In 1993, a psychologist, James Cutting, visited the Musée d’Orsay in Paris to see Renoir’s picture of Parisians at play, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, considered one of the greatest works of Impressionism. Instead, he found himself magnetically drawn to a painting in the next room: an enchanting, mysterious view of snow on Parisian rooftops. He had never seen it before, nor heard of its creator, Gustave Caillebotte.
That was what got him thinking.
Have you ever fallen for a novel and been amazed not to find it on lists of great books? Or walked around a sculpture renowned as a classic, struggling to see what the fuss is about? If so, you’ve probably pondered the question Cutting asked himself that day: how does a work of art come to be considered great?
The intuitive answer is that some works of art are just great: of intrinsically superior quality. The paintings that win prime spots in galleries, get taught in classes and reproduced in books are the ones that have proved their artistic value over time. If you can’t see they’re superior, that’s your problem. It’s an intimidatingly neat explanation. But some social scientists have been asking awkward questions of it, raising the possibility that artistic canons are little more than fossilised historical accidents.
Cutting, a professor at Cornell University, wondered if a psychological mechanism known as the “mere-exposure effect” played a role in deciding which paintings rise to the top of the cultural league. In a seminal 1968 experiment, people were shown a series of abstract shapes in rapid succession. Some shapes were repeated, but because they came and went so fast, the subjects didn’t notice. When asked which of these random shapes they found most pleasing, they chose ones that, unbeknown to them, had come around more than once. Even unconscious familiarity bred affection.
Back at Cornell, Cutting designed an experiment to test his hunch. Over a lecture course he regularly showed undergraduates works of Impressionism for two seconds at a time. Some of the paintings were canonical, included in art-history books. Others were lesser known but of comparable quality. These were exposed four times as often. Afterwards, the students preferred them to the canonical works, while a control group of students liked the canonical ones best. Cutting’s students had grown to like those paintings more simply because they had seen them more.
Cutting believes his experiment offers a clue as to how canons are formed. He points out that the most reproduced works of Impressionism today tend to have been bought by five or six wealthy and influential collectors in the late 19th century. The preferences of these men bestowed prestige on certain works, which made the works more likely to be hung in galleries and printed in anthologies. The kudos cascaded down the years, gaining momentum from mere exposure as it did so. The more people were exposed to, say, “Bal du Moulin de la Galette”, the more they liked it, and the more they liked it, the more it appeared in books, on posters and in big exhibitions. Meanwhile, academics and critics created sophisticated justifications for its pre-eminence. After all, it’s not just the masses who tend to rate what they see more often more highly. As contemporary artists like Warhol and Damien Hirst have grasped, critical acclaim is deeply entwined with publicity. “Scholars,” Cutting argues, “are no different from the public in the effects of mere exposure.”
Ian Leslie, “The Mona Lisa Effect”, The Ruffian, 2022-10-29 (originally published in Intelligent Life in 2014.
February 8, 2023
QotD: How do the “great works of art” become “great”?
February 7, 2023
QotD: The misery of certainty
So why are they always so fucking miserable?
Let’s stipulate, for instance, that gender really is just a social construction. Even if it’s not, you’re dogmatically certain of this. Crucially, everyone else in your world is equally dogmatically certain, so even if it’s not, it is. Shouldn’t you be much, much, much happier? So you’re really a wingless golden-skinned dragonkin. Cool. Everyone else is 100% on board with this. You should be the happiest wingless golden-skinned dragonkin on earth … but you’re not. You’re miserable, and you do your damnedest to make every single other person you come in contact with miserable, too.
As a wise man once put it, if you run into an asshole in the morning, well, you just ran into an asshole. If you run into nothing but assholes all day, then you’re the asshole.
Same question to atheists. I can understand nonbelievers being tormented by their uncertainty, but an atheist is dogmatically certain there’s no god … so why aren’t y’all happier? Why, exactly, does the kid with cancer make you mad? The universe, you’re sure, is nothing but the random collision of atoms. It sucks for the kid that those atoms collided in that particular way, but why are you mad? More to the point, why are you mad? It’s like getting mad at gravity for that apple bonking you on the head. There’s no cosmic injustice without cosmic justice. I’d expect a zenlike calm, but instead, every time I write something about atheism (which I really don’t very often), I get a whole bunch of sour, bitter, angry atheists dropping in to tell me that I’m the asshole.
Severian, “The Emotion is the Tell”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-24.
