Quotulatiousness

July 13, 2024

The BBC – the Biased Broadcasting Corporation

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

Like Canada’s CBC, the BBC considers itself to be more than just a TV, Radio, and online broadcaster. From its founding in the early 1920s, the BBC has taken upon itself the role of teacher, moral example, and moulder of public opinion. The BBC has always been more progressive in most senses than the British public (as the CBC has been in Canada), but over the last few decades, the BBC has been hurtling leftward on gender issues faster than ever before:

Complaints about BBC impartiality are nothing new. The state broadcaster has a kind of constitution in the form of its Royal Charter, by which it is required to maintain due impartiality in its news reporting and when it comes to controversial subjects. But does it succeed?

In holding politicians from the left and the right to account in its reporting, accusations of bias are always likely to occur. Some people claim the BBC is inherently left-leaning, others claim it is inherently right-leaning. It really depends on your perspective. For my part, I believe that BBC does a generally good job — with a few notable lapses — when it comes to political impartiality.

However, where I think it clearly fails is in regard to its ideological impartiality. When it comes to the ideology of Critical Social Justice, what has become known colloquially as the “woke” movement, the BBC in my view clearly suffers from an extreme bias. This explains why so many people no longer trust its reporting.

I know from personal anecdotes from employees at the BBC that there is a kind of internal struggle going on to overcome the problem, but nobody I have yet spoken to denies that the organisation is ideologically captured. And we can all see it for ourselves. You might have seen the educational film by the BBC called Identity – Understanding Sexual and Gender Identities, aimed at 9 to 12 year-olds, which claimed that there are “over 100 gender identities”.

Where is the balance there? Why is the BBC making pseudo-religious proclamations to children as though they were uncontested fact?

[…]

But perhaps most damning of all is the question of the WPATH Files. In March of this year, a series of internal documents and videos from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health were leaked to journalist Michael Shellenberger. As Mia Hughes’s report for the Environmental Progress think tank revealed, these leaks showed that members of the world’s leading global authority in gender treatment were engaging in medical malpractice.

There are messages proving that surgeons and therapists are aware that a significant proportion of young people referred to gender clinicians suffer from mental health problems. They reveal that some specialists associated with WPATH are proceeding with treatment in the knowledge that no consent has been secured from either the children or those directly responsible for their wellbeing. They have also withheld from patients details of potential lifelong complications, or continued down this path knowing that the children do not understand the implications. And the WPATH Standards of Care are the go-to policies for gender treatment throughout the world, and have been influential in our own NHS.

[…]

And yet if you search for the WPATH Files on the BBC News website, what do you find? Precisely nothing.

June 18, 2024

“If you convince a group of Homo sapiens that that group over there are economic parasites … then you have primed them for mass murder”

Filed under: Economics, Education, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lorenzo Warby on the malign influence of Karl Marx:

Despite — in some ways because of — all his Theorising about “capitalism”, Marx made no serious attempt to understand the actual dynamics of commerce, creating a (false) theory of economic parasitism (“surplus value”) that — both predictably, and in practice — motivated mass murder. If you convince a group of Homo sapiens that that group over there are economic parasites — and you and your society is better off without them — then you have primed them for mass murder. Hence, Marx’s theory was used to justify actual Marxist mass-murders, starting with Lenin’s infamous hanging order.

Marx’s economistic systematising created a pretence of being social scientist — to himself and even more to Engels — that many people have maintained ever since. Hence a pre-Darwinian metaphysician is even now regularly treated as if he was a social scientist. This despite being wrong about more or less everything — class, commerce, surplus, immiseration, the state, patterns of history, commodification, division of labour, foraging societies …

As I have noted elsewhere:

    To have a state, farming niches have to be sustainable after taxes are extracted. That means resources are extracted before they turn into extra babies. This means that states create surplus (income above subsistence): indeed, they dominate the creation and extraction of surplus.

The perennial dominance of the state in extraction of surplus — and hence the creation of class structures — is nowhere more obvious than in Marxist states.

Philosopher Charles Taylor pointed out the tension between the claim to being science — and the causal determinism that goes with that — and the messianic vision that motivates Marx’s and Marxist activism. In any tension between the two, the latter wins because it is so powerfully motivating. This includes with Marx himself, which is why his “science” is so profoundly wrong in fact. It exists to justify the messianic vision.

No political (or religious) movement has killed and tyrannised more people than revolutionary Marxism. A Marxist is someone for whom no amount tyranny and mass murder will stop them worshipping the splendour in their head. This testifies to the power of the messianic vision.

Marx was the original launderer of ideas. Over decades of wrestling with the economics of Smith and Ricardo, he laundered — via economic reasoning — the metaphysical conclusions he reached in the 1840s to create a system that would “scientifically” generate and justify those conclusions. That those conclusions went mostly unpublished in his lifetime — with the most dramatic exception being The Communist Manifesto (1848) — does not belie this. Marx himself insisted on the centrality of this period of “self-clarification”.

Nothing he published later significantly contradicted those conclusions. Marx is the archetypal activist scholar, whose activism drives, and so degrades, his scholarship and analysis. He is the key formulator of the Dialectical Faith, that has generated various disastrous spin-offs, from his own economism to Lenin’s Jacobinising of Marxism to the Cultural Marxism of Lukacs and Gramsci, Critical Theory, and all forms of Critical Social Justice.

No form or derivative of the Dialectical Faith have ever generated a net positive contribution to human flourishing, or understanding, compared to available alternatives.

