Quotulatiousness

January 26, 2023

Are memes the natural communications channel of non-progressives?

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

Sarah Hoyt on having to explain memes to her husband:

His time is more limited, and his time off — he does the taxes for all the family businesses and I’m not the only one with three — usually ends up being spent researching HIS obsessions, like music or some obscure movie thing that fascinated him for no reason I can figure out, or something about early 20th century history.

But he definitely never hung out on political blogs. Which means when I’m trying to explain why something is immediately obvious — like, DIL in training doesn’t like to eat sandwiches, so I immediately said “But you’ll still make them for my son, right? Otherwise, it’s just unnatural” three of us laughed and my husband looked confused. Because “women as sandwich makers” was not part of his mental archive. And then I had to explain how it started in the blog fights of the early oughts — I end up, more often than not having to get galoshes and a spade and go digging, until he gets how we got here.

And then I suddenly feel a weird sympathy for the left and their absolute belief we use “dog whistles” and are in the middle of some form of conspiracy.

It’s not just that they can’t meme, or are humorless (though dear Lord, that’s part of it) but the inherent structure of politics in this country — and parts of the world, though they’re behind us by a few decades — makes the two sides very different in how they communicate.

The left STILL commands all the traditional communication channels. And because they are and assume they are the “accepted” mode of being in the culture — because they have the cultural megaphones from media to education, from government mechanisms (even when nominally not) to entertainment — they communicate in the open. They just slap their “I support thing” as virtue signaling over everything, plus some. They — and this is partly personality attracted to the side — seem to change their programming over night and all talk about “new thing” in unison.

This means their mode of communication is detached from reality (often) and rests on shaky ideological/economic foundations but it’s out in the open and blared from a megaphone.

They make jokes that aren’t jokes, merely pointing out they support the thing. And they say things they think will shock the right, but they have no clue what the right is or what would shock us.

They are in a way the young girl just released from a convent school trying to shock the kids in public school. They get weird looks. We understand them, but they don’t get us at all.

Meanwhile the right comes from years of silence. Years of being silenced, and not even being able to explain it to anyone. If I had a dime for every time I told someone in the nineties or oughts “yeah, most bestsellers are left because the right ones who are known to be so are stopped early” and got back “Nah, the left is more creative, because they’re anti-establishment and blah blah blah.” (HOW the left, in control of everything, is supposed to be anti-establishment is a good question. I mean, sure, they do a lot of things they think are shocking, but wouldn’t shock anyone who wasn’t born in my grandparent’s generation. Look, people, naked Shakespeare was OLD HAT when I was a kid in the late sixties. Now extrapolate from that.)

At least now most people know — it took Twitter, I think — that the right was being hard-silenced.

Which means most people my age who are the oldsters of the “we talk back” generation came to our own conclusions and thought we were crazy to dissent from what “everyone knew” for the longest time. No, really. We were out there, thinking we were along, but we could see no other way to make sense of things, so we stood. Alone, we thought.

A lot of my generation discovered they weren’t UTTERLY alone due to Rush Limbaugh. (I was never a big listener. I just am not. I don’t listen to podcasts, except maybe once a week. Even the audio books I listen to are usually things I already read. I don’t hear very well, and need to be sure I can “catch” what’s said, even if I miss some words.)

And most of us hit the nascent right blogosphere with two feet in the early oughts. Which is where a lot of the early memes like the “girls make sandwiches” meme comes from.

But the blogs, and particularly the blog comments, being a wild west type of atmosphere, where people who developed their opinions in isolation came together and figured out how it all fit for the first time, is a completely different form of communication from the top down, revealed truth talk on the left.

On the right, the clash between right feminist and right not particularly enthralled with feminism gave rise to “Make me a sandwich and get me a beer” as response to screeds on how you’re disrespecting some feminist shibboleth. (Particularly when women on the right hadn’t fully realized how much of the feminist “current thing” was really Marxism in a cute scarf and high heels.) And from that it got meme-fied into short hand, so you could drop a picture of an early 20th century mesmerist levitating a girl and label it “And like that this sandwich maker becomes an ironing board” and it was immediately funny, both poking fun at feminist outrage and the troglodytes or pseudo troglodytes (I’ve been known to be one of those) on our side who think women are inherently house-keepers. (And a lot of this is self-conscious mocking of the person by him/herself.)

We had to develop a sense of humor about our internal battles, including our own opinions, and we had to be able to communicate we weren’t ossified in our opinions really quickly, to prevent minor disagreements becoming blog or alliance shattering wars.

A lot of memes come from that. Because they can communicate “Yeah, this is what I think, kind of, but I’m aware it’s also funny.” Or “This is how I see your opinion. Care to clarify” in — usually — a non-offensive, quick-hit manner. A manner that allows the other person to come back with “Yabut–” Or “Funny, but in fact–”

The left doesn’t do that, because no scrapping allowed in the ranks. They value unity and directives come from above.

Beyond giving them a tragic inability to meme (Seriously, we should start a fund to send them to meme school) it also leaves them with the conviction that the right is always speaking in “dog whistles” or “code” and that we’re plotting horrible and scarifying violence against them, in these bizarre coded words.

January 4, 2023

Sarah Hoyt on some of the dystopian futures we’ve avoided (so far)

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt outlines a few of the grim future scenarios that appeared to be the future to people who earned a living writing about possible futures:

1 – World government.
To be fair, it seemed an absolutely sane and inescapable prediction for people who had seen the centralized nation states of the twentieth century consolidate. With faster communication, would come total union, right?

I note Heinlein stopped believing this after his world tour. In fact in Friday he has a fractured USA.

That second vision is more likely. There are too many cultures in the world and too many competing interests to have a world government. Even on the administrative side, a world government might be absolutely impossible, unless it’s a nominal government and the sub-governments do everything really.

In which case, you know what? It’s no different than what we have, except we call any war a civil war.