February 6, 2023
TikTok – threat and menace
At Wrong Side of History, Ed West linked to this post by Gurwinder on the TikTok threat to western civilization:
For thousands of years, humans sought to subjugate their enemies by inflicting pain, misery, and terror. They did this because these were the most paralyzing emotions they could consistently evoke; all it took was the slash of a sword or pull of a trigger.
But as our understanding of psychology has developed, so it has become easier to evoke other emotions in complete strangers. Advances in the understanding of positive reinforcement, driven mostly by people trying to get us to click on links, have now made it possible to consistently give people on the other side of the world dopamine hits at scale.
As such, pleasure is now a weapon; a way to incapacitate an enemy as surely as does pain. And the first pleasure-weapon of mass destruction may just be a little app on your phone called TikTok.
[…]
Other platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, use recommendation algorithms as features to enhance the core product. With TikTok, the recommendation algorithm is the core product. You don’t need to form a social network or list your interests for the platform to begin tailoring content to your desires, you just start watching, skipping any videos that don’t immediately draw your interest. Tiktok uses a proprietary algorithm, known simply as the For You algorithm, that uses machine learning to build a personality profile of you by training itself on your watch habits (and possibly your facial expressions.) Since a TikTok video is generally much shorter than, say, a YouTube video, the algorithm acquires training data from you at a much faster rate, allowing it to quickly zero in on you.
The result is a system that’s unsurpassed at figuring you out. And once it’s figured you out, it can then show you what it needs to in order to addict you.
Since the For You algorithm favors only the most instantly mesmerizing content, its constructive videos — such as “how to” guides and field journalism — tend to be relegated to the fringes in favor of tasty but malignant junk info. Many of the most popular TikTokers, such as Charli D’Amelio, Bella Poarch, and Addison Rae, do little more than vapidly dance and lip-sync.
Individually, such videos are harmless, but the algorithm doesn’t intend to show you just one. When it receives the signal that it’s got your attention, it doubles down on whatever it did to get it. This allows it to feed your obsessions, showing you hypnotic content again and again, reinforcing its imprint on your brain. This content can include promotion of self-harm and eating disorders, and uncritical encouragement of sex-reassignment surgery. There’s evidence that watching such content can cause mass psychogenic illness: researchers recently identified a new phenomenon where otherwise healthy young girls who watched clips of Tourette’s sufferers developed Tourette’s-like tics.
A more common way TikTok promotes irrational behavior is with viral trends and “challenges”, where people engage in a specific act of idiocy in the hope it’ll make them TikTok-famous. Acts include licking toilets, snorting suntan lotion, eating chicken cooked in NyQuil, and stealing cars. One challenge, known as “devious licks”, encourages kids to vandalize property, while the “blackout challenge”, in which kids purposefully choke themselves with household items, has even led to several deaths, including a little girl a few days ago.
The Chinese government — not wishing this kind of insanity spreading among their own people — have ensured that it’s only foreigners getting the full TikTok experience:
Last month FBI Director Chris Wray warned that TikTok is controlled by a Chinese government that could “use it for influence operations”. So how likely is it that one such influence operation might include addicting young Westerners to mind-numbing content to create a generation of nincompoops?
The first indication that the Chinese Communist Party is aware of TikTok’s malign influence on kids is that it’s forbidden access of the app to Chinese kids. The American tech ethicist Tristan Harris pointed out that the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, is a “spinach” version where kids don’t see twerkers and toilet-lickers but science experiments and educational videos. Furthermore, Douyin is only accessible to kids for 40 minutes per day, and it cannot be accessed between 10pm and 6am.
Has the CCP enforced such rules to protect its people from what it intends to inflict on the West? When one examines the philosophical doctrines behind the rules, it becomes clear that the CCP doesn’t just believe that apps like TikTok make people stupid, but that they destroy civilizations.
February 3, 2023
Who will be the first ones to lose their jobs to ChatGPT? The confidence men
Ted Gioia somehow manages not to fall for the ChatGPT con:
The fast-talking hero of the TV show Sneaky Pete hates it when he’s called a con man.
“I’m not a con man”, he insists, “I’m a confidence man.” And that’s actually how the term originated — as “confidence man”. The scam only works because of that happy and confident relationship between criminal and victim.
“I give them confidence,” Pete explains. “They give me money.”
In the ultimate con, victims don’t even know they’ve been conned. They really think they’re sending cash to some gorgeous babe in Moscow, or bought a genuine Rolex, or whatever.