Ibn Khaldun was a far more acute analyst of the role of the state in the economy, and patterns within history, than Marx. Ibn Khaldun sought systematically to understand what he observed, participated in and read about. He was not laundering ideas, not justifying pre-set conclusions, nor judging evidence by his Theory.

Ibn Khaldun was a social scientist (arguably the first). Marx was not, he was pretending to be one (including to himself).

The Dialectical Faith holds that history is driven by dialectical process that transforms society from an oppressive past to a future liberated from constraints, if the oppressive elements of society are suppressed or abolished. As Marx tells us, our productive capacity will be so great, that we will so humanise the world, that division of labour will end for:

    In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Marx was not engaged in scientific enquiry but pseudo-scientific, or scientistic — the form of science without the substance — justification of already reached conclusions. He regularly judges and chooses evidence based on Theory, a pattern that has become endemic within all forms of Marxism and its spinoffs (such as Critical Theory). Marx exemplifies the activist principle that “what I can imagine — however self-contradictory — is so much better than what others have struggled to achieve”.

Marx’s picture of the evils of division of labour is metaphysical twaddle flatly contradicted by any serious study of the role of division of labour — and, for that matter, commodification — in production at scale. How can division of labour be such an alienating evil when it is built into sexual reproduction, into every eusocial species, even into the cells of every single complex organism?

The answer is via a ludicrous quasi-theological metaphysical inflation of human consciousness and creativity. Marx collectivises — through his notion of species-being — the Romantic notion of human fulfilment through self-expression.

May 31, 2024

QotD: Progressives believe you need to be changed to their design

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

The problem for the liberal is that most people do not want to be transformed. They want life to be better but not qualitatively different. It is only the liberal, or the “progressive”, as he prefers to be called today, who welcomes revolution and relishes the violent tactics necessary to bring it about. For the progressive, it is an article of faith that the masses will resist change and must be forced to swallow it.

This is a crucial difficulty, and it gives rise to all sorts of persuasion, nudging, compulsion, and outright violence. If the masses don’t know what’s good for them, they must be made to change. Every liberal in history, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Barack Obama, has adopted this course of action. The current liberal lions, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, and their lion cubs – New Jersey’s Sen. Cory Booker and California’s Sen. Kamala Harris – appear to be even more radical.

Booker speaks repeatedly in favor of what he calls “the collective good”. Apparently, he knows what that good is, and others do not. And he seems willing to use uncivil means to achieve that collectivist end, such as lashing out at DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. His humiliation of Nielsen was not just embarrassing. As I saw it, it revealed a cold, vicious, Leninist temperament, a willingness to sacrifice individuals in the service of the collective and of his own political ambition.

Then there is Harris. “Loose regulations and lax enforcement … That’s abandoning the middle class,” she says. What she seeks, apparently, is more government control with herself in charge.

Both of these über-liberals claim to know more than the rest of us, but what is it they know?

In a truth worthy of Wittgenstein, one could say that what they “know” is that they know, and nothing else. And what they oppose is any suggestion that they do not know.

In other words, liberalism is a temper, not a philosophy. It has no fixed content – it can be either communistic or fascistic, racially “progressive” or virulently anti-Semitic, pacifistic or militaristic – but in one respect, it never changes. It exerts control and demands obedience.

Jeffrey Folks, “Leftists versus the People”, American Thinker, 2018-02-24.

May 23, 2024

The “post-national” entity formerly known as “Canada”

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

You have to hand it to the Trudeau family (and all their sycophantic enablers in the legacy media, of course). What other Canadian family has had such an impact on the country? By the time Justin Trudeau’s successor is invited to form a government, Canada will have changed so much — to the point that he could describe us as the first “post-national” country thanks to his unceasing effort to destroy the nation. At The Hub, Eric Kaufmann points the finger at Trudeau’s “Liberal-left extremism” as the motivating factor in Trudeau’s career:

Justin Trudeau has always had a strong affinity for the symbolic gesture, especially when the media are around to record it.

Canada is currently suffering from left-liberal extremism the likes of which the world has never seen. This excess is not socialist or classically liberal, but specifically “left-liberal”. It is evident in everything from this country’s world record immigration and soaring rents to state-sanctioned racial discrimination in hiring and sentencing, to the government-led shredding of the country’s history and memory. Rowing back from this overreach will not be the work of voters in one election, but of generations of Canadians.

The task is especially difficult in Canada, because, after the 1960s, the country (outside of Quebec) transferred its soul from British loyalism to cultural left-liberalism. Its new national identity (multiculturalist, post-national, with no “core” identity) was based on a quest for moral superiority measured using a left-liberal yardstick. Canada was to be the most diverse, most equitable, most inclusive nation in world history. No rate of immigration, no degree of majority self-abasement, no level of minority sensitivity, would ever be too much.

In my new book The Third Awokening, I define woke as the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender, and sexual identity groups. Woke cultural socialism, the idea of equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for totemic minorities, represents the ideological endpoint of these sacred values. Like economic socialism, the result of cultural socialism is immiserization and a decline in human flourishing. We must stand against this extremism in favour of moderation.

The woke sanctification of identity did not stem primarily from Marxism, which rejected identity talk as bourgeois, but from a fusion of liberal humanism with the New Left’s identitarian version of socialism. What it produced was a hybrid which is neither Marxism nor classical liberalism.

Left-liberalism is moderate on economics, favouring a mixed capitalism in which regulation and the welfare state ameliorate the excesses of the market, without strangling economic growth. Its suspicion of communist authoritarianism helped insulate it from the lure of Soviet Moscow.

