Quotulatiousness

August 21, 2026

“For the female of the species is more deadly than the male”

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

A few weeks back, John C. Wright contemplated how he initially understood what Rudyard Kipling was saying in his poem “The Female of the Species” and how he realized he’d been mistaken:

    So it comes that Man, the coward,
    when he gathers to confer
    With his fellow-braves in council,
    dare not leave a place for her
    Where, at war with Life and Conscience,
    he uplifts his erring hands
    To some God of Abstract Justice –
    which no woman understands.

    And Man knows it! Knows, moreover,
    that the Woman that God gave him
    Must command but may not govern –
    shall enthrall but not enslave him.
    And She knows, because She warns him,
    and Her instincts never fail,
    That the Female of Her Species is more
    deadly than the Male.

The argument runs that woman’s nature, by its nature, requires her to be uncompromising and ferocious to defend her children. Hence the political logic of compromise, half-measures and horse-trading (universally required for masculine teamwork with friends or détente with enemies) ought to be and is alien to the female instinct.

The poet here, with tongue in cheek, calls these masculine traits of professionalism toward allies and military courtesy toward enemies as prompted by folly or fear. The woman is described as if she were a battleship “armed and engined” and launched for one sole purpose.

The poet then cautions that this maternal instinct, so right and necessary for the survival of the race (“lest the generations fail”), becomes fanatical and destructive when used to support political policies, which become, in effect, to her, her children.

In law school, I was told that a prisoner on death row, after all other souls on earth were convinced he was a murderer, would still have his mother writing letters to the governor petitioning for a pardon. The maternal instinct never parlays, never ceases, never surrenders, never listens to reason.

Hence, or so Kipling warns, the female of the species must be kept away from the seats of power, that is, the ballot box and public office (“when he gathers to confer with his fellow-braves in council”) and he ends by warning that she herself knows this and warns of it.

One jest in particular that flew over my head was the line about femme and baron. In law, man and mate are treated as one person by coverture, and in heraldry her coat of arms and his are two halves of one: here, the poet is implying that she is usurping his rights without surrendering any of her own (As when a female can vote for war but is immune from the draft.)

Yesterday, I linked to a Lorenzo Warby essay that considered some of the same aspects in a non-poetic context.

Update: I’m told it’s helpful to include the URL to the original post.

Ted Gioia’s objections to Effective Altruism

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

I’ve only encountered discussions of Effective Altruism in the comments at Scott Alexander’s blog, so I don’t have strong opinions one way or the other. On Substack Notes, Ted Gioia explains his why he’s not a fan:

After my article on the Phoebe Gates scandal yesterday, some readers have asked for more analytical detail of my objections to Effective Altruism. I provide that below — but, be forewarned, this is more philosophy than journalism. If you’re not interested in analytic philosophy, you should just skip this. Even so, some of you will find this interesting, so I share it here.

TED ON EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM

    Effective Altruism is a consequentialist ethical system, unlike deontological approaches which are primarily rule-driven. You may assume that judging a moral action by its consequences is obviously the right thing to do, but the reality is that no religion, government, or community has ever made ethical decisions in this way.

    If you commit murder, the judge pronounces sentence on your violation of the law, but the judge NEVER says: “Let’s wait ten years and determine the consequences of the murder you committed — maybe it was okay”. This never happens and never will, and for a very good reason. Chaos would ensue if actions could be justified by long-term consequences.

    But that is precisely the kind of chaos that Effective Altruism allows, and willingly embraces. Its practitioners are extreme in this way — they focus on the most long-term and geographically distant consequences. This is dangerous, much like driving without looking at the road in front of you, but instead imagining what’s happening on the road a mile ahead.

    This inevitably results in crashes. That’s why I can accurately predict that Effective Altruists will be recognized by the chaotic short-term impact of their efforts. And this is precisely what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried, Catherine Ellison, Leopold Aschenbrenner, and now Phoebe Gates. None of this is coincidence. The chaos is hard-baked into their philosophical assumptions.

    So I can safely predict that the same thing will happen again in the future. Effective Altrusim, if it continues to retain its influence, will lead to more fiascos, meltdowns, and criminal actions. That’s why I describe it as a moral philosophy for Bond villains.

    And even if we did attempt to justify actions by consequences, how can you begin to implement such a methodology? Do we need to wait a year to measure consequences? Or ten years? Or a lifetime? Or several generations? And how can you even begin to separate the impact of other factors or counterfactuals? If you kill a baby because you know it will grow up to be Hitler, how can you ever prove that fact? The only certainty is that you just killed a baby.

    So this adds a second problem to Effective Altruism — not only does it embrace chaos, but it operates in a perpetual mist of vagueness. This, too, is exactly what we see in the public statements of Sam Bankman-Fried and others. Here, too, the connection between their philosophy and their malfeasance is evident at every step. Just look and see the many grand (but ambiguous) pronouncements that come out of their lips. It’s almost a trademark of the cult.

    The next problem of consequentialist ethics is that the bad things its practioners do are REALITIES — happening immediately — while any positive consequences of their actions are merely POSSIBILITIES. So from a chronological perspective, the chaos precedes benefits. From an ontological perspective, the negatives have total existence while the positives merely possess possible existence. And because chronology can’t be reversed, the perpetrators can’t undo actions if the positive consequences never ensue. These are significant problems with Effective Altruism.

    I won’t even go into the psychological make-up of people who act this way — who tend to display a narcissistic savior complex that runs counter to everything we know about the character of ethical people. I’m dealing here with philosophy, not psychology. But you could write an entire book on the psychological profile of Effective Altruism — and it would be a devastating takedown of the cult.

    So you can cite names like Peter Singer, but that doesn’t change any of this. At best, Singer can say that he is so super smart he can understand consequences better than any of us. But that’s exactly what Sam Bankman-Fried thought, and Leopold Aschenbrenner, and all the others. (By the way, Stalin, Mao and other mass killers would inevitably make this same kind of Effective Altruist argument to justify their murders — because crimes on that magnitude inevitably demand consequentialist justifications. They were super-smart people too.)

    After you consider this, you start to understand why the most powerful ethical systems are built on something stronger than possible longterm consequences. Take your pick — Kant’s categorical imperative, Thomistic natural law, Aristotelian virtue ethics, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Code of Hammurabi, Rawlsian justice, or whatever. They are all superior to Effective Altruism, and it’s not even close.

Batman as a modern Sisyphus

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

I don’t normally post much about comic book characters, because my interest in comic books lasted from about 1965 to 1975 … a very different era than most of the comic books of today (I’m sure it’s considered tantamount to a hate crime to refer to them as “comic books” by a significant number of long-time fans). Here, Devon Eriksen explains why the Batman character is a modern rendition of the Greek hero Sisyphus and his eternal punishment in the underworld:

Batman, the fictional character, does not embrace the Batman Fallacy because he is written as stupid. He’s obviously intended to be very intelligent.

