Quotulatiousness

November 6, 2022

How bad do the midterm elections look for the Democrats? Even Andrew Sullivan is voting Republican this time

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

From the free-to-cheapskates excerpt of Andrew Sullivan’s Weekly Dish:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

The day I received my absentee ballot from the DC government, there was a story in the Washington Post about the DC Council’s imminent vote:

    The bill would eliminate most mandatory minimum sentences, allow for jury trials in almost all misdemeanor cases and reduce the maximum penalties for offenses such as burglaries, carjackings and robberies.

Over the past few years, violent crime in DC has been rising fast. Last year the murder rate was the highest since 2003, and this year the death toll is slightly higher so far. Carjackings are up 36 percent and robberies are up 57 percent. Almost all this hideous violence is inflicted on African-Americans, including many children. It permeates outward, creating a deeper public sense of insecurity and out-of-control crime. Tent cities are now all over the city. People suffering from mental illness patrol the streets. You feel the decline in law and order, the slow fraying of the city, every day.

And yet the Council has decided that now is the time to make it harder to prosecute and easier to defend violent criminals, partly in the name of “equity”. Yes, it’s part of a longstanding “modernization” of the criminal code, but they had to include these provisions and now? And this isn’t new. Just before the crime explosion took off, the DC mayor had “Black Lives Matter” painted on the street in letters so large you could read them from a plane, and allowed “Defund the Police” to remain next to it. That summer, woke mobs were allowed to harass anyone in their vicinity, yelling slogans that vilified all police — and the MSM took the side of the bullies. After the summer of 2020, the DC police force dropped to its lowest level in two decades.

So guess what? I’m going to vote for the Republican and the most conservative Independent I can find next Tuesday. And I can’t be the only Biden and Clinton and Obama voter who’s feeling something like this, after the past two years.

There was no choice in 2020, given Trump. I understand that. If he runs again, we’ll have no choice one more time. And, more than most, I am aware of the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents. But that’s precisely why we need to send the Dems a message this week, before it really is too late.

By “we”, I mean anyone not committed to the hard-left agenda Biden has relentlessly pursued since taking office. In my view, he and his media mouthpieces have tragically enabled the far right over the past two years far more than they’ve hurt them. I hoped in 2020 that after a clear but modest win, with simultaneous gains for the GOP in the House and a fluke tie in the Senate, Biden would grasp a chance to capture the sane middle, isolating the far right. After the horror of January 6, the opportunity beckoned ever more directly.

And yet Biden instantly threw it away. In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus that, in a period of supply constraints, fueled durable inflation; a second welfare stimulus was also planned — which would have made inflation even worse; record rates of mass migration, and no end in sight; a policy of almost no legal restrictions on abortion (with public funding as well!); the replacement of biological sex with postmodern “genders”; the imposition of critical race theory in high schools and critical queer theory in kindergarten; an attack on welfare reform; “equity” hiring across the federal government; plans to regulate media “disinformation”; fast-track sex-changes for minors; next-to-no due process in college sex-harassment proceedings; and on and on it went. Even the policy most popular with the center — the infrastructure bill — was instantly conditioned on an attempt to massively expand the welfare state. What on earth in this agenda was there for anyone in the center?

November 3, 2022

Twitter’s evolution from protecting celebrities to shaping “the narrative”

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

At Common Sense, Walter Kirn recounts his own recognition of how Twitter has changed since he first opened an account in 2009 (incidentally, the same year I did … but unlike Walter, I still have about the same number of followers there as I did in my first year):

The platform belonged to celebrities back then, who hawked their movies, albums, and TV shows in words that were their own, supposedly, fostering in fans a dubious intimacy with figures they knew only from interviews. One of these stars, an investor in the platform, was Ashton Kutcher, the prankish, grinning actor who became omnipresent for a spell and then, stupendously enriched, largely vanished from public consciousness. It seemed that Twitter had sped-up fame such that it bloomed and died in record time.

The power of the new platform struck me first in 2012. Two incidents. The first one, a small one, occurred in Indianapolis, where I’d gone to watch the Super Bowl. I attended a party the night before the game at which many Hollywood folk were present, including an actor on a cable TV show who played a roguish businessman. The actor was extremely drunk, lurching about and hitting on young women, and it happened that my wife, back home, whom I’d texted about the scene, was able to read real-time tweets about his antics from other partygoers. A few hours afterward she noticed that these tweets had disappeared. Instant reality-editing. Impressive.