On culture, however, left-liberalism has no guardrails. When it comes to group inequality and harm protection, its claims are open-ended, with institutions and the nation castigated as too male, pale, and stale. For believers, the only way forward is through an unrestricted increase in minority representation. They will not entertain the idea that the distribution of women and minorities across different occupations could reflect cultural or psychological diversity as opposed to “systemic” discrimination. This is the origin of the letters “D” and “E” in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). Rather than seeking to optimize equity and diversity for maximal human flourishing, these are ends in themselves that brook no limits.

Left-liberals fail to ring-fence the degree of sensitivity that majority groups are supposed to display toward minority groups. Their emphasis on inclusivity through speech suppression rounds out the “I” in DEI. From racial sensitivity training (starting in the 1970s) to the “inclusive” avoidance of words like “Latino” or “mother” that offend and create a so-called hostile environment that silences subaltern groups, majorities are expected to police their speech.

May 22, 2024

The new queen of the AWFLs

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

Elizabeth Nickson on the rise of new NPR CEO, Katherine Maher:

Banner for Christopher Rufo’s article on Katherine Maher at City Journal.
https://christopherrufo.com/p/katherine-mahers-color-revolution

The polite world was fascinated last month when long-time NPR editor Uri Berliner confessed to the Stalinist suicide pact the public broadcaster, like all public broadcasters, seems to be on. Formerly it was a place of differing views, he claimed, but now it has sold as truth some genuine falsehoods like, for instance, the Russia hoax, after which it covered up the Hunter Biden laptop. And let’s not forget our censor-like behaviour regarding Covid and the vaccine. NPR bleated that they were still diverse in political opinion, but researchers found that all 87 reporters at NPR were Democrats. Berliner was immediately put on leave and a few days later resigned, no doubt under pressure.

Even more interesting was the reveal of the genesis of NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, a 41-year-old with a distinctly odd CV. Maher had put in stints at a CIA cutout, the National Democratic Institute, and trotted onto the World Bank, UNICEF, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Technology and Democracy, the Digital Public Library of America, and finally the famous disinfo site Wikipedia. That same week, Tunisia accused her of working for the CIA during the so-called Arab Spring. And, of course, she is a WEF young global leader.

She was marched out for a talk at the Carnegie Endowment where she was prayerfully interviewed and spouted mediatized language so anodyne, so meaningless, yet so filled with nods to her base the AWFULS (affluent white female urban liberals) one was amazed that she was able to get away with it. There was no acknowledgement that the criticism by this award-winning reporter/editor/producer, who had spent his life at NPR had any merit whatsoever, and in fact that he was wrong on every count. That this was a flagrant lie didn’t even ruffle her artfully disarranged short blonde hair.

Christopher Rufo did an intensive investigation of her career in City Journal. It is an instructive read and illustrative of a lot of peculiar yet stellar careers of American women. Working for Big Daddy is apparently something these ghastly creatures value. I strongly suggest reading Rufo’s piece linked here. It’s a riot of spooky confluences.

Intelligence has been embedded in media forever and a day. During my time at Time Magazine in London, the bureau chief, deputy bureau chief and no doubt the “war and diplomacy” correspondent all filed to Langley and each of them cruised social London ceaselessly for information. Tucker Carlson asserted on his interview with Aaron Rogers this week that intelligence operatives were laced through DC media and in fact, Mr. Watergate, Bob Woodward himself, had been naval intelligence a scant year before he cropped up at the Washington Post as “an intrepid fighter for the truth and freedom no matter where it led”. Watergate, of course, was yet another operation to bring down another inconvenient President; at this juncture, unless you are being puppeted by the CIA, you don’t get to stay in power. Refuse and bang bang or end up in court on insultingly stupid charges. As Carlson pointed out, all congressmen and senators are terrified by the security state, even and especially the ones on the intelligence committee who are supposed to be controlling them. They can install child porn on your laptop and you don’t even know it’s there until you are raided, said Carlson. The security state is that unethical, that power mad.

Now, it’s global. And feminine. Where is Norman Mailer when you need him?

May 8, 2024

ESR on the shambolic response of the “elite” universities to the protests

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

ESR finds a silver lining to the storm clouds of all the ongoing pro-terrorist campus protests we’re seeing these days:

What I’m thinking as I watch the shitshow elite universities are making of their response to violent pro-Hamas demonstrations and the systematic terrorization of Jewish students:

All my life I’ve been watching Marxist infiltrators capture more and more of our institutions, and been terrified of the moment when they achieved primacy, because our f*cking useless conservatives ran away from that fight after the Army-McCarthy hearings, a few years before I was born.

The moment of victory for the Long March is here, or as close to it as makes no difference, but I’m feeling curiously relieved. Because it turns out that what they discarded in order to sock-puppet every institution in sight was *competence* (which is white supremacy, doncha know, they keep telling us that themselves), and then public trust in those institutions.

Their triumph is collapsing around them because they are literally too dysfunctional and insane to run what they have captured. I was expecting competent totalitarianism, not this. I like this better.

Of course there is the problem that the wider civilization might not survive the collapse of everything they’ve corrupted. But as long as we can avoid that, I actually feel more hopeful about the future than I did 20 years ago.

And the thing elite academia has become is certainly something we can watch collapse into rubble without worrying that it’s going to take civilization down with it.