The confidence game is a real art — more than just cheating or lying. Those are boring and pathetic vices by comparison. A con job requires something grander, a fast-talking sureness that always seems to be right, even when it’s dead wrong.
If you’re caught in a lie, you just build a bigger lie to hide it.
Which brings us to the subject of ChatGPT, the AI bot that’s the hottest thing in tech right now.
Judging by my Twitter feed, ChatGPT is hotter than Wordle and Taylor Swift combined.
It’s even hotter than its predecessor Sam Bankman-Fried, who was doing something similar 12 months ago. ChatGPT is just better than SamFTX in every way. It can’t even be extradited — because it’s just a bot.
People love it. People have confidence in it.
They want to use it for everything — legal work, medical advice, term papers, or even writing Substack columns. If I believed half of what I heard about ChatGPT, I could let it take over The Honest Broker, while I sit on the beach drinking margaritas and searching for my lost shaker of salt.
But that’s exactly what the confidence artist always does. Which is:
- You give people what they ask for.
- You don’t worry whether it’s true or not — because ethical scruples aren’t part of your job description.
- If you get caught in a lie, you serve up another lie.
- You always act sure of yourself — because your confidence is what seals the deal.
Am I exaggerating? Is the hottest AI chatbot in the world really doing this?
Instead of offering up my opinions on this, I’ll just share some tweets from knowledgeable observers who are starting to suspect the con.
I’ll let you decide for yourself whether this measures up to a confidence game.
February 1, 2023
QotD: Creating a hostile working environment
Anecdote is not data, of course; but ask any ordinary working woman* whether she’d prefer to work with men, or in a female-only workplace. The response may surprise you.
* This definition would exclude gender careerists and almost all rabid feministicals.
Kim du Toit, “Just Sayin'”, Splendid Isolation, 2022-10-26.
January 31, 2023
“Thorstein Veblen’s famous ‘leisure class’ has evolved into the ‘luxury belief class'”
Rob Henderson had a particularly difficult childhood, but thanks to his own efforts ended up going to Yale after leaving the military. He discovered a very different world when he began his studies:
I was bewildered when I encountered a new social class at Yale four years ago: the luxury belief class. My confusion wasn’t surprising given my unusual background. When I was three years old, my mother was addicted to drugs and my father abandoned us. I grew up in multiple foster homes, was then adopted into a series of broken homes, and then experienced a series of family tragedies. Later, after a few years in the military, I went to Yale on the GI Bill. On campus, I realized that luxury beliefs have become fashionable status symbols. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.
In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more affordable than before. And people are less likely to receive validation for the material items they display. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.
[…]
You might think that rich students at elite universities would be happy because they are in the top 1% of income earners. But remember, they’re surrounded by other members of the 1%. Their social circle, their Dunbar number, consists of 150 baby millionaires. Jordan Peterson has discussed this phenomenon. Citing figures from his experience teaching at Harvard in the 1990s, Peterson noted that a substantial proportion of Ivy League graduates go on to obtain a net worth of a million dollars or more by age 40. And yet this isn’t enough for them. Not only do top university graduates want to be millionaires-in-the-making, they also want the image of moral righteousness. Elite graduates desire high status not only financially, but morally as well.
For our affluent social strivers, luxury beliefs offer them a new way to gain status.
Thorstein Veblen’s famous “leisure class” has evolved into the “luxury belief class”. Veblen, an economist and sociologist, made his observations about social class in the late nineteenth century. He compiled his observations in his classic work, The Theory of the Leisure Class. A key idea is that because we can’t be certain of the financial standing of other people, a good way to size up their means is to see whether they can afford to waste money on goods and leisure. This explains why status symbols are so often difficult to obtain and costly to purchase. These include goods such as delicate and restrictive clothing, like tuxedos and evening gowns, or expensive and time-consuming hobbies like golf or beagling. Such goods and leisurely activities could only be purchased or performed by those who did not live the life of a manual laborer and could spend time learning something with no practical utility. Veblen even goes so far as to say, “The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master’s ability to pay.” For Veblen, butlers are status symbols, too.
