Quotulatiousness

August 23, 2023

Frustration as a key driver in motivating mass unrest

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

Rob Henderson reviews the old classic The True Believer by Eric Hoffer:

Eric Hoffer made the case that if you peel back the layers of any mass movement, you will find that frustration is their driving force.

Frustration, though, doesn’t arise solely from bleak material conditions. The dockyard philosopher argued that “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.”

He points out in the years leading up to both the French and Russian Revolutions, life had in fact been gradually improving for the masses. He concludes, “It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt” and that “The intensity of discontent seems to be in inverse proportion to the distance from the object fervently desired.”

Personally, I saw this when I first arrived at Yale. I recall being stunned at how status anxiety pervaded elite college campuses. Internally, I thought, “You’ve already made it, what are you so stressed out about?” Hoffer, though, would say these students believed they had almost made it. That is why they were so aggravated. The closer they got to realizing their ambitions, the more frustrated they became about not already achieving them.

Hoffer’s conceptions of frustration highlight how if your conditions improve, but not as much or as quickly as you’d like, you will be vulnerable to recruitment by mass movements that promise to make your dreams come true.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “When inequality is the general law of society, the most blatant inequalities escape notice. When everything is virtually on a level, the slightest variations cause distress. That is why the desire for equality becomes more insatiable as equality extends to all.” For Hoffer, this insatiability cultivates frustration — a nebulous, simmering emotional state that can be harnessed by any ideology.

He describes what has now become known as the “Tocqueville effect”: A revolution is most likely to occur after an improvement in social conditions. As circumstances improve, people raise their expectations. Societal reforms raise reference points to a level that is usually not matched, eliciting rage and frustration.

August 14, 2023

“Behold rationalism’s turncoats”

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

Brendan O’Neill calls out the New Atheist community for their wide adoption of the trans ideology-cum-faith:

Fractal Pride flags

We are living through a great showdown between hysteria and reason. On one side stand the adherents to the cult of transgenderism, hawking their hocus pocus about gendered souls and self-authentication through castration. On the other side stand those of us who know that biology is real, and that every cell in the human body is sexed, and that a man is as likely to become a woman as that chalice of wine is to become the blood of Christ during Mass (apologies, Catholics).

You’ll never guess which side some New Atheists are taking in this clash between delusion and truth. The crazy side. The side that says a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be a lesbian. Which is infinitely more cranky than the idea that a bloke with a beard and balls can literally be the Son of God. How did rationalist bros, those secularists on steroids, those Dawkins acolytes whose hobby for years was to make fun of the faithful, become devotees of such a strange, post-truth sect?

One by one, atheists are falling at the altar of trans. This week a Twitterfeed called The New Atheists slammed Richard Dawkins for becoming a TERF. Dawkins is a rarity in the new rationalist ranks: he thinks people with penises are men, not women, just as bread is bread, not the body of Christ. He is “utterly confused”, decreed his angry apostates. Biology “isn’t black and white, it’s a full spectrum of colour just like a rainbow”, they said. This hippyish belief that humans can pick their sex from a multicoloured smorgasbord is entirely an article of faith, of course, not science. Behold rationalism’s turncoats.

We’ve witnessed Neil deGrasse Tyson, America’s best-known scientist, bow to the creed of gender-as-feeling. In a TikTok video he said “XX/XY chromosomes are insufficient” when it comes to reading someone’s sex, because what people feel matters along with their biology. So someone might feel mostly female one day but “80 per cent male” the next, which means they’ll “remove the make-up” and “wear a muscle shirt”. Sir, that’s cross-dressing; it does nothing to refute the truth of chromosomes, which absolutely do tell us what sex a person is. As destransitioner Chloe Cole said to Tyson, you’re “confusing basic human biology with cosmetics”.

We’ve seen Matt Dillahunty, a leading American atheist, promote the mystic cry that there’s a difference between “what your chromosomes are” and your “gender identity”. “Transwomen are women”, he piously declares, perhaps keen to prove that while he might be fond of bashing the old religions, he has not one cross or blasphemous word to say about the new religion. Well, no one wants to be excommunicated from polite society.

Stephen Fry is another godless lover of science who appears to have converted to the trans belief. Phillip Pullman, Stewart Lee and others who were once noisy cheerleaders for rationalism are likewise strikingly reserved on this new ideology, this devotional movement which, among other things, invites young women to submit themselves to bodily mortification in order that they might transubstantiate into “men”. Seems like something a rationalist should question.

August 11, 2023

Toward a more perfect Homo Sovieticus

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

Ed West on the interplay between Soviet ideology and Soviet humour during the Cold War:

Krushchev, Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders review the Revolution parade in Red Square, 1962.
LIFE magazine photo by Stan Wayman.