April 13, 2024

“One of the banes of the traditionalist and neoreactionary is ideology”

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

Theophilus Chilton urges conservatives to rebuild the crucial social structures that modern life has so signally undermined: churches, the männerbund, and militias (and no, I’d never heard of männerbund either).

One of the banes of the traditionalist and neoreactionary is ideology. Now, any thinking person has a worldview, a comprehensive picture of how they view the world and interpret what they see around them that is based on their experiences, education, and background. However, this is not what is meant with the term “ideology.” Instead, an ideology is a set of beliefs – often unsubstantiated – which are held in a doctrinaire fashion, even in the face of any and all evidences that the beliefs are wrong. Moreover, ideologues will demand adherence to these beliefs, and will actively seek to ridicule and punish those who do not sufficiently fill out the list of checkboxes demanded by the ideology. In short, an ideology is a way for people to avoid having to think for themselves, to resist bringing their worldview into line with reality as it is manifested around them. The key to the concept here is not that of having a cohesive worldview, but the fact that this worldview is held in spite of any countervailing evidence. The ideologue refuses to consider any evidences or objections to his belief system, and will try to find ways (accusing his opponent of being racist, sexist, etc.) to get around having to deal with them.

One such ideology is modern American conservatism, along with its close relative by cousin marriage libertarianism. Just as much as modern neoliberalism demands a blind adherence to a rigidly held set of ideological positions which are increasingly out of step with human nature and reality, so also does modern conservatism. One of the most obvious examples of this is the conservative/libertarian idolisation of “rugged individualism” and “the sovereign individual”. Indeed, these folks have created an elaborate mythology which places the “rugged individual” at the centre of the American experience throughout our history. Like most beliefs built on a purely ideological foundation, this mythology is deeply held while being deeply out of touch with actual history and reality.

If I were to make this criticism on a typical conservative site such as Free Republic, it would be roundly met with automatic and unreasoning condemnation. How dare I suggest that Americans should be anything less than atomised individuals with no connexions or associations of community to each other! I must be the reincarnation of Josef By-George Stalin!

And yet, the whole history of America has been one of traditional communities acting in concert. The Revolution was driven by citizen associations formed in churches and taverns, who then fought as community militias. The settling of the West was not done by individuals, by and large, but by groups who traveled by wagon train for mutual support and self-defence. Even today, most local community matters are handled by citizens acting together. While the individuals in American history may have been rugged, they were not alone. America, like most other traditional Western societies from the classical period forward, was communitarian and group oriented.

In other words, there is ample evidence which suggests that our choices don’t have to be either Ayn Rand or Bernie Sanders. There is a third option, which is to recognise the organic bonds of community, society, and nation which bind men together.

This is important for us to keep in mind today because there are any number of influences due to the modernism of our world today which act to draw people away from community and the positive associative bonds we used to have with each other. One of these which I’ve discussed previously is the set of social phenomena surrounding the creation of suburbia after World War II. Our forms of popular entertainment work toward this end as well – instead of towns and villages coming together to celebrate births, marriages, and deaths with song, dance, and competitions, modern American man sits alone in front of his television or in a darkened movie theatre where he’s not allowed to talk to those sitting next to him. Modern American religion plays into this as well, with its selfish emphasis on “what church can do for me”, rather than the other way around, and where Americans “church hop” from assembly to assembly, never integrating into a body of believers, but always flitting about looking for the next new program for their kids.

I say that we ought to reject this modernism as inferior to what we once had. In place of the atomised individual of conservative and libertarian phantasies, those of us in tradition and neoreaction ought to seek to restore and then strengthen traditional social bonding institutions.

The three institutions which I’d like to discuss in particular here are churches, the männerbund, and militias. Each of these institutions play different, yet complementary, roles in communitarian society. Each also, I believe, appeals particularly to one of the three complementary and interdependent tripartite divisions (spirit, soul, and body) of the holistic makeup of man.

March 17, 2024

QotD: Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany never had a “long game” … but Stalin did

Filed under: Germany, History, Japan, Military, Quotations, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Though both the Germans and the Japanese had every intention of starting major wars, as everyone knows they seemingly put zero thought into what they’d do once they won. I know, I know, [Himmler] had his sweaty wet dreams about Wehrbauern on the vast Russian steppes, but all but the most rudimentary post-victory planning seems to have been beyond the Third Reich’s capacity — the Reich Resettlement Office, for instance, was tiny even when the war looked like it would be over by Christmas. The Japanese were, if anything, even dumber — they honestly seemed to believe they could run China, all of it, and even India Manchukuo-style.

The Russians, meanwhile, never stopped playing the long game. While Goebbels made a few token gestures at rapprochement with “the West” (yeah, they called it that), and to sell Nazism to ditto, his heart wasn’t in it, any more than the Japanese’s heart was in their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” hooey. Stalin, by contrast, was always pimping Communism to the West — even in the deepest, darkest days of the war, when it looked like the Wehrmacht was about to march into Moscow, the propaganda directed at the West continued full blast.

Like the German and Japanese aircraft industries, the German propaganda industry was ideologically locked into its core mission: To sell Nazism to Germans. And they were aces at it, no doubt … but then the mission changed. The smart thing for the Germans (and Japanese) to have done with their conquered territories was, in the context of the war, to ease up on the Nazi shit for the duration. The Nazis could’ve had zillions of Ukrainians fighting for them in 1941 just as the Japanese probably could’ve waltzed into India in 1941 had they not been so … well, so Japanese, in the rest of the Pacific rim. Stalin would’ve done it in a heartbeat, had the situation been reversed, and to hell with “authentic” Marxism-Leninism. Win the war first; square the ideology later.