The only people this idea still makes sense to are people who think they can change reality by changing the words.

Of course, just because there isn’t a formal world government doesn’t stop national governments and legacy media organizations from pretending that there is some supranational body whose directives they must always follow … at least when they want to do something the voters don’t want them to do. Lockdowns, anyone? Vaccine mandates? Social media censorship at the micro level? Oh, we have to do them because the WHO/UN/WEF/etc. insist.

2 – Overpopulation.
Yeah, I know what the population “counts” are, but we don’t have overpopulation. We don’t have any of the signs of overpopulation, and it’s becoming plainly obvious, country by country, locality by locality that there’s no overpopulation.

Malthus was an unpleasant fatalist. he was also wrong. Humanity doesn’t keep reproducing like mindless rabbits.

To be fair, this makes perfect sense because we’re a scavenger species. For scavenger species the population curve is the bell curve, not an exponential climb.

It’s funny how third world governments can “accurately” report booming populations — at least partly because foreign aid from the west is often directly tied to those reports — yet many of them don’t even know how many civil servants they employ. And western governments and aid agencies just pretend to believe them.

3 – Total depletion of resources leading to the “rusty future” in a lot of eighties science fiction.
A lot of resources are in fact depleted, but we have found others This is something that the “Greens” seem unable to grasp. Humanity is a continuous depleting of resources, and discovering new resources and new ways to use them. For instance, given our population, I don’t think we have enough flint to knap for knives for all of us. It’s an obvious crisis.

In the same way, do you think it’s even possible for all of us to have a horse? Our cities would be hip-deep in horse poo.

But we are the ape that adapts. Things change. And the future will be as shiny as we want it. Unless fashion calls for dull, of course.

If you’ve been educated in a zero-sum economic picture, then it’s difficult or impossible for you to recognize that when resources begin to run short and prices rise, individuals and companies look for more efficient ways to use the now more expensive resource or to consider substitutions. This is why economies who try to suppress normal market signals, like rising prices due to diminished supplies, end up far worse off … humans in aggregate are adaptable and will try to find alternatives when they can.

4 – The world isn’t a communist state, or filled with communist states.

There are some yes, but the ones there are are in obvious trouble, and only the propagandized and the ignorant believe it is a way to live, or a way that brings about paradise. In fact, most of today’s communists are merely wanting to reign in hell.

They know they’d unleash hell, they just think they’d be king.

As bad as it is that people are still fighting for this, it’s miles ahead of the status quo till the eighties, where people actually believed planned centralized states were better.

We still have a fight ahead of us, and we might still fail, but there will never be a whole-word communism. and those of use devoted to freedom will eventually win. It just will take probably more than my life. At least on a world-scale.

Among the governments most likely to resort to market denial (and autarky) are socialist and communist states. Central planning is one of the fastest methods to starving your population aside from total war. Central planners are always confident that they “know better” than filthy capitalists, and with proper “scientific” planning they can avoid all the “waste” that market societies produce. For a detailed look, consider the plight of poor, imaginary Wyatt, a factory manager under GOSPLAN in the old Soviet Union. If anything, Sev underestimates the economic disaster that Soviet central planning perpetrated.

5 – We don’t have some sort of central authority that contols all of something: genetics; who is arrested; etc.
A lot of places have crazy authorities, but not the whole world. we’re not enslaved by the Tech Lords (and what a pitiful lot those turned out to be) and the agencies trying to subjugate us are not all powerful, more along the lines of a bunch of venal chuckleheads. Annoying, with no morals and insane, but not all powerful. It could be worse.

It certainly could be worse, and useful idiots in western governments and legacy media are doing what they can to bring everything possible under tighter control, but as I’ve pointed out repeatedly the more a government tries to do, the worse it does everything.

November 10, 2022

The headscratcher that was the American midterms outcome

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

As the voters went to the polls on Tuesday, it was easy to find doom-and-gloom-mongering among Democratic stalwarts and most of the mainstream media (BIRM), and chest-thumping triumphalism on the right. Both sides seemed to agree that the outcome was going to be somewhere between a red landslide and a red wipeout. So … how do we square the expectations of both sides with what actually happened? Chris Bray makes an attempt:

Eight percent uptake of the much-touted bivalent booster, 75% wrong track sentiment, pretty good night for the party in power. Multiple signs of a total loss of trust and respect for the existing order equals a decision to more or less stay the course.

Tribalism is the first explanation, sure. If you shat on a sidewalk and ran it for office with a D behind its name, Democrats would vote for it; if you shat on a sidewalk and ran it for office with an R behind its name, Republicans would vote for it. John Fetterman is headed for the United States Senate. Go ‘way, I’m ‘batin’.

And I agree with the argument that Republicans didn’t offer much of a plan or a vision, a premise you can check by reading Kevin McCarthy’s Commitment to America. More mush from the wimp.

But the other thing, and you can argue with me about this, is that the society of the spectacle madness of messaging without regard to reality actually achieves its purpose, no matter how absurd it is. We have to add $3 trillion in extra debt-funded spending to the economy to reduce inflation! If you vote Republican, they’ll kill our children!

Amazingly, this turns out to work pretty well. The available evidence suggests that we have a sizable population that cannot assess fact claims. I propose that we test this with sample messages to voters: If you vote for bubblegum trees, the sky bees will give you a diamond-crusted ribeye! (Ohh, I have to vote for bubblegum trees!) If you’re out in public, look to your left; then look to your right. At least one of those people thinks Karine Jean-Pierre makes some pretty good points.

Sarah Hoyt strongly believes that the busy midnight vote-finders of 2020 were just as busy on Tuesday night:

As I write this late on the 8th, the tsunami is resolving itself into a wavelet.

Or rather, the tsunami has been overfrauded into a wavelet. And it might be frauded away to a Dem win before I wake tomorrow.
This shouldn’t be a surprise to any of us who were awake and remember this:

And we know damn well it was a Trump landslide before that.

