Quotulatiousness

November 2, 2019

When entertainment morphs into propaganda

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

One of the key elements aiding Hitler and the NSDAP to take power and stay in power in Germany in the 1930s was the constant, ongoing propaganda campaign orchestrated by Joseph Goebbels. Hitler and the Nazi party were lauded as the perfect Germanic solution to every problem and Jews, socialists, homosexuals, and other undesireable elements were belittled and used as targets of hate. A big part of Goebbels’ propaganda revolved around one idea, the “Big Lie”:

Hitler, Göring, Goebbels and Hess.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

By suppressing competing voices and having all the methods of reaching the people repeating the same story, the Nazis solidified their control on power in Germany that lasted until 1945, and was only demolished by massive military effort by the United States, the Soviet Union, and the British Commonwealth. Propaganda is a very powerful tool that works distressingly well to implant and nurture evil ideas in a subject population.

Modern propagandists in the west generally don’t have the power of the state aiding them, but if they get enough of the channels of communication — especially the entertainment channels — to co-ordinate the message, the effects can be very strong:

… I perfectly understand the legitimacy of feminist concerns regarding the portrayal of women in the media as consistently demure, retiring, and subservient to men. I grant that, in most of the action/adventure movies that I saw growing up, women would typically twist an ankle or get captured and then require rescuing by the swashbuckling male hero — and I realize how galling this must have been to generations of women. And therefore, a certain correction was undoubtedly in order. But what is problematic now is the Nietzschean quality of the reaction, by which I mean, the insistence that female power has to be asserted over and against males, that there is an either/or, zero-sum conflict between men and women. It is not enough, in a word, to show women as intelligent, savvy, and good; you have to portray men as stupid, witless, and irresponsible. That this savage contrast is having an effect especially on younger men is becoming increasingly apparent.

In the midst of a “you-go-girl” feminist culture, many boys and young men feel adrift, afraid that any expression of their own good qualities will be construed as aggressive or insensitive. If you want concrete proof of this, take a look at the statistics contrasting female and male success at the university level. And you can see the phenomenon in films such as Fight Club and The Intern. In the former, the Brad Pitt character turns to his friend and laments, “we’re thirty year old boys;” and in the latter, Robert De Niro’s classic male type tries to whip into shape a number of twenty-something male colleagues who are rumpled, unsure of themselves, without ambition — and of course under the dominance of an all conquering female.

It might be the case that, in regard to money, power, and honor, a zero-sum dynamic obtains, but it decidedly does not obtain in regard to real virtue. The truly courageous person is not threatened by another person’s courage; the truly temperate man is not intimidated by the temperance of someone else; the truly just person is not put off by the justice of a countryman; and authentic love positively rejoices in the love shown by another. And therefore, it should be altogether possible to hold up the virtue of a woman without denying virtue to a man. In point of fact, if we consult the “all conquering female” characters in films and TV, we see that they often exemplify the very worst of the traditional male qualities: aggression, suspicion, hyper-sensitivity, cruelty, etc. This is what happens when a Nietzschean framework has replaced a classical one.

My point is that it is altogether possible — and eminently desirable — to say “you go boy” with as much vigor as “you go girl.” And both the boys and the girls will be better for it.

QotD: Business writing

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

For a long time — well, it seemed like a long time — seven or eight years, I taught effective writing seminars to business people. I was young, and I looked even younger. But I had to get up in front of engineers, chemists, lawyers, sometimes accountants, people who were accomplished in their fields but were not necessarily good at writing, and I was supposed to talk to them about how to write reports and letters and memos. And they challenged me because I looked like I was 10 years old, and they expected to be bored also.

[…]

OK, the most consistent mistake … not mistake, but inefficiency of business writing — and it was very consistent — is the absolute refusal on the part of the writer to tell you right away what message he or she is trying to deliver. I used to say to them, “The most important thing you have to say should be in the first sentence.” And “Oh, no, you can’t. I’m an engineer. We did a 10-year study, this is way too complicated.”