But the many, many authors of this character have always agreed that he must have this one critical blind spot.

Why?

So the story can continue.

See, if Batman kills the Joker, or turns him over for execution, the story, or at least a popular villain, is over. No more Joker stories.

So the character of Batman must be created in the image of Sisyphus… always struggling against the manifestation of the problem, but never able to address the root cause.

All of Batman’s victories must be against the Joker’s latest scheme, not the Joker himself. He must forever be playing defense, making heroic efforts merely to maintain things as they are, like the Red Queen running as fast as she can just to stand still.

This is how the Joker, a man of no special resources or talents, whose sole advantage is utter disregard for law, empathy, or human life, can be a challenging foe for a billionaire genius superathlete with an endless array of technologies and skills.

He can simply generate schemes forever. He doesn’t have to win always, or even often. Because every one of his victories is real and has permanent consequences, and every one of his defeats is temporary, pending a rematch.

Batman, by his very nature, can never stop the Joker, only slow him down.

If Batman were a different character, if he were willing to, say, throw the Joker out of a helicopter over a vast body of water, then the story would eventually end, because pretty soon the setting would no longer need Batman.

And no doubt on that day, there would be a great deal of whinging over whether throwing the Joker out of a helicopter was a “human rights abuse”, as if the Joker himself were not a walking, talking human rights abuse to begin with.

But Batman can never win, and never stop fighting, because he refuses to go on the offensive and remove his enemies from play.

This post is not about Batman.

August 20, 2026

“It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams”

Filed under: Business, Health, Sports — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

It’s a common observation that teenage boys’ teams can compete — and beat — professional or national competitive womens’ teams in many sports. I’d always assumed that greater male muscle mass and overall strength were the primary reason for this, but Lorenzo Warby points out that strength differences do not completely explain the competitive disparity:

Babylon Bee pokes fun at the US Women’s Team

Social media provides the technology to strongly increase the social signalling and the shunning and shaming that moralises disagreement in service of shared status games. To put it another way, social media upscales social/relational aggression that attacks people’s social standing on the basis of ostentatious moral or social concern.

Because believing X is such performative way of grading people, believing-X makes you a good person creates purity-spirals as people up-the-ante to make their signal — their moral piety display — more salient and reduce competition for positions. It also attracts and empowers the personality disordered — specifically Cluster B’s — as believing-X makes you a good person requires so little to join the status game and advantages those who are manipulatively unrestrained. In other words, it acts as a negative character test, that selects for people of bad moral character.

The inability to admit ever being wrong goes with the moralising of disagreement and identity-through-belief.

Social media does not enable the up-scaling of physical aggression, although it does enable the transmission of threats of such. By contrast, social media — with its electronic mobbing — is a very effective medium for emotional or relational aggression. As women, the physically weaker sex, are particularly inclined to be quite protectively self-deceptive about their own aggression — it is “just” moral or social concern — that leads to both intense aggression and denial of its existence: “there is no such thing as cancel culture”/”it is just a shift in moral, in social, concern”.

Screenshot

Social media can be particularly toxic for adolescent girls. Adolescents often lack a settled or robust sense of self, tend to be very wrapped up in how other people see them, and have a weak sense of their effect on others. All this is even more so for people-focused adolescent girls, who are both particularly prone to engage in — and be vulnerable to — emotional or relational aggression and to seek socially-protective identities. It is plausible that growing up with the excesses of social media increases support for control of speech, including making hate speech a live issue.

More things-focused boys are much more likely to retreat into playing games (both online or physical games) or some other physical activity. The greater female focus on people makes adolescent girls more vulnerable to social media-generated aggression, identity confusion and comforting cognitive refuges and conformism; the greater male focus on things creates a divergence between young male and female perspectives, aggravated by the strong female social preference for other females.

Survey of British women done for The New Statesman.

Due to strong, even at times intense, sex-differentiated selection pressures, in human evolution, human males are systematically better at forming and operating teams than women. Among women, it is the most masculinised personalities — lesbians and tomboys — who tend to be better at teams and teamwork, though they are still generally not as good at it as men.

The operating principle is that men are more likely to suppress their emotions to perform their designated role (in a team, in an organisation). Women are more likely to subordinate their designated role (in a team, in an organisation) to their emotions. Hence, for example, women and girls are more likely to be aggressive towards fellow team members during a game than are men and boys. Hence also — as we will see — male-dominated institutions have been better at catering for women and girls than female-dominated institutions have been at catering for men and boys.

It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams. From adolescence on, boys and men are systematically stronger than girls and women of the same age: but even a fit 14 year old boy is not likely to be stronger than a fit, athletic 21 year old sportswoman. It is difference in male and female cognitive and behaviour patterns that leads to teenage boys sporting teams beating national women’s teams.

Institutions — to be functional — generally have to been scaled-up teams. That women are systematically worse at teams than men means that the feminisation of institutions and organisations tends to degrade their functionality. For example, female “emotions-as-threat” tone-policing makes it harder to generate trust, as people curate their interactions. Men and boys make outrageous jokes and rib and insult each other to test whether the others will fold under pressure. The social flattening of tone policing generates much more uncertainty, because it produces far less revealing information, so less trust.

The more differences of opinion are seen as threat, insult or moral failure, the more destructively conformist the institution or organisation is likely to be. This both acts to block feedback and enable the entrenchment of structures of conformist not-noticing.

One way out of this is to have strong standards in favour of truth and robust use of evidence. This, in turn, requires willingness to enforce such standards, which many women find emotionally confronting to do, as they are far more primed to read emotions as threat. Retreating from enforcing standards and boundaries on the grounds of being “inclusive” gives emotional — and so moral — cowardice a warm inner glow via a patina of self-righteousness. An emotionally-comforting retreat from enforcing standards then aids the entrenchment of emotionally-comforting opinion conformities.

That women tend to be self-deceptive about their own aggression — passing it off as moral or social concern — can be highly corrosive to the internal operation of an organisation or institution. In particular, it can be an effective way to block inconvenient information or concerns. All of this makes an information-restricting conformity likely to develop, and become entrenched, within an organisation as it becomes more female-dominated while making it less functional in enforcing standards, so delivering services.

Women are much less likely than men to have friends of lower socio-economic standing — as those of lower social standing are generally not a good social return on the emotional investment that female friendships are based on. Given the biological expense of human children, focusing on getting a good social return for one’s emotional investment was a successful reproductive advantage. For more team-oriented men, one never knows when someone of lower socio-economic status might be useful on your team.

Feminisation — that is, the increasing pervasiveness of more female-typical behaviour patterns — thus raises issues of weakening social solidarity. One of the striking things about contemporary Western societies is how little active concern that female university graduates show for people, including other women, of lower socio-economic status within their own societies. They have very little sense of how very different the experience of women in very different social milieus can be, and they do not socialise with such women to find out.