I concluded that Twitter was in the business not only of promoting reputations, but of protecting them. It offered special deals for special people. Until then, I’d thought of it as a neutral broker.

[…]

My own habits on Twitter changed around that time. Observational humor had been my mainstay mode, but I realized that Twitter had become an engine of serious opinions on current affairs. On election night in 2016, while working at another journal, Harper’s, I was given control of the magazine’s Twitter feed and asked to think out loud about events while following them on cable news. I saw early that Trump was on his way to victory — or at least he was doing much better than predicted — and I offered a series of tart remarks about the crestfallen manners of various pundits who couldn’t hide their mounting disappointment.

The official election results were still unknown — Clinton retained a chance to win, in theory — but before the tale was told, my editors yanked my credentials for the account and gave them to someone else. The new person swerved from the storyline I’d set (which reflected reality) and adopted a mocking tone about Trump’s chances, even posting a picture of a campaign hat sitting glumly on a folding chair at his headquarters in New York City.

It struck me at first as pure denial. Later I decided that it was far more intentional — that my left-leaning magazine wished to preserve the illusion for its readers that the election’s outcome was unforeseeable, possibly to maintain suspense or so it could later act startled and disturbed in concert with its TV peers. Its Twitter feed, as a record of its reactions, had to align with this narrative.

I grew convinced that night that Twitter meant trouble for me. It had become an opinion-sculpting instrument, an oracle of the establishment, and I knew I would end up out of step with it, if only because I’m of a temperament which habitually goes against the flow to challenge and test the flow, to keep it honest. Mass agreement, in my experience, both as a person and a journalist, is typically achieved at a cost to reality and truth.

October 31, 2022

“If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news”

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

At Founding Questions, Severian offers some preliminary thoughts on the new field of “Brandonology”, specifically how to determine whether what’s in the legacy media is news or propaganda:

I’m throwing this out there now, because it’s shaping up to be a long-term project and I think we can all contribute to it as needed. But as Brandonology / FNGology is such a new discipline, it’ll help to lay in the foundations.

The first step in analyzing the “news” is determining whether or not it is, in fact, news. “News” here being defined as “an unplanned event — or catastrophic fuckup of a planned event — to which The Regime is forced to react in more or less real time”. Lot of that going around recently, such that we’re spoiled for choice. Pick pretty much any of the shenanigans in Ukraine: The botched assassination of Alexander Dugin; the Nordstream sabotage; the Ukrainian dirty bomb false flag. Those clearly fall into the “catastrophic fuckup of a planned event” category …

… or do they? Because as Z Man pointed out in great detail on his last podcast, all of that stuff seemed to catch The Regime flatfooted. Yeah, somebody planned those things, but that somebody wasn’t Brandon, or anyone close to Brandon, or anyone in position to prop up Brandon. Which is the surest tell for actual news (as defined above) right there: If The Regime doesn’t have their canned narrative ready to go, it’s real news.

The necessity of the canned narrative also allows the keen Brandonologist to anticipate the “news”. For instance, it has obviously started to dawn on The Regime that they’re going to get walloped in the midterms, so they’re trying out narratives as we speak. Z Man identified one I hadn’t seen, something about Brandon “inadvertently” saying something about the debt ceiling that’s supposed to give the Republicans all kinds of ammunition against him. I’m not so sure. I’ll have to look into it, but the fact that it squarely blames Brandon — who The Regime still insists is the very picture of mental acuity and vigor — pings my radar a bit. I think the stuff Her Nibs is rolling out is much likelier the Narrative being developed — she’s outright stating that “the Republicans” are going to engage in massive voter fraud.

Which to normal people is chutzpah beyond belief, but that’s how The Regime rolls. The 2016 election was, of course, full of Russian Hacking™. The 2020 election, by contrast, was the cleanest canvass in human history, and you’re an insurrectionist, a domestic extremist, and of course a racist if you dare to suggest the mere possibility of an American election being tampered with. But wouldn’t you know it, those dastardly Russians are going to rally here in 2022, because you can’t keep a Russian Hacker™ down. They might even hire a few prostitutes to pee on a bed for good measure; that’s how evil they are.

Further complicating the task, though, is that “botched op” thing. We’ve got Brandon et al. on record threatening Nordstream, so you know that was an American caper gone bad … but gone real, real bad, because if The Regime had been fully in the know, there’d have been a whole bunch of Tier Four Stoyak about lousy maintenance on the pipelines for months in advance.

