Quotulatiousness

December 18, 2024

The modern Furies

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Greek mythology, the Erinyes (the Furies) — euphemized as the Eumenides (the “Gracious ones”) were the goddesses of vengeance. You may dismiss the ancient Greeks and their beliefs, yet they often encapsulate hidden wisdom for those who know how to interpret their stories. Today, as Janice Fiamengo points out, we have no need for mythological Furies, as they’re frequently embodied in otherwise ordinary women:

The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies
Oil painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1862, in the Chrysler Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons.

Feminist uproar over Trump’s election was easy to predict, and not long in coming. Within ten days of the election, Clara Jeffery wrote in Mother Jones that “Women are furious — in a Greek mythology sort of way“. Taking examples from TikTok, Jeffery chronicled abundant “sorrow, disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage”, which many women vowed to exorcise on men: “‘If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue‘”, she quoted one.

In The New York Times, a 16-year-old girl, Naomi Beinart, charted her tumultuous emotions, which included a sense of betrayal because her male classmates had carried on with their lives on the day after the election, seemingly immune to the girls’ all-pervasive gloom and outrage. “Many of them didn’t seem to share our rage, our fear, our despair. We don’t even share the same future,” Beinart opined melodramatically.

No one with even a minimal acquaintance with social media can have missed the many similar, raging reactions: the heads being shaved, the death threats, the promised sex strikes, the fantasies of revenge against Trump-voting husbands. We are to understand that the re-election of a man rumored to lack sufficient pro-abortion commitment justifies thousands of self-recorded screams, imprecations, and poisoning plots.

At least one group of women gathered physically in Wisconsin to shout their angst and anger at Lake Michigan, and there have already been tentative (though apparently less enthusiastic than formerly) plans for a revival of the anti-Trump Women’s March protests, in which women with vulgar placards and pink hats exhibited their “collective rage“.

Women’s rage is all the rage.

It is not enough, it seems, for these women to say that they are disappointed by Trump’s win, and certainly inadequate for them to state strong disagreement with his policies or style. Expressing evidence-based positions is the sort of thing a rational person would do, and significant groups of women appear increasingly uninterested in rational talk or behavior. Instead, they reach for the most extreme language, tone of voice, postures and actions to express what feminist journalist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett called the “visceral” “body horror” produced by the Trump victory, including the “profound physical revulsion” Cosslett and many of her sisters allegedly feel simply as a result of seeing one of Trump’s tweets (talk about fragility!).

Like so many feminist pundits telling us of women’s “horror” and “fury“, the emphasis is squarely on feeling and the female body, as if to bypass the intellect and the will altogether. The idea some feminists once scorned — that women are less reasonable and self-controlled than men — seems to have become a feminist axiom.

December 12, 2024

The dispiriting rise of the “kidult”

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

Freya India explains the need for modern parents to re-embrace some of the more traditional duties of parents in raising children:

It’s pretty much accepted as fact that parents today are overprotective. We worry about helicopter parenting, and the coddling of Gen Z. But I don’t think that’s the full story. Parents aren’t protective enough.

Or at least, what parents are protective about has changed. They are overprotective about physical safety, terrified of accidents and injuries. But are they protective by giving guidance? Involved in their children’s character development? Protective by raising boys to be respectful, by guiding girls away from bad influences? Protective by showing children how to behave, by being an example?

As far as I can see many parents today are overprotective but also strangely permissive. They hesitate to give advice or get involved, afraid of seeming controlling or outdated. They obsess over protecting their children physically, but have little interest in guiding them morally. They care more about their children’s safety than their character. Protective parenting once meant caring about who your daughter dated, the decisions she made, and guiding her in a good direction. Now it just means preventing injury. And so children today are deprived of the most fundamental protection: the passing down of morals, principles, and a framework for life.

One obvious example of this is that adults act like children now. They talk like teenagers. They use the same social media platforms, play the same video games, listen to the same music. Our world moves too rapidly to retain any wisdom, denying parents the chance to pass anything down or be taken seriously, so they try to keep up with kids, who know more about the world than they do. Fathers are “girl dads” who get told what to think. Mothers are best friends to gossip with. The difference between childhood and adulthood is disappearing, and with it, parental protection.

Beyond that, too, there’s this broader cultural message that adults should focus on their own autonomy and self-actualisation. This very modern belief that a good life means maximum freedom, with as little discomfort and constraint as possible, the way children think. Now nothing should hold adults back. They have a right to feel good, at all times. They stopped being role models of responsibility and became vessels of the only culture left, a therapeutic culture, where it’s only acceptable to be protective of one thing, your own mental health and happiness. Listen to the way adults judge decisions now, how they justify themselves. Parents are celebrated for leaving their families because they were vaguely unhappy or felt they needed to find themselves, even at the expense of their children’s security. Adults talk about finding themselves as much as teenagers do. Parents complain online about the “emotional labour” of caring for family, or express regret for even having children because they got in the way of their goals. Once growing up meant sacrificing for family, giving up some of yourself, that was an honour, that was a privilege, and in that sacrifice you found actual fulfilment, broke free from yourself, moved on from adolescent anxieties, and there, then, you became an adult.

But slowly, without thinking, we became suspicious of adulthood. We debunked every marker and milestone, from marriage to children all the way to adulthood itself. Now we aren’t just refusing to grow up but rejecting the very concept of it. Adulthood does not exist, apparently. It’s a scam, a lie, a myth. Adulthood is a marketing ploy, we say, while wearing Harry Potter merch and going to Disneyland. Adulthood is a performance, apparently, that’s going out of style. “There is nothing, there is nobody which/who would really justify the claim ‘you have to grow up’,” seems to be the sentiment. “For whom? for what?”

