Quotulatiousness

February 5, 2022

Why great NFL players rarely make good coaches

Filed under: Football, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In his (mostly) weekly mailbag post, Severian at Founding Questions considers the latest NFL scandal and some of the insane requirements to be a really great NFL quarterback and how few can both play and coach at that high level. First, the Romney Rule scandal:

I see that some black coach has sued the NFL for racial discrimination, and I must say I hope he takes them for every cent they’ve got. From the very little I’ve seen, his case is airtight, because of the NFL’s astounding stupidity. For those who don’t know, the NFL has been using what’s called the “Rooney Rule” for at least two decades now. This states that whenever a head coaching job comes up, the team must interview at least one (and I think two are mandatory now) black candidate.

Since there’s a serious dearth of black coaches at all levels of organized football (we’ll psircle back to that in a minute), this means that the same three or four guys go through the same pro forma interviews every time. As far as I understand it, then (which is not very, admittedly), this particular coach was actually told to his face that this interview with whatever team was just pro forma compliance with the Rooney Rule; we’ve already got our guy, so just fly out here, we’ll buy you lunch, have a nice chat, and put you back on the plane lickety split.

That’s one part of his airtight case. The other is that whatever team he interviewed with also has a Diversity and Inclusion Officer — because of course they do — and the DIE Officer is on record as saying all kinds of typical sanctimonious virtue-signaling shit, e.g. “We are a systemically racist organization and have to do better,” blah blah blah. Put those together, and what else can you conclude except that this coach got screwed out of a job because of explicit racial animus?

But as to why there are so few black NFL coaches, part of it is due to the way young quarterbacks are trained — he discussed this in detail here — which very frequently diverts talented young black quarterbacks away from learning the skillset they would need to make it in the NFL. The other thing is that the skills you need to be a good coach don’t often appear in a person who has the physical ability to be a good player:

If you haven’t met any high-caliber pro athletes, think of professors. The third-rate knockoff cow college I went to had a pretty big league chemist on staff; if he hadn’t won the Nobel he was at least in the conversation, something like that. This guy was a terrible teacher, because he just couldn’t grok that other people couldn’t follow him. Your brain couldn’t fire fast enough to keep up with his, and he couldn’t slow his down enough to let you catch up. The best chemistry teacher was still pretty smart — no dummies in Chem PhD programs, at least not back then — but because he was nowhere near the top guy’s level, he was so much better at explaining the nuts and bolts.

You could ask the low-end guy “What do I need to do to get better at chemistry?” and he could give you some solid, practical advice (I know, because with his help I squeaked out a C-). You asked that of the high end guy, and he’d reply “Be smarter”. (Not really, he was actually pretty cool, personally, but nonetheless that’s really all he could say).

Sports works the same way. While I was there, this same college also hired a former NBA player to coach basketball. Not a Hall of Famer, but a Hall of the Pretty Good-er; if you know basketball from the late 70s, you’ve heard of him. They thought having this guy as a coach would boost recruiting and ticket sales (he was a local notable, too), and it did … for a time, but under his stewardship the team got much worse, and for the same reason the Nobel-candidate chem wiz was the worst teacher. Billy Bigshot would tell his guys “Just go out there and do this and that” … but his guys couldn’t do this and that. Billy could, which is why he was a very good player at the highest professional level; but he couldn’t grok that not everyone could do the same genetic freak shit on the court he could, because they weren’t genetic freaks like him.

Psircling back to the NFL, if you want a race-neutral entry point for discussing this stuff, there you go. Good players are generally terrible coaches, because pretty much by definition good players are genetic freaks who have no idea how they do the things they do; they just do them. Good coaches, on the other hand, tend to be nerdlingers with people skills … another fairly rare combo, it must be said, but nowhere near as rare as a 6’4″ chess master with a big arm. If pro teams really wanted to start thinking outside the box, they’d start recruiting potential coaching candidates at video game tournaments … or straight from high school, where guys have to do much more with much, much less.

January 27, 2022

What is this “Mass Formation Psychosis” thing that so many are suddenly fascinated with?

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

I started seeing the phrase “Mass Formation Psychosis” popping up a lot recently, but I hadn’t bothered looking into it until quite recently. In an effort to figure out what it’s supposed to be and why people are talking about it, I did the lazy thing I usually do and had a quick wander through some of the blogs I follow to gather up their respective takes on it. Here’s one from earlier in the week from Severian at Founding Questions:

In the depths of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong decided that China must overtake at least Great Britain, if not the US, in steel production (this was back when the US actually made shit, you understand, so … you know, like a hundred years ago). But since that was impossible with China’s existing steel mills, Mao hit on a solution: He’d just have the peasants do it! Right in the backyards of their collective farms.