Revolutions go through stages, becoming more violent and extreme, but also less anarchic and more authoritarian. Eventually the revolutionaries mellow, and grow dull. Once in power they become more conservative, almost by definition, and more wedded to a set of sacred beliefs, with the jails soon filling up with people daring to question them.

The Soviet system was based on the idea that humans could be perfected, and because of this they even rejected Mendelian genetics and promoted the scientific fraud Trofim Lysenko; he had hundreds of scientists sent to the Gulag for refusing to conform to scientific orthodoxy. Lysensko once wrote that: “In order to obtain a certain result, you must want to obtain precisely that result; if you want to obtain a certain result, you will obtain it … I need only such people as will obtain the results I need.”

Thanks in part to this scientific socialism, harvests repeatedly failed or disappointed, and in the 1950s they were still smaller than before the war, with livestock counts lower than in 1926.

“What will the harvest of 1964 be like?” the joke went: “Average – worse than 1963 but better than 1965”.

The Russians responded to their brutal and absurd system with a flourishing culture of humour, as Ben Lewis wrote in Hammer and Tickle, but after the death of Stalin the regime grew less oppressive. From 1961, the KGB were instructed not to arrest people for anti-communist activity but instead to have “conversations” with them, so their “wrong evaluations of Soviet society” could be corrected.

Instead, the communists encouraged “positive satire” – jokes that celebrated the Revolution, or that made fun of rustic stupidity. “An old peasant woman is visiting Moscow Zoo, when she sets eyes on a camel for the first time. ‘Oh my God,’ she says, ‘look what the Bolsheviks have done to that horse’.” The approved jokes blamed bad manufacturing on lazy workers, while the underground and popular ones blamed the economic system itself. This official satire was of course nothing of the sort, making fun of the old order and the foolish hicks who still didn’t embrace the Revolution and the future.

Communists likewise set up anti-western “satirical” magazines in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where the same form of pseudo-satire could mock the once powerful and say nothing about those now in control.

Indeed in 1956, the East German Central Committee declared that the construction of socialism could “never be a subject for comedy or ridicule” but “the most urgent task of satire in our time is to give Capitalism a defeat without precedent”. That meant exposing “backward thinking … holding on to old ideologies”.

[…]

Leonid Brezhnev had a stroke in 1974 and another in 1976, becoming an empty shell and inspiring the gag: “The government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics has announced with great regret that, following a long illness and without regaining consciousness, the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the President of the highest Soviet, Comrade Leonid Brezhnev, has resumed his government duties.”

Brezhnev was an absurd figure, presiding over a system few still believed in. His jacket was filled with medals – he had 260 awards by the time of his death – and when told that people were joking he was having chest expansion surgery to make room for all the medals he’d awarded himself, he apparently replied: “If they are telling jokes about me, it means they love me.”

July 28, 2023

Ideology and Mediocrity: Inside the 12th SS Division Leadership

Filed under: France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

OTD Military History
Published 27 Jul 2023

Historian Dr. Philip W. Blood discusses how the leadership of the 12th SS (Hitler Youth) Panzer Division were a clique of ideological motivated Nazis and most were promoted into their positions because of their loyalty to Hitler and Nazism and not because they were good soldiers.

Check out my full conversation with Philip Blood at the link below.

Waffen-SS Fantasies and the Commodification of War Crimes
https://youtube.com/live/vdZf_2tooSM
(more…)

July 7, 2023

QotD: Nazi Germany’s plans for Eastern Europe versus their actual implementation of those plans

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

… it’s easy to see what the evidence is (or would be): The well-documented awfulness of life under Stalin. There’s also plenty of evidence that the Wehrmacht certainly thought they’d be greeted as liberators, and while it’s hard to put too much weight on the anecdotes of individual soldiers and civilians (most recorded long after the fact), there seems to be a fair amount of evidence they actually were greeted as liberators …

… at least in some places, and at least initially. There’s a second inference here: “the exigencies of war led Germany to behave tactfully”. Here’s where our initial ground rules of evidence become extremely important. Those anecdotal reports of civilian / military interaction, above: What weight do we assign those? And why?

If I’m arguing for the “greeted as liberators” theory, I can use all those recollections of cordial civilian / military interaction. But I need to be consistent: If I say “You can trust those, even though they’re personal memories written down long after the fact, because XYZ”; then I can’t turn around and dismiss contrary evidence of the same type: “All those reports of brutality are just personal memories written down long after the fact.” That’s one of the ways you catch a propagandist: they constantly conflate the two.