And inevitably, they were wrong. Inevitably, if they really thought about it, they were able to, in one sentence, summarize why it was really important. But they refused to do that because the way they found out was by spending 10 years of study and all this data and everything, and that’s the way they wanted everyone to look at what they did. They wanted their supervisors to go plowing through all they had done to come to this brilliant conclusion that they had come to.

    COWEN: Through their history, through their thought patterns.

Drag everybody through it. And it was the one thing the newspaper people were taught to do that made more sense. You don’t have your reader’s attention very long, so get to the point. I found it was very difficult to get even really smart businesspeople to get to the point. Sometimes it was because they really couldn’t tell you what the point was.

What I wanted to say, but rarely felt comfortable saying, was, “If you don’t know what the point is, then you can’t really write this report.” But it was always too complicated for a layperson like me to understand. That was the way they did it. I was being hired by their bosses to tell them, “No, we want you to write clearly, and we want you to get to the point.”

    COWEN: And why were they, at this meta level, resistant to your message?

Because nobody else was doing it. When I would start the class, I’d have 32 people in the class typically, and when they would turn in all their samples of writing, every one of them wrote the same way. They all wrote business-ese writing. This is my parody of it, but it was, “Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosure.” That kind of formal, nonsensical, meaningless flow of words. Somewhere in there would be something important, something significant, or maybe not.

Dave Barry, interviewed by Tyler Cowan in “Dave Barry on Humor, Writing, and Life as a Florida Man”, Medium, 2017-08-16.

November 1, 2019

QotD: The much-ballyhoo’d open office benefits are a lie

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

As urban rents crept up and the economy reached full employment over the last decade, American offices got more and more stuffed. On average, workers now get about 194 square feet of office space per person, down about 8 percent since 2009, according to a report by the real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield. WeWork has been accelerating the trend. At its newest offices, the company can more than double the density of most other offices, giving each worker less than 50 square feet of space.

As a socially anxious introvert with a lot of bespoke workplace rituals (I can’t write without aromatherapy), I used to think I was simply a weirdo for finding modern offices insufferable. I’ve been working from my cozy home office for more than a decade, and now, when I go to the Times‘ headquarters in New York — where, for financial reasons, desks were recently converted from cubicles into open office benches — I cannot for the life of me get anything done.

But after chatting with colleagues, I realized it’s not just me, and not just the Times: Modern offices aren’t designed for deep work. […]

The scourge of open offices is not a new subject for ranting. Open offices were sold to workers as a boon to collaboration — liberated from barriers, stuffed in like sardines, people would chat more and, supposedly, come up with lots of brilliant new ideas. Yet study after study has shown open offices to foster seclusion more than innovation; in order to combat noise, the loss of privacy and the sense of being watched, people in an open office put on headphones, talk less, and feel terrible.

Farhad Manjoo, “Open Offices Are a Capitalist Dead End”, New York Times, 2019-09-25.

October 26, 2019

QotD: Pulp fantasy writers

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

All the great fantasies, I suppose, have been written by emotionally crippled men. [Robert E.] Howard was a recluse and a man so morbidly attached to his mother that when she died he committed suicide; Lovecraft had enough phobias and eccentricities for nine; Merritt was chinless, bald and shaped like a shmoo. The trouble with Conan is that the human race never has produced and never could produce such a man, and sane writers know it; therefore the sick writers have a monopoly of him.

Damon Knight, quoted by John C. Wright, “Conan and the Critic”, John C. Wright’s Journal, 2017-11-01.

October 15, 2019

QotD: Over-protected children become insecure adults

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

Kids need conflict, insult, exclusion – they need to experience these things thousands of times when they’re young in order to develop into psychologically mature adults. Every adult has to learn to handle these things and not get upset, especially by minor instances. But in the name of protecting our children we have deprived them of the unsupervised time they need to learn how to navigate conflict among themselves. That is one of the main reasons why kids and even college students today find words, ideas and social situations more intolerable than those same words, ideas and situations would have been for previous generations of students.

Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Naomi Firsht, “The Fragile Generation”, Spiked, 2017-08-31.

