…nationalist feeling can be purely negative. There are, for example, Trotskyists who have become simply enemies of the U.S.S.R. without developing a corresponding loyalty to any other unit. When one grasps the implications of this, the nature of what I mean by nationalism becomes a good deal clearer. A nationalist is one who thinks solely, or mainly, in terms of competitive prestige. He may be a positive or a negative nationalist — that is, he may use his mental energy either in boosting or in denigrating — but at any rate his thoughts always turn on victories, defeats, triumphs and humiliations. He sees history, especially contemporary history, as the endless rise and decline of great power units, and every event that happens seems to him a demonstration that his own side is on the upgrade and some hated rival is on the downgrade. But finally, it is important not to confuse nationalism with mere worship of success. The nationalist does not go on the principle of simply ganging up with the strongest side. On the contrary, having picked his side, he persuades himself that it is the strongest, and is able to stick to his belief even when the facts are overwhelmingly against him. Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.
George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism”, Polemic, 1945-05.
November 17, 2018
QotD: Positive and negative nationalism
October 24, 2018
How long can you go without sleep? | James May’s Q&A (Ep 14) | Head Squeeze
BBC Earth Lab
Published on 5 Apr 2013James May talks us through how long you can go for without any sleep.
October 23, 2018
Myers-Briggs Type Indicators as a “variety of psychobullshit rune-gazing”
In the latest issue of Reason, Katrina Gulliver reviews a new book on a pop psychology notion that escaped into the wild for a generation, wreaking havoc in corporate HR departments across the country:
The Myers-Briggs test and others like it were huge in the corporate world in the 1980s and ’90s. Individuals took them to see what kind of careers they should pursue; H.R. offices used them to decide who to hire or promote. In The Personality Brokers, Merve Emre explores how, precisely, this variety of psychobullshit rune-gazing was born.
Briggs and Myers were a mother and daughter who shared a personal fascination with psychology. Katharine Briggs, born in the last quarter of the 19th century, was one of the few women of her generation to gain a college degree. Like most female members of the upper-middle-class in her time, however, she didn’t pursue a career, instead marrying young and raising a family. Rather than the chemistry she had studied at college, children became her research subject.With an intensity that sounds frightening, Briggs believed she could develop a scientific approach to raising well-behaved, intelligent children. She seemed to do a good job with her daughter Isabel, and other parents soon sought her advice. Briggs was well-connected — her husband was a Washington bureaucrat, so of course she knew magazine editors. Soon she was writing columns for various publications about ideal parenting and child behavior.
As a devotee of psychology, she developed a correspondence with Carl Jung. She drew on his psychological theories to interpret the personalities of kids, the better to advise their parents on behavior management. The 16 “types” of the Myers-Briggs index directly relate to Jung’s thinking, and Jung’s approval of her ideas offered validation for her explorations.
But the commercial Myers-Briggs test came later, and it was far more her daughter’s achievement. Isabel Myers was also fascinated with psychological type. But being a generation younger, she was better placed to pursue this professionally. Again, she had the advantages of social connection: Her husband was an attorney, and she happened to know Edward Northup Hay, one of the first personality consultants in the United States.
In 1943, Hay allowed Briggs — despite her having no formal qualifications or experience — to offer her test to his clients. The takers were few: mostly small outfits, sometimes just a single test for a potential employee. She continued working to perfect the evaluation, trying it on friends and neighbors.
Finding Meaning in The Incredibles
Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 4 Oct 2018What sustains people through difficult times is a sense of meaning, not happiness or wealth. In The Incredibles, Bob had to learn to find the same level of meaning in being a husband and father as he did in being a superhero. How do you find meaning in your life?
October 19, 2018
QotD: “None of us are standard issue”
Our own age, still, has the “image” of the mass-producing society that brought unparalleled prosperity and riches to the world in the last century (along with some truly horrible mass killings.)
The mass killings, Marxism (which people inhale without knowing, even in American Universities), behaviorism, and a passion for numbered, standardized everything are part of the ethos of the industrial age.