QotD: The True Believer

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

A cult claimed that a flood would destroy the Earth on December 21, 1954. Only the faithful would be saved, because they’d be evacuated by a flying saucer. 12/21/54 passed without incident, of course, but what you’d expect to happen to the cult, didn’t — instead of everyone dropping out and moving on with their lives, most stayed, and their commitment to the cult’s leader actually increased.

Why? From the Wiki summary, believers will persist in the face of overwhelming disconfirmation if:

  • A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he or she behaves.
  • The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
  • The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
  • Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
  • The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

This is Leftism in a nutshell, and it explains why SJWs are impervious to factual, rational argument. Boiled down as far as it will go: Group identity is so important to the Leftist that, faced with the choice between continued group membership and the evidence of xzhyr own lying eyes, xzhey will pick group membership, every time. This sets up its own feedback mechanism, such that disconfirmations of their dogmas actually increase their commitment — only the truest, holiest believers would keep believing in the face of the facts.

Severian, “What Happens if the UFO Actually Comes?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-25.

October 21, 2022

“The function of elected officials in California is the performance of symbols, the narcissistic status dance”

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

Chris Bray on the essentially performative nature of law-making in California:

That mayor is gone, now, but her rotating crop of replacements aren’t noticeably more committed to the quotidian reality of the city, 3.4 square miles of crumbling streets. They’re busy with the climate action plan, and with their very very serious regional outreach to achieve social justice and climate justice and, you know, something something justice something. They are performing their symbols.

So start with this premise: The function of elected officials in California is the performance of symbols, the narcissistic status dance.

Doing just that, the bumbling halfwit Richard Pan, a pediatrician turned Big Pharma water-carrier, has succeeded in the passage of his “disinformation” bill, AB 2098. Here’s how the legislative counsel explains the bill:

    Existing law requires the applicable board to take action against any licensed physician and surgeon who is charged with unprofessional conduct, as provided.

    This bill would designate the dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or “COVID-19,” as unprofessional conduct.

But, as Igor Chudov notes, the bill — now the law — defines away its purpose, declaring that misinformation is “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care”. (And disinformation, the law says, is merely misinformation spread with “malicious intent”, disagreeing with the consensus plus being mean and bad.)

Being a longtime admirer of Richard Pan’s unique mind, I adore the definition of falsehood as something contrary to the consensus. It’s true, you moron, ’cause lots of people believe it! (The earth is at the center, and the sun revolves around it! Go to your room!) But back to Chudov’s good catch: The law evaporates if you can show that the consensus isn’t, and European public health regulators, among others, are doing that work. So if a doctor violates the consensus by telling a patient that the mRNA injections don’t prevent infection or transmission … okay, hold on a second.

So Senator Pan wishes to burn the witch, but he defines “witch” in such pudding-soft language that he gives the witch-burners nowhere to stand without sinking and vanishing. His declared purpose evaporates in the sloppiness of his mind. But he gets the symbol, declaring that he has declared that the witch should be burned. He gets his tweet.

QotD: The real reason for Upton Sinclair writing The Jungle

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Business, Food, Government, Health, History, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In 1906, Upton Sinclair came out with his book The Jungle, and it shocked the nation by documenting the horror of the meat-packing industry. People were being boiled in vats and sent to larders. Rat waste was mixed with meat. And so on.

As a result, the Federal Meat Inspection Act passed Congress, and consumers were saved from ghastly diseases. The lesson is that government is essential to stop enterprise from poisoning us with its food.

To some extent, this mythology accounts for the wide support for government’s involvement in stopping disease spread today, including Covid and the catastrophic response.

Not only that, but the story is also the basis for the US Department of Agriculture’s food inspection efforts, the Food and Drug Administration’s regulation of medical drugs, the central plan that governs food production, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the legions of bureaucrats who inspect and badger us every step of the way. It is the founding template for why government is involved in our food and health at all.

It’s all premised on the implausible idea that people who make and sell us food have no concern as to whether it makes us sick. It only takes a quick second, though, to realize that this idea just isn’t true. So long as there is a functioning, consumer-driven marketplace, customer focus, which presumably includes not killing you, is the best regulator. Producer reputation has been a huge feature of profitability, too. And hygiene was a huge feature of reputation — long before Yelp.