October 10, 2019

QotD: Taxonomy of the online troll

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

First, the Peevish Adolescent. This is the most common and least interesting form of haterboy. There’s almost nothing there except a juvenile desire to fling feces. This is the type that is most likely to have indifferent-to-poor writing skills – crappy spelling, difficulty forming coherent sentences, run-on paragraphs – and most likely to use an anonymizing handle.

The Peevish Adolescent’s dominating emotions are all about primate posturing for status. One often gets the sense that any authority or high-status figure would do as a target for his feces-flinging and one has been chosen for the role almost at random. The Internet enables him to demonstrate belligerantly at a silverback male without fear of actual consequences; this thrills him and helps him feel marginally less inadequate.

The polar opposite of the Peevish Adolescent is the Embittered Old Fart. This type is much less common and much more interesting. Tends to be middling on the language-competency scale, and may have interesting things to say if you can mask out that 60-cycle hum.

The dominant emotions of the Embittered Old Fart are envy and resentment. The EOF fails to hide the fact that he thinks he could have been as famous and successful as you, or should have been; in order to live with his own comparative failure, he has to try to tear you down and trash your reputation. The amount of effort and intelligence an EOF may expend on this project is a very sad thing to see; one can’t help thinking he’d have much less resentment in him if he’d directed his energy more constructively in the past. Accordingly, where the Peevish Adolescent is mostly just ridiculous, the Embittered Old Fart is genuinely tragic.

Next we come to the Zealot. The Zealot thinks you are an articulate advocate of evil and must therefore be discredited at all costs. He doesn’t hate your success other than consequentially, and isn’t mainly concerned with posturing for status. No; his problem is that you have associated yourself with the wrong operating system, or the wrong political ideas, or the wrong religion, and that you commit the intolerable crime of persuading others to do likewise.

High-grade zealots are the most articulate variant of haterboy; indeed, they often run over with immaculately grammatical verbiage. Of all the haterboy types, they are most likely to try to pack a PhD thesis into a blog comment, complete with numerous hyperlinks. The thing about them, though, is that no matter what their particular idée fixe is, they all sound alike after awhile. The 60-cycle hum drowns out the idea content.

Zealots are also the least likely type to use an identity-concealing handle. Sadly, the appearance of honesty often deceives; their citations are apt to be thin and hyperpartisan, and their arguments to have gaps or even tactical falsehoods at crucial points. You are more likely to learn something useful from an Embittered Old Fart than from a Zealot.

Finally, the Iconoclast. The Iconoclast is, in his own mind, a fearless and principled speaker of truth to power. You are the idol with feet of clay, the pretender, the false god he must destroy. But note how he differs from the Peevish Adolescent; he is relatively unconcerned with his own status, and more like the Zealot in that he is mainly interested in protecting others from your baneful influence. The core of his complaint, though, is about social power and personal influence rather than ideas.

On this blog, the characteristic accusations of the Iconoclast are that (a) I’m a monster of ego, and (b) I claim a position of leadership in the hacker community that I don’t actually hold. I point these out because they’re issues that matter much less to the other haterboy types. The Peevish Adolescent and the Embittered Old Fart attack me exactly because they see me as a silverback alpha, and the Zealot is only upset by my social power insofar as it assists the infectiousness of my ideas.

Eric S. Raymond, “Taxonomy of the haterboy”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-12-22.

October 8, 2019

Anton Howes on innovation

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Anton Howes publishes a newsletter on the Age of Invention (I just signed up to start receiving it). Here’s an older article from the newsletter on innovation:

The Industrial Revolution was caused by an acceleration of innovation. But how was that acceleration caused? Most theories of the acceleration’s causes assume that innovation is in human nature, that it has always been around.

So, they might argue:

  • Property rights became better enforced so budding innovators felt more secure to make themselves known.
  • Patents appeared so innovators could reveal their secrets and still profit from them.
  • Brits were particularly skilled or well-educated so innovators could more easily get their innovations implemented.
  • British society started to accord dignity or honour to innovation so innovators felt motivated to have a go.
  • Demand increased so innovators had a big enough market to begin selling their innovations.