No, I’m not kidding. They really did that. The “steel” produced was worthless, of course, and indeed the whole zany scheme probably contributed to the Great Famine, as peasants ended up throwing farm implements, cooking pots, anything and everything that could be melted down into their backyard furnaces. Yeah, they’d need them for the harvest, but the harvest was a month or two away, and the commissar and his pistol demanding more more more! steel was right now.

And that’s the great thing about a totalitarian dictatorship (if you’re the dictator) — if your madcap caper runs aground on reality’s rocks, you can simply declare victory and move on. What backyard blast furnaces? Never heard of them … and neither have you, comrade, if you know what’s good for you. Problem solved.

But … what if, for some bizarre reason, Mao’s slaves had just kept throwing things into their backyard furnace? If Mao had come down personally from the Forbidden City and said “Yeah, we’re good here, save your hoes and scythes and woks and whatnot,” but they still they persisted?

That’s the situation in which Tapioca Joe and the Juggalos find themselves vis a vis Covid.

Severian linked to Robert Stacy McCain’s call for making today “Everybody Blog About Mass Formation Psychosis Day”, which in turn linked to this Substack post from Robert Malone.

As many of you know, I have spent time researching and speaking about mass psychosis theory. Most of what I have learned has come from Dr. Mattias Desmet, who realized that this form of mass hypnosis, of the madness of crowds, can account for the strange phenomenon of about 20-30% of the population in the western world becoming entranced with the Noble Lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians, science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media.

What one observes with the mass hypnosis is that a large fraction of the population is completely unable to process new scientific data and facts demonstrating that they have been misled about the effectiveness and adverse impacts of mandatory mask use, lockdowns, and genetic vaccines that cause people’s bodies to make large amounts of biologically active coronavirus Spike protein.

These hypnotized by this process are unable to recognize the lies and misrepresentations they are being bombarded with on a daily basis, and actively attack anyone who has the temerity to share information with them which contradicts the propaganda that they have come to embrace. And for those whose families and social networks have been torn apart by this process, and who find that close relatives and friends have ghosted them because they question the officially endorsed “truth” and are actually following the scientific literature, this can be a source of deep anguish, sorrow and psychological pain.

QotD: American cars after 1970

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

If you weren’t there, I don’t think I can adequately convey to you just how bad American products were back in the Seventies and Eighties.

Especially cars. American-made cars were almost Soviet, in that if you happened to get one made by the one factory the one day the workers weren’t falling down drunk on the job, it might run … for a while. American workers weren’t drunk, of course, but they were unionized, which from a quality control perspective amounted to the same thing. Chrysler and especially General Motors were little more than employee pension plans that occasionally cranked out a crappy car. Not to take anything away from underhanded Japanese business practices back then — “dumping” etc. — but you had to give the Nips this, their shitboxes actually worked.

Even ten-thumbs guys like me became at least semi-adequate shade tree mechanics, because we had to keep the Sixties hand-me-down cars that got us through college running well into the 1990s, or we’d have to walk. No one in his right mind bought an American-made car from any year after 1970. Take that out for any large consumer product, and there you had it. Thanks, Big Labor!

But here in Clown World, the dilithium crystals have reversed polarity, so what was already fake and gay back at the very dawn of the Fake and Gay Era (future historians, please credit me for that coinage in your textbooks) is now a pillar of probity. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, and Big Labor is definitely shaping up to be the enemy of Big Government. Brandon’s puppetmasters have clearly decided to go for the quadruple axel, politically — they’re going to totally alienate every single cisgender, heteronormative member of their old coalition, so that when they finally make Utopia with just Intersectional Genderfluids of Color, even the French judge will be forced to give them a 10.

It’s a bold strategy, Cotton … let’s see how it works out for them. In the meantime, yeah, if you’ve got a tradesmen’s local in your area, buy ’em a box of donuts or something. They’re fighting the good fight on this one.

Severian, “Friday, No Job, Etc.”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-22.

January 26, 2022

Three generations of the OG Puritans

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

At Founding Questions, Severian considers the New England Puritans and the world they inhabited:

Portrayal of the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s book The Meritous Price of Our Redemption by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy; it was the first-ever banned book in the New World and only 4 original copies are known to survive today.
Engraving by F.T. Merrill in The History of Springfield for the Young by Charles Barrows, 1921.

Total cultural and intellectual uniformity, constantly reinforced. If those Puritans were going to go crazy, in other words, they’d do it within very carefully circumscribed boundaries. The only thing close to that level of mental control is Twitter … and I suppose I must put the disclaimer out front, so that you can factor it in if you disagree with me: I hate the Puritans. They’re just SJWs with balls and a slightly less tedious prose style. When they’re not obsessing over the tiniest motions of their pwecious widdle selves, they’re screwing you over for the hellbound heathen you are.

Credit where it’s due, though: If you need to go sodbusting in an unexplored continent, the Puritans are your guys. The original Plymouth Bay colony was thoroughly militarized, and they didn’t fuck around — when the local Indian tribes were beginning to wonder if they shouldn’t do something about these White devils they’d let loose, the Puritans attacked the fiercest tribe and wiped them out, as a show of force. Life was hard in the OG Plymouth Colony, but it was about as good as you were going to get in that era.