As this is running way long, one example should suffice. Goebbels approached the task of selling Nazism to Germans in the most German way possible: He created the Reich Culture Chamber, which controlled all newspapers, radio broadcasts, film distribution, etc. And it worked, as far as it went — Goebbels deserves his “evil genius” rep — but as we’ve seen, that locked the leadership into an ideological straightjacket. Telling the Wehrmacht to ignore the Commissar Order and buddy up with the Ukrainians would’ve been the smart thing to do, militarily, but it was culturally impossible. Goebbels did his job too well … and then the mission changed.

The Soviets had a similar problem inside the USSR, but — here’s Stalin’s evil genius — they had free reign in propagandizing the West. Goebbels hardly bothered, but the Soviets poured massive resources into it. Forget, as far as you can, everything you think you know about “Nazism” […]. Even if you look at it as objectively as possible, it still seems ridiculous, and there’s a simple explanation for that — it’s not for you. Unless you were a pure blooded Aryan, actually living in Germany (or within Germany’s potential military reach), [they] couldn’t care less about you. Which made being a “Nazi” in, say, America uniquely pointless — you just look like a bigot at best, a traitorous bigot at worst.

Being a “Communist”, though? That was universal. Indeed, that made you a Smart person, a very very smart person, and morally superior to boot. Why? Because you care so much that you’ve mastered this large body of deliberately esoteric doctrine, comrade … all straight out of the NKVD playbook. And if actual life as it was lived in the Soviet Union didn’t quite measure up to the promises, well, that’s because they didn’t have the right people — people like YOU — running things. It’s fucking brilliant — a totally ideologically closed, indeed brutal, system at home, presented as the most open-minded, enlightened, tolerant one possible abroad.

Which is why Joey G. needed a huge Reich Culture Chamber that never came close to justifying its budget, and Stalin needed, effectively, nothing. Being so very, very Smart, wannabe “elites” in the West were happy to spread Commie propaganda for free. The NKVD, let alone the Gestapo, ain’t got shit on the Junior Volunteer Thought Police of Twitter and Facebook …

… which forces us to confront the question: Which model of propaganda are our rulers using? Has the one morphed into the other? Is it real, or is it just “German efficiency”?

Severian, “The Myth of German Efficiency”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-26.

February 27, 2024

QotD: The role of the scholar

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

The first Great Commandment of scholarship is be honest; everything else is commentary. All the standards and methods that scholars have developed over the ages can be reduced to “be honest”.

Of course, fraudulent scholars have always existed, but it seems to me — not that I’ve conducted a study of the matter — that clear dishonesty by leading scholars no longer elicits widespread condemnation and no longer discredits the guilty parties to the extent that it used to. The Nancy MacLean affair [her book Democracy in Chains (2017) was an extended character assassination of Nobel Prize winning economist James M. Buchanan] is clear-cut. Thomas Piketty’s work is either blatantly dishonest or spectacularly incompetent. And many other examples might be adduced. Ideology, it seems, has overwhelmed scholars in the humanities and social sciences to an unprecedented degree.

Scholars should be seeking the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, however much they appreciate that this objective can never be attained fully. They are obliged to strive. If they clearly are not trying, indeed, are twisting and turning in the ideological wind above all, real scholars should drum them out of their professions as unworthy of recognition by genuine scholars.

Bob Higgs, Facebook, 2019-08-28.

February 21, 2024

“College attendance is our society’s only meaningful initiation ritual, and it thus assumes an existential importance that renders it near-impossible to replace until an alternative is found”

Filed under: Education, Health, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Johann Kurtz believes the modern university’s survival despite its increasingly irrational and counterproductive actions can be explained as the last modern example of an initiation ritual:

Harvard University Memorial Church.
Photo by Crimson400 via Wikimedia Commons.

Our understanding of the college system is incomplete. Until we correct this, we won’t be able to fix or replace the system.

First, consider a paradox: college attendance remains near all-time highs [Link], yet the majority of Americans no longer believe it is worth the cost [Link].

The college system seems irrationally resistant to declining value. We must therefore ask: is there an important non-rational reason for college attendance which we have failed to acknowledge?

I believe the answer is “Yes”. College attendance is our society’s only meaningful initiation ritual, and it thus assumes an existential importance that renders it near-impossible to replace until an alternative is found.

Our culture is historically anomalous in lacking explicit initiation rituals.

Mircea Eliade, the great religious historian of the 20th-century, defined initiation rituals as “a body of rites and oral teachings whose purpose is to produce a decisive alteration in the religious and social status of the person to be initiated“.

    In philosophical terms, initiation is equivalent to a basic change in existential condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.

    — Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth

In Europe, fully expressed initiation rituals were common until the end of the Middle Ages, and in the wider world, until the end of the First World War. Now, they only persist in the West in the sacramental practices of devout Christians (baptism, confirmation, and so forth).

Once, however, these practices were of tremendous importance to us, as Eliade makes clear:

    To gain the right to be admitted among adults, the adolescent has to pass through a series of initiatory ordeals: it is by virtue of these rites, and of the revelations that they entail, that he will be recognized as a responsible member of the society. Initiation introduces the candidate into the human community and into the world of spiritual and cultural values. He learns not only the behavior patterns, the techniques, and the institutions of adults but also the sacred myths and traditions of the tribe, the names of the gods and the history of their works …

In the absence of local community rituals, the universities are a natural site for their replacement. These have always been religious sites, although the nature and expression of this religion has transmuted over time.