Fortunately, in this case we’re dealing with two totally ideologized societies. Even better, one of those totally ideologized societies was German, with their well-documented love of paperwork. All armies generate scads of paperwork, and an ideologized army’s paperwork is full of ideology. So: How does the Army of Occupation’s paperwork tell the tale? That should give us some clues as to their future plans — obviously the occupiers would need to be part of it — and some insight as to the day-to-day.

As it turns out, the second part of your inference — “the exigencies of war led Germany to behave tactfully” — is false. We’ve got the paperwork on it, starting with the infamous “Commissar Order” and working down. Ideology trumps exigency. It seems clear from Wehrmacht paperwork that so long as military efficiency was maintained, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted out there.

[Interestingly, in a bit of meta-irony, the Wikipedia “thumbnail” — the little box you get on the side of the search results page — says of the Commissar Order: “Nazi conspiracy-enforcing unit of the Nazi military.” [Sic], of course — they really want you to know these guys were Nazis. Also, what’s a “conspiracy-enforcing unit”? One imagines a Q-tard goon squad, beating up people whose faith in the God-Emperor is wavering. Finally, it wasn’t a “conspiracy” — they were right out in the open with it. We’ve got lots of copies of the Commissar Order, because it was read out to the troops before the invasion. ALL the troops].1

That segues into the “Organizational Darwinism” thing. The paperwork shows us that “the Nazis” really did have grandiose plans for settling a whole bunch of Germans in the depopulated East. They even got a pilot program underway, as I recall — a whole bunch of ethnic Germans from Bohemia or someplace getting stuck in a transit camp in eastern Poland, or even Ukraine. But notice I put “the Nazis” in quotation marks. The guys with the grandiose plans were RuSHA, the Main Race and Settlement Office. And not even all of them: It was the fourth department, “Settlement”, inside RuSHA. And RuSHA was inside the SS, which was inside — but also outside, over, under, around, and through — the rest of the Nazis’ plate-of-spaghetti org chart.

And it’s actually way more complicated than that, because of course it is — these are the Nazis we’re talking about. I’m not going to dive into the details (not least because it all makes my head hurt), but if you were an ethnic German who wanted to get resettled in Ukraine for some reason — and this is all mostly theoretical, I hasten to add, very few actually moved so far as I know — you’d have to deal with a bewildering array of bizarrely-acronymed organizations. RuSHA, VOMI, the Generalgovernment (Occupied Poland), the SS (in general; over and above RuSHA), the army, the whole bewildering array of groups represented in Generalplan Ost, which was a “plan” in much the same way the “Holy Roman Empire” was holy, Roman, and an empire. Various Party goons would want to get their beaks wet, as would the Gestapo (hell yes they want to know if people are moving around the Reich, especially towards the front on military railroads), and so on.

As weird as this sounds, all this elaborate mishmash of ass-pulled “organization” was by largely by design. For one thing, it diffuses responsibility for really nasty shit — when it comes to certain events on the Eastern Front, even scrupulously neutral historians are often reduced to Ilhan Omar’s level: some people did some things. Who gave what order? Who was he reporting to? And in what capacity? Insufficient data.

Severian, “Organizational Darwinism”, Founding Questions, 2023-01-30.

    1. Side note: Ideology really increases military efficiency, up to a point. Recalling that I’m not even an armchair general, it seems like the American military is really missing a trick there. Imagine what the Americans could’ve done in Vietnam if their regular forces had been better indoctrinated, instead of punting military-civilian relations off to CORDS. Properly indoctrinated, I mean, with an ideology that kinda sorta makes sense and is internally consistent and at least somewhat intersects with the real world. “Spreading democracy” would work ok, if they actually ideologized the ranks (instead of having the PR guys just parrot it to the cameras). The AINO military is of course fully indoctrinated, but see above: we’re talking combat efficiency here, not butt stuff.

June 13, 2023

QotD: The purge of the Socialist Revolutionaries

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

Ideological revolutions follow a predictable pattern. At some point, you see what the Bolsheviks called “the Revolt of the Left SR’s.” “SR” stands for “socialist revolutionaries”, so their “left” was, of course, radical by all but Bolshevik standards. Nonetheless, they actually meant it when they said they were for “soviet power”, the “soviets” in this case being “assemblies made up of actual workers, not limpwristed eggheads like Lenin whose fathers were minor nobility”.

As Solzhenitsyn explained it, in the early days of the Bolshevik revolution, these SRs were part of a coalition government with the Bolsheviks. As such, they had to be given a certain amount of jobs in the ministries, including the justice ministry. They actually believed that stuff about The Workers, so they weren’t ready to send people to Siberia for twenty, thirty, forty years like Lenin demanded. They broke with Lenin (over other issues as well, obviously), the Bolsheviks crushed them, and once the Bolsheviks had power over all the ministries, there’s your gulag archipelago. Same as it ever was.