So for the Republicans to have picked up any seat, this was the tsunami to end all tsunamis.

I know the usual idiots are out there, already saying “It was abortion: the Womyns came out in force to vote dem.”

Are there women who are single ticket abortion voters. Sure. Most are older than I and are determined to make sure their actions and choices are validated a posteriori. They’re an ever dwindling minority. Married women vote more and more for the right every time. Single women? Who knows? But I suspect there’s been a shift in that too after the last too years. And most of them don’t see that career path ahead they once did.

Then there’s the other bs which is of course “The people don’t want to be free.” That’s bs. The people, every time they can express their displeasure do so. But having the vote taken away from them via fraud means THEY each individual thinks he or she is alone.

Things like “Let’s go Brandon” sweep the nation, but there’s no major legal or financial movement to protest the fraud, because each person thinks “I guess all these idiots are so beaten down they like beaten down, and I’m the only one who is angry.”

Meanwhile the perpetrators know what the people think, and erect barricades in DC to protect themselves from the anger they sense but can’t seem to bring out into the open.

Yes, we’re getting the house, and probably not the senate. Which means a good five/six seats fraud. I’m in a group right now with people crunching numbers, and the fraud is evident. The races the democrats cared out got flipped by turning just those votes for the dems. That’s the flexibility of Dominion at work, and the way they can turn a vote into the other.

At Founding Questions, Severian is appropriately sanguine about the notion of “adjusted” or “fortified” ballot counts in disputed races:

So the “elections” were fun, eh? By far the best “news” from the Dissident perspective is that they did, in fact, pull out all the stops for S-s-s-Strokey. As I think it was Based 5.0 who quipped below, it looks like dual-passport-holding Muslim carny barkers aren’t going to be making America great again. Here’s hoping they’re stupid enough to fall for the “Dr. Jill” trap twice — now they’re stuck with Strokey the way they’re stuck with Tapioca Joe, because Giselle is Dr. Jill on steroids (perhaps literally). Eh, Dr. Jill had 40 years in [Washington, DC] to get a taste of the finer things; Giselle’s price is probably far lower. But until Strokey resigns for health reasons and is replaced […] the image of a tatted-out, brain-damaged hobo in a hoodie shuffling around the Senate floor is so on the nose, no novelist would dare use it.

[…]

I bet if we look back on it, we’ll see the state (lowercase s) Media freaking out first, dragging the Official State (capital S) Media with them. It makes sense, given the perverse incentive structure of the Media. Stick with me here:

Joe Schmoe (D) is running for Congress in Flyover State. Obviously The Media wants him to win, because (D). And they’re sure he’s going to, because his opponent is some “ultra-MAGA” yahoo. But Reality is what it is, and suddenly the yahoo is getting closer and closer …

At that point, The Media’s perverted incentive structure kicks in. The “reporters” at the biggest local rag in Flyover State, the Toad Suck Times-Picayune, only care about one thing: Getting the fuck out of Toad Suck, trading the Times-Picayune for a slot somewhere higher up the chain. Now, there are only two ways to do that: Be a hard-hitting, straight-shooting newshoun …

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Oh Jesus, I’m sorry, I thought I could type that with a straight face, but I can’t. Give me a minute …

… ok, there’s only one way to move up in The Media, and that’s by proving yourself a more zealous cultist than the next guy. So our Heroic Journalist starts doing what he thinks the Inner Party wants, which is of course “propping up Joe Schmoe for all he’s worth”. But here’s the rub: He’s not privy to what the Inner Party actually wants. Of course he’s not; after all, he’s riding a desk at the Toad Suck Times-Picayune. And of course everybody in a similar position, nationwide, is doing the same thing …

… but they’re all at least kinda sorta privy to the real polls that come down from the big organizations (recall that there are maybe three companies that control all the newspapers in the US), and so he knows things are looking grim for Joe Schmoe. More importantly, he sees that Tapioca Joe himself is out stumping for Democrats, and not in battleground states — they’re putting Brandon out there in supposedly safe Democratic districts.

So our man at the Toad Suck Times-Picayune consults his own personal political tea leaves, and he concludes: We’re gonna lose. The “red wave” is real. So again, he starts doing what he thinks his masters want, the thing he thinks will get him noticed at the higher levels: He admits the truth, or as much as he personally can stomach, and starts laying in the groundwork for #TheResistance, same as in 2020. Oh, Kari Lake is ahead 8% over Abortion Mouse there in AZ (give Ace of Normies this, he coins a good nickname), well obviously that’s because of bigotry MAGA yadda yadda and don’t forget the Russian hacking!

But here’s the problem with that: It does get him noticed by the Big League club, but in the exact opposite way. So long as everyone stays on point, you can brazen it out through the inevitable “fortification”. Had everyone stayed on point, a “worryingly tight race” — they’ll admit that much, for verisimilitude — can easily be turned into one of those 3am miracles the Dems are famous for. Hey, whaddaya know, all the mail in ballots were for Joe Schmoe. What a surprise.

But now that the Toad Suck Times-Picayune is running stories about the challenger being ahead, the Big League clubs have to at least acknowledge it, the school of fish effect takes over, and pretty soon you’ve got the entire Media in panic mode. Which has the further effect of making the freelance riggers even crazier, so that the regularly scheduled 3am ballot drop is being disrupted by mysterious “hiccups” at key locations — you know, “cyberattacks” and whatnot (why the fuck is a voting machine connected to the internet in the first place?), and so on, plus all the mailmen and so forth dumping a whole bunch of ballots from red districts into the nearest streams, culverts, and landfills. Jimmy Hoffa is probably up to his eye sockets in Republican ballots out there in the foundations of Giants’ Stadium…

And so the weird shit we see above, and the odd “had a Narrative all ready” vs. “are clearly scrambling” coverage of different contests.

