experienced to pretend to believe — elected political office is an intensely consuming job, and the only people who succeed in it, as Fraser has, are the kind of people prone to being consumed. So we call bullshit on that. But, to be honest, we probably wouldn’t have even mentioned this if the circumstances weren’t so blatantly egregious. It’s low-level bullshit. Other Liberals changed their minds, too. As Liberal polling fortunes have improved, we saw Anita Anand, for example, reverse her earlier decision to bow out and decide to run again. And we didn’t really comment on that, because, well, it’s her choice.

What’s different about Fraser’s decision, though, is that clearing the way for him to run again meant dumping the man who had stepped forward to run in his place. Graham Murray had been declared to be the Liberal candidate in the Central Nova riding just a few days ago, and had even begun to campaign. He had signs and an office. The announcement of his candidacy is now a dead link on the Liberal party’s website.

Now you see it:

Now you don’t:

So yeah. Murray was the guy. He’d probably told his family and friends and everything. I’m sure they’d said nice things about him. And then Fraser — apparently tired of hanging out with his family after a solid few months, and having duly concluded his kids did not in fact deserve having their dad around — glanced at the latest polls and had the poor son of a bitch who stepped forward to run in his seat shoved into a disintegration chamber so that Fraser could come back.

Look, we’re not here to shed any crocodile tears for a political candidate being roughly handled by their party. But in this case, we still can’t help but feel some human sympathy for Murray. The poor guy. This is like campaigning to get a job, being told you’ve got the gig, and then showing up on your second day of work and being told you’re fired because the last guy wants his job back.

March 28, 2025

QotD: Prosopography

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

In the History Biz, prosopography is the study of quasi-familial relationships, a kind of “collective biography”. It’s different from genealogy, which studies direct lineal descent — So-and-So begot Wossname, like in the Bible. Your classic prosopography is Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which you still see Leftards on the Internet hauling out all the time, though of course they don’t know where it comes from (or that modern historians, who are far more flamingly Leftist than Beard ever dreamed of being, consider it largely discredited).

Prosopography is vital in the study of Classical Antiquity, especially the Roman Republic. The Romans, as I’m sure you recall, practiced “patronage and clientage” — a man’s clients were often in a very real way more important than his biological family. Prove that Wossname was So-and-So’s client, and you know a lot about Wossname, even if you can’t find it in the archaeological record, and what you do know about him from the record takes on a whole new meaning. For instance, under Gaius Marius (et al.), the patron / client relationship got extended to the army — coteries of officers and NCOs personally loyal to their commanding general, not to the State — and there’s your Fall of the Roman Republic.

Kremlinology required something similar. Since the important levels of the Apparat all went to the same Higher Party Schools in Moscow, the fact that So-and-So was Wossname’s roommate for a few semesters was potentially of much greater importance than anything So-and-So did as the People’s Commissar of Whatever. He might’ve looked like a real up-and-comer based on his early promotion to a prestige post, but based on his prosopography an experience Kremlinologist might deduce that this was just horse-trading — someone high up in the Politburo owed Wossname’s father a favor for something back in the Great Patriotic War, and so this was payback; Wossname wasn’t going any higher than that.

It’s even more important in a completely ideologized society like the USSR. No Roman client would ever go so far as to openly stab his patron in the back — no one in his society would ever trust him again; he’d get shanked the very minute he donned the purple — but a Roman could have a change of heart. He might get religion, of either the philosophical (Epicureanism, Stoicism) or the actual cultic sort. This would significantly change the patron / client relationship. But in a society like the USSR — ostentatiously dedicated to the World Proletarian Revolution — ideology imposed some hard limits …

Severian, “Alt Thread: A Brief Bit of Brandonology”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-01.

February 19, 2025

QotD: The inborn bias of all mankind

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

“I would strangle everyone in this room if it somehow prolonged my son’s life.” That’s what I blurted into a microphone during a panel discussion on ethics. I was laughing when I said it, but the priest sitting next to me turned sharply in horror and the communist sitting next to him raised her hand to her throat and stared daggers at me.

Why was I on a panel with a priest and a revolutionary communist? Long story — not very interesting: we were debating the future of ethics with special attention to the role of religion. The interesting part, however, is that at some point, after we all shook hands like adults and I was on my way home, I realized that I meant it — I would choke them all. Well, of course, one can’t be entirely sure that one’s actions will follow one’s intentions. The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that. But, given some weird Twilight Zone scenario wherein all their deaths somehow saved my son’s life, I was at least hypothetically committed. The caveman intentions were definitely there.