The Nazis had their “Left SR’s”, too. These were the Strasserites, led by brothers Otto and Gregor, the guys who put the “Socialist” in “National Socialism”. The Night of the Long Knives was a purge against both “left” and “right” — though Röhm and his butt boys get all the press, one of the Strasser brothers got his, too. That’s German efficiency for you!

And then there was the original Terror, in France, and even before that we had ours, too — the Whiskey Rebellion and Shays’ Rebellion aren’t usually taught as ideological (they’re usually not taught at all, of course), but they were. We’ve had two revolutions (before this week), in fact, and in both cases you had those pesky “we really believe this shit!” types causing all kinds of problems for the revolutionary government — see, for example, those state governors who made Jeff’s life hell in Richmond, objecting to the nationalization of their state militias on the grounds that the Confederacy is actually, you know, a confederacy, and that drafts and war production boards and taxes in kind and all the rest are exactly the kind of tyranny you’d expect from Abe’s gang in Washington …

Severian, “Speaking of Purges…”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-08.

June 10, 2023

QotD: The word “objectively”

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

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

For years past I have been an industrious collector of pamphlets, and a fairly steady reader of political literature of all kinds. […] When I look through my collection of pamphlets — Conservative, Communist, Catholic, Trotskyist, Pacifist, Anarchist or what-have-you — it seems to me that almost all of them have the same mental atmosphere, though the points of emphasis vary. Nobody is searching for the truth, everybody is putting forward a “case” with complete disregard for fairness or accuracy, and the most plainly obvious facts can be ignored by those who don’t want to see them. The same propaganda tricks are to be found almost everywhere. It would take many pages of this paper merely to classify them, but here I draw attention to one very widespread controversial habit — disregard of an opponent’s motives. The key-word here is “objectively”.

We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are “objectively” aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the “objectively” line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore “Trotskyism is Fascism”. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.

This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people’s motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions. For there are occasions when even the most misguided person can see the results of what he is doing. Here is a crude but quite possible illustration. A pacifist is working in some job which gives him access to important military information, and is approached by a German secret agent. In those circumstances his subjective feelings do make a difference. If he is subjectively pro-Nazi he will sell his country, and if he isn’t, he won’t. And situations essentially similar though less dramatic are constantly arising.

In my opinion a few pacifists are inwardly pro-Nazi, and extremist left-wing parties will inevitably contain Fascist spies. The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things, that has made political prediction in our time so remarkably unsuccessful.

George Orwell, “As I Please”, Tribune, 1944-12-08.

June 1, 2023

QotD: “The Puritans were the SJWs of their day”

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

Predestination is Calvinism’s fundamental doctrine. To the Calvinist, all human effort is utterly futile, since nothing we could ever possibly do could affect our salvation, or lack thereof, which was decreed by God long before the foundations of the world were laid. How the hell you get from “all human effort is futile” to “we must totally remake society” is above my pay grade, feel free to check Walzer if you want to give it a go, but it’s obvious that the Calvinists did get there — see the English Civil Wars, which themselves were a sideshow to the whole charming episode we pros call The Period of the Wars of Religion, 1517-1648.

The Puritans, as English Calvinists were called, wrote difficult prose, but in translation it sounds shockingly modern. The Puritans were the SJWs of their day, obsessed with their own pwecious widdle selves. They didn’t get around to making up xzheyr own pronouns, but they did give themselves self-righteous new names — when Ben Johnson called his caricature Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy he got big laughs, but he wasn’t really joking, they really did stuff like that. To be a Puritan requires two things: An obsessive focus on the tiniest micro-movements of your own soul …

… and an equally obsessive focus on forcing other people to disclose the tiniest micro-movements of their souls. There’s nothing anyone could ever do, so trivial that a Puritan could in good conscience overlook it. Calvin’s Geneva was the closest thing to a police state 16th century technology allowed, and when their turn came, Oliver Cromwell and the boys gave importing it to England the old college try. And, of course, Plymouth Bay Colony started as a Puritan police state …

Ideology, then, removes the distinction between public and private. You can’t simply say you’re a Puritan, you really have to BE one — constantly, perfectly, since there’s nothing that Puritanism doesn’t touch. And the only way to do that, of course, is to do everything in full public view at all times. Calvin did — as Walzer remarks, John Calvin, the man, is almost completely absent from Calvin’s writings. (Unlike Luther, whose idiosyncratic, not to say lunatic, personality comes through in practically every sentence). Calvin achieved that clear windowpane prose Orwell claimed was the mark of a great writer — nothing between audience and subject at all. Calvin would, indeed, take the remark that he’s almost a complete cipher, personally, as a very high compliment.