And so on. All of these arguments assume the same thing — that innovation is a part of human nature, a choice that has always been recognised. Their implicit claim is that, other than in mid-eighteenth century Britain, save for a few short-lived cases, choosing innovation was simply just not worth it.

I disagree.

The more I study the lives of British innovators, the more convinced I am that innovation is not in human nature, but is instead received. People innovate because they are inspired to do so — it is an idea that is transmitted. And when people do not innovate, it is often simply because it never occurs to them to do so. Incentives matter too, of course. But a person needs to at least have the idea of innovation — an improving mentality — before they can choose to innovate, before they can even take the costs and benefits of innovation into account.

An illustration: at a conference I was at last month the attendees wore lanyards with name tags, which listed their names on one side. Over the course of the conference the tags would inevitably flip over, hiding the names. People would, when introducing themselves, periodically check each other’s tags, flipping them the right way around. But only one person — one single person, of attendees in the hundreds, had the ingenuity to write their name on the other side. To my shame, it wasn’t me.

Everyone at that conference had an incentive to do that innovation. Everyone was there to meet one another, so the innovation helped achieve that goal. And the cost of the innovation was negligible. It took a couple of seconds to whip out a pen and scribble a name. It simply did not occur to them to innovate. Innovation can be extraordinarily rare — despite the opportunities, despite the incentives.

October 5, 2019

Legends Summarized: El Dorado

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 4 Oct 2019

El Dorado! A shining golden city packed with promises of wealth, power and everlasting glory. An unspoiled paradise deep in the jungle, the PERFECT destination for treasure-hunters and anthropologists alike. Something that perfect is something EVERYONE wants to be real.

Aaaaand that’s the trick, isn’t it? Wanting something that badly isn’t healthy. Just ask the conquistadors!
(Oh wait, we can’t – because so many of them died on fruitless quests for El Dorado. And also it’s been five hundred years and they’d all be dead anyway)

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September 27, 2019

QotD: Environmental cultists

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

There are a million examples, but since climate hysteria is briefly back in the news let’s go with that. That Greta Thunberg freak might not know it — she is, after all, a product of modern “education” — but anyone old enough to remember the early 2000s has heard her spiel before. Al Gore kept telling us that the world would end by 2012 or something; he made a movie about it and everything. Hell, several generations of Americans have heard this nonsense before, going all the way back to the original Earth Day in 1970.

Of course, back then it was global cooling that was going to kill us all, and do you see what I mean about True Believers? The very same people who were convinced that we were all gonna die in a new Ice Age in 1970 were certain we’d die of melted polar ice caps in 2006, just as they’re now positive we’re going to get killed by … whatever it is Thunberg is hectoring the UN about. Normal folks’ skulls would’ve exploded from cognitive dissonance, but the eco-freaks don’t suffer from cognitive dissonance. Because, for them, it never rises to the level of cognition in the first place. If “pulling a U-turn on your deepest convictions” is what it takes to stay in the group, well, start peeling rubber. The cult’s leadership will come up with a retcon in due time.

Two interesting effects flow from this. The first is the growing disconnect between the cult’s leadership and the True Believers. A cult with a big enough membership roster stops being a cult and becomes a movement. Movements beget organizations, which by universal law attract grifters, with predictable-as-sunrise consequences. E.g. Christianity. Back in the mid-first century, Christians were sure that Christ would return in their lifetimes — after all, He said so Himself. His comeback tour kept getting postponed, though, and these days you can be the leader of a major Christian denomination without ever bothering with that “Jesus” guy, much less any of the stuff He said.

This is why “global cooling” became “global warming,” which is now “global climate change.” We cognitively-normal folks assume that the eco-freaks keep changing the name to avoid cognitive dissonance. After all, the climate “changes” every day — we call it “weather,” but if you’re looking for evidence that your crackpot eco-doom theories are correct, well, just look at how much the temperature varies from noon to midnight!! But see above: Cognitive dissonance is actually a boon to the eco-freaks, because in cult psychology, disconfirmations prove that you were right all along. The eco-freaks would still trot goofy Greta Thunberg out there no matter what it’s called, and she, poor deluded little sod, would keep on doing her thing, because she’s in the cult. So: They, the eco-freaks, didn’t come up with “climate change;” the grifters in charge of Climate Shakedown Inc. did.