But the typical inheritance pattern soon took over. “Regression to the mean” is a behavioral phenomenon, too, not just an IQ one. Puritanism is an obsessive, paranoid creed; it can only flourish in times of high stress and dire insecurity. But by the 1690s, Plymouth Colony was arguably the healthiest, wealthiest, safest place per capita in Christendom (not a high bar, obviously, but still). The OG settlers were all gone by that time, of course — the original settlement, you’ll recall, was 1620 — and so were most of their almost as hardcore kids. The third generation was coming up fast …

… but finding their way blocked by the old men of the previous generation, who were as tediously, dogmatically Puritan as the OGs, but without the stones. This made them — the 2nd generation — enormous hypocrites, but even without the hypocrisy, imagine living in a world where the ultra-wealthy who control everything in society tell you that they deserve it all, because they’re God’s Elect, while you, sinner, deserve to live in a rented box and eat bugs and own nothing, because God hates you.

History’s full of weird stuff like that, and that was the situation circa 1690. One example will have to do: Since we probably all got to experience Nathaniel Hawthorne’s existential angst back in high school, consider that the ancestor who caused him so much grief, Judge John Hathorne, was born in 1641. He would’ve been 51, then, during his trial service – a ripe old age by 17th century standards.

Not only that, but the 2nd generation — the one that stubbornly refused to move on and let the kids take their place in the sun — had spent the previous twenty years grievously fucking things up. King Philip’s War nearly ruined the colony, there’d been widespread plague, and oh yeah, that whole Restoration thing back in England — the hardest of hardcore Puritan thinkers in the run-up to the Civil War had been colonials; guys like Col. Rainsborough were closely associated with Massachusetts, etc. Lots of bad blood on the other side of the water, and while the third generation was willing to let bygones by bygones, the 2nd generation wasn’t.

So: Hypocritical old throwbacks and cavemen, with a decades-long track record of dumbfuckery, who just wouldn’t get out of the way. As they got older, they got more insular and inward-looking, as old people tend to do … and “more inward looking” for a Puritan is a near-BCG level of narcissism. Meanwhile, the new generation is eager to take their place in the burgeoning Atlantic world, especially after the Glorious Revolution (1688) … but can’t.

December 30, 2021

The Cursus Honorum of the late Roman Republic

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

At Founding Questions, Severian notes that the Cursus Honorum — the formal “career path” for ambitious men in the late Roman Republic was a remarkably effective process … that ended up being a victim of its own success:

Ahhh, God bless the autists at Wiki, they’ve got it down to a chart:

This is from Caesar’s time, and since one of this blog’s main themes is the confusion between process and outcome, let’s put it right up front: This system, the cursus honorum, was designed to produce men like Julius Caesar …

… and you can take that in either sense.

Caesar is one of the most mulled-over men in history, but nobody seriously doubts that he was at least competent at pretty much everything. Maybe he didn’t make the big list of “Greatest Pontifices Maximi” (or however the Latin goes), but he wasn’t a disgrace to the toga, either. If it was a public function in the Late Roman Republic, Caesar was at least decent at it.

And that’s what the cursus honorum was designed to do. It was a three-fer: It gave you competent public officials, but it also gave young ruling class men some seasoning. Most importantly, it was a way of nurturing talent that also hedged against the Peter Principle. If you want to argue that that makes it a four-fer, go nuts, but the point is, it was a pretty good system … up to a point, and if you’re a regular reader, you know what that point is: The Dunbar Number, at which point relationships become too complex to be managed personally, and bureaucratic structures replace them.

One wishes later governments had something like this — if a guy starts out as a quaestor and discovers he can’t handle it, he’ll bring that knowledge with him to the Senate. (Of course, if he can’t even manage to get elected to that, he’ll know full well his level of talent, and he’ll sit down and shut up on the Senate’s back benches). Note too that the bottom rung is military service — since at that time legionaries were all militia, the voters got a good look at you where it really matters, right from the beginning.

By the time a man reaches the top, then, he has intimate experience of ALL the public offices. Not only that, but he’s well known to everyone who matters, since in between the various offices he’s in the Senate, making connections (or out in the provinces, making other — but no less valuable — connections). A consul, then, is pretty much by definition omnicompetent. He did a good enough job in all the previous public offices that he didn’t disqualify himself for the top slot. Also, he’s been thoroughly vetted — everyone who matters, at pretty much every level of society, has had a good look at him (or, at worst, has a good friend who has had a good look at him).