The utilitarian demand — that I should always maximize the greatest good for the greatest number — had seemed reasonable to me in my 20s but made me laugh after my son was born. And my draconian bias is not just the testosterone-fueled excesses of the male psyche. Mothers can be aggressive lionesses when it comes to their offspring. While they are frequently held up as icons of selfless nurturing love, that’s mostly because we offspring — the ones holding them up as icons — are the lucky recipients of that biased love. Try getting between a mammal mother and her kid, and you will see natural bias at its brutal finest.

Stephen T. Asma, “Confucius Got It Right: Giving in to ‘Bias’ is Part of Living an Ethical Life”, Quillette, 2020-02-01.

December 25, 2024

James Lileks on Christmas traditions

Filed under: Food, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

My family doesn’t have a lot of traditions that have carried on, although we do still do our big family get-together at our house on Christmas Eve, so I guess that counts. Here’s James Lileks‘ take on the tradition question at this festive time of the year:

Christmas gifts under the tree.
Photo by Kelvin Kay via Wikimedia Commons.

There are two views of Christmas traditions.

1. They are the jewels of the past, polished by time, handed down from loving ancestors whose memory we e’er keep warm and and alive when we do as they did, eat as they ate, and raise our new wine in the glasses of yore. Thus do civilizations maintain, and remember.

2. Traditions are the cold hands of the dead past punching through the coffin-lid of yesteryear and bursting up through the loam to reach out and smother the newborn ideas of today, because that’s not how Grandma did it.

I’m very much in the first camp, stamping around like Tevye in the opening number of Fiddler on the Roof. But I share his perplexity some times. Why do we do this? I don’t know. I don’t know why we always had Swedish Meatballs on Christmas Eve. Perhaps that was Grandpa’s favorite, and my Mom made it after he passed to remind herself of him. If so, cool; my daughter, who never met the old man, experiences a little of the remarkable old farmer – especially since I insist that she wash it down with a warmish Grain Belt and smoke an Old Gold afterwards.

“But I don’t want to! They smell and they make me cough!”

“It’s tradition. Your grandfather would be delighted to know you enjoy the rich, apple-fresh flavor of an Old Gold.”

Ahhhh, kids, it’s hard to get them interested in history. Even harder to get them to knock the ash in the coffee-cup saucer. My point is that we are not having Swedish Meatballs this year, because Daughter wants to make some German dish. It’s a roll of pounded meat layered with mustard and pickles. (Not to be confused with the German meal of mustard and pickles wrapped up in hammered meat; that one has more syllables.) I have never been impressed with German food, but this dish has the promise to provide a piquancy missing in Swedish meatballs, which seem like something that answers the question “what if the telephone dial tone was a flavor?”

October 7, 2024

The demographic impact of modern cities

Filed under: Education, Health, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lorenzo Warby touches on some of the social and demographic issues that David Friedman discussed the other day:

US Birth Rates from 1909-2008. The number of births per thousand people in the United States. The red segment is known as the Baby Boomer period. The drop in 1970 is due to excluding births to non-residents.
Graph by Saiarcot895 via Wikimedia Commons

Cities are demographic sinks. That is, cities have higher death rates than fertility rates.

For much of human history, cities have been unhealthy places to live. This is no longer true: cities have higher average life expectancies than rural areas. But they are still demographic sinks, for cities collapse fertility rates.

The problem is not that more women have no children, or only one child, making it to adulthood. Such women have always existed, though their share of the population has gone up across recent decades.

The key problem is the collapse in the demographic “tail” of large families. Cities are profoundly antipathetic to large families, and have always been so. This is particularly true of apartment cities — suburbs are somewhat more amenable to large families, though not enough to make up for the urbanisation effect.

While modern cities do not have slaves and household servants who were blocked from reproducing as ancient cities did, various aspects of modern technology have fertility-suppressing effects. Cars that presume a maximum of three children, for instance. An effect that is worsened by compulsory baby car-seats. Or ticketing and accommodation that presumes two children or less. There is also the deep problems of modern online dating. Plus the effects that endocrine disrupters and falling testosterone may be having.

These effects also extend to rural populations: falling fertility in rural populations is far more of a mystery than falling fertility in urban populations. How much declining metabolic health plays in all this is unclear. Indeed, futurist Samo Burja is correct, we do not really understand the “social technology” of human breeding.

Be that as it may, cities as demographic sinks is a continuation of patterns that go back to the first cities.

Matters at the margin

There are factors at the margin known to make a difference. Religious folk breed more than secular folk, though that is in part because rural people are more religious and city folk more secular.

Educating women reduces fertility. This is, in part, an urbanisation effect, as more education is available in cities. It is also an opportunity cost effect — there is more to do in cities, both paid and unpaid.