It is perhaps too much to ask people working on standard machines, to produce standard sizes, using standardized movements to conform to the machine’s mechanical exactness not to think in terms of “standard sizes” and “Models.”
You see this more strongly in the works of early science fiction writers, who expected psychology to to be standardized, numbered and filed and then all problems of mankind would be solved.
This stopped around the forties or fifties, when there was starting to be a suspicion that humans were not in fact standard issues, and that they had a disturbing tendency to be … human on an individual scale. I.e. “Nobody is normal” started penetrating the collective consciousness, but people STILL try to be normal. A part of the craze for transgenderism (other than that the progressives decided this was the next hill to die on) is this idea that there are standard models of people. Note I don’t say every transgender person is the result of that. There are cases of such profound mismatch between mind and body that even flawed and ultimately mutilating surgery (which is all we can do right now) is preferable to going on with the mismatch. These cases are, needless to say, very rare. But I swear at least half of the generation after my kids identifies as transgender, or gender queer, or gender fluid, or some other form of gender nonsense that has absolutely nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with the fact the poor dears have imbibed this flawed version of humanity as easily filable and definable. If you think that a girl who prefers trains and toy cars, a boy who prefers dolls […] a boy who is better at verbal than math, a girl who is the reverse, all of these are TOLD they are abnormal, if not in words, in the reaction of other people, until they feel they must have a problem.
In fact, none of us are standard issue. The very fact that, say, the medieval world, a communitarian world under stress (compared to us) of disease and famine, which needed to eliminate odds to operate, spent SO MUCH time decreeing what men and women COULD do meant that men and women kept blurring those lines, which for that time and place were FAR more clear than they are now. (I am an odd. In the world I grew up in, which retains a lot of medieval characteristics, I not only was pulled away from groups of boys I was playing with and told that girls play with girls and boys with boys (sounds like a motto for a gay bar) but I was also severely suppressed when I was about 8 and developed a fascination with whistling. I was told that women who whistle and men who spin (thread) are both going to hell. This must be a medieval thing, as I have clue zero why whistling should be masculine. In my family’s defense, this might have been an attempt at just getting the horrible noise to stop.
Sarah Hoyt, “Gears and Patterns”, According to Hoyt, 2016-12-16.
October 18, 2018
QotD: Relationships with much younger partners
A contemporary of mine, after a number of marriages, found a girlfriend less than half his age of a transcendent pneumatic beauty who hung on his every word — and dumped her after a couple of months. Why, I asked — she was perfect! “Too many things we didn’t have in common,” he said sadly. Like what? “Well, the Eighties.”
Which brings us to sex. Nicola has just exclaimed with unusual force that she has never slept with a 60-year-old and she’s not planning on starting now. Nobody wants to think about 60-year-olds doing it, least of all 60-year-olds. Another contemporary pointed out that it wasn’t finding the first grey pubic hair on yourself that was the doom-laden shock, it was finding it on the person you were sleeping with.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
October 14, 2018
QotD: Variant forms of Kafkatrapping
Sometimes the kafkatrap is presented in less direct forms. A common variant, which I’ll call the Model C, is to assert something like this: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, …}, you are guilty because you have benefited from the {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive, …} behavior of others in the system.” The aim of the Model C is to induce the subject to self-condemnation not on the basis of anything the individual subject has actually done, but on the basis of choices by others which the subject typically had no power to affect. The subject must at all costs be prevented from noticing that it is not ultimately possible to be responsible for the behavior of other free human beings.
A close variant of the model C is the model P: “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, …}, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the {sinful, racist, sexist, homophobic, oppressive, …} system.” For the model P to work, the subject must be prevented from noticing that the demand to self-condemn is not based on the subject’s own actions or choices or feelings, but rather on an in-group identification ascribed by the operator of the kafkatrap.
It is essential to the operation of all three of the variants of the kafkatrap so far described that the subject’s attention be deflected away from the fact that no wrongdoing by the subject, about which the subject need feel personally guilty, has actually been specified. The kafkatrapper’s objective is to hook into chronic self-doubt in the subject and inflate it, in much the same way an emotional abuser convinces a victim that the abuse is deserved – in fact, the mechanism is identical. Thus kafkatrapping tends to work best on weak and emotionally vulnerable personalities, and poorly on personalities with a strong internalized ethos.