November 27, 2024

Scolianormativity

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

At FEE, Michael Strong defines the neologism and provides evidence that it has been a long-term harm to children forced into the Prussian-originated school regimentation regime:

Scolianormative (adj.): The assumption that behaviors defined by institutionalized schooling are “normal”. An assumption that became pervasive in industrialized societies in which institutionalized schooling became the norm that resulted in marginalizing and harming millions of children. Once society began to question scolianormativity, gradually people began to realize that the norms set by institutionalized schooling were perfectly arbitrary. It turned out that it was not necessary to harm children. The institutions that led to such widespread harms were dismantled, and humanity transcended the terrible century of institutionalized schooling.

The conventional educational model, government-enforced and subsidized, is based on 13 years of schooling consisting of state-defined curriculum standards and exams leading to a high school diploma.

Young human beings are judged as either “normal” or not based on the extent to which they are “on track” with respect to grade level exams and test scores. Students who are not making the expected progress may be diagnosed with learning differences (formerly known as disabilities). Students who can’t sit still adequately may be diagnosed with ADD/ADHD. Students who find the experience soul-killing may be diagnosed with depression or anxiety. Students who can’t stand to be told what to do all day may be diagnosed with Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). Students who score higher on certain tests are labeled “gifted”.

Massive amounts of research and institutional authority have been invested in these and other diagnoses. When a child is not progressing appropriately in the system, the child is often sent to specialists who then perform the diagnosis. When appropriate, then the child is given some combination of medication, accommodations, and/or sent to a special program for children with “special needs”.

Many well-intentioned people regard this system as life-saving for the children who might otherwise have “not had their needs met” in the absence of such a diagnosis and intervention. And this is no doubt often true, but our fixation on scolianormativity blinds us to the fact that an entirely different perspective might actually result in better lives for more children.

How could one possibly deny mountains of evidence on behalf of such a life-saving system?

Scolianormativity

The Prussian school model, a state-led model devoted to nationalism, is only about two hundred years old. For much of its first century it was limited to a few hours per day, for a few months per year, for a few years of schooling. It has only gradually grown to encompass most of a child’s waking hours for nine months a year from ages 5 to 18. Indeed, in the U.S., it was only in the 1950s that a majority of children graduated from high school (though laws requiring compulsory attendance through age 16 had been passed in the late 19th and early 20th century). In addition, for most of its first century, it was far more flexible than it has become in its second. The increasing standardization and bureaucratization of childhood is a remarkably recent phenomenon in historical terms.

In his book Seeing Like a State, the political scientist James C. Scott documents how governments work to create societies that are “legible”, that can be perceived and managed by the state to suit the needs of the state’s bureaucrats and political leaders. Public schools are one of the most pervasive of all state institutions. The structure of public schooling has grown to suit the needs of the state bureaucrats who monitor it.

November 23, 2024

They just can’t stop themselves from taking the MAGA bait

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

Kat Rosenfield in UnHerd discusses the inability of American leftists from rising to the (obvious) trolling from pranksters on the right:

Carol Kane and Billy Crystal as Valerie and Miracle Max in The Princess Bride, 1987.

The current state of the American political discourse is best understood through the lens of the 1987 movie The Princess Bride — or more specifically, one scene therein. It’s the part where Miracle Max is decompensating over the insistence of his wife, Valerie, on saying the word, “Humperdinck”, the name of the movie’s evil prince, who is also Max’s most loathed nemesis.

“Why would you say that name!” he screams.

“What? Humperdinck!?” she shrieks back, gleefully.

One gets the sense that these two do this a lot — her Humperdincking, him screaming, which only makes her Humperdinck harder. That this problem has two obvious solutions only illuminates its intractability. Valerie could stop saying the name, but then again, Max could also choose not to react to its every utterance as if he’s been electrocuted. That neither of them are making different choices suggests that something about this dynamic serves them both.

I thought of this scene when the first “Your body, my choice” post from a male Trump voter skittered insect-like across my timeline in the wake of the election — closely followed by a handful of “My body, his choice” remixes by savvy OnlyFans models hoping to cash in on the moment. This crude riff on the feminist war cry that once defined the battle for abortion rights was akin to an inaugural shout of “Humperdinck!”, designed explicitly to trigger a meltdown among liberals. And lo: if you do an internet search for the phrase now, around 5% of the results are of people posting it and 95% are critics freaking out in response. “Women need to be kept safe from the ‘your body, my choice’ peddlers,” The Guardian announced, while CNN warned: “Attacks on women surge on social media following election”. And The New Yorker, for whom the phrase is a harbinger of a “coming era of gender regression”, described it as “A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right”.

The phrase “irony-poisoned” in that last headline — which graces an essay by Jia Tolentino — struck me as an especially savvy bit of rhetoric. It functions as a preemptive strike against the obvious counterpoint to all this panic. Namely: “your body my choice” is a repulsive thing to say, but also the furthest thing from a legitimate threat.

The men behind these posts are not rapists-in-waiting, announcing their intent to commit sexual violence; they are trolls, gleefully trolling away in the hope of making people Mad Online. But if Tolentino knows this is bait (and she clearly does), she nevertheless cannot help taking it, hook, line, and sinker. The piece is imbued with a near-religious sense of horror at seeing the feminist catechism of “my body my choice” twisted by nonbelievers into something unfathomably malignant. This is beyond distasteful; it is heretical. And unlike the provocations in which the millennial Left once delighted, back in the days when one measly crucifix soaked in urine could trigger a weeks-long meltdown among religious conservatives, this little joke (Tolentino argues) is simply not funny.