Education increases the general opportunity cost of motherhood, by expanding women’s opportunities. This also makes moving to cities more attractive. Women having more career opportunities reduces the relative attractiveness of men as marriage partners, reducing the marriage rate.

Strong cultural barriers against children outside marriage can reduce the fertility rate, by largely restricting motherhood to married women. This makes the fertility rate more dependant on the marriage rate.

Educating women makes children more expensive, as educated mothers have educated children. Part of the patterns that economist Gary Becker analysed.

October 5, 2024

David Friedman on falling birth rates

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

In the west, generally speaking, female employment and economic power has been rising and birth rates have been falling, except among religious minorities. David Friedman provides some explanations:

“Tetra Pak® – Housewife at the dairy counter in a Swedish shop” by Tetra Pak is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

One possible explanation is changes in norms and legal rules that make mate search more difficult. An example is a norm against dating fellow employees and a stronger norm against dating someone who has authority over you or you have some authority over.

For many people, their job is the only context in which they routinely interact with lots of other people, the best environment for mate search. The interaction often provides a way of evaluating someone for characteristics such as honesty and competence as well as compatibility, much harder to do in the context of dating, harder still in computer dating. It works better for people who not only are fellow employees but are actually working together, which often means one just above the other in the office hierarchy.

The same issue arises in the university context. Undergraduates are free to date each other — mate search is arguably one of the main functions of college. Junior faculty members, likely to be unmarried, are commonly not supposed to date students, even students not taking classes from them, certainly not students who are. I am not sure what current norms are for graduate student/undergraduate interaction, expect graduate student/faculty romance to be at least somewhat frowned upon, especially if the faculty member has some authority over the student which is likely if they are in the same field, the context in which they are most likely to get know each other.

Another cause for declining birth rates might be changing norms of courtship. I have not been part of that market for over forty years but I gather from what younger people say online that many men believe that making advances that do not turn out to be wanted is not only embarrassing but dangerous, that they risk being accused of harassment or some related offense. In the student context, many men believe that if a romantic partner changes her mind she can get him into a great deal of trouble by taking advantage of a college disciplinary process heavily biased against men. I do not know to what degree that belief is true but many men believe it is, which could be expected to discourage courtship.

Along related lines:

    Also, when I was working for a big time international consulting firm, they tried to come out with a formal rule that said that you were allowed to ask out a co-worker, but only one time. If they said no, you could never ask again. Apparently the Italians howled with laughter and insisted that if this rule was enforced in Italy, no one would ever have kids, as the typical Italian courtship approach involves like a dozen rejections before ultimately the woman finally gives in. (GoneAnon)

That cannot be the full explanation since Italian birth rates are down too. Since birth rates are down in all or almost all developed countries and many less developed ones, it is worth investigating how widespread the relevant norms are.

Housewife Becoming a Low Status Profession

For a very long time, the default system for producing and rearing children was a married couple, with the husband producing income and the wife in charge of running the household and rearing the children. Over recent decades, the woman’s role in that division of labor has become a low status activity, lower status than making a living in the marketplace, much lower than professional success.1 Being an unmarried adult woman used to be, in most contexts, low status, on the presumption that if she could have caught a man she would have. At present, in much of western society, that has reversed — being a married housewife is lower status than being an employed single woman.

    …arguments from the stay-at-home moms I know, who say people are constantly giving them grief about it, and who are often looking for some part-time make-work job they can take just so people will stop giving them grief about being a stay-at-home mother (Scott Alexander)

It is possible for a married woman to have both a job and children or for an unmarried woman to have children, but the former is more difficult than for a full time housewife, the latter much more difficult.

August 28, 2024

QotD: NFL team owners

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

It’s probably also worth noting that the new Vikings owner is very big on family. By my count, [new Minnesota Vikings majority owner] Zygi [Wilf] used the word “family” 1,068 times during the 45-minute interview session. He mentioned his family, the Vikings family, his partners’ families, local families and the family business.

Asked about meeting the other NFL owners for the first time, Wilf said — you guessed it — they are like a family. Which I can see, particularly when I envision the Corleone family.

Tom Powers, “No news is good snooze with Wilf”, St. Paul Pioneer Press, 2005-06-17.

June 20, 2024

The “Idiot Nephew Theory” of show business management

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

Ted Gioia recalls his hopes of getting into the entertainment industry after graduation:

The story of how I became a strategy consultant is shameful.

I was a student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and needed a job after graduation. I wanted to work in the music or entertainment industries — but I soon learned this was an impossible dream.

They didn’t want me. And they didn’t want my classmates either.