August 15, 2026

Mark Steyn denies being a “Never Trump”-er

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

From his sickbed, Mark Steyn responds to a criticism from one of his long-time readers that he’s “gradually devolved into NeverTrumpism:

I have no idea where I saw this meme, but it makes me laugh

I begin to understand why, since I emerged from my coma, the docs have recommended eschewing the Internet. Following Wednesday’s Clubland Q&A, Joe Huber comments:

    Unfortunately, SteynOnline (once my favorite place to visit) has gradually devolved into NeverTrumpism, and that’s sad. But it is what it is.

We may have to introduce weekly ceremonial expulsions from The Mark Steyn Club. I’m not “NeverTrump” on immigration, DOGE, MAHA, endless war, etc, and I would still favour him over any likely Democrat candidate or “mainstream” Republican. The first time I met him was over thirty years ago, when his then wife was auditioning for a Broadway musical produced by a friend of mine. The only substantive exchange we had that day was his demand for assurance that the show was a bona fide hit … because the defining characteristic of Trump has always been his utter contempt for what he calls “losers” and his disinclination to allow his brand to be contaminated by association with them.

So it is a mystery to me that he allowed himself to get mixed up with an institution that, by any objective measure, is the biggest “loser” on the planet.

By contrast, my position on this has been exactly the same throughout the time Mr Huber regarded SteynOnline as “my favorite place to visit”. This piece, for example, was published in the print edition of National Review over fifteen sod-bollocking years ago, and its first sentence remains the question that, multiple unwon wars later, the Rah-Rah Right still declines to answer. I recall multiple back-and-forths with the editors over passages they felt were too strong meat, and I would probably write it more bluntly today. But its comparative sobriety should cause Mr Huber to reflect that his charge of “NeverTrumpism” is bollocks, and that my concerns about US inability to use half of the entire planet’s military budget to accomplish any minimal strategic purpose is principled, long-held, and borne out by any random headline. From today:

    Russia Captures Record Share of India’s Oil Market

And so it goes. (Incidentally, just as a minor point: I note the increasing adoption of the term “West Asia” for the zone of conflict. “Middle East” is a designation that reflects the view from Washington; “West Asia” is how it looks from Delhi and Beijing.)

You will see in the latter half of my ancient piece the reference to the US military as “the expeditionary force of the Parliament of Man”. It is safe to say that President Trump — with his declaration that he’ll pick the next Supreme Leader — does not see it like that, but that’s the point: the rhetoric may change, but the self-bollocksing of American warmongering does not.

August 13, 2026

A minimum 12-year sentence

Filed under: Cancon, Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’ll probably be no surprise to anyone who’s met me, but I was a terrible student in school. While I quite enjoyed learning (about some things, anyway), I hated the environment where that learning was supposed to be taking place. I did well enough in primary and middle school, but I dropped out of high school and finished my diploma through correspondence. I have a great deal of sympathy for those kids who don’t fit into the institutional framework, as I certainly didn’t feel I fit in during my sentence. (It’s often worse for boys, as it’s more difficult for boys to sit still and stay quiet, and teachers readily interpret distraction and fidgeting as something needing medical intervention rather than signs of normal human development for half the species.) At Without Diminishment, Sam Dagres considers the plight of the vast majority of children locked in to that minimum 12-year incarceration:

You’re sitting there, one eye on the clock, eagerly waiting for the bell to ring. How you crave the chime of that sweet-sounding bell, a ring marking the start of your allotted outdoor time. You rush outside, feel the sun on your skin, eat a snack reminding you of a world that exists on the other side of the fence. But for most of the day, you are sat, effectively immobile for 8 hours. Stillness is the highest virtue, and any violation leads to punishment and an ADHD diagnosis. Day in and day out, you wait for the last bell.

Most of us will have experienced this kind of imprisonment, befitting what crime, you may wonder? We are punished for the crime of being born into a society where all forms of care are by default institutional, a society whose “child care policy is adult policy, not early childhood policy”, as Katharine B. Stevens noted.

According to Statistics Canada, approximately 5.5 million students are enrolled in K–12 public schools, dwarfing the 67,000 who are home-schooled. Nearly 99 per cent of all school-aged children in Canada are currently institutionalised.

In 2025, 58 per cent of children aged 0 to 5 were in childcare facilities, representing approximately 1.4 million children. One-quarter of those were aged under 1.

As someone who attended public schools all my life, I never thought of it as anything but natural. But as I reach a point in my life where family formation is uppermost in my mind, I wonder whose interests are prioritised whenever I walk by a school and hear, not see, kids playing on the other side of a tall brick wall.

We do not leave it to children to decide very much for themselves, which means their interests are ours to safeguard. Luckily, the research exists: institutional, non-familial care is not what is best for most of our young.

The incomparable Institute for Family Studies recently enumerated the relevant studies, one of which is the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which followed 1,000 children from infancy through adulthood and found that “children who had spent at least 30 hours per week in those settings beginning in infancy had three times the rate of social-emotional difficulties, including lower social competence, higher externalising behavior, and more conflict with teachers and peers. These effects persisted through elementary school, and by adolescence appeared as impulsivity, risk-taking, and substance use.”

Similarly, studies of Quebec’s universal childcare system have shown that the programme “has been associated with increased anxiety, aggression, hyperactivity, worse parent-child relationships, and lower self-reported life satisfaction in adolescence. By young adulthood, the negative effects extended to a 22% increase in criminal conviction rates.”

The foundations of our emotional and cognitive lives are formed early on while we bond with caregivers, and early institutionalisation disrupts that. The emotional downsides resulting from the systematic separation between the young children and their mothers are not broadly grasped, since the opposite is widely believed. When I share my musings about home-schooling with my friends, without fail, I receive the unanimous response: “Aren’t you worried they’ll turn out weird?” To that I respond, “Have you been paying attention?”

We are living through an era of weird, surrounded by friendless, non-eye-contact-making, socially anxious individuals. Nowadays, most schools encourage gender exploration and, through intense anti-bullying campaigns, demand a near-total embrace of any and all quirks. Not to mention that these tiny balls of anxiety, for some reason, require Vietnam-War-vet-levels of pharmacological intervention. I had someone tell me, “In my current role, I feel more like a pharmacist than a teacher”.

We can attribute the explosion of weirdness to a whole host of factors, notably digital devices and their role in mass social atrophy, but the forced dislocation of young children from their families is the foundation for a lifetime of alienation.

August 8, 2026

QotD: Why more men than women love videogames

Filed under: Gaming, Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    Autumn Christian @teachrobotslove

    I love video games. I met my husband because he hired me to QA for a Sims game. I was a game designer for companies like Zynga and EA. I was a writer on State of Decay 2.

    And I still have never loved games like I’ve seen the way men love games. I was surrounded by men who would eagerly work on min-max spreadsheets during their lunch break. One designer had a cabinet full of games that he would replay over and over again to study the levels. They’d go home from making games to play more games.