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

September 11, 2019

QotD: Male versus female social structure

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

Female social structure is completely different from male social structure. Men tend to organize in a hierarchy of sorts. There’s one guy at the top, a few guys he trusts underneath him, etc. downward until you reach the guys that are on the bottom of the pile. The structure makes sense. It’s efficient, everyone knows who’s in charge, and it’s largely based around the individual. Someone can rise or fall in this hierarchy based on any number of things, but their position is usually pretty clear from the outside looking in.

Female social structure is more fluid. It’s based more on group identity than on individual characteristics. You tend to have one woman who is kind of in charge, your queen bee as it were. Those in her favor circle around her, and the circles continue outward until you have the women who are not part of the group. They aren’t at the bottom of the pile, they pretty much don’t exist. At least, if they’re lucky they don’t. One’s position in the social hierarchy can change at any time, to include who the queen bee is. Remember the scene in Mean Girls where Regina tries to sit at the lunch table with the other plastics but isn’t wearing the right color clothes? She was just knocked out of her position in the social hierarchy.

In a social structure like this, there’s no room for difference of opinion or people who stand out too much. If an individual, even by noncompliance, threatens the group identity; she will gain the ire of the entire group. They will hunt her without mercy until she complies with the demands of the group, is removed from their reach by either death or physical distance (which is getting much harder with the internet), or manages to win enough females to her side to either form a new group around her or replace the existing leader. The last option allows her to push her standard on the group as a whole. There is no option to live and let live. In other words, female social structure is closer to the Borg than the complex world we currently enjoy.

I can already hear the cries of, “But women aren’t violent!” If you’re talking about direct violence, you’re mostly right. Women are not men, and we don’t hunt in the way that men do. Our weapons are usually words and emotions, not direct violence. Instead of a brawl in which two people fight it out and determine which is the strongest, you’re looking at extreme emotional abuse for anyone who is outside the group and unlucky enough to have their attention. Emotional abuse attacks a person in the most deeply personal of ways, and the scars it creates are more damaging than the physical scars of a beating. We wonder why girls who stand out grow so bitter, but if you’re a little too pretty or a little too different, other girls swarm on you and rip you apart with constant emotional abuse. They attack who you are at the base of your being, your very self-perception. This is why you see truly beautiful women who struggle to see their worth. Other girls have been ripping into them since the nursery, and it only gets worse as they get older. Boys court you and try in their awkward boyish way to get your attention, but you’re mostly convinced that it’s a cruel joke they’re playing on you, because of course you aren’t pretty or smart or special. The scars run deep and never fully heal.

“outofthedarkness”, guest posting at According to Hoyt, 2017-08-09.

September 10, 2019

QotD: Mere words are not “violence”

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

“I’m very concerned about a phenomenon called ‘concept creep’ – which has been happening to a lot of psychological terms since the 1990s”, he says. “When a word like ‘violence’ is allowed to creep so that it includes a lot of things that are not violence, then this causes a cascade of bad effects. It’s bad for the students themselves because they now perceive an idea that they dislike, or a speaker that they dislike, as having committed a much graver offence against themselves – which means that they will perceive more victimisation of themselves. And it’s also really bad for society because, as we are seeing in a spectacular way in the United States this year, when each side can point to rampant occurrences of what they see as violence by the other side, this then justifies acts of actual physical violence on their side. And there’s no obvious end to this mutual escalation process.”

He adds: “Everybody involved in education needs to be dampening down violence and the acceptance of violence. Telling students that words are violence is counterproductive to that effort.”

Jonathan Haidt, quoted by Naomi Firsht, “The Fragile Generation”, Spiked, 2017-08-31.