November 20, 2024

QotD: The Chads, the Staceys, and the Incels

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

I have spent some time in the twilight reaches of the manosphere researching a new book, a world of depressing forums, full of hatred and despair, where young men gather to focus on the absence of sex in their lives. There are two broad categories: The Incels hate women because they won’t sleep with them. The Men Go Their Own Way (MGTOW) guys won’t sleep with women because they hate them.

These boys have their own vocabulary and belief systems. Pretty girls (Staceys) all sleep with the same few Alpha men (Chads). The Staceys ride the Cock Carousel, ie, have sex with the same few Chads. All this sluttish behaviour gives the Staceys something called A Thousand Cock Stare.

It is a grim world, in which women are evil and manipulative, and hated both for being sluts and for being virgins. It is a world in which pictures of pretty girls with their pet dogs are unbelievably sinister. These boys choose to live in this bleak world. They are culpable. But, if you tell all young, white boys that they are damned, why should they not behave as if they are damned?

A society which does not allow for people to atone, to be redeemed, and to be judged on their intent and actions is a miserable place. Most people interact with each other without antagonism most of the time. We should start being a bit more forgiving to each other, ditch the Puritanism and learn to cherish the well-meaning stumble towards decency. Even if, sometimes, we fall.

Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.

November 12, 2024

John Carter – “We can all sense the vibe shift”

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

At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter tries to explain the “vibe shift” in western culture:

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Underneath the medical tyranny of COVID, the stolen elections, the Internet censorship, the inflation, the hypermigration, the gender psychosis, the polarized rancor of sexual politics, and all of the rest of the symptoms of our decaying mismanagerial order, a countercurrent has flowed through the deep and hidden places of our collective psyche, hot and slow, like a chthonic river of magma rising implacably to the surface.

It isn’t just frustration with the intolerable imposition of Woke into every aspect of our lives, as though we could reset the clock to 90s liberalism and get fresh again with the Prince of Bel Air. It isn’t just anger at the invasion of our countries by the third world, nor is it limited to impatient disgust with the glossolalic babble of an incompetocracy comprised of credentialed midwits who seem to feel that word-shaped noises confer all the legitimacy they need to misrule our countries into oblivion.

It isn’t purely negative.

There’s a sense, somehow, of hope.

Hope, that after decades in which it seemed that history has stalled, that the culture has been frozen in permafrost, that nothing new could ever really be done again, that Nothing Ever Happens, that the only thing we can look forward to is a long, cold decline into technocratic surveillance, demographic implosion, green energy poverty, and final, irrecoverable collapse … hope that maybe this insipid fate isn’t so inevitable as we thought. Hope, that the building tectonic pressure of those buried psychological forces might finally break through and crack the shell of a dead future.

The sudden birth of artificial intelligence and the renewed enthusiasm for the conquest of space are two very obvious signs of this abrupt return of novelty. This is not a purely positive thing – AI is regarded with anxiety by almost everyone, but it is the raw fact of its sudden transition from science fiction to mundane tool of everyday life that is significant here.

There are other signs of this sense of renewal. The proliferation of self-improvement culture amongst many of the youth, particularly on the Very Online Right. The rise of the digital nomad, a modern re-enactment of the Romantic wanderjahr. The quiet birth of the network state, for instance in the form of Praxis. The renaissance of thoughtful, long-form essays right here on Substack. Surging interest in the religious traditions of our ancestors, whether in the form of Orthodox Christianity or paganism. The transformation of warfare by drones, promising a revolution in military affairs every bit as epochal as the firearm. The rise of a contradictorily global sense of national particularism. The steady refinement of 3D printing technologies.

Trump’s victory in 2024 seems a sure sign of this vibe shift. In a plot arc that could have been lifted straight from the original Star Wars trilogy, Trump brought A New Hope to America – and the world – in 2016; his forces were shattered and scattered to the winds in 2020 when The Empire Struck Back; only for the rebel forces, tempered by the lessons learned in defeat and strengthened with the assistance of new allies, to Return With the Jedi in 2024 and once again blow up the Death Star. This time around, Trump represents not simply the desperate holding action of an underground resistance to granny state totalitarianism, but the coalescence of a new and vigorous counter-elite, as embodied most of all by the ambitious hectobillionaire space lord who built auctoritas by buying the digital public square out from under the Empire so he could shitpoast in peace with the chuds.

Each of these has their good and bad aspects – the point, again, is not to dwell on whether any given development will be to our benefit or our detriment. As always, the ramification of second and third-order effects through the social order will result in both advantage and disadvantage. The point is simply that things are changing, that we can all feel it, and that this fuels a sense of nervous excitement that permeates the atmosphere like electrical buzz of a high-tension wire. Perhaps there will be disaster, and we shall drive ourselves to ruin and extinction; perhaps our descendants will walk the stars as near-gods. Either way, we are here, now, at this most interesting of nexus points in the unfolding history of our species. Would you rather be anywhen else?

The pessimism of recent years naturally generated an interest in cyclical theories of history – the empirical Strauss-Howe model of generational turnings, Turchin’s mechanical cliodynamics with its elite overproduction and wealth pumps, Spengler’s mythopoetic conception of cultures as vast organisms whose lifecycles progress through predictable seasons. Hard times make strong men; strong men make good times; good times make weak men; weak men make hard times. Whichever model one favours, the invariable conclusion is that Western civilization is in its terminal winter – fragile, ossified, decadent, corrupt, exhausted, and doomed. Desolation awaits.