Converging on these sociological observations, the biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed that animals evolve certain displays because they are so costly. The most famous example is the peacock’s tail. Only a healthy bird is capable of growing such plumage while managing to evade predators. This idea might extend to humans, too. More recently, the anthropologist and historian Jared Diamond has suggested that one reason why humans engage in displays such as drinking, smoking, drug use, and other physically costly behaviors, is because they serve as fitness indicators. The message is “I’m so healthy that I can afford to poison my body and continue to function.” Get hammered while playing a round of golf with your butler, and you will be the highest status person around.
QotD: Religious rituals
We tend to have an almost anthropological view of rituals, even ones we still practice: we see them in terms of their social function or psychological impact. Frank Herbert’s Children of Dune (the Sci-fi miniseries; I can’t find the quote in the text, but then it’s a lot of text) put it wonderfully, “Ritual is the whip by which men are enlightened.” That is, ritual’s primary effect is the change that takes place in our minds, rather than in the spiritual world. This is the same line of thinking whereby a Church service is justified because it “creates a sense of community” or “brings believers together”. We view rituals often like plays or concerts, experiences without any broader consequences beyond the experience of participation or viewing itself.
This is not how polytheism (ancient or modern) works (indeed, it is not how most modern Christianity works: the sacraments are supposed to be spiritually effective; that is, if properly carried out, they do things beyond just making us feel better. You can see this articulated clearly in some traditional prayers, like the Prayer of Humble Access or Luther’s Flood Prayer).
Instead, religious rituals are meant to have (and will have, so the believer believes, if everything is done properly) real effects in both the spiritual world and the physical world. That is, your ritual will first effect a change in the god (making them better disposed to you) and second that will effect a change in the physical world we inhabit (as the god’s power is deployed in your favor).
But to reiterate, because this is key: the purpose of ritual (in ancient, polytheistic religious systems) is to produce a concrete, earthly result. It is not to improve our mood or morals, but to make crops grow, rain fall, armies win battles, business deals turn out well, ships sail, winds blow. While some rituals in these religions do concern themselves with the afterlife or other seemingly purely spiritual concerns (the lines between earthly and spiritual in those cases are – as we’ll see, somewhat blurrier in these religions than we often think them to be now), the great majority of rituals are squarely focused on what is happening around us, and are performed because they do something.
This is the practical side of practical knowledge; the ritual in polytheistic religion does not (usually) alter you in some way – it alters the world (spiritual and physical) around you in some way. Consequently, ritual is employed as a tool – this problem is solved by a wrench, that problem by a hammer, and this other problem by a ritual. Some rituals are preventative maintenance (say, we regularly observe this ritual so this god is always well disposed to us, so that they do X, Y, and Z on the regular), others are a response to crisis, but they are all tools to shape the world (again, physical and spiritual) around us. If a ritual carries a moral duty, it is only because (we’ll get to this a bit more later) other people in your community are counting on you to do it; it is a moral duty the same way that, as an accountant, not embezzling money is a moral duty. Failure lets other people (not yourself and not even really the gods) down.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part II: Practice”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-01.
January 26, 2023
Are memes the natural communications channel of non-progressives?
Sarah Hoyt on having to explain memes to her husband:
His time is more limited, and his time off — he does the taxes for all the family businesses and I’m not the only one with three — usually ends up being spent researching HIS obsessions, like music or some obscure movie thing that fascinated him for no reason I can figure out, or something about early 20th century history.
But he definitely never hung out on political blogs. Which means when I’m trying to explain why something is immediately obvious — like, DIL in training doesn’t like to eat sandwiches, so I immediately said “But you’ll still make them for my son, right? Otherwise, it’s just unnatural” three of us laughed and my husband looked confused. Because “women as sandwich makers” was not part of his mental archive. And then I had to explain how it started in the blog fights of the early oughts — I end up, more often than not having to get galoshes and a spade and go digging, until he gets how we got here.
And then I suddenly feel a weird sympathy for the left and their absolute belief we use “dog whistles” and are in the middle of some form of conspiracy.
It’s not just that they can’t meme, or are humorless (though dear Lord, that’s part of it) but the inherent structure of politics in this country — and parts of the world, though they’re behind us by a few decades — makes the two sides very different in how they communicate.
The left STILL commands all the traditional communication channels. And because they are and assume they are the “accepted” mode of being in the culture — because they have the cultural megaphones from media to education, from government mechanisms (even when nominally not) to entertainment — they communicate in the open. They just slap their “I support thing” as virtue signaling over everything, plus some. They — and this is partly personality attracted to the side — seem to change their programming over night and all talk about “new thing” in unison.