August 29, 2019

QotD: Imagining a world made up only of women

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

If enough women decide to mob on some unfortunate outside their group, they may well turn physically violent and the beating will not stop once the point is made. It will stop when the target of their wrath is dead or nearly dead. Women don’t really have much of an “off switch” when we move into physical violence out of anger.

So what would a world made up totally of women really be like? It would be tyrannical beyond belief. No one would be willing to speak against the accepted narrative unless they were willing to be unpersoned or killed. Think of a mix between 1984, the very worst social aspects of socialist regimes, and the Borg. There would be constant pushing for position, usually by starting whisper campaigns or setting someone above oneself up to be badly embarrassed. Look at the SJWs of today’s world and see how they operate. That’s what it would look like, writ large across the entire planet. They attack anyone outside the group who doesn’t comply with their demands, and if someone inside the group says a single word out of line according to the ever-shifting standards the entire group turns on them without mercy. The only way to get back in their good graces is to loudly proclaim your “sin” and accept their abuse until they get bored of you. Even afterward, you’ll forever be “tainted” with the sin of noncompliance.

When you write your books and send them out into the world, please stop writing women as soft, cuddly pacifists. We aren’t. Kipling was completely right about the female of the species being the more dangerous sex. He was also right about the price of letting women control society. If any thinking individualist finds themselves in a society run by women, may God have mercy on their souls because those women will have none at all.

“outofthedarkness”, guest posting at According to Hoyt, 2017-08-09.

August 26, 2019

QotD: Princesses

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

[Princesses] think of themselves as Strong, Independent Women, even while saying “I like a man to open doors and pay for everything — and treat me like a princess!” No, dear, if a man opens doors for you he’s treating you like a simpleton and if he pays for everything, he’s treating you like a hooker. (The crossover between the princess look and the hooker look, as the late Barbara Cartland grotesquely illustrated, is considerable.) And it’s a man knowing that you can be bought with a dinner and a pair of shoes which leads to him so frequently mugging you off — royally — in favour of a better bargain. Back on the pink plastic shelf you go!

How do you spot a Princess? She’ll be keen on pampering to an extent which indicates to the casual onlooker that her natural self must be extraordinarily rank if it takes such effort and expense to keep in check. (Princesses shouldn’t be confused with Professional Beauties, most of whom retain a healthy contempt for the business of exchanging physical gifts for fiscal rewards, from Hedy Lamarr saying “Any girl can be glamorous — all you have to do is stand still and look stupid” to the catwalk models who invariably live in jeans and sneakers after shrugging off the stupid clothes which Princesses pine for.)

The Princess believes that retail therapy is the answer to everything, even though the rest of us avert our eyes from this most obvious manifestation of the essential hollowness of a life that an over-enthusiasm for clothes-shopping invariably indicates in anyone out of their teens. They’ll have long nails, ostensibly to show that they’re ladies of leisure, but signalling to the rest of us that they’re very likely parasites with low sex-drives. They like big weddings — and as a liking for big weddings often goes hand in hand with humourlessness, they often have very short marriages. They are in short practitioners of the Violet Elizabeth Bott school of feminism – less about equal rights and fulfilling one’s potential than about stamping your foot till you get what you want.

They dislike men, seeing them not as flesh-and-blood people so much as platinum-and-titanium meal-tickets, and they mistrust women, seeing them as competition. An ageing Princess is more than likely to end up lonely — and with no life of the mind to comfort her, this loneliness may make her mentally addled at a comparatively young age. Once the sheen is off her skin, the Princess has nothing that would make one seek her out; like a lot of people over-keen on spangles and glitter, they are at heart rather drab people — drains not radiators, personality-wise — who never make things happen or drive things forward but rather wait to be rescued. They tend to find themselves eternally in the passenger seat of their life’s journey, stranded on the hard shoulder with their souvenirs, waiting in vain for hunky help to arrive.

Julie Burchill, “The Princess generation needs to grow up”, The Spectator, 2017-07-18.