Severian, “Ideology II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-09.

May 31, 2023

The War Against The Patriarchy, updated

Filed under: Economics, Education, Government, Health, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo responds to a recent Joel Kotkin op-ed in the National Post discussing the “war of the sexes” and the long, long string of victories chalked up by the “weaker sex”:

    The war between the sexes has ended, and rather than a co-operative future that could benefit all, it has turned out to be more like a lopsided win for the female side.

So begins Joel Kotkin’s National Post op/ed “Women have won the ‘war between the sexes’, but at what cost?” It is a welcome but disappointing analysis that starts with a show of defiance and ends in quiet desperation. Of course, it’s good to find anyone in a major newspaper willing to cast a less-than-adulatory eye on “The Future [that] is Female” or to write sympathetically about men, and Kotkin, a prolific author on cities and technocracy, proves his good faith on the strength of that opening statement alone. Aside from the wishful thinking of believing feminism to be winding down (was #MeToo a prelude to ceasefire?) or ever having envisioned a co-operative future (he should take a look at Kate Millett’s incendiary “Theory of Sexual Politics“), Kotkin is to be commended for daring to name as a war the decades of post-1960s activism, in which all the decisive victories have been claimed by feminists against men.

Kotkin, however, isn’t able to continue in the take-no-prisoners style he chose for his opening salvo. He is prevented, either by his own prudence, his lack of deep knowledge, or the paper’s editorial insistence, from targeting feminist ideology and policies in the rest of the article. In fact, the article doesn’t name a single piece of debilitating feminist legislation or even make one reference to the many expressions of anti-male contempt that are now deeply embedded in our public culture. The result is a curiously disembodied discussion in which serious social problems linked to male decline are pointed to without any attempt made to say exactly how they came about or how they might be reversed.

“The crux of the problem,” Kotkin tells us to start off, “lies in the fact that as women rise, men seem to be falling.” Here we see him start to draw back from the attack, as if afraid to say what he really thinks. His phrasing makes male decline sound like a natural phenomenon, an illustration of the primordial principle of Yin and Yang. Or perhaps it is simply that men, with their allegedly fragile egos and hegemonic masculinity, haven’t been able to compete against all that female ability, once dammed up by the patriarchy, now finally being let loose on the world (though always with calls for more to be done to assist women).

[…]

Kotkin refers to men “left behind” in the economy, but he keeps mum about the decades of affirmative action in higher education and hiring (detailed by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in Legalizing Misandry, pp. 81-124) as well as draconian sexual harassment legislation that have made work life unrewarding and often punitive for men.

He stresses the loss of sexual amity and of willingness to marry, but avoids discussing the nightmare of family law that has made marriage or even cohabitation perilous for many men.

The sins of omission do not end there. Perhaps working on the assumption — not without basis — that any discussion of social problems will need to focus on women at least as much as on men, Kotkin proceeds to backtrack on his earlier claim about women’s victory in the sex war, outlining instead a downbeat portrait of women’s troubles. Citing research by Jonathan Haidt, he tells us that adolescent girls have been severely affected by depression and self-harm, that many young women, without reliable men to support them, have had to fend for themselves in a difficult economic climate, and that single mothers, left with few options, are unable to offer stability to their children. It looks as if the decline of men mentioned early in the article has mainly hurt women and their children.

What Kotkin neglects to mention — surely deliberately — is that adolescent boys commit suicide at 4 X the rate of girls, resolving their depression decisively enough that Haidt seems not to have felt the need to account for them; that women are the ones who choose divorce in approximately 70% of cases; and that divorced fathers are too often denied a real role in their children’s lives while being burdened past endurance by exorbitant support payments. In other words, for every sad woman held up for our concern, there is a plurality of equally sad men rendered invisible in the conventional reporting. The staggering statistics on male suicide provide a stark illustration of Kotkin’s initial contention about the casualties of the sex war — yet he leaves these aside, choosing instead to voice the now-obligatory concern about the trans threat to women’s sports.

Perhaps most importantly, Kotkin suggests through his word choice that the data he cites are simply “trends”, occurrences that came about through economic and demographic factors independent of the sex war initially evoked. But they aren’t. They flow directly from a feminist vision in which the family — explicitly understood by feminist leaders to be a source of abuse and oppression — must be transformed and women liberated from reliance on the fathers of their children. Under this vision, a more just and equitable world will be ushered in by women’s superior leadership once they are freed from their unpaid labor in the home and the many sexist barriers that hold them back. That freedom must be aided, according to conventional wisdom, through abundant contraception, unfettered abortion, collectivized child care, no-fault divorce, programs and propaganda to urge men to do more housework, and non-stop encouragement to women — in movies, sit-coms, advertising, articles, and government equity programs — to give up on their men.