Sinclair’s book was not intended as a factual account. It was a fantasy rendered as an ideological screed. It did drum up support for regulation, but the real reason for the act’s passage was that the large Chicago meat packers realized that regulation would hurt their smaller competitors more than themselves. Meat inspections imposed costs that cartelized the industry.

That’s why the largest players were the law’s biggest promoters. Such laws almost have more to do with benefiting elites than protecting the public. It was not really about safety, the best scholarship shows, but exclusionary regulation to raise competitors’ costs of doing business.

Jeffrey A. Tucker, “Poke and Sniff: A Lesson from 1906”, Brownstone Institute, 2022-06-29.

October 18, 2022

QotD: The US media and the Democratic Party since 1968

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

… back in 1968 the Media convinced themselves they held the whip. Between the “Chicago Police Riot” (in reality a bunch of SDS goons finally goading the cops into cracking down) and the Tet Offensive (in reality, a communist catastrophe that all but destroyed the Viet Cong as a fighting force), the Media convinced themselves they truly were the shapers of the nation’s hearts and minds. From then on out, the Media assumed their primary job was not to report the news, but to instruct us how to feel about the news. They anointed themselves as a secular priesthood, and from that moment forward, people went into “journalism” specifically to change the world.

That suited the Democrats’ short-term interests just fine. Then as now, the Democrats were a bunch of fellow-traveling wannabe-totalitarians. The difference, though, is that in 1968 grownups were still in charge of the party. Being intimately familiar with the concept of “useful idiots”, the grownup Dems were happy to encourage the journo-kids’ delusions of grandeur. The kids might not have been able to stir up enough shit to get Hubert Humphrey elected — that would’ve been a tough sell for Josef Goebbels — but they could make life hot for Richard Nixon. In other words, the Democrats thought they held the whip.

1972 should’ve been a wakeup call, but to be fair, all the campaign wonks were still reeling from The Great Magic Party Switch of 1964. Both halves of the failed Democratic ticket from 1968 ran in the 1972 primaries, and so did George Wallace (who actually won more primaries than either Humphrey or Muskie — 6 to 5 and 4, respectively). Which left George McGovern, a goofy hippie from a nothing state who was so bad at politics that he got outflanked as a peacenik by Richard Nixon, the man who was right at that moment actually running the goddamn war. […]

[McGovern’s platform was], in short, “amnesty, abortion, and acid,” a Donald Trump-level linguistic killshot if ever there was one.

The point isn’t that McGovern was a goofy hippie. The point is that McGovern was The Media’s fair-haired boy. Hubert Humphrey was no one’s idea of a steely-eyed realist, but he was a grown-up. When he attacked McGovern as too radical during their primary debates, he was expressing America’s frustration with bratty, coddled, know-nothing college kids and their bong-addled, patchouli-soaked nonsense. But since it was the aforesaid spoiled, stoned college kids who wrote the election coverage …

Viewed from this perspective, Democratic Party politics up to now can be seen as the increasingly desperate attempts of the few remaining grownups to fend off The Media’s increasingly frantic grabs for the whip. Take a gander at these goofballs from 1976. Remember the “Scoop Jackson Democrats” all the National Review types kept gushing about when they needed some Democratic cover for W’s imperial misadventures? “Scoop” Jackson was a real guy, and probably the only adult in the room in 1976. Jimmy Carter, the eventual nominee, could at least fake being a serious, mature human being when he wasn’t being chased by enraged, swimming bunnies. The Jerry Brown of 1976 is the very same Jerry Brown who is putting the finishing touches on the shitholization of California here in 2019, and guess who The Media just loooooooved back in the ’76 primaries?

See also: Every other election through 2016. Sometimes The Media and the Party moved in tandem — e.g. Bill Clinton — but more often it played out like 1988, when the Party had to drag a bland nonentity (Mike Dukakis) over the finish line in the face of a Media darling (Jesse Jackson). This dynamic also explains the weird “enthusiasm gap” of Democratic voters starting in 2000 — nobody actually liked Al Gore or John Kerry, but since W. made The Media lose their tiny little minds, they went all-in on painting those two human toothaches as The Saviors of Mankind.

Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.

October 16, 2022

The concept of “childhood” changes over time

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

Chris Bray on the steady changes in how adult societies have viewed their children from the “better whipped than damned” views of the Puritans to the “childhood is sexy” views of today’s avante-garde opinion pushers:

Childhood is mercury.