    Honestly, it’s a big reason I quit game design. I didn’t have that obsessive, compulsive desire to play games in a way that superseded everything else in my life. Lots of women play videogames. I’ve never seen one consumed by them as their life falls apart around them.

Autumn is right. Even women who love video games don’t become obsessed with them the way men do. I know why, and I think it reveals a tremendously important difference between male-typical and female-typical psychology.

Men. Want. Power.

Men want to be able to do things. To shape the world. To impose their will on reality. To win.

Video games are a fast, reliable superstimulus for that urge. With only a handful of exceptions, the good ones are designed to both excite the desire for agency and power, and to satisfy it.

If you doubt me, ask yourself why many men fixate harder on video games than they do on pornography. It’s very telling that this is even possible.

Women don’t work that way. I could go off on a long tear about why, but the evolutionary-biology reasons are so obvious that I don’t think I need to. If it’s not obvious, ask an LLM “why do men seek power and agency the way women seek love and social validation”. You’ll get an earful.

Of course this also explains the well-known phenomenon of women getting the ick when men play video games.

It’s not just that men doing this are chasing a goal women don’t really understand or identify with. To them, a game-obsessed man is dropping out of the real-world contest, wasting the traits and energy that would otherwise make him attractive on a pursuit that is both literally and figuratively sterile.

I don’t have a fix for the problems this mismatch creates, nor am I judging either men or women about this — instincts are what instincts are and I don’t waste any time arguing with the law of gravity either.

But understanding what’s going on increases the chances that we can make choices that aren’t doomed to fail.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-07.

August 7, 2026

QotD: A provisional taxonomy of “stupid smart guys”

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

The low IQ: I know some of y’all don’t like [Julian] Jaynes [author of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind], but one of the big reasons I like Jaynes is that he really brings home just how much of our behavior is unconscious. Including quite complex behavior, including stuff that we have to believe is the product of deep thought — he cites the “three B’s” his physicist friend told him about. Those are Bed, Bathroom, and Bus, which is where big important ideas seem to just come to them unbidden. You may not agree with where Jaynes goes with that, but we all have experienced something similar.

If we assume this is a universal mental process, I suggest, then saying someone has a low-normal IQ does not mean he’s always going to do stupid things. He has those three-B flashes too. It might take a while for him to cotton to something that seems obvious, but cotton he will, in three-B fashion.

Moreover, Jaynes is good on the complexity of unconscious tasks. The mechanical parts of driving, once learned, are completely unconscious. Try teaching someone to drive and you’ll see it right away. You’ll find yourself literally side-seat driving — your foot pushing down on an imaginary brake, unconsciously. And you never really forget those unconscious patterns, either. You may not have ridden a bike in 30 years, but you could go out and do it right now. Same way with swimming, or the manual of arms — if you’ve been through Basic, a guy with the proper tone of voice can have you twirling around like a marionette, even if you got out of uniform decades ago.

The actual low IQ guys might be the most dangerous cogs in the machine.

The Dunning-Krugerrand. That’s Larry Correia’s phrase, and it’s great. This is the person who believes he’s way smarter and more competent than he actually is. Which on the one hand, they all do. But on the other hand, there are levels above D-K, so please hold fire for now.

The Artiste. It’s been my great … fortune, actually, to have been around a lot of Media people in my youth. I dated a gal who did production work for one of the big tv news programs in a fairly large city, so I saw the video side of it, at least, from close range. The on-camera bobbleheads are all Ron Burgundy, of course, but the production people are usually quite bright … but in a very odd way. They have what I came to think of as “the artist’s eye”. They naturally see everything in terms of camera angles and visual presentation, and training develops this to a very high degree.

This leads to wildly divergent takes on things. You or I see the police approaching a stopped car with their guns drawn, or firemen pulling up in front of a burning building, and we think something like “Damn, crime is out of control!” or “I hope everyone’s ok.” News people — video people, at least — think “What a shot!” They frame the visuals first, then start processing the propositional content … if they ever do. The longer they work in “news”, the more the propositional content — “the cops are arresting a bad guy”; “there are real people in real danger in that burning building” — drops away.

Same thing, I imagine, with the folks on the verbal end. They have a novelist’s sense of pace, structure, and so on. Is what they’re writing true? Of course not! At one point about 30 years ago they felt the need to justify this, and created a whole new category of writing: “creative nonfiction“, aka lies, aka “the news”. The “creative nonfiction” people will tell you, in Wiki’s words, that it “uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives”. Emphasis mine, because like the cameraman who ends up exclusively focusing on the shot and never thinks about the life behind the shot, so the writer of “creative nonfiction” gets caught up in the creative part, and just kinda forgets the “nonfiction” part.

Medicalization. Not a category of people, but a technique. We say smart people tend to be spergy, and stupid smart people tend to be really spergy, but that’s mistaking effect for cause. They’re not very good at reading people, and have no social savvy, but that’s because they don’t practice — because they don’t need to practice. They medicalize their deficiencies. Instead of acknowledging a weakness in their game, they attribute it to a pathology.

Severian, “The Stupid Smart Guy”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-13.

August 6, 2026

The Goddess That Failed by Janice Fiamengo

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

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo shares the foreword to her new book, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself:

Feminism poses a threat to everything good in western culture, perhaps especially to women’s capacity to love, reason, and exercise self-restraint.

I was an adherent of feminism before I became a critic. I have felt its euphoric exultation and its self-flattering conviction of moral purity. Later, I recognized its hubris and moral hollowness.

I am familiar with feminism’s core texts, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Anne Franks, having studied them and believed in them for years. I understand the psychology and the history of the movement because I lived inside it for many years.

Unlike others who have criticized feminism’s excesses, I contend that although there are some moderate feminists, there was never a moderate feminism inspired by reasonable goals and untainted by anti-male fanaticism. Feminism did not go wrong at some point in history, whether after the Second Wave or before, whether in anti-sex or pro-sex zeal. It was always rooted in resentment and envy, warped by utopian longings and false notions of female moral superiority.

Decades of feminist grievance-mongering and accusation have led inevitably to our present time of ceaseless complaints, anti-western causes, hysterical accusation, rampant divorce, a declining birthrate, millions of abortions, and anti-male cruelty. Feminism has undermined and will continue to undermine the stability and viability of all western societies.

From the first occasions when I began to speak and write about feminism in 2012 and 2013, I encountered the same response from feminists: “What you are describing is not real feminism” or “Those feminists do not speak for all feminists”, and so on.

I am regularly accused of hating myself, of hating other women, and/or of seeking male approval. I am accused, by those who have never studied feminism, of not understanding feminism.