This means their mode of communication is detached from reality (often) and rests on shaky ideological/economic foundations but it’s out in the open and blared from a megaphone.
They make jokes that aren’t jokes, merely pointing out they support the thing. And they say things they think will shock the right, but they have no clue what the right is or what would shock us.
They are in a way the young girl just released from a convent school trying to shock the kids in public school. They get weird looks. We understand them, but they don’t get us at all.
Meanwhile the right comes from years of silence. Years of being silenced, and not even being able to explain it to anyone. If I had a dime for every time I told someone in the nineties or oughts “yeah, most bestsellers are left because the right ones who are known to be so are stopped early” and got back “Nah, the left is more creative, because they’re anti-establishment and blah blah blah.” (HOW the left, in control of everything, is supposed to be anti-establishment is a good question. I mean, sure, they do a lot of things they think are shocking, but wouldn’t shock anyone who wasn’t born in my grandparent’s generation. Look, people, naked Shakespeare was OLD HAT when I was a kid in the late sixties. Now extrapolate from that.)
At least now most people know — it took Twitter, I think — that the right was being hard-silenced.
Which means most people my age who are the oldsters of the “we talk back” generation came to our own conclusions and thought we were crazy to dissent from what “everyone knew” for the longest time. No, really. We were out there, thinking we were along, but we could see no other way to make sense of things, so we stood. Alone, we thought.
A lot of my generation discovered they weren’t UTTERLY alone due to Rush Limbaugh. (I was never a big listener. I just am not. I don’t listen to podcasts, except maybe once a week. Even the audio books I listen to are usually things I already read. I don’t hear very well, and need to be sure I can “catch” what’s said, even if I miss some words.)
And most of us hit the nascent right blogosphere with two feet in the early oughts. Which is where a lot of the early memes like the “girls make sandwiches” meme comes from.
But the blogs, and particularly the blog comments, being a wild west type of atmosphere, where people who developed their opinions in isolation came together and figured out how it all fit for the first time, is a completely different form of communication from the top down, revealed truth talk on the left.
On the right, the clash between right feminist and right not particularly enthralled with feminism gave rise to “Make me a sandwich and get me a beer” as response to screeds on how you’re disrespecting some feminist shibboleth. (Particularly when women on the right hadn’t fully realized how much of the feminist “current thing” was really Marxism in a cute scarf and high heels.) And from that it got meme-fied into short hand, so you could drop a picture of an early 20th century mesmerist levitating a girl and label it “And like that this sandwich maker becomes an ironing board” and it was immediately funny, both poking fun at feminist outrage and the troglodytes or pseudo troglodytes (I’ve been known to be one of those) on our side who think women are inherently house-keepers. (And a lot of this is self-conscious mocking of the person by him/herself.)
We had to develop a sense of humor about our internal battles, including our own opinions, and we had to be able to communicate we weren’t ossified in our opinions really quickly, to prevent minor disagreements becoming blog or alliance shattering wars.
A lot of memes come from that. Because they can communicate “Yeah, this is what I think, kind of, but I’m aware it’s also funny.” Or “This is how I see your opinion. Care to clarify” in — usually — a non-offensive, quick-hit manner. A manner that allows the other person to come back with “Yabut–” Or “Funny, but in fact–”
The left doesn’t do that, because no scrapping allowed in the ranks. They value unity and directives come from above.
Beyond giving them a tragic inability to meme (Seriously, we should start a fund to send them to meme school) it also leaves them with the conviction that the right is always speaking in “dog whistles” or “code” and that we’re plotting horrible and scarifying violence against them, in these bizarre coded words.
QotD: Non-commissioned officers
Your ideal “delta” is something like a lifer noncom in a non-pozzed military. Back in the days, I’m told, new recruits and civilians used to call crusty old gunny sergeants “sir”, to which the gunny would reply “Don’t call me ‘sir’, I work for a living!” That’s the attitude. Those guys with all the stripes on their sleeves aren’t officers because they lack “command presence”; they’re not officers because they don’t want to be officers. They know themselves, and, crucially, they know where they best fit into the organization’s overall mission. “Get in where you fit in” is, in a very real sense, their identity.
Examples of that kind of guy are tougher to find in the historical literature, which is why we need to develop, and pump up, the archetype. […] the ideal is the centurion, the backbone of Marcus Aurelius’ army. A soldier, a Stoic, a leader … but one who knows, and values, his place in the organization above all things.