Puritans thought that children were born in a state of profound corruption, marked by Original Sin. Infants cry and toddlers mope and disobey because they’re fallen, and haven’t had the time and the training to grow into any higher character. The devil is in them, literally. And so the first task of the Puritan parent was “will-breaking”, the act of crushing the natural depravity of the selfish and amoral infant. A child was “better whipped than damned”, in need of the firm and steady repression of his natural depravity. Proper parenting was cold and distant; parents were to instruct.

By the back half of the 19th century, children were sweet creatures, born in a state of natural innocence, until the depravity of society destroyed their gentle character. (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”) Meanwhile, the decline of family-centered industry changed the household. The historical father, present all day on the family farm and guiding his children with patriarchal modeling and moral instruction, left for work at the factory or the office, and mom occupied “the women’s sphere“, the nurturing home.

Depraved infants, stern and firm parents; innocent children, nurturing mothers. Those two conceptions of childhood and the family can be found less than a hundred years apart at their edges. There are some other pieces to layer into that story, and see also the last thing I wrote here about the history of childhood. But the briefest version of an explanation is that the changing idea of what it meant to be a child was a reflection of growing affluence and security: Calvinist religious dissenters living hard and unstable lives viewed childhood darkly, while the apotheosis of Romantic childhood appeared in the homes of the emerging Victorian management class.

So childhood is mercury: It moves and morphs with societal changes, becoming a different thing in different cultures and economies. It tells you what the temperature is.

In the febrile cultural implosion of 2022, childhood is sexy, and legislators work hard to make sure 12 year-olds can manage their STDs without the interference of their stupid clingy parents.

Or click on this link to see a fun story about a teacher in Alabama who has a sideline as a drag queen, reading a story to young children about a dog who digs up a bone and then cleverly telling the children, “Everybody loves a big bone.” Wink wink! I mean, really, what could be sexier or more fun than talking to very young children about thick adult erections, amirite?

Update: Corrected link.

October 12, 2022

The two traditions of the American political left

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

Chris Bray responds to a post by Leighton Woodhouse that declares that “left libertarianism” has won the battle for the soul of the American left:

I see two traditions on the American political left.

One is a tradition skeptical of authority, or aggressively hostile to it: Striking miners battling Coal and Iron Police, or Pinkertons, or Colorado sheriffs, or the National Guard; Wobblies fighting cops in the street; Great War-era socialists attacking the military draft, and going to prison for it; the Weatherman planting bombs in police and military offices. This tradition on the left views government as authority, a repressive servant of the status quo — “the executive committee of the bourgeoisie”. Leftists in this tradition say that of course government serves capitalism and corporate power, and of course the government isn’t on our side. Go back to the Coal and Iron Police to see how radical labor activists saw them: state-sanctioned police, with badges, on the private payroll of the industrialists. The young radical George Orwell, writing about his time fighting in Spain: “When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

The other is a tradition centered on the supposedly inherent decency, wisdom, and fairness of government, a tradition that runs through the capital-p Progressive Era and Woodrow Wilson, to the New Deal, and onward into the Great Society. In this tradition, state power is benevolence itself, and points its kindness downward. Government interposes itself between the downtrodden worker and the power of the wealthy, ensuring the dignity of the poor. Tax the rich! In this tradition, government represents our best selves, our highest yearning for a better world. Why, just look at how much more equitable the progressive income tax made our social order, back when marginal tax rates were so much more fair at the top. Government serves, protects, nurtures: It’s the tool of the ordinary man, offering the noble guarantees of Social Security and Medicaid. Of course government is on our side, fellow downtrodden, and we need more of it.

Those two traditions don’t fit together, though the obvious way to square the circle is to say that a Bill Ayers opposes the power of the state when it opposes him, and embraces it if he thinks his side has come to control it. This would mean that there aren’t two ideological traditions — just two different instrumental postures. But no one who survived the Ludlow Massacre thought the government was a benevolent servant of the working man.

As Leighton Woodhouse notes, we have a good deal of what looks like anti-authority leftism in our cities, in the form of movements that call for the end of mass incarceration, the defunding of the police, and the transition to a social services model in response to homelessness and drug addiction. In this view, rising crime and growing homelessness are signs of urban leftists rejecting authority as a tool. Homelessness is not a crime, you fascists!