Hundreds of companies came to our business school to recruit talent, and they included most of the leading US corporations. So I talked with everybody — Coca Cola, Morgan Stanley, Atari, Procter & Gamble, you name it.

But no record label or movie studio ever showed up. They didn’t even send job listings.

Can you guess why?

I asked around on campus and was told the following (off the record):

    Come on, Ted. You will never see the entertainment business recruit here. Those folks are not looking for business talent.

    They give the choice jobs to their family members — the idiot nephew gets hired, not an MBA. Even better if it’s an idiot son.

    And if there are other openings? Well … You’ve heard about the casting couch, haven’t you? Let me give you a hint — that couch isn’t just for auditioning the cast.

    But you wouldn’t want a job there even if they gave you one. When time comes for a promotion, the drooling idiot nephew moves up — not you.

I’ve never shared that story before — because I know how people inside the music business hate hearing it.

And maybe it’s not a fair story.

All I can say is that I found this advice very helpful. I stopped planning on a career in the music business. And I also developed a very useful theory to explain why record labels are so bad at making strategic decisions.

I call it the “Idiot Nephew Theory”:

    THE IDIOT NEPHEW THEORY: Whenever a record label makes a strategic decision, it picks the option that the boss’s idiot nephew thinks is best.

And what does the idiot nephew decide? That’s easy — they always do whatever the company lawyer recommends.

Maybe this theory is wrong. All I can say is that it helps me predict events in the entertainment industry with a surprising degree of accuracy.

I always operate on the assumption that there’s no business strategy in the music or movie business — only legal maneuvering.

Years later, when the music business got totally reamed by tech companies — a phase we’re still living through, by the way — I wasn’t surprised in the least. The record labels respond to every new music technology by litigating, but whenever they encounter a company with more legal clout than them (Apple or Google/YouTube, for example), they simply gave up.

In the future, you can test this theory yourself. You will see that it possesses great explanatory power.

June 17, 2024

Farm Camp for city slickers

Filed under: Business, Education, Food, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Larissa Phillips explains the kind of things city children (and their parents) learn when they stay at her family’s small farm for a week or a weekend:

Here are some things I have taught the kids who visit my farm: animals don’t care about your feelings, and sometimes we kill them to eat them. It doesn’t matter how desperately you want to find more eggs, the hens don’t lay on demand. Tomatoes aren’t ripe in June. The stalls aren’t going to clean themselves. Cuts, scrapes, and stings aren’t really a big deal. And there will always be poop.

I’m often struck by what city kids don’t know when they turn up at the education program I run for families on our 15-acre hobby farm — Honey Hollow Farm — in the Upper Hudson Valley. As a longtime urbanite, I get it. I lived in Brooklyn for 15 years before my husband and I moved upstate in 2010 with our two young children and one goal: start a farm. We kept horses and ponies for fun and raised poultry and sheep — and sometimes pigs — for food.

It was hard. Slaughtering animals we’d raised since they were babies was wrenching. Breeding and birthing those babies was dicey, too. But these experiences toughened us up. Working with animals and the land and the seasons was grounding — and the best antidote to anxiety I’d ever found. And most of it was fun.

I wanted to share this outlook with other families, even if it was just for a weekend. So at the start of the pandemic, I opened our guest cottage — and set up an informal curriculum to teach escaping urbanites what I’d learned.

I called it farm camp.

We host one family at a time, all through the year, in a renovated barn apartment overlooking the pony pasture. Most come for a week, some for a weekend. Every morning I’ll take a handful of kids, sometimes as young as three, through a two-hour, hands-on class on animal care, life, death, poop. All of them have to do some real farmwork.

There is a lot to learn. I don’t expect a child to know how long it takes for a chick to hatch, or why the roosters are always jumping on top of the hens. But I am often surprised by some of the straightforward things they don’t know how to do. Like how to pull a wagon around a corner, hold a shovel, climb over a gate, make a braid, or tie a knot.

Don’t get me wrong — I love offering explicit instructions on the most mundane tasks, then standing back and cheering when a kid does it independently. But two generations ago, these skills would have been common knowledge. For most of human history, the proportion of the world’s population living in cities was below 5 percent. It’s at 56 percent now. By the time today’s toddlers reach adulthood, it is expected that 80 percent of humans will live in urban areas.

Overprotected as they are, a lot of city kids are missing out on so many important encounters with material reality: with death or danger or manual labor. These encounters can be unpleasant, even painful. It’s understandable that we want to save our children from them. But they lose something essential when we do.