H/T to Bruce Gudmundsson at Extra Muros for the link and his additional comments:

This hypothesis accords with the argument, made often in this blog, that education and schooling are two very different things. At the same time, it suggests that one of the definitive purposes of Extra Muros, the encouragement of young people to eschew the conventional college experience in favor of a combination of practical pursuits and systematic self-tuition, may be a fool’s errand. After all, if four (or five or six) years of drinking second-rate beer from red plastic cups does for the office-bound folk of North America what fear-filled rites of passage do for members of the bone-in-the-nose set, then I might well be sailing against the wind.

Upon second thought, I find hope in the possibility that the parasite (or, to be more precise, the cancer) promoted by d’Angelo, Kendi, and company will soon deal the coup de grâce to its mortally-wounded host.

The coming-of-age ordeals of warrior tribes demand that boys who would be men prove possession of such martial virtues as courage and self-command. The rites-of-passage of the modern middle classes, however, require that postulants demonstrate a mixture of conformity, conscientiousness, and, to a diminishing degree, intelligence. (Readers familiar with the oeuvre of economist Bryan Caplan will recognize the source of this troika. However, it is worth noting that, while Professor Caplan will occasionally tip his hat in the direction of the campus-based building of basic brain-power, he devotes far more attention to the collegiate cultivation of the two components of Sitzfleisch.)1

The cult of Marx, Mao, and Marcuse demands complete compliance, not only with its basic tenets, but also with any changes in the party line that, from time to time, may occur. (I am old enough to remember the days when campus commies of the caucasian persuasion could don dashikis without facing charges of “cultural appropriation”.) Thus, those who sit at the feet of the acolytes of critical theory learn an art of great value to people who wish to thrive in a large organization, that of discarding the old hat, and putting on the new one, at just the right time. (Think, if you will, of the mid-level employees of the McDonalds Corporation, who, over the course of the last four decades, were obliged to alter their opinion of the McRib sandwich more often than they changed the oil in their cars.)

    1. Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), pages 9-21.

February 13, 2024

Step aside, puny humans, here comes “the new Marxist Homo tabularasa“

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

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter considers what might occupy the god-shaped space in the new secular religion of wokeness:

Ryan T. Hancock, via Postcards from Barsoom

It’s trite to observe that the Great Awokening is a fundamentally religious phenomenon, representing a sort of secular Abrahamic heresy mining the latent guilt swirling within the hearts of post-Christian whites and thereby activating the messiah complexes of the Anglosphere’s Protestant populations, who have exhibited other similarly self-destructive enthusiasms throughout their ethnoreligious histories. It’s trite because it’s so obviously apt, but it raises an obvious question: if Woke is a cult, what is its god?

I don’t mean whichever symbols or causes they flock to from one moment to the next. These are merely mortal embodiments of archetypal forms, rising perhaps to the level of heroes or saints should their celebration become widespread enough. George Floyd was not deified but beatified, not because of anything he did in his life (which no one really argues wasn’t a sewer of petty criminality), but because in his death he was filled with a holy spirit of some kind. What spirit was that?

One answer to this question is provided in the title of Lorenzo Warby‘s ongoing series “Worshipping the Future“. As Warby explains in “The Deep Appeal of Marxism“, progressivism is besotted with the transformational future, an imaginary utopia qualitatively different from and superior to the Tartarus of antiquity in every way – an Elysium of peace, stability, equality, wealth, ease, comfort, and bliss, existing in a perpetual state of liberatory ecstasy in which the war, chaos, poverty, strife, suffering, and misery of the past have been permanently eradicated.

As Warby writes, there is no limit to the delights of the transformational future:

    As a thing imagined, it can be imagined to be as perfect as one likes. This means politics grounded in an imagined future can be as morally grandiose as one likes, with whatever moral urgency goes with such imaginings.

    This is deeply intoxicating.

    Grounding one’s politics in an imagined future also provides huge rhetorical advantages, precisely because said future is as perfect as one wants it to be. Anyone who wishes to defend some actually existing thing has the problem that it will be the product of trade-offs and human failings.

    An “imagined future” believer, by contrast, can just wish all that away for political purposes while hanging current imperfections on those who wish to defend what exists. In any contest between the actual and the imagined, the imagined sparkles ever so more brightly.

This utopia is of course always at some point just over the horizon. Just one more revolution, bro, and we’ll reach the Promised Land! Just one more gulag, and we’ll get to utopia, I swear! C’mon bro, just one more mass grave, we’re almost there, you gotta believe me!

There is a fatal epistemic flaw at the heart of this faith: no information can be extracted from the future, because information can only be obtained from the past.

    Not only does the imagined future have no reality test, it distorts one’s use of the information to which we do have access. The past is profoundly discounted by its distance and difference from the imagined future. It is both morally discounted — a record of sin and depravity — and structurally discounted, because it has not undergone the social transformations that are imagined to change everything.

    If the imagined future is a secular heaven, then the past becomes a moral hell from which we must escape. All information from it is tainted as profoundly impure and corrupt: the record of sin.

This means that when policies fail to obtain the desired result, for example erasing ethnic and sexual distinctions through affirmative action and thereby producing the new Marxist Homo tabularasa, no corrective action is possible. Policy failure exists in the past, which is ignored as sinful, and which therefore cannot be learned from. The only permissible answer to failed progress is to progress faster, with the only possible consequence being to fail harder.