Severian, “Be a Centurion!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-04-07.
January 22, 2023
The Scientific Reason Your Wife Is Always Right. Don McMillan
A Little More Dry Bar
Published 23 May 2022The scientific reason your wife is always right as presented by Don McMillan in this clip from his first ever Dry Bar Comedy special. Whether you’re someone who appreciated power points and graphs, or you just enjoy a good laugh, this clip form Don McMillan’s Dry Bar Comedy special is sure to have you laughing from start to finish.
(more…)
January 20, 2023
How to evaluate character
At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia is in an advice-giving mood so he’s sharing his own eight techniques for evaluating character:
I wish somebody had told me these things when I was younger. I now practice them when I need to get a fast assessment of people I don’t know well.
1. Forget what they say — instead look at who they marry.
This is a sure-fire technique, and it tells you important things about people you can’t learn any other way. A person’s choice of a spouse — or if they aren’t married, their closest lifelong partner — is much more revealing than anything they say or do in public.This choice tells you about their own innermost longings, expectations, and needs. It tells you what they think of themselves, and what they think they deserve in life (or will settle for). It is, I believe, the clearest indicator of priorities and values you will ever find.
This advice is diametrically opposite to what I was taught as a youngster, but I think Ted is probably right here. I’d go further and say that observing how the person interacts with a spouse or significant other will tell you much more about that person’s character. If they’re abusive or dismissive of their nearest-and-dearest, how will they treat you?
2. See how they treat service workers
People reveal their true natures when they deal with others who have no power and can never return a favor. They feel immune and free of all consequences — so they let it rip. Their true self comes to the forefront.
This is one I figured out for myself in my first few jobs. Bullies and sadists just can’t help themselves when they find themselves in a situation where they can lord it over an underling with no repercussions. It’s disgusting to watch this kind of performative power imbalance and should be a red flag for anyone you hope to do business with.
3. Discover what experiences formed their character in early life
This is another CEO story, but with a positive lesson in this case. I met this particular corporate power broker when he interviewed me for a project, and we later became quite close.In the interview, he started by asking me about my earliest experiences — entirely focused on what I did before reaching the age of twenty. I thought this was just small talk, and eventually he would change the subject in order to inquire about my qualifications and plans for the project.
But he never changed the subject. We spoke for more than one hour, and solely about my childhood, my teenage years, and how I grew to adulthood.
Later he explained to me that he lets other people in the organization worry about boring things like credentials. His belief is that people’s character and ability to handle challenges are almost entirely formed during the first two decades of their life. It’s an unusual case, he said, for people to change in any substantive way after that point — not impossible, but very rare. So those early years were always the focal point for his inquiries.
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered this in the working world. Occasionally, I might have been asked a little bit about my early life, but never to this kind of extent. I suspect such questioning today would be very likely to raise hairs in HR or even provoke lawsuits if pursued to this degree.
7. If they cheat at small things, they will cheat at big things.
I recently heard a man complaining about a bad business deal. His partner had robbed him, and he should have known better.When they first met, they had played golf. Afterwards his wife told him: “I saw him move the ball when you weren’t looking — don’t get involved with this guy.” He had laughed at this. Why get worked up over a tiny thing like this? It’s just a few inches on the golf course.
But, of course, if someone will break the rules for something as unimportant as a game, what will they do when higher stakes are involved? In this instance, he had a useful warning, but didn’t take it — because he thought it was so small.
I think this is excellent advice in business and in life. Character revelation in the smallest of details.
January 17, 2023
How ideological programming in British schools make men like Andrew Tate inevitable
To be honest, I don’t think I’d ever heard of Andrew Tate before his legal troubles in Romania hit the headlines, and I’m not well-versed on his achievements (such as they might be). Janice Fiamengo also admits that Tate wasn’t on her radar before then, but she’s done some work to try to put him into perspective:
What has Tate got to do with UK education, except perhaps as a telling symbol of its unintended consequences? Why not just model and enforce ideals such as courtesy, self-restraint, and hard work, while upholding high academic standards? The article demonstrates how deeply committed schools have become to ideological programming. Some schools have drawn up “entire lessons focused on Tate” (!!!) while others deal more generally with “misogyny and gender stereotypes”. Whatever the particulars, the general message is unvarying: “We’ve all got to work collaboratively and collectively to support young men to reframe masculinity—away from this toxic ideology that’s presented by the likes of Tate.”