Most urbanites have a very sanitized — in fact, Disneyfied — view of rural life and especially life on a farm. It can be traumatic to discover that all the animals aren’t like you saw in the cutesy cartoons as a preschooler …

May 16, 2024

QotD: Modern parenting in open-concept houses

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

… our era does seem to be peculiarly marked by careless design. Few of the men who built middle-class versions of the Craftsman bungalow or Colonial Revival in the early twentieth century were trained architects, and they often adapted or simplified their designs to cut costs, and yet they somehow managed to get their proportions right. They might have used fewer columns than the more expensive examples of their styles, but what columns they did employ were the right shape, while today’s are liable to be too skinny (if Classically-inspired) or fat and stubby (if Craftsman). I won’t pretend I have an explanation for this — it seems a small aesthetic piece of a much broader societal failure, just one more case of chucking tradition out the window. Architect Léon Krier suggests that once the language of traditional design had been intentionally destroyed by architecture schools, it was very hard to recreate or rediscover because our new and exciting construction materials do not punish us for our errors the way wood, stone, and lime do. (“Even a genius,” he writes, “cannot build a lasting mistake out of nature’s materials.”)

But the real crime of most new construction isn’t the exterior details. It’s inside, and it’s walls. They’re missing.

Open floorplans are bad. They’re bad for entertaining and they’re bad for families. Sure, that photo looks great (if you’re allergic to color and texture) and the HGTV hosts love ’em, but imagine actually living in that room with children. Seriously, just try: how fast are the cushions coming off those couches? How fast are your neutrals drowned beneath colorful toys and backpacks? (Unless you’re inflicting the same sad beige color scheme on your children.) How much visual clutter can a room of that size accumulate, and how much help will a small child need just figuring out where to start tidying up?

How many times do you have to ask the monster truck vs. dinosaur battle by the fireplace to pipe down so you can talk to Daddy over here by the stove, for Pete’s sake?

There’s a school of American parenting that says every moment with your child should be spent intensively nurturing his or her precious individual development. At lunch, for instance, you should make eye contact with your ten-month-old and describe the texture and flavor of each food (perhaps in French!) while Baby carefully grinds it into her hair. Your child’s quiet drawing time will surely be enhanced by his mother hovering at his elbow: “Tell me about your picture, honey! Uh-huh, and how do we think the villagers feel about Gigantor devouring them? Gosh, you sure gave him some big teeth!” An open floorplan is a tremendous boon to this sort of parenting: your child is always visible, so you can always be engaged.

It is completely impossible to raise more than maybe two children this way.

I don’t know which way the causation goes — do parents who were already inclined to be a little more laid-back and hands-off find their lives have room for more kids, or does sheer number of children force you to alter your tactics? — but either way, small families and intensive parenting go together, and they live in an open-concept house with 1.64 children.

Walls and doors, on the other hand, are God’s greatest gift to large families. Of course it is wonderful to be together. It’s important to have spaces that will fit everyone. (We were very sad when it was no longer possible to pile everyone into a king-size bed, even with elbows.) But it’s just as important to be able to be apart: because your little brother is practicing piano while you’re trying to do algebra, or a blanket fort combines poorly with an elaborate board game, or just because LEGO spaceships are a noisy business and your mother is reading to your sisters. (Or, God forbid, reading a book herself.)

Because at the end of the day, houses are just the stage where life happens. This isn’t to say that the stage-dressing is irrelevant — there is real worth and value to surrounding ourselves with order and beauty, and understanding how your house or neighborhood got to be that way can illuminate new things about the world. But ultimately, what matters most is how you make it a home.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: A Field Guide to American Houses, by Virginia Savage McAlester”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-12-05.

January 7, 2024

Evelyn Waugh’s horrible family

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte explains why Evelyn Waugh drank:

Happy New Year! How were your holidays? Were you as festive as undergraduate Evelyn Waugh kicking off his Christmas break in 1924?

    Then I went to Oxford. Drove to 31 St Aldates where I found an enormous orgy in progress. Billy and I unearthed a strap and whipped Tony. Everyone was hideously drunk except, strangely enough, myself. After a quiet day in cinemas, I had a dinner party of Claude, Elmley, Terence, Roger Hollis and a poor drunk called MacGregor. I arrived quite blind after a great number of cocktails at the George with Claude. Eventually the dinner broke up and Claude, Rogers Hollis and I went off for a pub crawl which after sundry indecorous adventures ended up at the Hypocrites where another blind was going on. Poor Mr McGregor turned up after having lain with a woman but almost immediately fell backwards downstairs. I think he was killed. Next day I drank all morning from pub to pub and invited to lunch with me at the New Reform John Sutro, Roger Hollis, Claude and Alfred Duggan. I ate no lunch but drank solidly and was soon in the middle of a bitter quarrel with the President — a preposterous person called Cotts — who expelled me from the club. Alfred and I then drank double brandies until I could not walk. He carried me to Worcester where I fell out of the window then relapsed into unconsciousness punctuated with severe but well directed vomitings. On Wednesday I lunched with Robert Byran at the New Reform and the man Cotts tried to throw me out again. Next day I lunched with Hugh and drank with him all the afternoon and sallied out with him fighting drunk at tea time when we drank at the New Reform till dinner… Next day, feeling deathly ill, I returned to London having spent two months’ wages. I had to dine with Alex, Richard Greene, Julia Strachey … and then back to Richard’s home for a drink. …