In addition, the success of a model P kafkatrap depends on the subject not realizing that the group ascription pinned on by the operator can be rejected. The subject must be prevented from asserting his or her individuality and individual agency; better, the subject must be convinced that asserting individuality is yet another demonstration of denial and guilt. Need it be pointed out how ironic this is, given that kafkatrappers (other than old-fashioned religious authoritarians) generally claim to be against group stereotyping?
There are, of course, other variants. Consider the model S: “Skepticism about any particular anecdotal account of {sin, racism, sexism, homophobia, oppression, …}, or any attempt to deny that the particular anecdote implies a systemic problem in which you are one of the guilty parties, is itself sufficient to establish your guilt.” Again, the common theme here is that questioning the discourse that condemns you, condemns you. This variant differs from the model A and model P in that a specific crime against an actual person usually is in fact alleged. The operator of the kafkatrap relies on the subject’s emotional revulsion against the crime to sweep away all questions of representativeness and the basic fact that the subject didn’t do it.
Eric S. Raymond, “Kafkatrapping”, Armed and Dangerous, 2010-07-18.
October 7, 2018
QotD: Hitler’s over-arching “grand strategy”
… on the internal evidence of Mein Kampf, it is difficult to believe that any real change has taken place in Hitler’s aims and opinions. When one compares his utterances of a year or so ago with those made fifteen years earlier, a thing that strikes one is the rigidity of his mind, the way in which his world-view doesn’t develop. It is the fixed vision of a monomaniac and not likely to be much affected by the temporary manoeuvres of power politics. Probably, in Hitler’s own mind, the Russo-German Pact represents no more than an alteration of time-table. The plan laid down in Mein Kampf was to smash Russia first, with the implied intention of smashing England afterwards. Now, as it has turned out, England has got to be dealt with first, because Russia was the more easily bribed of the two. But Russia’s turn will come when England is out of the picture — that, no doubt, is how Hitler sees it. Whether it will turn out that way is of course a different question.
Suppose that Hitler’s programme could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of “living room” (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder. How was it that he was able to put this monstrous vision across? It is easy to say that at one stage of his career he was financed by the heavy industrialists, who saw in him the man who would smash the Socialists and Communists. They would not have backed him, however, if he had not talked a great movement into existence already. Again, the situation in Germany, with its seven million unemployed, was obviously favourable for demagogues. But Hitler could not have succeeded against his many rivals if it had not been for the attraction of his own personality, which one can feel even in the clumsy writing of Mein Kampf, and which is no doubt overwhelming when one hears his speeches …. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs — and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.
George Orwell, “Review of Mein Kampf” by Adolf Hitler”, 1940.
October 4, 2018
The True Frontier – Cordwainer Smith – Extra Sci Fi
Extra Credits
Published on 2 Oct 2018The godson of Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, Paul Linebarger led an exciting life of unusual achievements well before he got into writing science fiction — including setting up one of the United States’ first psychological warfare units. Under his pen name, he wrote the trend-bucking work Scanners Live in Vain.
September 27, 2018
France moves toward the Soviet system of psychological “treatment” for dissidents
You may not agree with much that prominent French nationalist politician Marine Le Pen stands for, but the recent court order that she must undergo a psychological evaluation as part of the investigation of a “hate crime” should worry everyone. Jacob Sullum writes:
Marine Le Pen speaking in Lille during the 2017 French presidential election
Photo by Jérémy-Günther-Heinz Jähnick via Wikimedia Commons
France ranked 12 notches above the United States in this year’s World Press Freedom Index, produced by Reporters Without Borders. But such ratings can be misleading, as illustrated by the prosecution of Marine Le Pen, head of the right-wing National Rally party (formerly the National Front), for posting images of ISIS atrocities on Twitter. Last week Le Pen revealed that she had been ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination as part of the investigation into her speech crime, which added another layer of Soviet-style thought control to the story.