February 7, 2024

QotD: Indoctrinating children into progressive worldviews

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

… As an analogy for the price of progressivism, it’s close to perfect. Authorities impose an ideology onto reality; reality slowly fights back. The question is simply how much damage is done by this kind of utopianism before it crumbles under its own weight. Simple solutions — like a separate, individual gender-neutral bathroom for the tiny minority with gender dysphoria or anyone else — are out of bounds. They are, after all, reinforcing the idea that girls and boys are different. And we cannot allow biology, evolution, reproductive strategy, hormones, chromosomes, and the customs of every single human culture since the beginning of time to interfere with “social justice.”

It’s also vital to expose children to the fact of their race as the core constituent of their identity. Here is an essay written by a woke teacher about the difficulty of teaching “White boys”:

    I spend a lot of my days worried about White boys. I worry about White boys who barely try and expect to be rewarded, who barely care and can’t stand being called on it, who imagine they can go through school without learning much without it impacting in any way the capacity for their future success, just because it never has before.

This sounds to me as if he is describing, well, boys of any race. And when boys are labeled as “White” (note the capital “W”) and this requires specific rules not applied to nonwhite boys, they often — surprise! — don’t like it:

    This week, a student spoke up in class to say that every time a particular writer talked about White people and their role in racism, he would start to feel really guilty, and it made him not want to listen … I try to keep an arm around the boys who most need it, but it’s hard, because I’m also not willing to give an inch on making my room safe for my students of color. It’s not their job to keep hurting while White boys figure it out.

Children, in other words, are being taught to think constantly about race, and to feel guilty if they are the wrong one. And, of course, if they resist, that merely proves the point. A boy who doesn’t think he is personally responsible for racism is merely reflecting “white fragility” which is a function of “white supremacy”. QED. No one seems to have thought through the implications of telling white boys that their core identity is their “whiteness”, or worried that indoctrinating kids into white identity might lead quite a few to, yes, become “white identitarians” of the far right.

One of the key aspects about social-justice theory is that it’s completely unfalsifiable (as well as unreadable); it’s a closed circle that refers only to itself and its own categories. (For a searing take down of this huge academic con, check out Douglas Murray’s superb new book, The Madness of Crowds.) The forces involved — “white supremacy”, “patriarchy”, “heterosexism” — are all invisible to the naked eye, like the Holy Spirit. Their philosophical origins — an attempt by structuralist French philosophers to rescue what was left of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s — are generally obscured in any practical context. Like religion, you cannot prove any of its doctrines empirically, but children are being forced into believing them anyway. This is hard, of course, as this teacher explains: “I’m trying. I am. But you know how the saying goes: You can lead a White male to anti-racism, but you can’t make him think.”

The racism, sexism, and condescension in those sentences! (The teacher, by the way, is not some outlier. In 2014, he was named Minnesota’s Teacher of the Year!) Having taken one form of religion out of the public schools, the social-justice left is now replacing it with the doctrines of intersectionality.

Andrew Sullivan, “When the Ideologues Come for the Kids”, New York Magazine, 2019-09-20.

January 18, 2024

Understanding the Spanish Civil War

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Niccolo Soldo offers an introduction to the context in which the Spanish Civil War took place, with emphasis on one side’s uneasy coalition of interests:

Picasso’s “Guernica” in mural form in the town of Guernica.
Photo by Papamanila via Wikimedia Commons.

At a crossroads in his life, [Ernest Hemingway] decided to go to Spain to cover the conflict for a newspaper chain. Out of his experiences in that war came For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), one of his most celebrated novels. In this excerpt, he uses the female character “Pilar” to relate the story of how Republican forces massacred a group of people in a small town who were opposed to the government and supported the Spanish Generals seeking to overthrow it. Derided as “fascists”, each of the men were forced to pass a line of pro-government peasants who would beat them with flails before throwing them off of a cliff. Civil wars are indeed the most vicious, even in fictional depictions like this one.

The Spanish Civil War is odd for two reasons, the first one being that more than any other war that I can think of, historians have placed a much stronger focus on the politics of the conflict to the detriment of its military aspects. The second reason is much more important overall, and particularly germane to the subject of this essay: it is the only war that I can think of where the histories have been overwhelmingly written by the losers.1

If you ask a random, somewhat educated person in the West about the Spanish Civil War, they will generally say that “Franco was a fascist who allied himself to Hitler and Mussolini and won the civil war in the most brutal fashion possible. He was a dictator who hated democracy and killed thousands upon thousands of innocent people.” Beyond that, they might make mention of Hemingway and his novel, or even Pablo Picasso’s painting entitled “Guernica”2, that depicts the victims of the German Luftwaffe bombardment of that small Basque town in the north of Spain. Others still will relay the fact that the term “Fifth Column” came out of the Spanish Civil War.3 Added up all together, the most simplified take becomes “Franco bad, Republicans good”.