[…]

I picked up Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (2004), several weeks ago. I’ve been enjoying it so much that I’m rationing it, reading about ten pages at a time to make it last.

Alexander Waugh is a music writer and biographer, former opera critic at the Evening Standard, son of novelist and Private Eye diarist Auberon Waugh, grandson of the aforementioned Evelyn, the titan of English letters whose brother, Alec, and father, Arthur, were also reasonably famous writers. The book is about the interpersonal relations of these three generations of men who produced about 180 books among them. And it’s wild. These are hugely and incorrigibly flawed people. Often horrible to one another (also to outsiders but they save their best for kin). They are in equal parts perverse and hilarious, and often brilliant, especially Evelyn. I can’t believe people ever behaved this way.

Undergraduates have never required reasons to binge drink, but you can’t read the opening chapters of Fathers and Sons without thinking Evelyn had special motivation. He was the second son of Arthur. His older brother, Alec, was “the firstling”, the “future head of the family”, their parents’ “darling lamb”, and mom and pop didn’t care who knew it, least of all Evelyn.

Arthur and his missus, Kate, had an “unbounded fascination for Alec”, who won all his school honours and was star of the cricket team. Arthur considered the boy a literal gift from God and believed that they could communicate telepathically. He would write him notes like: “I simply go about thinking of your love for me all the time”. Their relationship, writes Alexander, was “hot, clammy and compulsive”, and to the “objective eye their behavior might have resembled a pair of star-crossed teenage lovers”. Indeed, it was romantic in all but the physical sense — Arthur saved his sexual depredations for girls of tender age with whom he played “tickling games” (he also had a fetish involving young women and bicycles).

In addition to being second born, Evelyn made the mistake of being male. His parents had wanted a daughter; they consoled themselves by giving him an effeminate name and dressing him in bonnets and frills long beyond the standard of the day. He was said to be a “warm, bright. sweet-natured and affectionate child”, at least until an awareness of the family dynamic dawned. In Edwardian terms, he was treated as a bastard child by his legitimate parents. His possessions were hand-me-downs. He attended the less expensive school. When eleven-year-old Evelyn asked for a bicycle, his parents bought a bigger and better one for Alec. When Alec asked for a billiard table, space was found for it in Evelyn’s room. Despite winning prizes and becoming head of his house in school, and president of the debating society, and editor of the school magazine, Evelyn remained an afterthought and something of a nuisance in the minds of his Alec-obsessed parents.

Evelyn responded to his circumstances in a clever and self-protective fashion, defining himself against his brother and father. By adolescence, he had an inkling that he was smarter and funnier than both. They could keep their mawkish outpourings of emotion toward one another; he would be hard of head and sharp of tongue. By his early teen years, he was confiding to his diary that Arthur was a fat and “ineffably silly” Victorian sentimentalist. He considered both Alec and Arthur philistines. “Terrible man, my father”, Evelyn said to a schoolmaster. “He likes Kipling.”

To the extent that his parents thought about Evelyn, they were disturbed by his dark moods and lassitude, and intimidated by his cynical wit. Both Alec and Arthur were threatened by Evelyn as a potential literary rival. When Evelyn, in what was becoming a typical act of rebellion, ran up an expensive restaurant tab and had it sent to an outraged Arthur, Alec said: “You know father, if Evelyn turns out to be a genius, you and I might be made to look very foolish by making a fuss over ten pounds, seventeen and ninepence.”

So you can perhaps see how young Evelyn Waugh developed an enthusiasm for drink remarkable even in an undergrad, and why the rare characters killed in gruesome fashion in his fiction tended to be fathers.

November 24, 2023

It sometimes seems that the only thing that isn’t “violence” these days is actual violence

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

David Sedaris at The Free Press:

“Gen Z” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Words, we are now regularly reminded, are violence. So too is silence. I read not long ago that capitalism is violence, as is misgendering someone. Ignoring someone is violence, but so too is paying them attention. A friend recently called on one of her assistants to deliver a statistic during a business meeting and was later charged with “casual violence”. Apparently Deborah needed to give advance warning that she was going to ask a question, one that might possibly put her employee — someone who was well paid to know stuff and be able to spew it forth — on the spot.