Obviously it wasn’t a perfect system. Rome had her share of inept consuls, because people are people and sometimes “promotion to your level of incompetence” means “promotion to the very top job”. But for the most part it worked well, and even if a guy turned out to be a dud as consul, well, what can you do? Everyone had at least a reasonable expectation that he’d be able to handle it, which is pretty much the best one can consistently achieve in human affairs. Not only that, but because of the candidate’s long experience and careful vetting, you had a much better than average chance of getting a real winner …

… a man like Caesar, who is at minimum competent at everything, and outstanding at lots of things.

December 29, 2021

QotD: The pervasive infantilization of the “elites”

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

One is tempted to go first after the fattest target, Harry Potter (one is even more tempted to make the obvious jokes about “academia” and “fattest”, but one will manfully resist). The thing is, I think I get the appeal of something like Game of Thrones — the part of the appeal that isn’t spelled “scads and acres and furlongs and metric shitloads of tits,” that is, which makes up the appeal of 99% of any given HBO show (seriously, where would that network be without gratuitous nudity?).

We’ll get there, fear not. But the appeal of Harry Potter absolutely eludes me. I’m sure it’s a charming enough story, but … it’s kid stuff, and they’re not reading it with their kids, because they don’t have kids. And it’s really creepy, y’all, how seriously they take this kids’ stuff. As Vizzini pointed out yesterday, the very mature deep thinkers in the Totally Legit Joe regime are whiling away their hours behind the razor wire by choosing spirit animals for themselves, based on their favorite Harry Potter characters. And while that is absolutely the kind of thing those imbeciles should be doing, instead of attempting to govern, not a one of them is under age 40 (Jen Psaki, for instance, is 43 — and also, according to anonymous White House sources, a “wild cat”; make of that information what you will).

Part of it is just the infantilization of American culture, of course, but it’s strange and disturbing how the more educated, professional classes seem to be not just more infantile than the hoi polloi, but much more passionate about it, too. I know a senior ER doc at a big hospital, for instance, who is waaaaay into Star Wars. And I don’t mean Star Wars collectibles, though of course he has a bunch of those, and as silly as that is in itself (guilty as charged; let me show you my baseball cards sometime).

I mean the dude is just really, really, really into Star Wars. He’s got Star Wars shit all over his house … his huge, grossly expensive, “befitting a senior trauma surgeon whose wife is also a big league university administrator” house, in the toniest part of town, to which he routinely invites other big league people, including — for professional purposes — politicians and powerful apparatchiks. And let me hasten to add, he’s not House MD, whose abrasive “quirks” are tolerated because of his preternatural genius. This guy is, himself, a slick political operator; he’s got plenty of social savvy. But … he’s also got a scale model Millennium Falcon hanging from the roof in the dining room.

I’m sure there’s an explanation for how nobody but me seems to find this really, deeply, disturbingly fucking odd … but there it is.

Severian, “The One Pop Culture Thing”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-16.

December 19, 2021

“Instant replay” in the NFL

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Severian talks about the surprising statistical results when the NFL introduced “instant replay”:

I was a big NFL fan when they first started debating the now-standard “instant replay challenge” rules. Like most people, I was all for it — geez, these refs are terrible, video’s the way to go. My only worry was that if every call those numbnuts obviously screwed up got reviewed, games would last 12 hours …

But a funny thing happened: As with most people, my respect for the refs went way, way up once they put in the video challenge rules. Yeah, they screw up one or two calls per game, the challenges prove that … but that’s one or two out of hundreds, which is a phenomenal success rate. Not only that, even the very toughest calls — the ones that draw the red flags — they get right, or at least not-wrong (football is nothing if not Hegelian), about half the time. Put it through all the techno-whizbangery you want — slow it down to molasses-in-winter speed, run it through one of those Blade Runner image enhancers — and it’s still pretty much a coin toss, at least half the time. And the refs are making those calls at full speed, from dramatically different angles.

In other words, I learned a lesson in applied statistics. Before instant replay, if you’d asked me to guess, as objectively as possible, how many calls per game the refs blew, I’d have said something like “four or five, tops”. (I suppose we must pause here to note, for the benefit of anyone who still follows the NFL for some reason, that I’m not talking about bullshit like the “tuck rule” or whatever the fuck a “catch” is supposed to be these days, which even the refs don’t seem to understand; I’m talking stuff like “Did he fumble?” or “They missed the ball spot by a yard or two”). I certainly wouldn’t go any higher than that, and if you told me that an independent auditing firm had reviewed ten seasons’ worth of game tape and came up with a hard number of 2.6 calls per game, I’d roll with it, no problem.

If you then told me that this represents a “failure rate” of well under 1%, well, I’m not sure I want to go through all the math to check you, but I’d believe it, because I know something about how the game is played. I don’t want to get too far off track here, but for the benefit of casual fans and especially non-American readers, there are 11 men on a football team, and all of them have the opportunity to do all kinds of illegal stuff on every single play. Call it 65 plays per game (the first rough number I could find with a five second internet search), and that’s … well, my math doesn’t go that high, but let’s just say it’s a lot of opportunities for fouls. And that’s not counting all the other stuff refs have to do — that they have the opportunity to get wrong — on nearly every play: Marking the ball spot, determining where a guy went out of bounds, and so on.