It’s true that not all feminists are as fervid as an Andrea Dworkin or a Sally Miller Gearhart. They do not all fantasize, as Gearhart did (to much congratulation and gushing praise), about how much better life would be if the number of males could be reduced to 10% of the human population. They do not rhapsodize, as Mary Daly did, about a decontamination of the earth through such a reduction. They do not make jokes about killing men as a public service, as Mona Eltahawy did.

But it’s also true that such vicious women, and the many others who have lent their malign energies to the movement, have never been disavowed by other feminist leaders. In fact, feminists’ lack of shame before bloodthirsty feminist pronouncements is remarkably consistent.

True, there are many varieties of feminism, not all of them agreeing on every point: radical feminism, socialist feminism, lesbian feminism, post-colonial feminism, intersectional feminism, eco-feminism, animal rights feminism, abolitionist feminism, trans-inclusive feminism, feminism for sex-based rights, maternal feminism, and even (most bizarrely) conservative or reactionary feminism. Some extend their compassion to victim groups other than women, such as trans women, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, or the environment.

Such distinctions do not concern me because none makes a real difference.

None escapes the victim mentality: the belief that the history of humanity up until the present moment has been a history of (privileged, white) men oppressing women and other innocent victims; and that because of their alleged greater suffering and moral innocence, particular care and attention must be paid to women and to their unique capacity for empathy and social justice.

No version of feminism escapes the binary logic whereby the world is divided up into (sometimes intricate, overlapping) categories of oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer, to be treated differently and valued differently according to their identity category.

Because it thinks in terms of groups and divides the world into innocent and guilty, feminism is incapable of devising universal principles or pursuing individual fairness or freedom. It is distorted by its victim thinking, incapable of extending empathy to those feminists see as oppressors, and incapable of demanding accountability from those feminists see as victims.

August 1, 2026

Why UK crime victims’ families always sound so similar talking to the media

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

On Substack Notes, John Carter linked to an article about the British Home Office’s “nudge unit” who, among other things, coax and cajole the families of murder victims to avoid any hint that they blame the perpetrators for the loss of their loved ones:

This is incredible. I always wondered how family liaison officers from RICU or the CRS reliably got the families of victims murdered by political or racial terrorists to provide such anodyne, don’t look back in anger public statements. I figured in most cases it would be concern trolling, with legal threats held in reserve.

This lays the technique bare, using interviews conducted both with victim’s families and former police officers. Liaison officers serve as anesthetic patches that get slapped on the open wounds of the migration war. They apply therapeutic techniques to calm and reassure the families, establishing dependent relationships and using the trust they build to guide them away from saying anything inflammatory when the time comes to speak to the public. If families become noncompliant in this respect, they’re threatened with causing a mistrial should they speak too openly about their feelings.

That isn’t all RICU does, of course. “Communications” includes a huge propaganda arm, which uses every tool at its disposal, including battalions of fake social media profiles. You have to wonder how much of the culture war of the last decade or more was pure hallucination.

The article in question is by David Shipley for the Pimlico Journal:

RICU, the Home Office’s Research Information and Communications Unit, is often the subject of much attention online, particularly around its role in the consistently bland calls for “unity” after horrific acts of violence. Many people online suggest that either the Unit itself, or the “specially trained officers” (Victim Liaison Officers or Family Liaison Officers) must threaten victims and their families to ensure their compliance with approved messaging. This always struck me as unlikely — widespread coercion would surely have leaked by now. There was also good reason to be sceptical of the efficacy of behavioural science applications to government. And yet public statements by those victims and their families are remarkably consistent.

So I was delighted when, a couple of months ago, Pimlico Journal asked me to investigate RICU and victim liaison properly. In order to do so, I studied historic statements, publications and coverage of RICU and spoke with victims’ families, some of whom are named in this piece and former police officers, none of whom are named, with knowledge of the Victim and Family Liaison units. What I discovered is fascinating and far more insidious than the imagined coercion. This article provides an overview of RICU’s history, goals and methodology, followed by details from those interviews. I hope it sheds some light on this murky area of the state’s “communications management”.

RICU was established in 2007 “under the Prevent strand of [the UK government’s] CONTEST strategy” with its stated goal being to “understand and counter terrorist and extremist ideologies to reduce the risk to the UK, its citizens and its interests overseas”. Giving evidence to MPs in 2009, Charles Farr, a former SIS officer, and head of the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism, who set RICU up in 2007, said the unit is “responsible for advising the rest of government [and] officialdom, from a brigade commander in Helmand province through to a chief constable in Yorkshire, about how they wish to characterise the threat we face and describe the response that we are making and, secondly, rather different, they are responsible for challenging the propaganda which comes to us from al-Qaeda and associated groups — generally not from people in this country; usually from the incessant 4,500 websites that are in one way or another associated with radical Islamist terrorist organisations around the world”.

The unit embraced convenient lies from the start. Part of their strategy was to send advice to “local authorities, people working on community cohesion projects, local police, neighbourhood policing teams” and “the Chief Constable” that they should not “talk about Islamic terrorism, not because in certain circumstances that is an inaccurate description but because the language admits of a number of interpretations which are not always helpful to us“.

RICU was also always concerned with the whole of British society — while Farr said the unit decided to “start” with Muslim communities, he told MPs that he did “not want to give the impression that RICU’s sole purpose is to communicate with Muslim communities in this country. It is not.” So by 2009 a unit existed which had “about 35 people” working for it, “and a bit of the private sector in there to advise us on aspects of communications”, which was telling every arm of the state, along with much of civil society, that they should lie about the nature of the threats the country faced, to serve the state’s perceived interests. It was also already building wide and deep relationships within many parts of the state, including policing.

What has it become, in the 17 years since Charles Farr gave his evidence?

In 2011, when the government reviewed Prevent, it found that RICU’s communications sometimes “erred in seeking to make language acceptable to some in Muslim communities, at the expense of candour”. The unit was described as having “a central role in developing counter-ideological or counter-narrative work”, although its track record was described as “mixed”. It was directed to take “more care … to identify credible partners to develop powerful and specific narratives across a range of communications channels, especially on the internet“. Despite these criticisms, the state chose to “retain RICU, largely in its current form”, but with the expectation that it would produce “much sharper and more professional counter-narrative products” — there was also a commitment to “continue to work with social media enterprises” in the battle against “propagandists and radicalisers” including those whose “propaganda work” might be illegal under “race and religious hatred legislation”. The shift is notable — Farr’s commitment that RICU would work across the whole of British society is clearly underway, with Islamic terrorism and radicalisation no longer the main focus.

More recently, RICU has long been the subject of much discussion on social media, and of occasional interest in the mainstream press. It’s often accused of being behind the anodyne calls for unity and calm issued by public bodies, victims and their families after the latest “Yookay” Event in which a migrant has done something appallingly violent. Not unrelatedly, it is generally the right who are more vocal in their criticism of RICU, and it is regularly suggested that they threaten families into sticking to the regime-approved line.