“The Course of Empire – Desolation” by Thomas Cole, one of a series of five paintings created between 1833 and 1836.
Wikimedia Commons.

Yet a cycle is not defined by its final product, no more than a symphony is defined by its concluding note, a life by its last moment, a wheel by a single turn, or a circle by a single point. Viewed from another angle, the death of Faustian civilization is also the birth of a new civilization … and even as we are here to live through the death of one, we plant the seeds for the other. With the tempo of history moving faster than ever before due to the global interconnectivity of instantaneous telecommunications and high-speed travel, it may be that our children will live in the savage springtime of that new civilization … perhaps one animated by the Aenean rather than the Faustian soul, which “will go Mars, not because it is hard, but because it is necessary”. You should read the essay at that last link, by the way. It isn’t long, it’s extremely interesting, and it’s new.

November 7, 2024

QotD: Fear of … freedom

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

When Rousseau said you’d need to force men to be free, he wasn’t joking. It’s hard to admit the truth of that statement, especially as Rousseau, like all Leftists, quite obviously pleasured himself to the thought of forcing great masses of people to do things, but he’s right for all that. As Nikolai points out, so many people quite obviously enjoy the COVID madness, because it gives structure to their otherwise stressfully chaotic lives. Everyone, even the most rugged Marlboro Man individualist, has experienced “analysis paralysis”, that rising sense of near-panic that comes from having too many choices. Your developmentally normal person quickly snaps out of it — a mental slap upside the head in the form of “it’s just peanut butter, dummy!” usually does it — but a vast and increasing number of people never do.

Since this is my blog and it’s Friday and all that, I’ll go ahead and expand this into a nebulous Theory of Everything: What people really want, deep down, is drama within limits. Ideally, you have the sense that something better is possible — and that something worse is possible — but, most importantly, the sense that if you follow the rules, and make sure everyone else follows the rules, neither of them will happen.

If you reach what appears to be an end state — that is, there’s no realistic possibility of anyone going higher or lower — you see nasty Karen-ish behavior. From everyone, everywhere, always. The Z Man did a piece the other day on Sayre’s Law, which anyone who has ever dealt with eggheads instinctively understands: “The fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small”. If you read the bios of the real lunatics — the insane-by-egghead-standards, I’m talking — you almost always see that they’re tenured at some second rate academy. They’re topped out, and they know it. Hang around the faculty lounge long enough, and you learn to spot it in their eyes — that precise moment when they realize that Harvard won’t be calling, so they’re stuck here at Flyover State. They can’t move up, and thanks to tenure there’s no realistic (in their minds) possibility of falling down. The only drama left, then, is interpersonal drama, which is why they’re such vicious, obnoxious bitches to everyone, everywhere, always.

It works outside the academy too, of course. The two main CRT loons, Robin De Angelo and that Ibram X. Kendi guy, are maxed out and they know it. They weep, because they’ve seen they have no more worlds to conquer. Ever-escalating lunacy is the only emotional escape hatch they have left. You saw the same deal with “the workers” under Communism. They’re stuck there, forever, and they know it. They can’t move up — wrong class background, comrade, plus you lack Party connections — but they can’t really move down, either, if for no other reason than the KGB, vast as it is, can’t bother with every moribund tractor factory in Krasnoyarsk. Can’t move up, can’t move down, so you drink yourself into oblivion and spend your still-conscious hours in petty backbiting.

Severian, “Mailbag Etc.”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-06.

November 5, 2024

QotD: “If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others”

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

A message to trans people:

I’m a biological essentialist about sex — your sex is a given of your chromosomes and organs, and I will never actually believe that you can invert it by choice.

I am, however, conditionally willing not to challenge your weird Gnostic beliefs on this point, and to treat you as the sex you “identify” as anyway. Here are the conditions:

1. You must be good at passing. If you can’t present a convincing pretense, it’s neither in my interest nor anyone else’s to help you prop up an unconvincing one.

2. You must be harmless. Most obviously, you must not use your “identification” to prey on others, whether directly by violence or by using the physical advantage of your sex to overwhelm them in sports, or in any other way. And if you’re told you’re unwelcome in a bathroom or changing room, it’s on you to not impose.

3. You must be modest. Your desire to role-play as M or F does not entitle you to violate prevailing norms about where, and to whom, you expose your genitals. If you aren’t polite enough to refrain from this, I won’t be even a bit polite to you.

4. Children are off-limits. The moment you engage in behavior that seems intended to confuse or indoctrinate them, you enter the category of “predator” and stay there. My response to sexual predation on children only begins with rejection and rudeness.

5. If you try to use the force of law to gain what equal and voluntary negotiation with individuals won’t give you, you also enter the category of “predator” and stay there.

The meta-rule is: the more your behavior imposes costs on others, the less polite and accepting I will be. If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others.

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-07-28.

November 1, 2024

QotD: J.D. Vance, a Führer for the rest of us

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

    Expert: JD Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism

Quoted for the lulz. Ol’ JD, a Führer for the rest of us.