I can’t think of a better way to really shore up the idea that ALL elections are rigged than that. Wait a minute, the “red wave” was on last week. You guys admitted it. Early Tuesday afternoon, every talking head on tv looked like he was weaving a noose under the “news” desk; you’d expect “journalists” hanging from the rafters by 7pm.

But … ooops! Short of actually being caught on camera throwing Republican ballots in a bonfire, or openly xeroxing Democrat ones — and it’s only mid-morning of the day after, give it time — I can’t think of a clearer way of announcing that it’s ALL rigged than that.

QotD: Sarah’s rules of art

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

… the botanic gardens were holding a sculpture exhibit, called “human nature” with statues from various times and places.

And why was this a bad idea, Sarah?

Mostly because I’m married to a mathematician. There is a certain … ah … compulsiveness that comes with it. If there’s something that’s numbered and has a route, we OF COURSE have to follow the route and see every single statue, even if that’s not what we set out to do.

This made things very interesting, since the wedding parties were blocking some of the statues, and others we could see from a distance were the sort of modern art that your kids could do with a backyard forge, meaning the actual level of artistry was about the level of a kindergartner, only they used metal instead of playdough.

This leads us to Sarah’s first rule of art: if people viewing it have trouble telling it from accidental formations, it’s probably not art.

The second corollary of this is: if you need an elaborate card pointing out to you that it’s art, it’s probably not art.

The third would be that if you need a placard explaining to you how daring and courageous this art is, and how it defied some tyrannical regime at great peril to the artist’s life, it’s not only not art, you’re in the presence of a self-aggrandizing conman.

Sarah Hoyt, “Art and Revolution”, According to Hoyt, 2019-05-31.

September 27, 2022

Sarah Hoyt on how Americans are mis-understanding the TV show Bridgerton

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

I don’t watch TV, so I haven’t seen the show myself, but apparently a lot of Blacks in the US are taking away the multi-racial casting of a parallel-universe TV show set in the Regency period as being a true representation of British history:

Anyway, all this came to a head with my watching the Bridgerton series. As other people know, it bothers the living daylights out of me to cast well-known historical figures as another race. Not because there can’t be decent actors of another race, but because I know there is a percentage of the population who takes fictional movies and shows as revealing “the truth”.

My mom, who is better educated (alas) than most American high school graduates is one of those. She will adapt her vision of the past according to some crazy movie she just watched. (The number of arguments I’ve had.)

For those who haven’t watched Bridgerton (bog standard regency romances, with gorgeous, if not period-accurate clothing) they cast a certain number of noblemen as black or indian or other “races” and the English Queen in Bridgerton is black.

The buried history in the mini-series (suggested and Heinleined in) is that black and white people coexisted in England side by side, until the king married a black Queen, and then suddenly mixed marriages were allowed.

This is obviously a fantastic parallel world history. Yes, there were black people in England in the regency. I’m sorry to tell you there were very few and 99% of them were slaves or servants brought by people who had lived in Africa.

There was no “black nobility” and no system of apartheid.

HOWEVER as we found out, American people absolutely believe this nonsense. They believe Queen Charlotte (mostly German, honestly) was “black” based on a very bad portrait and rumors of a Moorish ancestress. (Note this rumor was almost certainly political slander. Also that Moor at that time in the peninsula depending on whether in the South or the North might mean slim, small and tan, but did not mean AFRICAN.) Weirdly the best debunking I found was from Quora.

HOWEVER I also found endless pages of well-educated black-Americans celebrating Queen Charlotte for “Black history month”.

Let me also point out that both the Queen and her husband (Yes, mad King George) were ardent abolitionists and that did she have any legitimate hint of African blood ALL the opposition would have fixated on this, and the caricatures would have been next level. However this never happened. Queen Charlotte was and looked German, even if a portrait can imply “stereotypical” African features … As long as you remember that those features exist in a lot of other races, and that a lot of them are also Neanderthal.

Sure, if you go with the one drop theory, Queen Charlotte was black. So is everyone else. EVERYONE else, even those whose 23andme swears they’re pure Scandinavian. Because sometime in the last two thousand years all of us got an African ancestor, somewhere, on one of the many, many lines that fed into our family. (Note genealogy is also a lie to some extent, since it’s impossible to follow every single female (if you’re tracking the male. Vice versa otherwise) line that dropped into your family, and everyone who fed into every other of those lines.)

The problem is that it was the rats in the head of the American black producers of the series that led them to create this entire parallel universe which they THINK IS TRUE on the basis of “well the queen was black”. WITHOUT LOOKING.

And now those rats are reproducing everywhere, but most notably in black American heads, who now believe that “Well, the king married a black queen, so it must be true that the Americans rebelled to keep enslaving the black people”.

This is all not just arrant nonsense, but poisonous bullshit, and has no contact whatsoever with reality.

What can we do about it?

Correct it, ruthlessly, whenever we come across it. And keep pointing out that a queen who was blond and blue eyed was not in fact “black” unless everyone is. And that reading racial tea leaves is a pseudo-science, like phrenology.

I would very much appreciate if we could put this behind us so may family doesn’t keep getting asked “what is your racial background” by complete strangers. (And not just census takers, whom I like to answer with “human”.)

Look, in the end, the darkest African and the lightest Scandinavian have more in common with each other than not. To pretend otherwise is arrant nonsense.

Yes, our far-distant ancestors developed racism as a necessary survival tool (along with the uncanny valley discomfort) because you could fall into the hands of another hominin band and become “food”. (The chimps are less discriminating and will also eat babies of their own band.)

We are now past that, and I would like it not to return. Yes, there are physical characteristics that go with certain character traits, but it’s harder to track than you think, and they’re often things that have nothing to do with race, let alone racial stereotypes.