May 13, 2023

What was the First Modern War?

Filed under: History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 12 May 2023

The question about the first modern war has caused lively debates among historians and YouTube comment sections alike. In this video we take a look at a few candidates and some arguments why they are or aren’t modern wars.
(more…)

April 16, 2023

Do Foucault and Derrida deserve the blame for PoMo excesses?

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

In Spiked, Patrick West says that it’s a misunderstanding of Foucault and Derrida to blame them for the rise of wokeness:

Michel Foucault speaking at the Hospital das Clínicas of the State University of Guanabara in Brazil, 1974.
Public domain image from the Arquivo Nacional Collection via Wikimedia Commons.

It has become common to blame wokeness on its supposed philosophical parent: postmodernism. As the standard narrative goes, postmodernism is the ideology that entrenched itself in Anglophone universities in the 1980s and 1990s. It talked of relativism, of the absence of objective truth, of the spectre of a pervasive, invisible power, and it was generally anti-Western. A whole generation of professors, writers, journalists and a fair few activists have subsequently been raised on this diet of postmodern thinking. And the result is a cultural elite that is wedded to wokeness.

[…]

For these critics of woke, Foucault’s influence, in particular, is seemingly everywhere. According to [Douglas] Murray [in The War on The West], it’s through the “anti-colonial” philosophy popularised by the Foucault-inspired scholar, Edward Said, that Foucault and therefore postmodernism have filtered down into woke philosophy, which holds that Western society is uniquely racist and to blame for all of today’s ills. Equally, right-wing critics of wokeness will claim that the trans movement has sprung from the postmodern contention that sexuality and gender are entirely socially constructed and therefore plastic and malleable.

If Foucault is regarded as the father of wokeness then 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche tends to be regarded as the grandfather. After all, Foucault was profoundly influenced by Nietzsche and even proudly declared himself to be “Nietzchean”. Nietzsche, like Foucault, also saw all human behaviour stemming from the desire for power. And he conceived of morality – good and evil, right and wrong – as the mere manifestation of the will to power. As he wrote of the “origin of knowledge”, in The Joyous Science (1883): “Gradually, the human brain became full of such judgements and convictions, and a ferment, a struggle, and lust for power developed in this tangle. Not only utility and delight but every kind of impulse took sides in this fight about ‘truths’.” One can see this Nietzschean sentiment at work in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish (1975): “Power produces knowledge … power and knowledge directly imply one another.”

So, according to this largely right-wing narrative, wokeness is the product of a 20th-century philosophical assault on truth, objectivity and the West. And it was inspired by Nietzsche and led by several “cultural Marxist” thinkers.

There are several problems with this rather neat story. The first error is to use the phrase “cultural Marxism” to talk of postmodernism or wokeness. This term doesn’t really make sense. Marx himself conceived of his work as a historical materialism. It was focussed on class and the means of production, not on culture. Yes, in the 1940s and 1950s, some Frankfurt School thinkers, who sometimes presented themselves as Marxist, did focus on culture rather than class. But as Joanna Williams writes in How Woke Won (2022), their thinking “represented less a continuation of Marxism and more a break with Marx”.

Moreover, postmodern thinkers were broadly opposed to Marxism. Many may have been signed-up Communists in their youth (the French Communist Party dominated left-wing politics at the time), but by the 1960s they had become highly critical of Marxist politics. They rejected the idea that history was progressing “dialectically” towards a communist future, or “telos”. And they were often hostile to the scientific objectivity and “Enlightenment” values so central to Marxism. Foucault wrote that history was not the story of progress; it was but a series of non-linear discontinuities and contingencies. And Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), in his highly-influential The Postmodern Condition (1979), announced and celebrated the end of “grand narratives”, and with it the end of the Marxist “grand narrative” of progress. Lyotard’s writings from the 1970s onwards were violently antithetical to Marxism, especially its claims to objective truth.

As for wokeness itself, it has nothing to do with Marxism. With their myopic focus on race and gender, woke activists are utterly blind to the material, class-structure of society. Today, bizarrely, it’s often conservatives who are more attuned to the plight of the working class than woke “radicals”. As Williams writes, “critics who insist that woke is simply Marxism in disguise are wide of the mark”.