But since we’re here … a fascinating footnote in Jaynes informs us that schizophrenics, who Jaynes thinks might be throwbacks to the “bicameral mind”, have no problem with “diffused identity” or whatever the term was. Jaynes hypothesizes that ancient, preconscious peoples didn’t see images of their gods in cult objects; they saw the actual, physical gods. We unicameral people can’t wrap our heads around it, since there are lots of statues and they can’t ALL be god — even if we grant that the biggest statue in the best temple can be god, or if we allow that the black meteorite or whatever is really god to them, still, god can’t be diffused like that: Either your statue is god or mine is; or neither of them are, but they can’t both be.

Schizophrenics, at least according to Jaynes, would be down with that. He notes that you can put two guys who think they’re Napoleon in the same padded cell, and you don’t get a schizo bum fight, you get complete agreement: They’re both Napoleon, somehow. The law of the excluded middle, personal identity version, simply doesn’t apply.

And since my hypothesis is that smartphones are re-decameralizing (it’s a word) us at Ludicrous Speed, well … here you go. Donald Trump is Hitler, but J.D. Vance is somehow also Hitler. It’s not like the real, historical Hitler lacked for shitty, evil underlings — J.D could easily be Heinrich Himmler or somebody. But no, he’s gotta be Hitler, the same way Trump has to be Hitler, and if that means they’re somehow both Hitler, well … there it is. Bicamerality for the win.

Severian, “Catching Up With the Crazies”, Founding Questions, 2024-07-29.

October 26, 2024

QotD: Henry VIII

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

Barbara Tuchman […] said something about medieval nobles once, to the effect of “the reason some of their decisions seems so childish to us is that a lot of them were children”. I don’t think she’s right about that — kids grew up pretty damn fast in the Middle Ages — but if you expand it a bit to “rookies make rookie mistakes”, she’s got a big, important point. No account of the reign of Henry VIII, for instance, can really be complete without considering that when he took the throne he was only 17, and had only been heir apparent for a few years before that. He was most definitely the “spare” in the old “heir and a spare” formula for medieval dynastic success; it’s likely that his father was preparing him for a Church career when his elder brother Arthur died suddenly in 1502, when Henry was 11. What Arthur had been in training his whole life to do, Henry got at most six frantic years of, under an increasingly feeble father.

Leaving all of Henry’s personal quirks aside — and his was a very strong, distinctive personality — that’s got to affect you.

So many of the changes in Henry’s reign, then, must have been driven in part by the fact that it was the same man, reflecting on a lifetime’s experience in a job he was never expected to have, wasn’t really prepared for, and didn’t seem to want (aside from the lifestyle). There’s been lots of pop-historical theorizing about what was “wrong” with the later Henry — senility, syphilis, the madness of power — but more naturalistic explanations of his later actions must take into account simple age. A man nearing the end of his life, knowing that his succession was very much in doubt and fearing for the state of his soul, will do things differently than a young man in the prime of life.

[…]

Life was hard back then, and cheap. When every other child dies before the age of five and the average life expectancy is 35, I imagine, you live your life cranked to 11 every waking moment. Accounts of grown men weeping like little girls at the theater aren’t an exaggeration; the whole age was given to extreme outbursts. And that’s just the baseline! Now consider that a guy like Henry never had a moment to himself, and I do mean never — not once, in his entire life. He even had a guy with him on the crapper, who would wipe his ass for him. The relationship between Henry and a guy like Wolsey, then — to say nothing of his relationship with the Groom of the Stool — must’ve been intimate in a way we can’t possibly grasp. Compared to that, you and your wife are barely on speaking terms. If Henry seemed sometimes to set policy just because he was pissed at Wolsey, we must consider the possibility that that’s exactly what happened.

The best you can do, then, is imagine yourself back there as best you can, and make your interpretations in that light, acknowledging your biases as best you can (I’m not a medievalist, obviously, but I’m a much better read amateur than most, and though Henry VIII is a very hard guy to like, he’s equally hard not to admire). Most of all — and this, I think, is the hardest thing for academic historians, more even than recognizing their presentist biases — you have to keep your humility. Perhaps Henry’s decision about ___ was part of a gay little frenemies spat with Wolsey. That’s sure what it seems like, knowing the man, and having no contrary evidence …

… but contrary evidence might always emerge. It might not have been the optimal decision, but it might’ve been a much better one than you thought, because Henry had information you didn’t, but now do. It makes for some restless nights, knowing that your life’s work could be overturned by some grad student finding some old paper at a yard sale somewhere, but … there it is.

Severian, “Writing Real History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-18.

October 15, 2024

QotD: The Mandela Effect

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

Do you remember where you were when you heard that planes had struck the World Trade Center? That the Challenger shuttle had exploded? Or that Nelson Mandela had been released?

Your memories may be different from mine, but not as different as Fiona Broome’s. I remember watching the live TV footage of Nelson Mandela walking to freedom after 27 years in captivity, while Broome, an author and paranormal researcher, remembers Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s.

When Broome discovered that she was not the only person to remember an alternative version of events, she started a website about what she dubbed “the Mandela Effect”. On it, she collected shared memories that seemed to contradict the historical record. (The site is no longer online but, never fear, Broome has published a 15-volume anthology of these curious recollections.)

Mandela, of course, did not die in prison. On a recent trip to South Africa, I visited Robben Island, where he and many others were incarcerated in harsh conditions, to speak to former prisoners and former prison guards, and to wander around a city emblazoned with images of the smiling, genial, elderly statesman. How could it be that anyone remembers differently?

The truth is that our memories are less reliable than we tend to think. The cognitive psychologist Ulric Neisser vividly remembered where he was when he heard that the Japanese had launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. He was listening to a baseball game on the radio when the broadcast was interrupted by the breaking news, and he rushed upstairs to tell his mother. Only later did Neisser realise that his memory, no matter how vivid, must be wrong. There are no radio broadcasts of baseball in December.