No one who’s been following the feminist narrative over the past decade or two will be surprised by the dogmatic reference to “toxic ideology,” now standard in any discussion of “reframing” boyhood. There is just one problem for the concerned teachers: Tate is five steps ahead of them, having already made clear to his millions of followers why injunctions about “reframing masculinity” are just code for the continual marginalization that most boys naturally want nothing to do with. The moment Tate and his allies expressed their scorn for the project, it lost its power overs the millions of boys forced to sit in feminist classrooms across the UK. Tate confirmed what boys intuitively knew: having their masculinity “reframed” will prevent them from pursuing masculine dreams, from being proud of themselves as male, admired by their male peers, and able to attract the interest of pretty girls. Teachers can keep on telling boys that peer approval through masculine moxy isn’t important, but that won’t make it true.
The point is not whether Tate’s (“I’ve got 33 cars“) program is an unalloyedly good one; the point is that it is manifestly better than the recipe for self-loathing and irrelevance being offered by the schools. The school’s program is the same that has been tried for years without any enthusiastic uptake because it offers nothing affirmatively male for young men to be and do (see especially White Ribbon UK, which has been trying for years to turn boys into handmaidens of feminism). All the normal things that centuries of boys in every major civilization on earth have cared about—competitiveness, status, toughness, mastery, knowledge, self-reliance, stoicism, high-jinks, displays of ability, and male bonding—are now frowned upon and must be replaced by feminine traits like empathy, egalitarianism, conformity, verbal display, and tone-policing. It doesn’t take a gender studies specialist to see that the life being offered these boys is one of deference, self-suppression, and self-contempt. No boy should want that.
In case you doubt my characterization, take a look at the Global Boyhood Initiative’s report on The State of UK Boys: Understanding and Transforming Gender in the Lives of UK Boys, published in 2022. The report was written for “teachers, youth workers, early-years practitioners and other professionals” to achieve “gender equity and social justice”.
Incidentally, the report includes a section attacking an alleged “overemphasis” on research showing boys and men as victims of intimate partner violence by women. While the report enthusiastically promotes the end of “gender” through transgenderism and social constructivism, it emphatically does not support the end of gendered norms about which sex is violent. On this front, the report laments that “even young boys” now believe that male persons can be victimized by female persons, citing the case of Johnny Depp’s abuse by Amber Heard. Nothing could more clearly signal the report authors’ chagrined awareness of the difficulty of controlling boys’ thoughts in the internet age.
The rest of the report explores pathways to weaken masculinity. On a number of occasions, it takes aim at “simplistic notions that boys require male ‘role models'” because such notions “frame women as inadequate to parent and teach boys”. Taking for granted that “gender is not tied to sex organs, hormones, or biological traits” (one wonders, then, why trans persons elect to take hormones and to change their sex organs), the emphasis throughout the report is on “realigning” masculinity to highlight gender fluidity, transgenderism, and inclusion of girls. The document has absolutely nothing good to say about masculinity, which it describes, variously, as “a seductive form of power”, “hegemonic”, and “oppressive”. It even uses the derogatory term “boysplaining” to stigmatize boys’ alleged way of talking.
Even such seemingly benign behaviors as “laughter, banter, and entertaining one another” are said to be “laddish” and linked to the exclusion of women and homosexuals. Taking pleasure in being good at sport is also given a negative valence by being associated with bullying.
As in all such feminist propaganda, the report seeks the evacuation of all positive content from masculinity. “Realigned” boys are to anchor their sense of self mainly in not being what boys have always been. They are to shun the allegedly “hegemonic” characteristics of “physical, sexual, and mental prowess; being action-oriented; ‘knowing’; having autonomy […]; and being emotionally tough.” It is surely no coincidence that modern boys and young men have fallen well behind their female peers in educational attainment, economic status, and performance on the job market. “Prowess” is out, knowing is out, being active is out, toughness is out. No wonder so many boys feel lost, disaffected, and resentful, and no wonder some see Andrew Tate as a hero.
January 10, 2023
Repent, wrongthinker!
Neeraja Deshpande outlines the demands of the College of Psychologists of Ontario to send heretic wrongthinker Jordan Peterson to the re-education camp:
Jordan Peterson speaking at an event in Dallas, Texas on 15 June, 2018.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
Have you seen the “men will literally do X instead of going to therapy” meme? It’s funny: Men will literally join 10 improv teams instead of going to therapy. Men will literally teach you how to open a can of beans for 6 hours instead of going to therapy. You get the drift.