July 29, 2026

The American Deep State’s biggest experimental laboratory

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

On Substack, John Carter links to the latest of kulak’s fascinating-and-unsettling Anarchonomicon posts with this introduction:

Kulak’s thesis here is that English Canada generally, and Toronto specifically, is ground zero for a lot of the more insane gay race communism trends because America has been using Canada as a testing ground for psychological operations since the 1950s.

That sounds kind of nuts but he makes a plausible case. Since Canada is technically a foreign country, intelligence agencies don’t face the same limitations they do at home. Since Canada is almost culturally identical to the US, what works in Canada will generally work domestically (and all the GAE psyops are ultimately aimed at America’s domestic tax cattle).

Kulak also brings the receipts here, showing how things like MeToo and GamerGate seem to have been prefigured by similar movements in Canada a couple years before.

One thing he misses is land acknowledgements, which began spreading in Canada in 2013 or so, and have since started appearing at American and Australian universities. I don’t know for sure that they started in Canada, all I can say is that it was Canada where I first noticed them, and where they have become ubiquitous.

Multiculturalism is another Canadian export, developed here in the 60s and rapidly introduced all over the Western world. The prime ministers who introduced it were American puppets, and the ideology itself has a very broadly American “nation of immigrants” feel to it.

Anyhow, you motherfuckers, two can play this game.

On the land acknowledgements, the first time I encountered it was at my son’s university graduation ceremony, but his university had a big First Nations specialization so it didn’t seem too outlandish at the time. Since then, of course, pretty much every event in urban Canada seems to feature a land acknowledgement and they don’t appear to be optional any more.

Anyway, on to kulak’s post on “The Battle for the Mind of North America”:

The Land of Mind-Rape and Honey

Canada is/was a nice enough place to visit or grow up … several large nice cities surrounded by tons and tons of quaint and cute functional “Mainstreet USA” style quirky little towns.

The “Rape” refers to Rapeseed, the primary ingredient in Canola Oil, the unhealthy seed-oil. (they named it “Canada Oil” because “Rape Oil” might make people hesitate)

But when you scratch at the surface there’s something profoundly deeply wrong with Canada. You can feel it. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes.

and the Canadians are quite pleased to tell you just what that thing is:

America.

Funnily though, when you ask what Americans have done to them or what is wrong with America, they’ll tell you things about moral degeneracy and perfidy of Americans … no different than what the American elite and the US Government expresses about its own populace.

For reference: Canada is a vassal of the US.

It has been since the 1960s when the British lost the Suez Crisis and the American Deep State backed “Multiculturalism”, an end to “God Save the Queen”, legalized sodomy, ended prayer in public schools, demilitarized Canadian education (which til the 60s included rifle practice, marching, and survival training) … and oh ya a new flag.

The Canadian flag, adopted in 1964 … which the very year should be a “red flag”. Is in fact, an American flag. It is the symbol of America’s diplomatic and espionage victories over the British Empire and its final conquest of Canada.

Canada’s entire culture, defined by being British, Imperial, warlike, frontier militiamen (Indeed Canada’s 1950s culture in many ways resembled Washington’s and Jefferson’s colonial American culture more than America did) … was ripped out in the course of a decade … quite intentionally and by design.

Indeed Canada was the testing ground for the Global American Empire’s psychological cultural program.

To get a feel for just HOW aggressively Canadian culture was purposefully ripped apart … I encourage you to flip through the various programs for “Empire day in the Schools of Ontario” up on archive to see English Canada’s actual natural culture. (I will be writing about this in more detail in another piece.)

And Please Note: The British did nothing comparable … the “Narnia” age of Canada coexisted with The Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, and the basically open communist treason of the actual British Aristocracy.

The mottoes on the posters: “Obey/ the Law/ Follow/ Duty”, “One God/ One King/ One Flag/ One Fleet”, “Love God and Honour the King”

This was immediately ripped out by State Department’s assets like Pearson and Trudeau in the 60s and 70s in favour of “Multiculturalism”.

How does the one Canada: Royalist, Militaristic, Patriotic as Can Be, defined by the three institutions of Church, Militia Armoury, and the old-style High School ruthlessly enforcing standards … More akin to Cadia from 40k than a 21st century country … How did it transform into the modern Canada within living memory?

How do you destroy the entire culture of a country and replace it with an entirely new culture in front of its population’s very eyes … without resistance and without protest?

Well that’s the problem that was solved here.

Canada was the testing ground for all of the American Government’s cultural occupational weapons it would go on to use on Europe and on its own people.

Terms like “melting pot”, “racism”, “tolerance”, “the open society” … These of course has all been coined by American Jewish and Communist activists (“Racism” specifically is a Trotskyist doctrinal term of art propagated by Trotsky’s personal pamphlets, and you should call any “Conservative” who ever uses the term a Communist traitor).

However it was in Canada that top down US foreign policy institutions first applied the current model to a country which they had conquered without a war.

Indeed when one looks into “Denazification” in Germany or the US occupations of France, Italy, or Japan you find little to no overlap between the language, structure, and even values of the “Democratic”, “antifascist”, and “Peaceful” occupational ideology and modern Globohomo.

“Monument to Multiculturalism”. Toronto. Erected 1985. (The “Monument” can be interpreted two ways … the man and doves working together to build a unified world … or the man is unwittingly cooperating in his own caging and enslavement)

Whereas in Canada the US occupational ideology EXACTLY resembles modern globohomo. From the outset.

Pierre Trudeau’s first major political moment was the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality.

July 27, 2026

Timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs

Filed under: Greece, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The tag in my chosen headline means roughly “beware of Greeks bearing gifts”, which anyone who has read anything about the Trojan War can understand. A huge problem for modern translators of works like The Iliad and The Odyssey is that there’s a double layer of cultural change built in before you start: the Mycenaean Greek culture of the Bronze Age — the setting of the Trojan War — is significantly different from the Greek culture of the classic era — when the oral tales were first written down (and attributed to Homer).

Classic Greek culture is often misunderstood by modern audiences through the most prominent survivals of that time: especially Greek philosophy, as the philosophers we think of as most representative of Athenian and the wider Greek culture were actually a fairly small and relatively powerless subculture at odds with the mainstream of their times.

All that said, going from a translation to an on-screen interpretation requires a lot of picking and choosing of elements to highlight and others to leave unrepresented or actively suppressed. In the most recent film of Odysseus and his extended return journey from Troy to Ithaca, director Christopher Nolan chose to portray Odysseus as a modern man in ways that may suit today’s audiences, but don’t accurately portray the Homeric interpretation or the times in which it is set:

Some viewers have described Nolan’s version of Odysseus as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. But moral injury is the more accurate term. It overlaps with PTSD, but it’s not the same thing. Moral injury occurs when a person commits, witnesses, or fails to prevent an act that violates his moral convictions. In war, moral injury can arise when a person does something that violates his own ideals, loyalties, or sense of right and wrong. The result is lasting guilt. A combat veteran comes to see himself as corrupt, unworthy, or beyond forgiveness.