But I’ve written before about the incredible strangeness of progressive political columnists denouncing Donald Trump’s vicious authoritarianism, and then proudly pivoting to an expression of their approval of the warm and caring Justin Trudeau — who cracked down on incipient Trumpism in his country by boldly freezing the bank accounts of dangerous participants in the evil right-wing truck convoy. When government freezes the bank accounts of protesters, government is fighting against authoritarianism, obviously. More government power means less authoritarianism!

QotD: Luxury beliefs

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

Luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes … The way that people used to demonstrate their social class was through material goods, through expensive items … Today, it’s not necessarily the case … [Affluent] students will often downplay their wealth or even lie about how rich their parents are … [Now,] it’s luxury beliefs. It’s the unusual, novel viewpoints that they’re expressing to distinguish themselves. They crave distinction, that’s the key goal here …

An easy way to show that you’re not a member of the riff-raff, the masses, is to hold the opposite opinion, or a strange opinion that maybe doesn’t make sense, because it shows you’re not one of them. It’s not just the opinion itself, but the way that you express it. If you express it using vocabulary that no-one has ever heard of, for example … You often are not paying the price for your luxury beliefs, but even if you do, it’s still not nearly the same as the cost inflicted on the lower classes if they were to adopt those luxury beliefs too. […]

I talked to a friend of mine who was telling me, “When I set my Tinder radius to one mile, just around the university, and I see the bios of the women, a lot of their profiles say things like ‘poly’ or ‘keeping it casual’ – basically, they’re not interested in anything too serious.” He says something like half of them have something like that in their bio. And then he said, “But when I expand the radius on my Tinder to five miles, to include the rest of the city and the more run-down areas beyond the university bubble, half the women are single moms.” And basically, the luxury beliefs of the former group, the educated group, trickled down and ended up having this outsize effect on the people who are less fortunate, who don’t have the [social and] economic capital of the people who can afford that belief.

David Thompson, quoting from the transcript of a TRIGGERnometry interview with Rob Henderson, David Thompson, 2022-07-11.

October 6, 2022

QotD: Life in grad school

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

Grad students spend most of their time in the library, and because of the peculiar ecology of college towns, even their non-library hours are spent almost exclusively with other academics. You have to work very, very hard to have any kind of “normal” life in a college town, in other words, so even if you’re not a goofball when you arrive, pretty soon Stockholm Syndrome kicks in and you find yourself, if not liking, then at least tolerating, experimental theater and milk made from plants.

After a few years of this, you forget what normal life is even like. You come to understand the deep and longstanding grievances the Poststructuralist Feminist Marxists have with the Marxist Feminist Poststructuralists. Oh, there’s scads of “diversity” on campus — all those recruiting brochures they mail to dumb parents in the ‘burbs aren’t lying — but there’s one thing you’ll never, ever find: The thought that maybe politics doesn’t matter all that much.

That’s the answer, right there. Academic “humanities” work is mostly bullshit because most people just don’t care about politics. To normals, if they think about “politics” at all, it’s in Schoolhouse Rock terms — some guys in Washington vote on some stuff, and that’s how a bill becomes a law. They certainly don’t mean ideology, which is pretty much the only thing academics mean. That a normal person could walk into the voting booth without really knowing if he’s going to pull the lever for Trump or Hillary fries an egghead’s circuits…

… and yet, as we all know, the majority of American voters do this, every single time. There’s something profound about normal person behavior that academics just can’t — or won’t — grasp.

Severian, “Ignoring the Human Factor”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-08-14.

October 4, 2022

“… apparently the future of science is BAJEDI (Belonging Accessibility Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion), which is quite a bit cooler than mere DEI”

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

And you thought the stuffy old National Science Foundation was only supporting pale, stale, cisgendered white male research? Think again!

I’ve written many times about the National Science Foundation and its increasingly politicized conception of “science”. As an independent federal agency with a nearly $9 billion budget, the NSF is a behemoth in the world of academic science, shaping research agendas and the future of the professoriate. And apparently the future of science is BAJEDI (Belonging Accessibility Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion), which is quite a bit cooler than mere DEI. Here’s a current funding opportunity for scientists:

The federal agency that funds research projects like “Probing Nucleation and Growth Dynamics of Lithium Dendrites in Solid Electrolytes” is moving hard into the business of social justice, with career-making grants that will focus STEM researchers on the problem of racial grievances. Here’s how much money is available for that racial equity program:

The premise underlying this turn toward equity-focused science projects is that “science scholars who are underrepresented in STEM produce higher rates of scientific novelty”. Innovation is grounded in race and ethnicity; the more gloriously intersectional you are, the more creative you become. Imagine the boldness of a transgendered Asian Pacific Islander astrophysics, and how much newer and fresher our conception of the universe is when it doesn’t come from straight white males.