Canada’s most famous public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, brought that meme to real life this week when he announced he’d rather never work again than be forced onto the couch.
I don’t blame him.
The College of Psychologists of Ontario has told Peterson that if he doesn’t go to therapy — sorry, a board-mandated “Coaching Program” with a board-issued therapist — it may revoke his license to practice psychology.
What warranted this ultimatum? A few tweets and a podcast.
According to Peterson, about “a dozen people” from around the world complained to the college about comments he had made on Twitter and on Joe Rogan’s podcast, claiming that those statements had caused “harm”.
In March, the college began investigating these complaints. Then, in November, the college informed Peterson: “The comments at issue appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole, and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.”
Among those comments: Calling an advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “prik”. Snarking at environmentalists for promoting energy policies that hurt children in developing countries. Using female pronouns in reference to the transgender actor Elliot Page. Declaring a plus-sized model on the cover of Sports Illustrated “not beautiful”. (This Wall Street Journal editorial has a good rundown.)
With perhaps one exception — a comment Peterson made calling a former, unnamed client “vindictive” — the public statements that triggered this whole affair are political snipes that have nothing to do with his capacity as a psychologist. Nevertheless, the College is demanding that Peterson not only go through a re-education program, but also that he sign off on the following statement: “I may have lacked professionalism in public statements and during a January 25, 2022 podcast appearance.”
Now, no one who has followed Peterson — presumably including the higher-ups at the College of Psychologists of Ontario — seriously believes he would agree to such a request. He has confirmed as much on Twitter. (This is a guy who burst onto the scene in 2016 after refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns.) And Peterson is famous enough at this point to be inoculated against the financial consequences of refusing to submit, which the college must know.
The college’s statement, then, is not a message to Peterson, but a message to other would-be dissenters: Comply with our politics, or risk losing your livelihood.
QotD: A useful life lesson
Severian, “The Stakeholder State”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-22.
January 6, 2023
QotD: The weird economics of “Onlyfans”
Given that I am not in the target audience for OnlyFans, then, perhaps all my speculations are hilariously wrong. And obviously there’s a robust market for porn, so it stands to reason that a la carte porn would have, if anything, an even bigger market …
… but do we trust those numbers? Everything in Clown World is fake and gay, and everything to do with the Internet has always been … how shall we put this? Factually dubious. This was true even when the Internet was a Libertarian paradise (for the young guys out there: Back in the build-your-own-modem days, I’m told, the Internet was hardcore Libertarian. By the time I got there, it was still very, very Right. Which stands to reason — you needed patience, discipline, and a little savvy to be online back then, and those are not Leftist qualities). OnlyFans claims a subscriber base of X, with revenues of Y. Do we have any reason to believe those are even within shouting distance of reality?
Money laundering seems like a live option.
My other guess was kompromat. I understand that Chinese Intelligence has all but openly admitted that TikTok is part of a targeted program to spread deviance, and if it has some intel benefit that’s a bonus. I figure OnlyFans had some sort of similar function. We all know that the classic “honey pot” is alive and well — Eric Swalwell and of course Hunter Biden say hi — but why bother running a real agent at somebody when he’s perfectly willing to put all his deviant desires in writing, backed by his credit card number?
I checked out OnlyFans — on Wikipedia; for research — and hey, whaddaya know, they got in on The Current Thing in Ukraine. Given what we know about Vladimir Putin, I’m sure he’s real broken up about that. It probably works pretty well as “open source” domestic intelligence, too — just as your enemies are busy uploading their own blackmail photos, so your domestic deviants are busy outing themselves on the other side of the transaction. Indeed, the only thing that surprises me is that the usual (((retards))) aren’t blaming it on the Mossad …
… actually I’m sure they are, and I do NOT want to know about it, but the point is, the whole thing seems really sketchy. So what are your thoughts? Money laundering scheme? PsyOp? Really obvious intelligence ploy? Or is it exactly what it seems like, desperately horny betas doing their thing?
(Based on what I saw on Facebook etc., I’m almost willing to believe the latter. All a recognizably human female has to do is post a cleavage shot on Facebook and she’ll get a hundred thirsty simps complimenting her. It’s the money thing that gets me, though. Being a simp in the Facebook comments is free).
Severian, “The E-Thot Economy”, Founding Questions, 2022-10-05.