It is inconceivable that an American politician, no matter how extreme his views, would be prosecuted for doing what Le Pen did, because a law like the one she is charged with violating would be clearly inconsistent with the First Amendment. That law, Article 227-24 of the French Criminal Code, makes it a crime, punishable by a fine of €75,000 (about $88,000) and up to three years in prison, to distribute “a message bearing a pornographic or violent character or a character seriously violating human dignity…where the message may be seen or perceived by a minor.” Le Pen allegedly ran afoul of that prohibition in 2015 by posting three pictures of men murdered by ISIS—one beheaded, one burned alive, and one run over by a tank—in response to a Twitter user who likened her party to the terrorist organization. “Daesh [the Arabic acronym for ISIS] is this!” she tweeted.
This case vividly illustrates why Article 227-24 would never pass constitutional muster in the United States. Le Pen’s tweet is indisputably political speech, sitting at the core of the expression protected by the First Amendment. The terms of Article 227-24 (especially the phrase “seriously violating human dignity”) are broad and vague, encouraging self-censorship and inviting politically motivated prosecution of people who irk the powers that be. Le Pen, who unsuccessfully ran against Emmanuel Macron in a presidential runoff last year, was stripped of her parliamentary immunity six months later, leaving her open to prosecution.
September 4, 2018
Grad school mafia
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Andrea Long Chu recounts her experience as a teaching assistant to Professor Avital Ronell, and the disturbing psychological world inhabited by grad students at New York University:
Structural problems are problems because real people hurt real people. You cannot have a cycle of abuse without actually existing abusers. That sounds simple, which is why so many academics hate it. When scholars defend Avital — or “complicate the narrative,” as we like to say — in part this is because we cannot stand believing what most people believe. The need to feel smarter is deep. Intelligence is a hungry god.
In this way, Avital’s case has become a strange referendum on literary study. Generations of scholars have been suckled at the teat of interpretation: We spend our days parsing commas and decoding metaphors. We get high on finding meaning others can’t. We hoard it, like dragons. We would be intellectually humiliated to learn that the truth was plain: that Avital quite simply sexually harassed her student, just as described. Sometimes analysis is simply denial with more words. Sometimes, as a frustrated student in a first-year literature course always mutters, the text just means what it says it means.
My department has been largely silent since the news broke. Faculty members have said nothing to us. Upset and ashamed, my fellow graduate students and I speak with one another cautiously. We heal, or don’t, alone. People I know are afraid to make any public comment, even on Facebook, where they are friends with older, richer scholars who might one day control their fates. Even I, who have by extraordinary luck options outside of academia, fear what being vocal will bring.
A culture of critics in name only, where genuine criticism is undertaken at the risk of ostracism, marginalization, retribution — this is where abuses like Avital’s grow like moss, or mold. Graduate students know this intuitively; it is written on their bones. They’ve watched as their professors play favorites, as their colleagues get punished for citing an adviser’s rival, as funding, jobs, and prestige are doled out to the most obedient and obsequious. The American university knows only the language of extortion. “Tell,” it purrs, curling its fingers around your IV drip, “and we’ll eat you alive.”
Avital conducts herself as if someone somewhere is always persecuting her. She learned this, I imagine, in graduate school. No woman escapes the relentless misogyny of the academy. The humanities are sadistic for most people, especially when you aren’t a white man. This is understood to be normal. When students in my department asked for more advising, we were told we were being needy. “Graduate school should destroy you,” one professor laughed.
The irony is that those who survive this destruction often do so at the cost of inflicting the same trauma on their own students. Avital, now a grande dame of literary studies, who Reitman alleges bragged to him of a “mafia”-like ability to make or break the careers of others, still feels persecuted. She makes it the job of those around her to protect her from that persecution: to fawn, appease, coddle. The lawsuit against her reads as a portrait, not of a macho predator type, but of a desperately lonely person with the power to coerce others, on pain of professional and psychic obliteration, into being her friends, or worse.