March 23, 2023

Sometimes, it helps to know how the sausage is actually made

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

Apologies to the ghost of Otto von Bismarck for misappropriating his famous quote “Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them being made.” In this case, it’s actually quite enlightening to see how video magic helps make the progressive media experience:

Among the worst disasters for progressivism in recent decades has been the work of Aaron Sorkin, whose impossibly articulate ratatat dialogue made it way too easy to imagine sexy technocrats saving the world. It’s great entertainment, but normalized unreasonable expectations of the flawed human beings who happen to have high IQs and impeccable credentials.

As a child of the New Left, I never missed The West Wing: it was irresistible catnip for my adolescent hopes and dreams, and so much more satisfying than whatever was on the news — except for the eloquent public intellectuals on the Bill Moyers show on PBS. Later, as an idealistic policy major at Brown, I was surprised and disappointed to find basically nobody operating on that level.

It was only when I’d lucked into joining the Moyers organization that I began to understand how such Sorkinesque eloquence was manufactured each week — not with deliberate dishonesty, but ever more misleading as years passed and the scene grew shallower.

We’d typically tape on Thursday or Friday mornings to turn around by Friday nights. Being of Bill Moyers’ approximate height, I was tasked with showing up early to fill his chair as gruff union guys set up cameras and lighting. Then, as Bill’s blogger and research assistant, I’d watch live interviews from the control room to highlight quotable moments.

Uncut conversations were eye-opening; it was astonishing how often our esteemed guests hemmed and hawed and got basic facts embarrassingly wrong. And how many came off batshit crazy: one, later an anchor on MSNBC, speculated that Captain Sully’s Miracle on the Hudson — visible from our west side offices — had been God blessing the Obamas.

Drafting the Moyers Blog and promotional listings, I’d sit in with producers and video editors to consult on coalescing broadcasts. They were like wizards, casting away awkwardness and errors to sculpt artful vignettes of the most compelling bits of conversations that often stretched well over an hour or more.

So many of the most rousing clips came from when guests were at their most factually inaccurate, and editors deftly dipped in and out to pull and seamlessly reassemble the very best parts. It was wondrous alchemy, and a privilege to work with super-talented creatives, but the reality of our academic pundits remained the same.

Viewers, or at least those motivated enough to weigh in, frequently testified that their social-democratic faith had been wavering until they’d seen whichever inspiring interview affirming what they’d always believed. I always found that frustrating, wondering if they might have reacted more thoughtfully to the real deal than the perfected package that aired.

By no means were Bill Moyers and team operating with any less than the highest of ethics or best of intentions—from their perspective, we were clarifying what our distinguished guests were truly saying. The problem was that the intellectual scene our show channeled was dwindling, but my colleagues so badly wanted things to be better that it was all too easy to paper over the accelerating collapse of discourse. I remember trying to explain to Bill what a Brooklyn hipster was, or how to click around tumblr, but he didn’t really want to know.

H/T to Jesse Walker, by way of Colby Cosh for the link.

March 14, 2023

“Strangely, my friends have a more negative view of the feminist movement than I do”

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

Bryan Caplan explains why he chooses to write the books he writes:

Almost by definition, writing controversial books tends to provoke negative emotional reactions. Anger above all. Anger which, in turn, inspires fear. And not without just cause; the sad story of Salman Rushdie sends shivers down the spine of almost any writer. If you write controversial books — or care about someone who does — you should be at least a little afraid of the anger your writing inspires.

[…]

In contrast, when I announced the imminent publication of Don’t Be a Feminist, the fear went through the roof. Several folks warned me of “career suicide”. Others told me that I had no idea what horrors awaited me. Friends staged mini-interventions on my behalf.

The underlying premise, naturally, was that the feminist movement is at once terribly powerful and horribly bad-tempered.

My best guess is that the warnings are overblown. Strangely, my friends have a more negative view of the feminist movement than I do. Whether my guess is right or wrong, though, all this intense, widespread fear really ought to trouble the feminist conscience.

If I said, “Hi” to one of my kids’ friends, and they responded by fleeing in terror, my reaction would be, “Did I do something to scare him?” I would ask my kids, “Why was he so afraid of me?” If such incidents started to repeat, I would be severely troubled. “I thought I came off as a friendly dad, but I guess I’m seen as an ogre.”

The same applies if I were a feminist, and I discovered that critics are literally afraid to criticize feminism. If only a few critics feared feminism, my question would be, “What did we do to scare them?” If I discovered that fear of feminism was widespread, a full soul-search would be in order. “I thought we came off as a friendly movement, but I guess we’re seen as ogres.”

And guess what? Fear of feminism plainly is widespread.