August 23, 2019

QotD: The ego of Salvador Dali

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

Orwell’s press card portrait, 1943

[Dali’s] aberrations are partly explicable. Perhaps they are a way of assuring himself that he is not commonplace. The two qualities that Dali unquestionably possesses are a gift for drawing and an atrocious egoism. “At seven”, he says in the first paragraph of his book, “I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.” This is worded in a deliberately startling way, but no doubt it is substantially true. Such feelings are common enough. “I knew I was a genius”, somebody once said to me, “long before I knew what I was going to be a genius about.” And suppose that you have nothing in you except your egoism and a dexterity that goes no higher than the elbow; suppose that your real gift is for a detailed, academic, representational style of drawing, your real métier to be an illustrator of scientific textbooks. How then do you become Napoleon?

There is always one escape: into wickedness. Always do the thing that will shock and wound people. At five, throw a little boy off a bridge, strike an old doctor across the face with a whip and break his spectacles — or, at any rate, dream about doing such things. Twenty years later, gouge the eyes out of dead donkeys with a pair of scissors. Along those lines you can always feel yourself original. And after all, it pays! It is much less dangerous than crime. Making all allowance for the probable suppressions in Dali’s autobiography, it is clear that he had not had to suffer for his eccentricities as he would have done in an earlier age. He grew up into the corrupt world of the nineteen-twenties, when sophistication was immensely widespread and every European capital swarmed with aristocrats and rentiers who had given up sport and politics and taken to patronising the arts. If you threw dead donkeys at people, they threw money back. A phobia for grasshoppers — which a few decades back would merely have provoked a snigger — was now an interesting “complex” which could be profitably exploited. And when that particular world collapsed before the German Army, America was waiting. You could even top it all up with religious conversion, moving at one hop and without a shadow of repentance from the fashionable salons of Paris to Abraham’s bosom.

That, perhaps is the essential outline of Dali’s history. But why his aberrations should be the particular ones they were, and why it should be so easy to “sell” such horrors as rotting corpses to a sophisticated public — those are questions for the psychologist and the sociological critic. Marxist criticism has a short way with such phenomena as Surrealism. They are “bourgeois decadence” (much play is made with the phrases “corpse poisons” and “decaying rentiers class”), and that is that. But though this probably states a fact, it does not establish a connection. One would still like to know why Dali’s leaning was towards necrophilia (and not, say, homosexuality), and why the rentiers and the aristocrats would buy his pictures instead of hunting and making love like their grandfathers. Mere moral disapproval does not get one any further. But neither ought one to pretend, in the name of “detachment”, that such pictures as Mannequin rotting in a taxicab are morally neutral. They are diseased and disgusting, and any investigation ought to start out from that fact.

George Orwell, “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”, Saturday Book for 1944, 1944.

August 19, 2019

QotD: Hitler’s “wonder weapons”

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Quotations, Technology, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Historians have generally thought of the Type XXI [submarine] — along with other systems like the Me 262, V-1 and V-2 rockets, and the Tiger tank — as an example of Wunderwaffen, wonder weapons. Since 1945 many have fixated on the revolutionary military technologies that the Third Reich developed in the last two years of the war. The cultural impetus behind the concept, as implicitly or explicitly acknowledged by historians in the uneven and largely enthusiastic literature on the subject, was an irrational faith in technology to prevail in operationally or strategically complex and desperate situations — a conviction amounting to a disease, to which many in the Third Reich were prone in the latter years of the Second World War. To the extent that it shaped decision making, faith in the Wunderwaffen was a special, superficial kind of technological determinism, a confidence in the power of technology to prevail over the country’s strategic, operational, and doctrinal shortcomings. To the extent that leaders, officers, engineers, and scientists after 1943 believed innovation to be the answer to Germany’s strategic dilemmas, they displayed a naive ignorance of how technology interacts with cultural and other factors to influence the course of events. In particular, they reflected a willful ignorance of the extent to which even substantial technological superiority has proved indecisive in human conflict throughout history.

Marcus Jones, “Innovation For Its Own Sake: The Type XXI U-boat”, Naval War College Review, 2014-04.

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