The important thing to note is how far my emotional perceptions of the game diverge from statistical reality. Let’s stipulate that all the math up there results in a “success rate” of 99.993%. I’d buy that … Intellectually I’d buy it, because I know a bit about how math works, and a lot more about how football works, but note my first impression when they started talking about instant replay: “Oh God yes, these guys suck, they blow so many calls that games are going to last 12 hours if they review all the calls those lousy refs obviously miss.”

Emotion beats math, every time.

And note that I’m talking about refs in general here. In general, they blow calls all the time (the emotional me said), but when it comes to my team in particular, well, they’ve obviously got it out for us. They screw up an entire season’s worth of calls every time my team plays, and all those screwups go the opponents’ way!

I’m kidding, but I’m not joking. I got to see this process firsthand, and that’s the second lesson instant replay taught me: “Indisputable video evidence,” as the phrase is, don’t mean squat when you’ve got your heart and soul in it.

Every NFL fan knows that the refs hate their particular team and love their most hated rival, and no amount of indisputable evidence will shake that belief. NFL fans are rather like progressives in that way …

December 10, 2021

Was Constantine’s conversion a form of reaction to societal decadence?

Filed under: Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At his new place, Severian makes a case for Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity being a reaction to (and attempted cure for) civilizational decadence:

The Vision of Constantine the Great by Stylianos Stavrakis (1709-1786). “The emperor, depicted mounting and dressed in decorated military uniform, appears to gaze at the Inscription ΕΝ ΤΟΥΤΩ ΝΙΚΑ ΚΩΝΣΤΑΝΤΙΝΕ/ In hoc signo vinces, that is written around a cycle of stars enclosing a cross. The scene is set in front of the harbour of a town, probably Constantinople, with low hills and pine slopes.”
Byzantine Museum via Wikimedia Commons.

The legend says that as Constantine the Great was preparing to fight the Battle of Milvian Bridge, he saw a cross in the sky and the words “In Hoc Signo Vinces” — “in this sign you shall conquer”. He converted to Christianity on the spot, won the battle, and made Christianity the official religion of the now-reunified Roman Empire.

If any of that is true is, of course, impossible to know. He’d been at least favorable to Christianity for some time, helping to promulgate the Edict of Milan that extended toleration to Christianity across the parts of the Empire where his writ ran. However it happened, Constantine’s conversion story — the myth that has come down to us — carries a lesson we Dissidents should study.

Constantine came up at the tail end of the Crisis of the Third Century, in which the Roman Empire all but collapsed. It’s traditional to say that the CTC “ended” with Diocletian (r. 284-305), but obviously the ructions continued, as the Battle of Milvian Bridge was one of several in a new round of civil wars. I’m no scholar of Late Antiquity, but I can boil down all the many overlapping causes of the CTC to a word: Decadence.

The Roman Empire after Aurelius was simply too decadent to go on. Your Marxist would point to serious and irreparable class divisions within the Empire, and he’d be right. Other Marxist-flavored historians would point out the collapse of the currency, the rudimentary and laughably flawed taxation system, and so forth, and they’d be right, too. Military historians would say that the Empire simply lacked sufficient manpower, or at least, sufficient high-quality manpower, for the tasks at hand, exacerbated by the other stuff we just discussed … and they, too, would be right. Let’s not forget the Antonine Plagues, of course, which older historians argued were horrible but, as I understand it, a new generation of bio-archaeologists are proving were far worse than we suspected …

All that played its part, but above all, the Empire was just tired. Bored. Worn out. Overstuffed. Made sick by its own excesses. In a word, decadent.

That’s where Constantine’s conversion comes in. Marcus Aurelius, the last good Emperor, was the world’s most famous Stoic, then as now. Stoicism is indeed proof against decadence … but Stoicism is a harsh, cold philosophy. It’s not just “suppressing your emotions and acting like a hardass all the time,” as so many young men on the internet seem to think — far, far from that — but the Stoic lives by reason. His whole goal in life is to live “in conformity to nature,” and on the Stoic view, “Reason” and “Nature” are one and the same.

For all Stoic discipline seems to focus on the body, then, it’s really in the mind where true Stoics are made. If it’s a religion – and I’d argue that it is, but that’s irrelevant — then it’s the most cerebral creed ever devised. You don’t have to be a brainiac to be a Stoic — no less a Stoic than Marcus frequently upbraids himself for being a bit slow on the uptake — but you do have to live, and have an overwhelming desire to live, entirely inside your own head.

December 2, 2021

QotD: The quickening pace of change

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

One of the toughest things to get across to History students is the pace of change. Students hate it, but the “memorize this list of dates” approach actually helps — one can’t help but notice that your list of “the 20 most significant dates” for, say, the medieval period covers a millennium, while that same list for the Roman Empire covers maybe a century. Even there, though, most people could be forgiven for mistaking 50 AD for 150 AD, or even 250 AD (even archaeologists generally consider it a success if they can date something to within a century, I’m told).