What, then, are feminists doing wrong? Above all, cultivating and expressing vastly too much anger. Sharing your angry feelings is an effective way to dominate the social world, but a terrible way to discover the truth or sincerely convince others. Maybe you don’t mean to scare others; maybe you’re just acting impulsively. Yet either way, the fear feminists inspire is all too real.

March 11, 2023

QotD: We used to call them “parlour pinks”

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

Leftists […] were, are, and always shall be nothing more than irritated butterflies. They don’t have to leave their ivy-covered ivory towers, so they won’t. They don’t know anyone who has ever killed so much as a mouse. When it comes right down to it, they find this whole “Revolution” business to be just … so … vulgar.

What’s life like in the Soviet Union? They neither know nor care, until the brute facts of life in the USSR are rubbed into their faces for so long that they have to acknowledge them. At which point they simply switch allegiances. Kolakowski’s essay doesn’t mention Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims, but they arrive at essentially the same conclusion — that instead of becoming disillusioned with Communism (Socialism, “social justice”) itself, the irritated butterflies of the Left grow disillusioned with a particular country or leader. The USSR has failed, yes, but — all together now! — “real Communism has never been tried”, so let’s put all our faith in Mao … and then Castro … and then Chavez, et cetera ad nauseam.

It’s all about maintaining the purity of the idea in the face of disappointing, vulgar, grubby reality. An honest-to-Marx Communist will come into plenty of contact with reality. A Leftist never will, because xzhey have convinced xzhemself that even the mugging they’re currently experiencing is a lofty and noble expression of authenticity. They’re willing to die for the Revolution, certainly — the urge for martyrdom has always been highly conspicuous on the Left. So long as they never feel that base, grubby, vulgar proletarian urge to defend themselves, they’ll be fine.

[…]

“Never cheer for your own.” When you come right down to it, that’s the Leftist motto. Leftists don’t deride “sportsball”, for instance, because they’re un-athletic little dweebs who were always picked last at recess (well, ok, not only that). It’s because cheering for a team, any team, is vulgar. It’s what grubby little proles do. (That’s another way to distinguish a Communist from a Leftist, by the way. Actual Commies love sports; look at all the resources the USSR poured into the Olympics, for instance. That’s because sports are good training for war).

Is Leftism curable? Can they be made to cheer for their own? Experience suggests that the cure will be very harsh indeed … if indeed it’s possible at all.

Severian, “Grubby Little Proles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-05-31.

February 21, 2023

Smart people are at least as likely to fall for false beliefs as anyone else

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

Gurwinder explains why people well above average intelligence are actually more likely to adopt irrational ideas:

What causes delusion?

The prevailing view is that people adopt false beliefs because they’re too stupid or ignorant to grasp the truth. This may be true in some cases, but just as often the opposite is true: many delusions prey not on dim minds but on bright ones. And this has serious implications for education, society, and you personally.

In 2013 the Yale law professor Dan Kahan conducted experiments testing the effect of intelligence on ideological bias. In one study he scored people on intelligence using the “cognitive reflection test”, a task to measure a person’s reasoning ability. He found that liberals and conservatives scored roughly equally on average, but the highest scoring individuals in both groups were the most likely to display political bias when assessing the truth of various political statements.

In a further study (replicated here), Kahan and a team of researchers found that test subjects who scored highest in numeracy were better able to objectively evaluate statistical data when told it related to a skin rash treatment, but when the same data was presented as data regarding a polarizing subject — gun control — those who scored highest on numeracy actually exhibited the greatest bias.

[…]

Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep”.

What this means is that, while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing.

This tendency is troublesome in individuals, but in groups it can prove disastrous, affecting the very structure and trajectory of society.

For centuries, elite academic institutions like Oxford and Harvard have been training their students to win arguments but not to discern truth, and in so doing, they’ve created a class of people highly skilled at motivated reasoning. The master-debaters that emerge from these institutions go on to become tomorrow’s elites — politicians, entertainers, and intellectuals.

Master-debaters are naturally drawn to areas where arguing well is more important than being correct — law, politics, media, and academia — and in these industries of pure theory, secluded from the real world, they use their powerful rhetorical skills to convince each other of FIBs. During their master-debatery circlejerks, the most fashionable delusions gradually spread from individuals to departments to institutions to societies.

Some of these FIBs can now be found everywhere. A particularly prominent example is wokeism, a popularized academic worldview that combines elements of conspiracy theory and moral panic. Wokeism seeks to portray racism, sexism, and transphobia as endemic to Western society, and to scapegoat these forms of discrimination on white people generally and straight white men specifically, who are believed to be secretly trying to enforce such bigotries to maintain their place at the top of a social hierarchy.

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