We all have one drop of slaves and enslaved, or saints, sinners, murderers, murder victims, kings and peasants, ascetics and whores. And we all have all the inclinations of all of mankind in varying degrees.
It’s what you make of it and with it that determines whether you can wear “human” as a crown, or in fact get cast out of the human race for shoving in line.

It’s time to stop with the nonsense.

September 23, 2022

Sarah Hoyt on the Overton Window

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

At According to Hoyt, Sarah considers the Overton Window:

Diagram of the “Overton Window”, based on a concept promoted by Joseph P. Overton (1960–2003), former director of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. The term “Overton Window” was coined by colleagues of Joe Overton after his death. In the political theory of the Overton Window, new ideas fall into a range of acceptability to the public, at the edges of which an elected official risks being voted out of office.
Illustration by Hydrargyrum via Wikimedia Commons

The Overton window is not natural to human society. It is the product of the mass-information-media-entertainment era.

No?

Sure, in some villages, or some other places, there are things you can’t see/say. That is usually because someone in that society, be it a village or a nation, is going to get under your nose for saying it. (At one point, you could get arrested in Portugal for shouting “Portugal is a sh*tty country!”)

Having “Unsayable” and “Unthinkable” and “if you say that in public you’ll be shunned” is always a sign of an oppressive society, whether the punishments are physical or mental, beatings or mere shunning.

Having beliefs that are beyond the pale — in fact, the existence of the pale — are a sign of an unhealthy society, one in which a truth is being enforced that is different from reality.

No? Fight me.

Look, yeah, sure, there are things people in all eras didn’t discuss in certain company due to manners or delicacy. One didn’t discuss sexual acts in front of children, not equipped to understand them, in most of the west since the onset of Christianity. One didn’t say certain things in front of elders either. “Gentlemen don’t discuss politics or coitus”. But that was a matter of — in a small gathering, or a confined society — keeping the social gears lubricated, and keeping disagreements at bay. What “couldn’t be said” varied.

However, the Overton window is something else. It is “you can’t report certain things, even if they are true, at the risk of becoming a social pariah”.

It avoids discussions of really important things, like how our kids are being sodomized by public education. Or how welfare really doesn’t contribute to the welfare of anyone. Or how Child Protective Systems is a money-laundering scam, in which kids die. Or how our government-funded science has become all government and almost no science. Etc.

It encourages rape rings like Rotherham, and has most of the black population of the US believe they are more at risk of police shootings than whites, which is plainly not true, but can’t be said, because the media has deemed saying so is “racist” (Somehow.) So people live in fear, rather than knowing they’re not at higher risk than anyone else.

And while speaking of risk, the media, and its control of information and encouragement of shunning dissenters, has led to fear of a “slightly more dangerous” flu, and led to elderly people living their last years in isolation and terror, and also led to our kids being isolated into loss of social function.

Furthermore, the only way to keep the Overton window over a whole country is to enforce strict control over the media, and even social media, and to ruthlessly crush down dissenters, so that everyone appears to agree, leading to shock-rejection of those who manage to break through the wall of government-encouraged-enforced lying.

A wall that they try to keep even when the lies are patently absurd and harmful. (Like the idea anyone who dislikes the Biden reign of terror is a terrorist or insurgent, or for that matter racist.)

The Overton window can suck what I don’t have.

July 16, 2022

QotD: No, your baby isn’t racist

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

Look, it’s not even racial, but it is tribal. Because human beings are tribal. By evolution and inclination, humans associate most with people they’re used to, and they feel safe amid a small number of people they know well.

The insanity of all the “your baby is racist” studies is thinking that babies prefer people who look like THEM. This is not the case. They prefer people who look like those they identify as parents. Take a Chinese baby, at birth, and have him raised by Maori and they’ll react badly to people who look Chinese. Think of it in terms of the band of human (or pre-humans.) If a baby found himself amid a group that didn’t look like its caretakers chances were it was dead and/or lunch. Sending up a distress signal in the form of wailing is its only hope its caretakers will come and rescue it. (“It” because I’m including pre-humans. This applies — with bells on — to baby chimps, btw, who are just human-adjacent.)

Sarah Hoyt, “They’re Out To Get You”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-09.

June 27, 2022

QotD: Perfectionism

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

Perfectionism should be classified as a disability.

It has blighted more lives than autism, destroyed more potential work than brain damage, stopped more achievement than mis-education. It can devour entire civilizations, and arguably has. […] If you’re an artist or even just a “creator” or worker: a writer, an artist, a programmer, a cook, holy heck, even a house cleaner, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

There’s this odd tendency to be more dissatisfied with our work the better we do and then to decide not to do things because, what the heck, it will never be good enough.

The way it blights lives is … interesting. As in I’ve seen perfectionists utterly ruin themselves by doing nothing. Oh, you want to write/create/climb your work ladder? But you look at your work and you know you’re not good enough because you can see flaws, so why even try. And then you do nothing. And then … and then you’re 65 and you’ve done nothing and achieved nothing in your life, and it’s a miracle if you came close to supporting yourself. (And the only reason you’ve done so is because you did some job you considered was menial and didn’t matter, so your perfectionism didn’t infect THAT.)

If you’re a true perfectionist, you also never had any relationships. Because even though you’re far from the ideal mate, you judge every potential by tagging up defects. If you can’t have perfection, why bother.

The very smart are extremely susceptible to this, but everyone can fall into the trap. If you care or know enough about any field, the flaws in your own (and others) work will stand out glaringly and in relief and then you can’t do ANYTHING.

Of course, the more you practice and know the more flaws you see. And it eventually shuts you down. I catch myself in this trap frequently to the point of being amazed when semi-pro anthos buy my work, because I’m sure it’s the worst thing ever written. And I can shut myself down for years. (I’m not alone, I know you know other writers with this problem.)

Sarah Hoyt, “The Flaw in Flawless”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-27.