But nobody would mistake 1790 for 1890, let alone 1990. A Roman of the late Republic (100 BC) could still get around ok if you time-warped him into the late Empire (300 AD). Time warp a guy from 1790 into 1890, though, and he’d think he was on Mars. (Zap him into 1990, and he’d think he’d died and gone to Hell). The pace of change accelerated exponentially starting in about 1400; by the Industrial Era it was a blur.

Which is why I’m terrified right now. We feel like change is happening at light speed. As a Historian, I can promise you — it’s at least Warp 6, and the dilithium crystals are nowhere near to overloading.

Severian, “Faster and Faster”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-02-01.

November 23, 2021

QotD: Generation X and the 1990s

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

When I retired, a retro 1990s fad was just gearing up on campus. It was an Uncanny Valley kind of experience. There they were, dressing like day-glo lumberjacks and listening to knockoff BritPop, but still plodding around campus with that peculiarly late-Millennial affect. You know the one — half secret policeman, half cringing mouse. Unpleasant, but it got me thinking about my own college years back at the dawn of the Clinton Era. We really screwed the pooch, didn’t we?

I’m referring, of course, to Gen X’s patented brand of “irony”. We’ve talked about this before, but here’s a quick recap: Every middle-class kid born after about 1965 was raised to believe that Authenticity was the thing, the only thing. Just do what you feel. Question authority. Don’t listen to The Man!

The problem, of course, is that we were told this by The Man.

It had a weird, telescoping effect. On campus, you were surrounded by people who actually were hippies, plus a whole bunch of wild-eyed fanatics who were sure they would’ve made truly excellent hippies if they hadn’t been in elementary school at the time, plus a bunch of kids — these would be your classmates — who thought of “Woodstock” as a brand name, a kind of backpacking-through-Europe, taking-a-year-off-to-find-myself experience that everyone has as a matter of course before settling down to the serious business of making partner at the law firm.

In short: Our parents were stuck in adolescence, and, being adolescents ourselves, we didn’t understand that “Rebellion” wasn’t something the hippies invented. We wanted to experience sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, too, but since the Baby Boomers treated those as their exclusive property instead of what they actually are — i.e. the natural impulses of teenagers in all times and places — we had to be all, like, you know, whatever about it. […]

That was the 1990s. Faced with a paradox that everything your parents say, do, and believe is lame — according to your parents! — the only safe way is to make sure nobody can figure out exactly what your attitude is at any given instant. You might end up working 90 hour weeks at the office to pay the nut on the McMansion and the Volvo the same way they did, but at least you’d be, you know, ironic about it. The ketman of the suburbs.

See what happens when you listen to your elders, kids?

Severian, “The Virtue of Hypocrisy”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-01-19.

November 19, 2021

QotD: People who are interested in history versus “academic” historians

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

One of many reasons I never went anywhere in my career as an academic historian is that I actually like history. I find it interesting. That’s because I find people interesting, and history is, above all, the study of people and how they be.

Your average academic historian lives entirely in xzheyr own head. They hate and fear people. They have no interest in how people actually are, only in how they should be. Thus, academic history quickly devolves into the worst kind of Social Justice Mad Lib, a never-ending, ever more frantic search for ever more obscure terms to complete the equation: “Despite [barbarities], the [micro-group] were actually only doing it because they were oppressed by the Pale Penis People, because [reasons].”

For example:

This is one of those things that’s true even if it’s not true, because Clown World, but I actually looked this guy up and yeah, he’s real — he’s a “Professor of Practice in Media and Activism at Harvard University”, which is exactly what it sounds like: basically, a tenured pest, who makes very nice bank making students protest shit for class credit. The “new book” referenced in the screenshot isn’t on Amazon yet, so maybe that’s not real, but again, Clown World — even if it’s not real, it’s real, because that’s exactly the kind of thing academic historians do. You probably remember it well from your own college days, if you were in college at any time between about 1985 through 1995, the heyday of “everyone you’ve ever heard of was secretly gay!” pseudo-scholarship.

Severian, “On Boredom”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-17.

November 14, 2021

QotD: Traffic in India

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

A buddy of mine once joked that the traffic signals, lane markers, etc. in India are the world’s biggest public art installation, since they have exactly the same effect on motorists’ behavior as those butt-ugly steel-and-concrete things your city council keeps insisting on sticking out in front of city hall. Long after I returned from my sojourn in the Raj, friends remarked on my newfound sangfroid. It’s no mystery, I explained to them. Delhi’s a big place, so usually took several autorickshaw rides a day — each and every one of them, by necessity, a dance with the Grim Reaper. As P.J. O’Rourke once quipped back when he was funny, on the Subcontinent it doesn’t even count as a car crash unless there’s probable loss of life involved. Death come for us all, I told my buddies; when my time’s up, my ticket’s gonna get punched regardless.