September 1, 2018
August 31, 2018
QotD: Victim mentality
Does feeling like a victim make one behave more or less selfishly? Imagine that an individual feels wronged by an everyday event: An executive sees a colleague receive a promotion that she feels she deserved instead; an academic finds out that he is once more assigned to a tedious committee, whereas his colleagues seem miraculously spared; an author is about to send off a manuscript when a computer glitch erases weeks’ worth of work, and she is penalized for missing her deadline.
As these individuals contemplate their unfortunate lot, how motivated would they be to help others? One could imagine that individuals who have received the short end of the stick would be especially motivated to help others, to redress other wrongs, or to make themselves feel better with the warm glow that comes from doing good. In this article, we make the opposite prediction: We propose instead that feeling wronged gives people a sense of entitlement to obtain positive outcomes — and to avoid negative ones — that frees them from the usual requirements of social life. Whereas individuals typically contend with a strong norm of benevolence that encourages helping and curbs egoism, we propose that wronged individuals, because of their heightened sense of entitlement, feel relieved from this communal obligation and therefore exhibit more selfish intentions and behavior.
[…]
Our research has shown that people who have just been wronged or reminded of a time when they were wronged feel entitled to positive outcomes, leading them to behave selfishly. They no longer feel obligated to suffer for others and therefore pass up opportunities to be helpful. By contributing to our general understanding of the determinants of selfishness, this research points toward one possible impediment to people’s engagement in charitable behavior. Future research in this vein thus has the potential to identify novel methods to encourage altruism in people who feel wronged, thereby stemming the cycle of suffering-to-selfishness suggested by our research.
Emily M. Zitek, et. al., “Victim Entitlement to Behave Selfishly”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2010-02.
August 28, 2018
The darker side of those cute, playful dolphins
David Warren considers the parallels between certain dolphin behaviour and its human equivalent:
Spinner dolphins
Photo by Philippe Bourjon via Wikimedia Commons.
I am, let me confess, no expert on dolphins, nor on any other member of the cetacean paraphyly. Nor, for that matter, on anything at all, in my current recollection. I do however know that dolphins can swim very fast, can leap high out of the water, can be as long as thirty feet, and that even small dolphins, no longer than a man, are very strong. I would not mess with one in the water. Before assuming that their behaviour, in the state of nature, is entirely benign, one should ask some fish. Even a porpoise could tell you: they have their dark side. Especially a porpoise: for dolphins have been known to murder hundreds of them, for no stated reason. They can take a dislike to each other, too; and for reasons that we may darkly surmise, act upon what we take for their emotions.
Example: when they throw each other’s children in the air, they are not being playful.
On at least one occasion I have had to explain to an environmentalist that the sob-story he was telling, about dolphins found dead or dying on a Virginia beach, had nought to do with capitalist perfidy. On forensic examination, all the beached dolphins were found to have suffered severe blunt-force trauma — administered by other dolphins.
They have also been known to dislike humans, for instance pulling them under the water until they stop making bubbles. Brooding, “loner” dolphins are particularly noted for the sort of behaviour that we might be inclined to characterize as evil.
Smiley-face, bottlenose dolphins, of the Tursiops genus, are among those sexually dimorphic, which is to say, the males are decidedly bigger than the females. They are very smart, in both sexes, but not nearly as sentimental as our New Age propagandists have advertised. I cannot imagine a feminist being pleased with their courting rituals, which closely resemble entrapment and rape. I take an unsentimental view of the dolphins myself, though I am prepared to admire their skills. I cannot believe male dolphins are gentlemen.
A story forwarded to me this morning from the London Telegraph tells a commonplace tale. A bottlenose dolphin has been terrorizing swimmers off a beach in Brittany. A loner male, with a marked preference for human females, has alas “progressed” from being a source of entertainment. The theory is that he is sexually frustrated. This strikes me as possible, but possibly narrow. I have read several stories before — from different continents — in which just such a loner male dolphin graduates from public entertainer, to public nuisance, to public danger, around a specific beach. In every case it seems the dolphin is believed to be sexually “aroused.” I would not be surprised to learn that the same symptoms accompany psychopathic behaviour in dolphins, as they often (if not always) do in rogue loner humans.