Who are these hothouse flowers, all so easily and consistently wounded? People whose parents never hit them, that’s who. People who don’t know what real pain is, but still want to throw the word around. When I was a child, a slap across the face was too minor to qualify as “casual violence”. It was simply what you got for talking back or holding everyone up. It never hurt all that much; what stung was the swiftness of it, the surprise. Who knew my mother could move so fast, like someone belted in the martial arts. I don’t feel like it traumatized me to be knocked around a little. Blood was rarely drawn. No limbs were broken. Could my parents have made their point without resorting to violence? Probably, but it would have taken more time, and with six kids to dress and get out the door that was a precious commodity. I see parents now who worry they’re being abusive if they don’t spend at least an hour putting their child to bed. An hour! I said to my sister, Amy, “Do you remember ever once being tucked in? Can you imagine Mom and Dad reading to us, or singing? Can you imagine them kissing us?”

“Ugh,” she said. “Stop!”

And look at us! We’re fine. We can handle stuff. We never get offended by anything.

Our parents thought we were okay, at best, and I think that really helped us in the long run. Ask someone now if they have kids, and they’re pretty much guaranteed to use the word amazing, as in “I have an amazing six-year-old daughter.”

“Amazing because she just discovered a cure for herpes or because she speaks three words of Spanish,” I always want to ask. “I mean, just how low have you set that bar?”

One of the worst things that’s happened to us as a country is that people are having fewer children — 1.8 as opposed to five 50 years ago. Sure, it’s good for the environment — fewer people means less demand for resources. The problem is that single children receive a freakish amount of love and attention. Most graduate at least twelve times before leaving high school. Their every move is recorded and celebrated, and it gives them an outsize sense of their own importance.

The solution isn’t for every couple to start having five kids again, but maybe for one chosen couple to have five, and the other four couples to go without — either have a full litter you can’t pay that much attention to, or nothing at all.

If our schools are a mess it’s in large part due to these parents who think their kids are special, who get mad if you contradict their brilliance, if you give them a bad grade or, God forbid, try to take their phones away. Had one of my teachers told my mother that I was acting up in class, she’d have said, “Thank you so much for letting me know.” Then she’d have come to wherever I was — in front of the TV, or at the side of the TV making my way to the front of it — and slapped my sister Gretchen so hard her eyes would have crossed.

“What was that for?” Gretchen would have asked.

“Oops, wrong kid,” my mother would have said. Then she’d have slapped me twice as hard to make up for her mistake.

November 17, 2023

Rationing In Britain

Filed under: Britain, Food, History, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Imperial War Museums
Published 8 Jan 2010

An American commentator looks at the effects of rationing on the people of England in 1944. The film presents a “typical” family of four (housewife, engine-driver husband, factory-working daughter, schoolboy son) to illustrate the basic rationing system, the workings of “point” systems and other restrictions, and the difficulties the average family faced when eating “on the ration”.

Explore IWM’s film collection: https://film.iwmcollections.org.uk

September 26, 2023

“Passport Bros”

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

Few online people are less tuned-in to the mainsteam zeitgeist than me, so perhaps I’m once again one of the last people to be clued-in about “passport bros”. Here’s Janice Fiamengo‘s post on the “bros” and the women who apparently spend a lot of time criticizing them:

Female commentary on so-called Passport Bros is not hard to find on the internet: women are angry, contemptuous, and incredulous that men are looking for women overseas and encouraging other men to do the same — not for sex tourism (which feminists loved to criticize until they discovered that women are doing it too, in which case it is acceptable), but for a long-term relationship, including, in many cases, marriage and children. These men will partially or entirely relocate to the women’s home country in order to start a new, non-western (and non-feminist) life. The angry internet women claim not to care personally: let the losers go is their expressed attitude. Yet the sheer number and vehemence of their responses suggests they do care.

The angry commentary follows a standard pattern in which the women claim to know why a significant minority of men are giving up on western women as mates. The reason never has anything to do, of course, with faults in western women or their unrealistic expectations […]

Likewise, the reason never has anything to do with western divorce laws — in which a man can be ejected from his home, imprisoned, forced to undergo a psychiatric exam, fleeced, and deprived of his children by a grasping ex-wife — or with the fact that women are the ones who initiate divorce in upwards of 70% of cases (and are often applauded for doing so).