Severian, “Cars, Bikes, Motorcycles”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-25.

November 7, 2021

QotD: Shoe manufacturing in the Soviet Union

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Commies weren’t big on consumer goods for obvious reasons, but even the proles need shoes. If you’re a Communist (or a teenager), it seems simple enough: send your flunkies out into a region, have them write down everyone’s shoe sizes, and then make those. Which would work, I guess, if not for the fact that industry doesn’t operate that way. Industries are only efficient through economies of scale. “A shoe factory” only beats “a cordwainer” because the factory can crank out 10,000 pairs of shoes in the time it takes the cordwainer to produce one pair. Worse, factories are massive resource sinks if they’re not running at full blast at all times …

After trying several workarounds, GOSPLAN, the state production ministry, decided to use “Gross Output Targets” to produce goods. Which probably worked ok for stuff like rebar, if you don’t care about quality (see Mao’s DIY backyard blast furnaces), but is terrible for stuff like shoes. So let’s say GOSPLAN decides that 100,000 lucky proles of Irkutsk Oblast shall receive one pair of shoes apiece. Since all materials had to be requisitioned in advance from GOSSNAB (I confess: I love Soviet acronyms), and since the production line would need to be re-tooled for each individual size and style of shoe, the factory managers — who had to hit the Gross Output Target, or go tour Siberia — did the only logical thing: They cranked out 100,000 baby shoes, all left feet. (Baby shoes use less leather; the excess can be sold or traded, see below).

Again, Commies couldn’t care less about consumer complaints, but eventually some up and comer in the Party will notice that everyone is wandering barefoot around a big pile of baby shoes. That might make him look bad, so he sends a report, and, after a long and convoluted bureaucratic process, GOSPLAN revises their order: 100,000 pairs of shoes, but in different sizes and styles, for men and women. In response to which, the factory manager does the only logical thing: 99,999 pairs of baby shoes, all left feet, plus one pump and one wingtip.

Lather, rinse, repeat. The factory manager isn’t a bad guy — in fact, let’s say he’s Wyatt. He’s just operating on an entirely different incentive structure than even his immediate boss, to say nothing of the faceless apparatchiks at GOSPLAN. Hitting any Gross Output Target is a real task, given that his workforce is a bunch of illiterate peasants who hate him and are constantly drunk. What probably seems like spectacularly inventive cruelty to the proles of Irkutsk Oblast is just Wyatt doing everything he can to keep his family out of the Gulag. And since Wyatt’s a smart guy, he can get around any target GOSPLAN sets. If they tell him to produce 100,000 pounds of shoes, his factory cranks out one enormous pair of concrete sneakers.

That’s one of Wyatt’s two overriding priorities: Staying out of the Gulag. The other one is: Using whatever he can scrimp, save, or scrounge from GOSSNAB as trade goods in the black market.

Here again, Wyatt’s not a bad guy. He’s not doing this to feather his own nest (though of course he lives a little better than others; he’s only human). In the words of the immortal Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until he gets punched in the mouth, and even the most meticulously “scientific” management gets punched in the mouth all the time. As we’ve seen, GOSPLAN can’t even get it right with something as low-tech, as easy to mass-produce as shoes, so imagine how they do with more complex bits of equipment. The factory managers, who have to hit the Gross Output Targets, no matter what, quickly figure out that they’ll be waiting until doomsday if they try requisitioning what they need from GOSSNAB, so they form a kind of black market between themselves. Indeed there’s an entire class of quasi-criminals, whose name I forget, that exists only to facilitate such transactions.

Extend that paradigm to everything, and you’ve got life in the USSR. There’s the “official” economy, which is pure fantasy. There’s the black market economy at the factory level, where bulk materials change hands (since the official economy is pure fantasy, nobody blinks an eye when, say, 100,000 metric tons of concrete disappears off a manifest somewhere and reappears, un-manifested (as it were), somewhere else). There’s the black market at the consumer level, since of course the poor proles of Irkutsk Oblast have to have shoes and there’s no way they’re getting them from Wyatt’s factory. And finally, there’s the black market at the service level — those go-betweens arranging for 100,000 metric tons of concrete to fall off a truck in Vladivostok and appear, like magic, in Kiev (and their consumer-level equivalents — think pimps, but for everything).

Severian, “Darker Shade of Black IV: Black Market”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-02.

November 6, 2021

QotD: Michael Bellesisles

Filed under: Books, Education, History, Politics, Quotations, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I offered a very limited defense of the History Biz. It’s not just that they’re rabid Leftists, I said. I mean, yeah, they are, no denying that, but outright “writing the conclusion before you even start asking the question”-type fraud, Michael Bellesisles-type fraud, is a lot rarer than you probably think.