June 23, 2022

QotD: Mis-preparing our kids for the future

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

I think that’s part of the issue, with our civilization at large. You see, the world is very complicated, and people are given the impression that it’s never been this complicated — which is a lie — and know for a fact that things are changing very fast. They no more find a path, than it dissolves and crumbles under them.

We’re preparing the new generation rottenly for this, too. Look, every generation is educated according to what their grandparents thought was desirable. Which is why I had the education that would have helped an upper class Portuguese Lady in the mid 19th century to make a good marriage and shine in society. For practical purposes, other than diplomacy […] the only use for my degree was academia by the time I took it. Though business desperately needed translators, we weren’t being taught office skills, or the terminology we needed to translate science or industrial stuff. (I learned those on my own, through running into them head first, as I learn practically anything.)

Kids now are being educated to the dreams of the early twentieth elites: for a communitarian world with a strong central government. They’re being told this is the future and what to expect, because when that idea made it into academia, and slowly worked itself through to curriculum and expectations, that was the future everyone EXPECTED. Even conservatives thought that the future would involve central planning. They just wanted to keep a little more individual freedom with it.

I remember blowing the world of Robert’s third grade teacher apart when we informed her that no, in the future there wouldn’t be a need for MORE group work, and that all creativity wouldn’t be communal (which frankly is funny. Creativity doesn’t work that way) but that it would be more individual, probably with people working on their piece of the project miles and miles away from the rest of the “team” and having to pull their weight alone. Dan and I explained why based on tech and trends, and all the poor woman kept saying is “that’s not what we were taught.”

Our kids were prepared not only for a world that doesn’t exist, but the world that idiot intellectuals (all intellectuals are idiots. They mostly don’t know a thing of the real world or real people) thought would come about, somehow, automagically. Think of Brave New World, but everyone is happy and doesn’t need the soma. (rolls eyes.)

And then we sneer at millenials for not finding their way, when people my age, who are self-directed and battlers, and have vocations, find ourselves caught in the grinding gears of change and get our goals and work broken over and over again, and yeah, also don’t find it easier to find our way.

Talk to the kids. Help them find something they’re “meant” to do (that’s not how it works, so make sure they know there isn’t only one goal and only one vocation, but there’s almost always something that their skills and ability are useful for RIGHT NOW. And the ability to learn more to change.) If needed, hook them on multiple streams of income. Help them see it’s possible. Dispel their illusions that life was ever easy.

Sure, in the past there were people who got “the one job” and stuck to it through thick and thin to the golden watch at the end. But I don’t think they were ever the majority. And by the time I came along, you couldn’t have any loyalty to your company, because it would have none to you.

Sarah Hoyt, “Finding Your Way”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-18.

May 31, 2022

QotD: Chaos, the ancient enemy

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

No, not that one. Though perhaps that one, or a more concrete incarnation of it. Though evil seems cohesive and organized, it is often either about to bring about the oldest enemy of mankind, perhaps the oldest enemy of life or perhaps just that enemy with a mask on, dancing forever formlessly in the void.

I was probably one of the few people not at all surprised that Jordan Peterson’s seminal work was subtitled “An antidote to chaos”. Because of course that is our ancient enemy, the enemy of everything that lives down to the smallest organized cell.

Perhaps it is my Greek ancestry (in culture, via the Romans, if nothing else. I mean 23 and me has opinions, but they revise my genetic makeup so often I’m not betting on anything. Also, frankly, they base it on today’s populations, so that if say every person in an extended family left Greece to colonize Iberia, today I’d show only Iberian genetics. [Spoiler: I don’t. Europeans are far more mixed up than they dream of in their philosophies.]) that makes me see Chaos as a vast force waiting in the darkness before and around this brief bit of light that is Earth and humanity, ready to devour us all.

I can’t be the only one impressed by this image, as I’ve run across echoes of it in countless stories both science fiction and fantasy. If you’re reading the kind of story that tries to scrute the ultimate inscrutable and unscrew the parts of the mental universe of humanity to take a metaphorical look under the hood, sooner or later you come across a scene where the main characters get to the end of it all and face howling chaos and darkness. Only it usually doesn’t even howl, nor is it dark. It’s just nothing. Which is the ultimate face and vision of chaos. And most of us know it. Perhaps writers, most of all.

I have a complex relation with chaos, in that part of me seems to be permanently submerged in it. Some of this is the culture in which I was brought up. You know, the Portuguese might have crime, but no one can accuse them of having organized crime. Or indeed organized much of anything.

It’s not just the disease of “late industrializing culture”. There’s something more at work. For one, the Portuguese pride themselves on it. They routinely contrast the British habit of queuing for everything to the Portuguese habit of queuing for nothing (And you haven’t lived till you see a communion scrum with the little old ladies having their elbows at the level of young men’s crotches) by describing the way Portuguese do not queue as “All in a pile and may G-d help us”.

Sarah Hoyt, “The Ancient Enemy”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-05.

May 24, 2022

QotD: Portuguese art and creative genius

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

If Portugal weren’t such an old nation (but maybe it’s a second childhood) I’d call them the college kid of Europe. They can’t quite get their act straight, but they can be startlingly, amazingly creative. One of the things I’ve talked about here is how many of my brother’s cohort, coming of age at a time when there were NO jobs took up some kind of craft work, from making jewelry to (I used to covet them) making elaborate, hand painted wooden dragon mobiles and selling all of this. Looking back at that pre-EU time when it was relatively easy to set up a stall (illegal, of course) in downtown Porto, I realize most of the stuff on offer was downright artistic, and often incredibly creative when you realized what materials they were working with.

Then the economy recovered, they got jobs, a lot of them connected to or linked to government and all of that stopped. And of course with the EU there are no illegal stalls. I mean Papiere, bitte and all that.