Of course this take is wrong, as this conflict was too complex to arrive at such a ridiculous reductionist conclusion no matter which side you sympathize(d) with. To give you a quick illustration of just how complex this conflict was, here is a list of the major domestic factions that took part in it:

Spanish Republican Side:

  • People’s Army (the armed forces of the Spanish Republic)
  • Popular Front (left-wing electoral alliance of communists, socialists, liberals, anarchists)
  • UGT (very large trade union affiliated with the Spanish Socialists)
  • CNT-FAI (massive trade union of anarchist militants)
  • POUM (anti-Stalinist communists, including some Trotskyites)4
  • Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalonian Autonomists)
  • Euzko Gudarostea (Army of the Basque Nationalists)

Spanish Nationalist Side:

  • Spanish Renovation (monarchists supporting the Bourbon claimant to the throne, Alfonso XIII, who abdicated in 1931)
  • CEDA (the main conservative party, Catholic conservatives)
  • Requetés (traditionalist Catholic monarchist militants who supported the Carlist Dynasty, mainly from the region of Navarre)
  • Falange Española de las JONS (Spanish Fascists)
  • The Army of Africa, including the Spanish Legion (Spanish Army in Spain’s then-colony of Morocco, with many Moroccans serving in it)

Add to this mix the International Brigades5 that fought on the side of the government, and the German and Italian forces who backed the rebels. To list off all the political groupings that participated in the war is a mouthful, but necessary to hammer home the point of the complexity of this conflict. So here goes: nationalists, monarchists (from two competing royal houses), fascists, conservatives, liberals, social democrats, socialists, communists (from two competing camps), anarchists, and regional autonomists. In short, this war had something for everyone, which is why it caught the attention of so many foreigners (especially famous ones) at the time. But before we dive into the run up to the civil war, we need to understand some of the history of Spain that lead up to this “world war in miniature”.

    1. “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it” – falsely attributed to Winston Churchill, but it makes for a good quote to illustrate the point. From the International Churchill Society: “‘Alas poor Baldwin. History will be unkind to him. For I will write that history.’ And another version often repeated is ‘History will be kind to me. For I intend to write it.’

    What Churchill actually said, in the House of Commons in January 1948, was in response to a speech by Herbert Morrison, the Labour Lord Privy Seal, which attacked the Conservatives’ foreign policy before the war:

    “For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.”

    2. In January of 1937, Picasso was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to create a work of art to display at the upcoming World’s Fair in Paris in order to draw international attention to their cause. At the time, Picasso was living in the French capital. It wasn’t until he read reports of the bombing of Guernica on April 26 of that same year that he felt inspired enough to create something that he felt was worthwhile for audiences to see.

    3. In September 1936, General Francisco Franco supposedly claimed that there were “four nationalist columns approaching Madrid, and a fifth column inside of it ready to attack”.

    4. Leon Trotsky did not support POUM and went on to disassociate himself from them and their actions. George Orwell joined POUM when he went to Spain to volunteer to fight against the Spanish nationalists.

    5. Formed by volunteers from outside of Spain and almost entirely Stalinist in leadership and political orientation.

December 3, 2023

QotD: Intersectionality and the “American experiment”

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

Let me remind you of the educational vision of the Founders, by way of E.D. Hirsch: “The American experiment … is a thoroughly artificial device designed to counterbalance the natural impulses of group suspicions and hatreds … This vast, artificial, trans-tribal construct is what our Founders aimed to achieve.” Intersectionality aims for the exact opposite: an inflaming of tribal suspicions and hatreds, in order to stimulate anger and activism in students, in order to recruit them as fighters for the political mission of the professor. The identity politics taught on campus today is entirely different from that of Martin Luther King. It rejects America and American values. It does not speak of forgiveness or reconciliation. It is a massive centrifugal force, which is now seeping down into high schools, especially progressive private schools.

Today’s identity politics has another interesting feature: it teaches students to think in a way antithetical to what a liberal arts education should do. When I was at Yale in the 1980s, I was given so many tools for understanding the world. By the time I graduated, I could think about things as a Utilitarian or a Kantian, as a Freudian or a behaviorist, as a computer scientist or a humanist. I was given many lenses to apply to any one situation. But nowadays, students who major in departments that prioritize social justice over the disinterested pursuit of truth are given just one lens — power — and told to apply it to all situations. Everything is about power. Every situation is to be analyzed in terms of the bad people acting to preserve their power and privilege over the good people. This is not an education. This is induction into a cult, a fundamentalist religion, a paranoid worldview that separates people from each other and sends them down the road to alienation, anxiety, and intellectual impotence.

Jonathan Haidt, “The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities”, City Journal, 2017-12-17.

November 30, 2023

QotD: “Information velocity” in the English Civil War

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

Information velocity had increased exponentially by the 1630s, such that the English Civil War was, in a fundamental way, a propaganda war, an intellectual war.

Some of the battles of the Wars of the Roses were bigger than some of the Civil War’s battles – an estimated 50,000 men fought at Towton, in 1461 – but the Civil War was inconceivably harder and nastier than the Wars of the Roses, because the Civil War was an ideological war. The Wars of the Roses could’ve ended, at least theoretically, at any time – get the king and five dukes in a room, hammer out a compromise, and simply order everyone in each lord’s affinity to lay down his weapons. The Civil War could only end when everyone, in every army, was persuaded to lay down his arms.

Thus the winners had to negotiate with the people, directly. The Putney Debates didn’t involve everyone in the realm, but they were representative, truly representative, of everyone who mattered. Though no one explicitly made an appeal to competence alone, it was – and is, and must be – fundamental to representative government. Guys like Gerrard Winstanley had some interesting ideas, but they were fundamentally impractical, and Winstanley was not popularly viewed as a competent leader. Oliver Cromwell, on the other hand, was competence personified – the Protectorate became Cromwell’s military dictatorship largely because the People, as literally represented by the New Model Army, wanted it so … and, thanks to much faster information velocity, could make their wishes known.

Severian, “Inertia and Incompetence”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-25.

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