On January 28 1986, the Challenger space shuttle exploded shortly after launch; a spectacular and highly memorable tragedy. The morning after, Neisser and his colleague Nicole Harsch asked a group of students to write down an account of how they learnt the news. A few years later, Neisser and Harsch went back to the same people and made the same requests. The memories were complete, vivid and, for a substantial minority of people, completely different from what they had written down a few hours after the event.

What’s stunning about these results is not that we forget. It’s that we remember, clearly, in detail and with great confidence, things that simply did not happen.

Tim Harford, “The detours on memory lane”, Tim Harford, 2024-06-20.

October 8, 2024

QotD: The competitive instinct

Filed under: Gaming, Quotations, Soccer, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I once saw an interview with basketball player Charles Barkley, in which he discussed his retirement. Barkley was a Hall of Fame player, and like most of those guys, he hung on a few seasons too long. Even having lost a step or three, Sir Charles was still a decent player, but that’s all he was — a decent player, but getting paid like a superstar and with a superstar’s reputation. A few seasons after retiring, he admitted as much. He said something like (from memory) “I’d guard a guy and think, ‘this is going to be easy, this guy is terrible’. And then he’d beat me, and I’d realize I just got beat by some guy who’s terrible, and then I knew it was time to hang it up.”

One thing chicks of both sexes and all however-many-we’re-up-to genders don’t realize these days is how competitive men — actual biological males — are hardwired to be. Things like World of Warcraft and fantasy football only exist because the genius who invented those figured out a way to tap into that heretofore-unexpressed male competitiveness. And indeed, it’s the guy who’d never even dream of putting on shoulder pads who’s the most insanely competitive guy in a fantasy football league or (I’m certain) a whatever-they’re-called in World of Warcraft. Even the uber-dorks in the Math Club and the Speech and Debate Society went after each other like Mickey Ward and Arturo Gatti. It’s just how guys are … or, at least, how guys used to be.

[…]

When it comes right down to it, that’s why men of a certain age simply don’t get “women’s sports”. Few will be as crustily chauvinistic as yer ‘umble narrator, and come right out and say it, but here goes: Women’s “sports” are just a shoddy knockoff of the real thing, because women just aren’t wired that way. That’s not to say that there aren’t competitive women, or athletic women — obviously there are, some very athletic and very competitive — but the female of the species just isn’t wired to put in the work the way males are. When faced with the prospect of three straight hours in the batting cage, swinging at curve after curve until your blisters have blisters and your shoulders feel like they’re falling out of their sockets, most women will quite sensibly ask “why bother?” Competition-for-competition’s-sake, even when it’s only against yourself in those long, long, looooong hours in the cage, just doesn’t motivate them the way it does us.

Which is why a person’s reaction to Simone Biles, or the USA Women’s soccer team, or the WNBA, or what have you is an almost perfect predictor of their age, not just their “gender”. I judge sports as sports. I don’t care about soccer, but if I did, I’d care about it as soccer — meaning, I’d want to see the best possible players, playing at the highest possible level. Women’s Olympic teams — that is to say, all star teams, the very best players — routinely get smoked by teams of 15 year old boys. Sir Charles is pushing sixty, but he could dominate the WNBA right now, in street clothes. Obviously this doesn’t apply to Pee Wee or rec leagues, but if you’re going to take a paycheck for doing it, then I want to see exactly what I paid for.

In estrogen-drenched, synchronized-ovulation Clown World, it’s all about appearances. Sure, she let her team down and wussed out (while still talking up how great she is), but can’t you see that it gave her the sadz? Sure, Megan Rapinoe et al keep getting smoked by 14 year old boys, then choking in international competition, but can’t you see her out there, with her pink hair and her tats and her Strong, Confident Empowerment? The “competition”, such as it is, is an excuse for the display. Michael Jordan ought to give baseball another shot. We know he can cry. These days, that’d get him a first-class ticket to Cooperstown.

Severian, “On Competition”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-02.

October 1, 2024

TikTok’s Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) community

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

The more we experience the joys of widespread social media, the more people seem to discover ways to bring attention to themselves for genuine or dishonest reasons. Freddie deBoer looks at the DID-sufferers on TikTok and assesses the chance that such a rare disorder can have had so many newly discovered sufferers:

Let me turn back to the TikTok “systems”, the strange, maybe-shrinking world of adolescent women on social media who pretend to have an incredibly rare and debilitating mental illness and treat it as a fun and quirky alternative lifestyle.

This piece from The Verge, though a little misguided, is a good jumping off point for this topic. The basic story is pretty simple. Dissociative identity disorder (DID), long referred to as multiple personality disorder, is a remarkably controversial diagnosis that has long captured the public imagination. It’s not hard to see why; the idea of someone who switches from one personality to the other is lurid and dramatic, making it easy fodder for television. (The number of episodes of legal dramas about DID is immense.) The condition also invites a particularly stark consideration of the question of individual agency and culpability for bad deeds. As you can imagine, pretending to have “alters” can be very convenient; a notorious case involved an embezzler whose only defense for his crimes was that he had multiple personalities and one of them stole the money. There have long been researchers and clinicians in psychiatry who doubt the very existence of DID, and even among those who are friendlier to the concept, the disorder is known to be incredibly rare. Many prominent cases of DID have proven in time to be fraudulent. The most famous American case, that of “Sybil“, was particularly tragic. The woman who supposedly suffered from the disorder, who faced a childhood of abuse and neglect, would go on to admit to her psychiatrist that she had made the alternate personalities up. (We know because we have the letters.) But the doctor, who had been made wealthy and famous thanks to her work with Sybil, threatened to withdrawn her financial support if Sybil did not recant that confession. Having no other choice, she did.