And somehow, perhaps because the new generation knows they have all sorts of “benefits” and “support” coming to them and have never felt the bite of chaos, the crafts and arts in the stores are either startlingly mundane or bizarre. I’m still rather puzzled by entire “scenes from life” (including one that was an operating room) sculpted with penises instead of humans. I mean … who even buys that? Okay. We know who buys that. But do the German tourists and their nostalgie de la boue think they’re tapping into something uniquely “uninhibited and free”, some kind of wild Portuguese sexuality? Raises eyebrow. The Portuguese have been civilized land long before the Germans traded their furs for a place as Roman soldiers. And sure, the Romans could be startlingly and inappropriately sexual (I call to mind a mural, not out of place in a Roman middle class home that had monkeys copulating with children) but it didn’t mean that the culture was “free”, rather that they had different rules. Frankly, the sixties attempt to erase history has corrupted real art and … well, everything else.

Which is kind of the college student thing. Chaos and free time allows you to be very creative, but then you’re not organized enough to parlay that into a career. (I mean, if they’re destined to be the touristic “warm port” of Europe, perhaps they should consider letting real art flourish. Or even encouraging it. Grants for small businesses and young people. It beats the jobs that don’t exist. Just demand they be actually creative and accomplished, instead of giving grants for art that my kids could do at age two and about as interesting.

Sarah Hoyt, “The Ancient Enemy”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-05.

May 17, 2022

QotD: Slavery

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

There is no doubt, if you read history, that people in the past treated other people very badly. We still do, too, but I guess it’s much more awful when society is not quite so affluent and when being on the bottom can mean starving to death. It is impossible to read history, particularly primary sources, and not to be horrified.

But part of that is that we’re imposing our values on the past. Look, history is looked at backwards, while we live forward. Take slavery (I don’t want it.) Yes, it was a horrible institution. It was also pervasive in human history, and as far as we can tell pre-history, world without end. Hell, still is as well, considerably less of the world than it was, but in Africa it’s pretty much still a thing, and not just in Arab countries.

Romans had complex rules to deal with it, and lived in fear of slave revolts.

It required mental gymnastics, because it was obvious to anyone that slaves were as human as their masters, and so a complex set of rules and philosophical separations were instituted and once any idea of the equality of man (or that man ought to be equal before the law (and G-d) the whole thing was doomed, sooner or later.

Americans tend to have a bizarre idea that slavery was always by race. I blame public school. I don’t know if it’s deliberately obscured, to emphasize the specialness of racial victimhood, or just because race and slavery are so associated in American history that it overshadows everything else. (Yes, again, is it malice or stupidity? Perhaps we should formulate an axiom that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.)

Men and women of all colors were enslaved throughout history. Heck, in the peninsula, in the long centuries in which it was a frontier between Christian and Moor, the slaving went on both ways. […]

Roman slaves were often blond, and the citizens often of African origin. But even there, it wasn’t tied to race. (Though celts were apparently in general fairly cheap, from what I can figure.)

So. All of us have slave ancestors. ALL OF US. All of us have slave owners in our ancestry.

Even in the US — though rare — there were black slave owners. And if you’re going to parse quadroons and octaroons who might very well be slaves, you’re going to assume race is one-drop but only for non-white races.

Sarah Hoyt, “I Am Myself Alone”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-25.

April 14, 2022

QotD: “… when life was simpler”

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

There is this memory of “the simple times”.

And then you get hold of primary sources on the thirties or fifties. Let’s say it’s particularly hilarious to read stuff from the right lauding that time of great freedom in either of those decades. Let’s just say that if some of the things happening back then were happening now we’d all be talking about how we were ready for revolution. (And the only reason they weren’t then is that the press was mass-media. You think it’s bad enough now, with a lying press? They had the same, but no way to check it. It was that concentration and lack of individual communication or access to the public by individuals unfiltered by the media/publishers that put us in the situation we’re in, with what is functionally the enemy of western civilization in control of the vital organs of culture. Before you get discouraged, it helps to remember, we’re only now fighting back. Continue fighting, but remember things take time. The larger a movement is, the longer it takes for it to become noticeable, much less prominent in the culture.)

And as for the left thinking that everyone before the oughts were good white Christians or whatever … Oh, sweet summer children. Let’s say when they get their freak on, with witchcraft or being naked in public, or talking about their poly relationships, or whatever the actual hell they have in their heads that day, they rarely if ever (I’ve never seen it) would have managed to shock their ancestors or ancestresses 100 years ago. Those Edwardians … well … Let’s just say they had fewer hangups. Yes, I know what the public image is. But none of them would have worried about things that the left worries about now like “differential of power” or “implied patriarchy” which meant they were much freer to do whatever crossed their heads at the moment. Of course they also thought they would have shocked their ancestors. And I bet you they wouldn’t.

At some point, if you have a chance, read a book called Our Bones Are Scattered about the Indian revolt in Victorian times. I only read it once because it’s a deeply disturbing book, one of those clashes of civilization where you feel sorry for both sides. But it is very well written, and the beginning of the book is … revealing. The British commander was … well … sort of married to a woman who had been sort of married something like six times before and who went from man to man, collecting kids along the way. Notwithstanding which, they were Victorian nobility and had a bunch of kids of their own and …

Let’s just say Victorians aren’t the way we’ve learned to think of them either. In fact you can be sure pretty much no one ever was. People kept and keep the front they need to, but behind the scenes things were always messy and complicated.

Which often makes finding our own way in this messy and complicated way very difficult.

Sarah Hoyt, “Finding Your Way”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-18.

March 29, 2022

A leading source of incompetence

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

My contacts on social media have probably gotten tired of me pointing out that any big organization will perform less well than a smaller one in the same activity, and governments across the western world have been growing bigger and less competent every year. Sarah Hoyt recalls the time she saw an almost Soviet display of big government incompetence on a visit to her native Portugal:

The last time I was in Portugal I got to witness (actually the time before last, while running through the Lisbon airport) something I’d only previously read about as being normal in the Soviet Union: structures that were being built and decaying, simultaneously, which seems impossible, but I assure you it’s not.