In the film, Odysseus describes his guilt over the violence he witnessed during the sack of Troy. He is conscience-stricken about his Trojan Horse gambit. Odysseus took an object that appeared to be a gift of peace and used it as a weapon of deception. His stratagem allowed the Greeks to enter Troy, destroy the city, and slaughter its people.

But the Trojan Horse is Odysseus’s crowning achievement. Homer’s Odysseus is a wily trickster, and a trickster would not be tormented by the fact that his trick succeeded.

During his journey, he repeatedly deceives his own men for what he believes is the greater good, and these acts clearly trouble him. The war itself is remembered as grim and pointless. Men are drafted rather than rushing eagerly toward glory.

This is not Homer’s moral universe. In the poem, the Greeks rape, rob, enslave, and pillage without displaying anything like modern guilt. We can tolerate this when reading an ancient text. It is harder to tolerate when those acts are placed directly before us on a movie screen.

This may explain Nolan’s decision. Had he shown the violence of the original story without softening it, would the audience still have been able to sympathize with Odysseus?

Consider what happens to the enslaved women accused of consorting with the suitors after Odysseus returns home. Odysseus orders them to be killed, and Telemachus hangs them. Homer does not present the scene as morally complicated. Their punishment is part of restoring order.

Modern films sometimes allow their heroes to inhabit moral worlds very different from our own. Robert Eggers’s 2022 film The Northman asks us to sympathize with Viking characters who obey codes that most moviegoers today would find reprehensible. But The Northman was a mid-budget film. Nolan made a summer blockbuster that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A blockbuster can’t afford to depict a hero from whom audiences recoil. Eggers could let his Viking be a Viking. Nolan needs his Greek warrior to be one of us.

Yet such individuals lived in societies that existed before Christian morality reshaped the Western understanding of guilt, mercy, and the value of every human life. The moral injury that afflicts Nolan’s Odysseus belongs more naturally to the AD world than the BC one.

In the film, Odysseus grieves for the men he lost and appears to blame himself for their deaths. But Homer presents that suffering as the result of pride, fate, divine anger, and human foolishness. The original story does not depict Odysseus as a man tormented by the fear that he has violated his own moral code.

The difference is clear in the episode of the lotus-eaters. In Nolan’s film, Odysseus eats the lotus because he seeks mental relief, a kind of ancient Greek version of using psychedelics to treat combat trauma. In the poem, Odysseus does the opposite. He refuses to eat the lotus and orders his men away from it.

Biosphere 2

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sama Hoole on a now-obscure experiment in the early 1990s which didn’t produce the expected results at all:

Eight people sealed themselves in a glass dome to prove humanity could feed itself on plants, and spent two years starving in front of the world’s press.

Biosphere 2 cost a hundred and fifty million dollars. Three acres of Arizona desert under sealed glass, eight crew, door shut on 26 September 1991, nothing in or out for two years. The farm inside was worked intensively and by any agronomic measure it was superb, out-producing the most efficient smallholder farming on earth by a wide margin.

It produced 83 per cent of what they needed.

Which left Roy Walford, the crew doctor, in a sealed box with seven hungry colleagues and his own life’s work. Walford was a UCLA pathologist who had spent thirty years arguing that severe calorie restriction extends lifespan. He had doubled it in mice. And here was reality handing him his own hypothesis with the door welded shut.

So he called it a health programme.

The menu became vegetables, half a glass of goat’s milk a day, and meat or fish about once a week. The men lost close to a fifth of their body weight, the women about a tenth. And the markers Walford cared about behaved impeccably: blood pressure, glucose, cholesterol and triglycerides all down at least twenty per cent, into ranges any doctor would frame. He published it in PNAS in 1992.

The bloodwork was magnificent. The people were falling apart.

Jane Poynter wrote the book afterwards. Fatigue, depression, mental fog, and a preoccupation with food that ate the entire interior life of the crew. They stole from each other. They split into two factions that stopped speaking. The ecological research the building had been constructed for was largely abandoned by people who no longer had the headroom for anything past the next meal. The ants and cockroaches, by contrast, were thriving.

The air was leaving too. Oxygen started at 20.9 per cent and kept dropping and nobody knew where it was going. Columbia eventually worked it out: the concrete was quietly eating it. So oxygen had to be pumped in from outside, which is an interesting result for a sealed world.

Walford’s verdict on the mutiny is the whole thing in one sentence. He said afterwards that any other physician aboard would have panicked and declared they were starving, but that he knew they were on a programme of health enhancement.

He knew. Seven other people, visibly wasting, were simply mistaken.

He came out in 1993, developed ALS, blamed the conditions inside, and died in 2004 aged 79 after years on 1,600 calories a day in pursuit of a longer life. The mice got double. He did not make it to average for an American professor.

Every argument you have heard this decade was already in that building. Grow it locally. Take the animals out. Eat less. Watch the numbers improve.

Eight of the most motivated humans alive, handed three acres of the best-managed farmland on the planet and no meat, could not feed themselves.

The press reported the fighting as a personality clash.

And he updated:

I left something out of that one.

Biosphere 2 had a working farm, and the farm had pigs, chickens and goats. Only one of those three was still alive when the door opened, and the reason why is the most useful thing the entire two years produced.

    Biosphere 2 had livestock, and the crew ate the pigs first.

    Zazu and Quincy were Ossabaw dwarf pigs. In the first year one of them produced a litter of seven, which inside a sealed glass building where every calorie was counted should have been the best news anybody had.

    They killed them anyway.

    The chickens went too. Mrs Fruitcake and the rest, slaughtered because they were eating more than they were laying.

    Neither animal was killed for meat. They were killed for competing.

    A pig and a chicken have one stomach, and it wants exactly what a human wants: grain, roots, beans, anything starchy or dense. Inside Biosphere 2 there was no outside, no feed lorry, no surplus. Every mouthful a pig took came off the plate of one of eight visibly starving people. The crew did the arithmetic and reached for the knife.

    Now notice which animals survived the cull.

    The goats. Milky Way, Stardust and Vision, three African pygmy goats, milked daily for the full two years. And in the crew’s own scientific write-up, published in Advances in Space Research in 1995, they recorded that the goats were the most productive domestic animals in the entire system.

    The most productive thing in a building where the humans lost a fifth of their body weight was the ruminant.

    It is the four stomachs. A goat is a fermentation vat on legs. She runs on stalks, leaves and crop residue, the fibrous rubbish that comes off any farm and that no human gut can process, and turns it into milk. She was never taking food off the crew. She was manufacturing food out of what the crew threw away.

    So that sealed box did test the great modern argument, the one about feeding crops to animals being a waste of land and calories.

    It found the argument correct for pigs and chickens.