What DID TikTok asks us to believe is that, in the span of maybe half a decade, tens of thousands of adolescent women developed DID, an exceedingly rare disorder marked by symptoms entirely unlike those on your For You page. The Verge article, written by Jessica Lucas, is typical of the media’s take on this issue, to the degree that they’ve written about it at all: relentlessly sympathetic to the DID TikTok adolescents even when grudgingly admitting that there’s a lot of fakery. And admit that she does, as it would be essentially impossible to pretend otherwise. Even the wokest wokie couldn’t help but look at this shit and conclude that a lot of it is bullshit.

The cases of DID that are considered to be particularly valid or believable are very few, and the people who have suffered in them have been people living absolutely wasted lives, lives filled with abuse and instability and addiction and misery; the overwhelming majority of DID TikTokers appear to be living perfectly stable and successful adolescent lives. Those with DID have almost never professed to be able to switch from one alter to another on command; many DID TikTokers playact that exact behavior for their viewers. Alters are notoriously uncooperative towards each other; TikTok DID videos routinely feature alters happily participating in “roll calls” in which they switch from one identity to the next, conveniently timed for the creation of #content. (The DID people claim that really they’re just opportunistically capturing organic switches, but a) it’s very clear that many of these videos are filmed in one day and b) that would still require alters to willingly turn the camera on and get into the costume etc, which is not at all how alters have traditionally acted.) In the DID literature alters are almost never aware of what’s happening when another alter is “fronting”; on DID TikTok they almost universally are, justified with the convenient idea of “co-consciousness,” which is one of many evolutions of DID these people have implemented to allow their little pageant to continue. Most people with DID diagnosis, historically, have not been photogenic women with an interest in getting more followers. I could go on.

Lucas’s piece is particularly useful for the remarkable, remarkably depressing story of Dr. Matthew Robinson, a clinician and researcher from Harvard Medical School’s McLean Hospital. (The site of Girl, Interrupted, among other things.) Like a lot of people in psychiatry, Robinson noted with alarm that his hospital had “been inundated with referrals and requests from schools, parents, and our own adolescent treatment and testing services to assess for symptoms of what [patients] call DID.” He proceeded to discuss the difficulties this sort of situation provokes in an already-overtaxed mental health system, and spoke frankly about the fact that a considerable number of the people presenting with this disorder obviously do not in fact have it. He stated plainly that which many are too circumspect to say, which is that these TikTokers are faking. The consequence, of saying this in a lecture with his professional peers, was review-bombing of the hospital online, threats, a call to have Robinson’s medical license revoked, and sufficient harassment that McLean pulled online videos of the lecture. The online mob engaged in the typical social justice-vocabulary freakout campaign, McLean folded, and as stated in the piece, most researchers are now too scared to publicly comment on this absurd situation. If someone tells you that there is no such thing as a social justice-inflected cancellation campaign, you can point to this exact scenario and to the vicious and vengeful disability rights movement in general.

To be clear, I think that probably literally zero of the people who perform DID on TikTok have the disorder. Zero. I imagine that a significant portion of them have deluded themselves into thinking they do. But I’m quite confident that most of them are very well aware that they’re faking.

September 30, 2024

British and Australian schools are teaching boys to hate themselves

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Education, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Janice Fiamengo discusses the sort of things British and Australian boys are being taught about themselves and their role in society:

For years, feminists in the English-speaking school systems have done everything they can to psychologically destroy a generation of boys, calling their masculinity “problematic”, “hegemonic” and “toxic”.

At their least malign, feminist teachers have made it clear to boys that their perspectives and experiences aren’t as important as those of girls. Many businesses and organizations support programs aimed at girls’ academic success; there are no equivalent programs for boys. When study after study shows boys lagging behind girls in school, many feminists don’t even pretend to care, blaming the boys, as did Australian feminist Jane Caro, for their alleged privilege. Such ideologues continue to call for more feminist teaching, and moreover take direct aim at schoolboys’ maleness in what scholar Paul Nathanson has identified as a form of identity harassment, a pervasive psychological assault that creates doubt, shame, and alienation.

Under the feminist model, boys learn from a young age that their sex is responsible for violence and other serious harms, and that they must take personal responsibility for it. A few years ago, it came to light that the female principal of an Australian school thought it a good idea to hold an assembly in which the boys were to apologize for male misbehavior to the girl next to them. Naturally, no girls are ever expected to apologize to boys for the misdeeds of the female sex.

Calls regularly circulate, as in the West Australian‘s “How We Stop This Kid Becoming a Monster“, for teaching to address the problem of predatory masculinity. Unless the feminist deprogrammers can get to work in the early years, we’re told, the boys will succumb to their inner monster. Boys learn that they can hurt girls and women even without meaning to, just by looking at them or holding traditional views. As we’ll see, any boy who objects to his own vilification will learn that objecting itself is a technique of domination.

Teaching Toxic Masculinity

A recent report on UK schools provided a glimpse into what feminist instruction looks like, revealing that terms such as “hegemonic masculinity” and “toxic masculinity”, until a decade ago part of the radical feminist fringe, are now in the mainstream of pedagogy even in the lower grades.