The reason has nothing to do with women’s openly expressed attitudes of superiority, resentment, and anti-male bigotry, which are rampant in western cultures, especially Anglophone ones. It has nothing to do with the #MeToo/Believe Women climate of baseless accusation that regularly sees men accused and disgraced purely on a woman’s say-so. It has nothing to do with the institutionalized discrimination of “equity” hiring that makes it difficult for men to find and advance in careers in order to be acceptably successful to the kind of women who now deride them for their failure.

According to the angry women online, men are leaving the west (particularly North America) to find partners because they aren’t good enough for western women. The men are allegedly “terrible, and don’t want to stop being terrible”, according to one gleefully irate commentator. Their only chance is with women so poor as to be grateful for a “terrible” man; in return, such women will have to “subject themselves to [his] advances”, according to another critic’s Victorian-style phrasing.

[…]

Many such women — protected by our pro-woman culture and deferred to by men terrified of female wrath — reach adulthood without ever having received any serious criticism. If and when they are criticized, their response is a howl of outrage and wounded self-regard. This is precisely what is happening in reaction to the Passport Bros.

Underneath the anger, there is perhaps a hint of fear. It’s not fear that men will leave the west in droves (they don’t see that happening yet, and neither do I), but it’s fear that men are not, after all, entirely under female control. Not yet, and maybe never. Some men are sick of the anti-male abuse and starting to do something about it. They are critically examining women’s characters and attitude; they’re drawing back from the acquiescence they’ve always been expected (and been willing) to give. Some are walking away and telling other men to do the same.

These women are used to dishing out the denunciation, reveling in justified grievance; they are infuriated to find that now they are the ones being judged and found wanting.

Don’t be that girl.

September 24, 2023

QotD: The composition of the polis

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

A polis is made up of households, called oikoi (singular: oikos), to the point that creating a new polis was called synoikismos (or synocism). The Greek there is συνοικισμóς, συν- (meaning “together”) and οἶκος giving the word a meaning something like “living together in one house” or “putting the houses together as one”. This was the word the Greeks used to describe the process by which a disparate set of tribes, villages and households came together to create a polis; Indeed Aristotle (Arist. Pol. 1253b) is explicit that the oikos is the smallest unit, the “atom” to use M.H. Hansen’s word, of the polis, not the individual.

So what is an oikos? Well that word is about as plastic as polis. Oikos can mean a house (as in a physical building), or it can mean a household (as in the family that dwells in that building) or it can mean all of the property of that household, and indeed Greek writers will use this word to mean all of these things, often in the same context (that is they shift freely between these linked meanings, not seeing them as fully distinct). Now as a “family” we should note that an oikos was rather more extensive than our sense of family (though rather less extensive than the Roman concept of a familia and a lot less extensive than a Roman gens; we’ll come to these in a later series): an oikos consisted of all of the people who lived together in a house, which generally meant the adult citizen male, his wife and dependents and also their enslaved workers. It that family had enslaved workers who did not live with them, they also generally counted as part of the oikos because they were understood as the property of it.

The creation of a polis meant merging all of these things together in a very literal way. In a physical sense the creation of a town core meant literally putting houses together, as a good part of the population might move to live in that town core (with their farms just outside the town in walking distance, remember: most of these poleis are very small). Indeed M.H. Hansen notes in the introductory article on synoikismos in the Inventory that the only “purely political synoecism” – that is, a synoikismos that did not involve actually moving people to form or merge with a new town center but merely politically united existing geographically distinct communities – occurs in myth in Theseus’ supposed creation of the Athenian poleis. That this sort of synoikismos never happens in the historical period (there’s an attempt in Ionia in 547/6 but it never gets off the ground) ought to suggest that it probably didn’t happen with Theseus either.

It is also in a sense the merging of families, as one of the key privileges of citizenship in a polis was the right to marry women of citizen status (that is, the daughters of citizens) and thus have citizen children. And it meant the new citizenry putting their fortunes – in a literal, physical sense of the wealth that enabled them to survive (think farms and farming) – together in common when it came to things like war.

This may all seem fairly straightforward, but I invite you to consider the different implications it has compared to the way we mostly conceive of the population of a country, which we tend to imagine as a collection of individuals; as we’ll see the Greeks did this a bit too, but it wasn’t the first thought they reached for. In the polis, it is the households that have standing, represented by their adult, free citizen male heads, not individuals. The polis protects the households from the world, not the members of the household from each other, with the most obvious and immediate legal implication being the fact that crimes against junior members of the household are often understood as property crimes against the head of the household and actions within the household are simply not the business of the state. Now we shouldn’t over-stretch this: the Greeks were capable of understanding non-free and non-male people as individuals at times, but the political structure of the polis is predicated on units of households.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.

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