And so the NSF wants to fund “diversity champions” who will freshen up our science with BIPOC innovation — which means adding more sociologists to the team of geophysicists: “When developing proposals, the PI team should acknowledge the need for increased engagement from social and behavioral science experts to address issues related to BAJEDI in the geosciences and include these best practices and experts in proposed projects.” […]

It’s a real cultural revolution in the world of academic science.

October 1, 2022

QotD: The Left does not handle political reverses gracefully

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

While this [recent progressive losses on religious school funding, gun control, voter ID, the repeal of Roe v. Wade] all may seem like fun and games to us, keep in mind that for the Left, this is the most serious business they’ve had to face since the 1960s. Being reversed in the courts — repeatedly, openly — represents a massive monkey wrench in their “march of progress”. And as I discussed last week, the Left has been accelerating the imposition of its agenda over the past two decades to the point that it cannot slow down or back off without the risk of losing everything. It’s truly all or nothing for these folks now. And they realise this.

The Left is absolutely right to fear all of this because these things represent the furtherance of a growing trend towards decentralisation that I’ve been talking about recently. This is bad for them because the Left’s whole program — and I’m talking about going back for at least two centuries — has been based on the centralisation of power into its own hands. Everything the Left does is predicated upon the “principle” of coalescing power into its hands in government, NGOs, woke corporations, and a constellation of other institutions that all coordinate together to advance the progressive agenda. Due to our place in our current demographic-structural secular cycle, this decentralisation is nigh inevitable, but that doesn’t mean the Left won’t (literally) burn through a lot of social capital fruitlessly trying to stop it.

These recent Supreme Court rulings represent real loses for their program at the most sovereign level in our government. This, in turn, signals openly their loss of control over that institution. This is why we’re seeing increasingly desperate ideas being floated for ploys to take back the SCOTUS, from packing the Court to (somehow) convincing 2/3 of the states to gut it completely. They know they’ve lost control over it as an institution, so they’re perfectly willing to dynamite it (hopefully not meaning that literally), like an ex-girlfriend who takes a baseball bat to a guy’s X-Box rather than just giving it back to him like a sane person would do. In the space of a few short years, the SCOTUS has gone from hero to zero in the Left’s eyes, since for them everything is situational in nature. Once something, anything, outlives its usefulness to them, it goes up against the wall.

The thing to understand from this is that these losses the Court has handed to the Left are real things. They’re not just some kind of plot to “mobilise their voters” to win the midterms in November. While lefties may often be cunning, they are also arrogant and in many ways kind of dumb. These people are really not out here playing some grandmaster game of four-dimensional chess. They’re desperate, which is why they’re willing to engage in such blatant attempts at gaming the system through naked procedural manipulation. They’re the ones who are suddenly finding themselves in the place of having to operate outside of “our sacred norms” by refuting the legitimacy of institutions that go against them.

Bear in mind that the Left’s entire view of legitimacy is predicated on this “ever-forward march of progress”. To “move backwards” is to show weakness, to reveal a chink in the armour of the dialectic of inexorable progress. This sense of legitimacy, in turn, was based upon their capture of the various power-generating and power-wielding institutions, including the Supreme Court, since the “right” people now had possession of the means to remake society. What a lot of people forget is that the whole “march of progress” since the mid-1960s occurred because of this institutional takeover. Their judicially imposed agenda has never really “won the argument” on any issue. They just used social and political force to achieve their goals, followed up by media-driven social pressure and anarchotyranny to “encourage” conformity among the general population. So yeah, especially with something like the repeal of Roe v. Wade, their whole program is in jeopardy. The post-Roe stance on abortion adopted in 1973 was the truly radical stance on this issue, but they don’t want you to realise this.

Theophilus Chilton, “The Left Is in a Precarious Place”, The Neo-Ciceronian Times, 2022-06-29.