The Family Education Trust surveyed materials used by UK schools in their sex education classes. Out of 197 schools that responded to a request for information (more than 100 did not respond), 62 schools confirmed that they were teaching about toxic masculinity. 10 schools even admitted to teaching that “men and boys possess traits that are inherently toxic and negative for society“. (One would be relieved to hear that the principals of such schools and all participating teachers were immediately sanctioned, or at least told to stop such claptrap — but of course such has not occurred.)

One slide from a lesson on toxic masculinity stated that while “masculinity in and of itself is not necessarily a harmful thing […] the way that masculinity is traditionally defined in society can be problematic”. Some of the materials don’t even make sense, as for example the statement that traditional masculine traits “can be limiting for women, girls and other people who don’t identify as men, who are not expected to display these traits”.

September 27, 2024

QotD: Nietzsche – a gamma male incel?

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

Nietzsche seems to elicit either frothing anger or dismissive contempt amongst Christians. This is understandable. He did after all write a book called The Antichrist, and coined such memorable phrases as “God is dead”. Characterizing Christianity as a form of slave morality doesn’t endear him to Christians either. As to the contemptuous dismissal, this is usually phrased along the lines that Nietzsche spent the last decade of his life as a catatonic madman, probably due to advanced syphilis, and that his life before this was marked by professional and social failure, continuous health problems such as severe migraines and painful digestive issues, and rejection by romantic interests. This “Ubermensch“, they say, was a loser. He was an incel. He was a gamma male.

If you aren’t familiar with Vox Day’s sociosexual hierarchy [SSH], you can find the definition of its categories at his Sigma Game Substack here. Briefly, the SSH classifies men (and only men) according to the ways they relate to one another, and therefore (since women are exquisitely socially sensitive), to women. It divides men into the following categories: alphas, the natural leaders who get most of the female attention; betas or bravos, who are not Pyjama Boy, but rather the alpha’s lieutenants and capos, enforcing the alpha’s rule and getting some of the female attention that spills out of his penumbra; gammas, who are essentially low-t nerds with poor social skills that scare the hoes; deltas, who are basically the workers, the ordinary joes who keep everything running, and are sometimes after much struggle successful in landing a waifu; omegas, who are at the bottom of the hierarchy, neither receiving much from it nor contributing anything to it, and never leave their dirty basements; sigmas, who are essentially lone wolves with an ambivalent relationship to the hierarchy, which they don’t really care about (they have their own, more interesting thing they’re doing, which they’re happy to do alone if necessary), but nevertheless do quite well within it, often challenging the alpha’s authority without intending to; and lambdas, who exist outside of the sociosexual hierarchy because they are literally gay.

If you want an image of the SSH, consider your typical American high-school in the 1980s. The alpha is the captain of the football team; the betas are the other football team players; the gammas are the chess club nerds; the deltas are the normal kids with nothing much remarkable about them; the sigma is the kid in the metal shirt who cuts class because it bores him and then shows up at the party with a hot girl from a different school that no one has met before; the omegas are the dropout welfare trash kids; and the lambdas are the theatre kids.

So, was Nietzsche a gamma male incel? Was he a loser and a nerd?

Of course he was. Vox is absolutely correct about this.

Christians will usually follow up the gamma male incel attack by noting the absurd contrast between Nietzsche’s lived reality, as a frail neurasthenic with a terminal case of oneitis who could be sent into days of migraines by a chance encounter with a caffeinated beverage, and the concept of the Ubermensch he preached in his writings, most notably in his very strange novel? prose poem? mental breakdown? Thus Spake Zarathustra. By the same token we might note that Virgil was no Aeneas. The character created by the artist is not the artist; if the artist was the character, he’d be too busy running around doing heroic character things, not hunched over in his scriptorium scribbling away with ink-stained fingers.

And make no mistake about it – Nietzsche was as much the poet as the philosopher, indeed, probably more poet than philosopher. One of the most common complaints you’ll hear about Nietzsche is that it’s not at all clear, much of the time, what he’s getting at. What is the actual argument here? people will ask. They’re used to philosophers whose turgid prose is a loose string of logical syllogisms, composed with all the charm of a mathematical derivation. The wild electricity of Nietzsche’s divine madness is an entirely different genre.

We call Nietzsche a philosopher because that’s the closest category we have to throw him in, but this is a poor categorization. Nietzsche’s mind – and yes, this may well be because it was broken by syphilis – did not proceed according to the narrow rails enforced by a rigid adherence to logic and reason. It was not weighed down by the gravity of methodological rigour. That is not to say that he did not apply reason, simply that he was not limited to it. He made use of revelation, of inspiration, just as much. He felt as much as he thought when he wrote, inhabiting the ideas he developed with his passion as much as his intellect. He thought with his whole brain, using both his left hemisphere and his right – in Nietzsche’s language, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Being aware that philosophy specifically, and Western thought more generally, was to an extraordinary and even pathological degree locked into the left-hemisphere mode, into the Apollonian realm of rational dialectic, he went out of his way to cultivate the Dionysian instead, to get into touch with his intuitive, subconscious, “irrational” mind. As much as Nietzsche was a philosopher, he was also an artist, a poet1, a mystic, and even, dare I say it, a prophet.

None of which is to say that he was not also a giant loser.

But then, most philosophers are nerds who are bad with the ladies. There are exceptions, of course. There is no record of Plato being bad with the ladies; Plato’s tastes are reputed to have run in different directions.

John Carter, “The Prophet of the Twentieth Century”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2024-06-25.

    1. He published a volume of actual poetry, which wasn’t very good; he also dabbled in musical composition, which was even worse.

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