[…]

The question is: competence has existed, and had high marks. We know it existed at various times, because their works survive: the landscape of Europe is still littered with Roman bridges and aqueducts, not to mention Roman roads. Cathedrals and monuments abound. Our own country has marvels of engineering and construction still standing and you don’t have to fix daily.

So, where did that competence go? And why does no one seem to know how to do anything. (Here as an aside, almost everything I learned to do competently had to be learned on my own, and often against massive resistance.)

Well, for about a hundred years now, we’ve been under the ideological ascent of socialism. And socialism — international socialism, to be precise — is only good for creating picturesque ruins. (The romantics would have loved them.)

Note that I’m not defending national socialism. As I’ve pointed out before, when the government takes over the economic life of a country, and directs what the companies can or cannot do, the tendency is to quash innovation, and as a rule everyone becomes very poor.

It’s just that it depends. Like empires (which to an extent they are) national socialist regimes can do okay under an extraordinary ruler. I had a mini-dispute with Herb in the comments on whether Franco was or was not Fascist. He absolutely was, both in the economic, and in the repressive, take over every minutia of life aspect. He was also better than the average bear at directing the economic life of the country which is why before his death we used to go shop in Spain, where more and better goods were available than in Portugal.

Relatively speaking, Salazar was a softer leader. Or at least, he stomped less on the opposition (while making more noises about stomping. It’s the Portuguese way.) But as an economic leader (director of the economic life. Führer if you will. Or where did you think that came from?) he sucked. He sucked upside down and sideways and with his head in a sack. And that’s because he was raised by Jesuits, and got his economic theories from them. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know. So over his rule, everyone became increasingly poorer. But weirdly not incompetent. (In fact, as a person who — there and here — likes to follow craftsmen around watching how they do things, the average craftsman who learned his trade under national socialism, was probably way better than anyone else.)

Which brings us to: how does international socialism/communism not only destroy competency but introduce incompetency and corruption to the degree it is enforced/implemented.

January 18, 2022

Decadence

Filed under: Economics, History, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt considers the old Soviet put-down of all of western culture (especially the American one) … that it was decadent:

“The Consummation of Empire” from the painting series “The Course of Empire” by Thomas Cole (1801-1848).
New York HIstorical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

Yes, sure. I hear any number of you gnashing your teeth on that side of the screen: the soft living, the snowflakery in — mostly — our universities, the demands that everyone cater to them, people being completely terrified of a bad cold. Oh, yeah, rampant crime and bad sexual morals. We’re OBVIOUSLY decadent. How can I make fun of it?

Very easily.

For one your gnashing of teeth rhymes eerily with Romans gnashing of teeth for millennia, long before Rome was anywhere near ripe to fall, and in fact while Rome was the bad ass of the world. Second, it echoes even more eerily all of the Christian explanations of why Rome fell, which curiously also echoed the Christian beliefs in the loss of paradise.

“Decadence is sinfulness, and then comes the end and only G-d can save you” is the narrative there. Which is fine, in a spiritual sense, and completely bonkers insane when it applies to cultures and history. But it served the nascent theocracy that replaced Rome quite well. One of the things it served was to explain why life was now much, much harder. Because you know, abundance is what leads to decadence. Life is too soft, you don’t work hard enough and … bam! suddenly you’re in the middle of an orgy or worshiping a goat or something. Never you mind that the Romans pretty much did that all along, even when they were the badasses of the world. It’s really easy to shape the history of a fallen civilization so it suits the purposes of its successor.

Which brings us to the fact that Communism is a Christian heresy, complete with paradise — the supposed egalitarian and property-free pre-history (it’s also really easy to shape a period that left no account of itself that we can find) — until greed — and in one version PATRIARCHY and in another “whiteness” WTF that means — kicked us out of it. Now we must force the perfect human (Homo Sovieticus!) to emerge, so we can go back to living in caves in (sing it) perfect harmony. (Yeah.)

The complaints of decadence I heard as a young woman were mostly Soviet Agit Prop. Yes, yours were too. They ranged from incoherent to frigging insane. Some of it was a very old rhyming chorus: Americans were decadent because they were too rich. They had too many choices. They were too immoral. They never had enough, and would commit crimes to be richer. They ate too much, drove too much, slept in too comfortable a bed, and in general were DECADENT. Just like Rome before it fell. (If you realize the actual structure of Imperial Rome was closer to the Soviet Union’s, a plunder culture that could only survive by stealing, the whole thing will take your breath away with its chutzpah.

The fact that our (even though at the time it was your, as I was a foreigner at least in some ways) entertainment and art echoed these crazy accusations only made the whole thing stick, so even the right, American loving side (which anyway always has a vast side of puritanism in America. And speaking of puritans, let’s talk about what some of them did to … turkeys? If weird sexual kinks are a sign of decadence, we’ve never been non-decadent) bought into it. I mean Spartacus (the novel) portrait of the decadence of Rome was meant to echo how bad America was. What’s that I hear? The author was a communist? You. Don’t. Say. I think I sent my shocked face out to be mended, but I won’t be a sec while I retrieve it.

In a more personal sense, my own family told me Portugal too was decadent. Why, unlike mom, I didn’t have to walk beside the train line to pick up enough coal for the family to cook. We had butane bottles delivered, even if they were super expensive, so we often cooked on a petrol lamp in the patio, if the weather was fine.

Decadent and soft living, I tell you. Sure, the bathroom was outside, but it was a bathroom, with running water included. JUST like Rome before the fall. How much longer till we started screwing Nightingales’ Tongues, eating Bear Sausages and electing horses to congress (I think in America we’ve been doing that all along, too. Though I’d prefer if every now and then we elected the front half of the horse.)

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