September 28, 2022

QotD: Yearning for the “endless now”

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

My guess — and I am NOT an art historian, I can’t stress that enough — is that this reflects the increasing emphasis on the individual [in the late 15th century]. Which, again, is tied to the acceptance of linear time — the desire to be commemorated as an individual, unique person, not as a type. The more people who could afford portraits, the more people wanted them, and the more the individual commemoration mattered. High-medieval “portraits” are extremely accurate as funeral sculptures, but illustrations in manuscripts are often little better than stick figures.

By the (I think) 16th, and certainly by the 17th, centuries, you’ve got portraits of people as Classical throwbacks — contemporary figures tricked out in Roman togas and whatnot. This is the full acceptance of linear time — you can move a distinct individual both forward and back along not just the course of his life, but the course of linear history.

Contrast this to the Juggalos, whose first impulse in any situation is to take a selfie … but who never, ever look at those selfies. Basic College Girl “culture” is often described as narcissistic — lord knows I’ve done it enough myself — but the funny thing is, for as self-involved as they are, they have almost no pictures of themselves hanging around. They don’t decorate their office cubicles with pictures of their families. Nothing could be easier than “flipping” through a digital photo “book”, but they never do. They go to extraordinary lengths to arrange the perfect selfie … but then they could instantly delete it, for all the impact it has.

I think this is because they actively shun the idea of linear time. When I was a young man, every girl had a photo album in her dorm room, and part of the “getting to know you” process was flipping through it with her. Half the fun was seeing the brutal fashions of yesteryear; you both had a good laugh over it.

I think that would be actively painful for Juggalos, and not just because they can’t stand to have others see them as less than 100% perfect at all times. Rather, I think the problem is the fundamental one — they don’t want to be reminded that time passes.

They want the endless now. They want to be ghosts.

Severian, “The Ghosts (II)”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-18.

September 27, 2022

QotD: The Poor Law Reform Act of 1834

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

The Royal Commission on the Operation of the Poor Laws, set up in 1832, was chaired by Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London. It numbered several other prominent churchmen among its members. The deliberations of this body led to the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834. This charming statute was based on the idea that the provision of poor relief must be made so torturous and degrading that only those suffering from extreme starvation and indigence would accept it. The sole form of assistance was to be within the context of workhouses, which were to be made as miserable and hellish as any prison. Any family unfortunate enough to have no choice but to fall back on the workhouse would be split up, as mixed-sex institutions would “undermine the good administration” of the workhouses, as the authorities euphemistically put it.

One of the law’s architects, Edwin Chadwick — a man who made Mr Gradgrind [Wiki] look like one of the Cheeryble brothers [Wiki] — infamously commented that it was vital that the inmates of workhouses should be given the coarsest food possible. William Cobbett, a leading opponent of the bill, gleefully seized on this, nicknaming the Whigs, who pushed the legislation hardest, the “Coarser Food Party”. The idea of all this — rooted in the principles of utilitarianism, political economy and Malthusianism — was, as future Archbishop of Canterbury John Bird Sumner put it, to encourage the labouring poor to do everything they could to avoid the “intemperance and want of prudent foresight” that creates poverty, the “punishment which the moral government of God inflicts in this world upon thoughtlessness and guilty extravagance”.

In the 1830s, these ideas were at the very vanguard of progressive thinking. They were promoted by the metropolitan liberal elite of the age, men such as James Mill, Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo, the forward-thinking “Philosophic Radicals” who spewed out reforming and “improving” ideas through their famous organ The Westminster Review. Other contributors included happy-go-lucky eugenicist pioneer and social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, as well as Harriet Martineau, the sort of woman who would cheerfully have put her “enlightened benevolence” into practice by personally taste-testing workhouse food to ensure it was sufficiently coarse.

These ideas were gleefully leapt upon by a large swathe of the Church leadership, who endorsed the grim dogmas of political economy with an alacrity that would only surprise anyone unfamiliar with the long history of our episcopacy’s lamb-like submission to secular liberal orthodoxies. As E.R. Norman pointed out many decades ago, the Church of England’s leaders have, again and again since at least the eighteenth century, “readily adopted the progressive idealism common to liberal opinion within the intelligentsia, of which they were a part”. They have “always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond to the values of their class and generation”, a process intimately connected to the fact that bishops are nearly always tied (by personal links, economic interests and a desire to conform) to their secular peers who set the broader cultural and political agenda.

Capel Lofft, “The closing of the Episcopal mind”, The Critic, 2022-06-21.

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