    It found it wrong for the animal that eats grass.

    Biosphere 2 gets quoted endlessly as proof we should grow plants and drop the livestock. Eight people with the most productive farmland on earth ran that experiment properly, went hungry for two years, and kept exactly one kind of animal alive throughout, because she was the only one paying rent.

    They killed the pigs to feed the people and kept the goat to feed the people.

QotD: The art of management

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

Despite this view being out of fashion today, most organizations retain a residual awareness that leaders should have a superset of the skills of the people they’re leading.1 So the only thing that really could serve as “management turpentine”, a transferable set of management techniques applicable to any domain, is narrowly-tailored advice for how to deal with people, how to motivate, direct, and control them. And so, by and large, that’s what management books like this one offer — techniques for the one part of the job generic enough to benefit from this kind of advice. But is it really so generic?

A nanosecond’s reflection will tell you that the techniques needed to manage computer programmers, movie actors, and the boom-town roughnecks that inspired Conan the Barbarian are going to be very different. What if we restrict our analysis to just one category, say the computer programmers?2 Well, consider another similarly restrictive category: children. The great limitation of parenting books is, as every parent of more than one child knows, that children are extremely different from one another. One child may need strict discipline, while another actually needs to be encouraged to take rules less seriously; one needs to be reassured constantly and showered with love, while another needs to have firm boundaries. The techniques that work brilliantly with one child will not work unmodified with another. If the goal is the Aristotelian mean, then some need to be nudged to one side, and others in the opposite direction.

If that’s the way it is with kids, imagine how much more so this all applies to adults, who in addition to having different innate personalities and temperaments and aptitudes also carry with them extensive life histories, experiences, and scar tissue. Any generic advice, any “management turpentine”, needs to be heavily customized to the personalities and the dynamics of a particular team. But the catch is that mastering the ability to apply this sort of generic management advice in a particular situation is pretty much just the same thing as mastering management itself.

To a very great degree, management just is the art of taking a set of discordant personalities and welding them into a harmonious whole. A great manager sizes up his or her team, sees the ambitious go-getter, the resentful and self-defeating genius, the timid and awkward newbie with leadership potential, the lazy slob who secretly glues them all together — sees not just these categories but sees the individuals and the unique ways they subvert these archetypes, and instantly and intuitively knows how to fuse them into a machine for achieving a common purpose. Or as Hilaire Belloc once put it:

    There is one element in the [management of men] which is all-important, and the possession of which is a gift, like the gift of verse or “eye” in a sport. It is not to be prayed for. It is not to be acquired. It is granted by the unseen powers. This element is that which you have in the good management of a pack of hounds, or in any other kind of good generalship. It consists in a mixture of detailed and general appreciation; for when those two faculties are combined — the faculty of seeing the individual, the faculty of seeing the whole — you have the genius of the human helmsman; as rare a sort of genius as there is among men.

But why does he say that this particular talent is not to be acquired? Go back to Johnson’s line about the management turpentine and read it again, but this time note how deftly the magic trick is performed. Do you see it? Hey presto, there are only two options as to what a book on painting could be about — “Form and Structure and Meaning,” or where to buy turpentine. This is important, because left to your own devices you might prefer a third possibility: namely a book about how to make great art. But as soon as you say it, it becomes clear why that option needs to be hidden from view — no such book has ever existed, no such book can exist, you can’t learn to make great art from a book.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-28.

  1. Fewer and fewer every day though. A United States military friend recently pointed out to me that the high ratio of senior Russian officers killed in Ukraine and Syria speaks well of their military culture, because it means that even their general officers make a custom of occasionally leading from the front (there’s a long history of this in the Russian armed forces). He then reflected bitterly that an American general being killed was simply unthinkable, since to a man they sit in air-conditioned offices and command their troops over satellite link.
  2. Johnson’s book is marketed towards those managing computer programmers, which is interesting since she worked on the operations side of the house and as far was I know has never been in charge of a crew of engineers.

July 21, 2026

QotD: Why Tiktok?

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Tiktok found a way to connect you to strangers who don’t make you angry. By offering performers money if they produced media that you “engaged” with, Tiktok offloaded the work of convincing you to conduct your online activities in a way that maximized opportunities to show you an ad onto an army of global theater kids who would spend every hour that god sent trying to figure out how to keep you looking at Tiktok.

This was hugely successful – so successful, in fact, that Tiktok was able to cheat, overriding its own algorithmic guesses about which of its billion cable-access television channels you’d stare at the longest with a “heating tool” that lets the company trick some of those theater kids into thinking that Tiktok was actually more suited to them than other platforms […]

For zuckermuskian social media bosses, Tiktok became an object of fierce envy. Here was the ultimate Tom Sawyer robo-fence-painter, a self-licking ice-cream cone that motivated people to convince each other to make money for you. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter took a hard pivot away from showing you the things that the people you loved had to say, in favor of showing you short videos of people whose parents didn’t give them enough affection in their childhood, desperately shoving lemons up their noses in a bid to win your approval (and a revshare split with the platforms).

It worked. Sorta. Thing is, some of those “content creators” are actually very good, and none of them appreciate being jerked around. They quite rightly see their reason for being on the platforms as improving their own lives, not the bottom line of the platforms’ owners and executives. They may be more “engaging” than your friends, but they’re also a lot mouthier and feel entitled to a say in how the platform operates.

What’s a billionaire solipsist to do? Obviously, the answer is “AI creators”. An “AI creator” is like a “creator” in that it works to maximize your engagement with the platform – and thus the number of ads that can be crammed into your face-holes – but, unlike a “creator”, it makes no demands upon the platform and exists solely to serve the platform’s shareholders and executives. It’s the perfect realization of the solipsist fantasy of a world without people […]

But there’s a problem with this plan: your friends are not a liability for a platform. Your friends are the platforms’ single most important asset. Your friends are why the platforms are so “sticky”. The platforms don’t “hack your dopamine loops” – they just take your friends hostage, and even though you love your friends, they are a monumental pain in the ass, and if you can’t even agree on what board-game you’re going to play this weekend, how are you going to agree when it’s time to leave Facebook, and where to go next?

So long as you love your friends more than you hate Zuckerberg or Musk, you will remain stuck to their platforms. The platform bosses know this, and they inflict pain on you that is titrated to be just below the threshold where you hate the platforms more than you love your friends.

But as much as the platform bosses rely on your love of your friends, they still view your friends as liabilities, thanks to those friends’ unreasonable insistence on structuring their relationship with you to maximize their own satisfaction, rather than how much time you spend looking at ads. So the platforms are deliberately disconnecting you from your friends by minimizing the fraction of your feed that is given over to posts from people you follow, and replacing those friends with a succession of ever-more fungible posters: trolls, creators, and chatbots.

Cory Doctorow, “Tiktokification shall set us free”, Pluralistic, 2026-04-17.

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