Bellesisles, you might recall, is the guy whose revolutionary revisionist thesis was that the Founders weren’t really all that enthusiastic about guns, and didn’t own that many, and that whole 2nd Amendment thing was just an afterthought. Yeah, right. That one was written conclusion first, and since no remotely objective look at the evidence could ever possibly support it, he resorted to making lots of “evidence” up. But the reaction of the rest of the profession was interesting: They lauded Bellesisles to the skies. He won the Bancroft Prize for his work, which is the biggest one you can get in American history. Now, I’m sure you’re saying “of course they praised him, he was telling them exactly what they wanted to hear!”, and you’re right …

… but only to a point. Because eggheads are — as you might imagine — the pettiest, most envious bunch of little bitches this side of a junior high cheerleading squad, there’s no piece of research so meticulous, no conclusion so solid, that someone isn’t going to tear into it in one of the professional journals, for base personal reasons if no other. Lest you think I’m kidding, I personally know of a woman at a big league school whose husband was seduced, and her marriage ruined, by an open, obnoxious lesbian colleague, all because she, the hetero, had dared to question some of the lesbian’s work at a conference in their mutual field.

That’s the level of pettiness we’re dealing with here. And I can’t say for absolute certain that Bellesisles received no criticism whatsoever; he doesn’t work in my field, so even though I was certain that Arming America was bullshit of the purest ray serene, it wasn’t my problem, professionally speaking. But whatever, point is, in my fairly well-informed opinion, merely “telling them what they want to hear” doesn’t account for the entire profession ignoring the huge, blinking, neon red flags surrounding Arming America. Rather, I suggest it’s more of a Pauline Kael thing.

I actually kinda pity Kael — much like John Montagu, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, she was a fairly big wheel back in her day, but if she’s known at all now, it’s for something entirely peripheral to her life’s work. In Kael’s case, it’s her declaration that it was impossible for Richard Nixon to have won in 1972, since “nobody I know voted for him” (it was one of the biggest blowouts in American electoral history). The Arming America thing is, I think, like that — nobody in academia owns a gun, or knows anyone who owns a gun, or knows anyone who knows anyone who owns a gun. So, yeah, they know all the scary statistics about how there are sixty gorillion more guns than people in America, but all of that iron belongs to the Dirt People, far away over the horizon. They’d never in a million years even be in the same zip code as someone who thinks Arming America was absurd on its face. Hence, it never occurred to them to question it.

It helped that Bellesisles was telling them what they wanted to hear, no doubt, but the main reason nobody challenged it was that they lacked the cognitive toolkit to even consider the possibility he might be wrong.

Severian, “Are They Trying to Lose?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-15.

October 26, 2021

“…watching The Media spin for Brandon; it’s just so Pravda-licious”

Filed under: China, Government, Health, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Severian manages to find entertainment in the full-blown propagandization of “The Media”, especially during the course of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Wikimedia Commons.

Back when the Kung Flu nonsense first started, I took it quasi-seriously. Let me clarify: Like America’s greatest philosopher, I assume that everything in the newspaper is 90% bullshit, and I read it because it entertains me. Nonetheless, the bullshit operates on several levels, and it’s important to distinguish between them if you want to extract more than entertainment from it. In the case of Covid, back in the earliest days, I assumed that the bullshit was more top tier — that is, that it was mostly ignorance.

Media people are stupid. We all know that, but unless you’ve been around them (or their inbred, banjo-picking cousins, academics) recently, you probably don’t realize just how stupid they actually are. Remember Michael Crichton’s bit about “Gell-Mann Amnesia“? He said that The Media are so dumb, they routinely get important things not just wrong, but completely backwards: The headline would read the equivalent of “Wet Streets Cause Rain”.

And to be fair to The Media — I know, I know, but again, if you want anything more than a chuckle from the propaganda, you must try — it really did seem to be more ignorance than anything. I’m the kind of guy who needs to pull off a sock every time he has to count past ten, but compared to everyone in The Media I’m Euclid himself. I could see right away that the numbers they were spouting would make Kung Flu exponentially more lethal than even the Black Plague, which would, you know, tend to show up on satellite reconnaissance. And since there’s this thing called “Google Earth” …

But even though I knew right away you’d need to scale back their projections by a factor of about eleventy billion, that wasn’t the end of it, because even doing the necessary mental math to scale it down by eleventy billion — take the cosine, carry the one, divide by zero — it still looked pretty bad. But not “pretty bad” in a factual way. Rather, pretty bad in a second-level bullshit way, the mere propaganda way.

Those were the days, you might recall, when — out of the blue, on a dime — the Official Story changed from “China categorically denies there’s any such thing as germs, much less this particular strain of flu” to “OMG, the Chinese are welding apartment doors shut as people keel over in the streets.” Accompanied, in some cases — and good luck finding those video clips now — with grainy little movies of obvious actors keeling over so hammily, Al Pacino himself would tell them to tone it down. Pravda et al would never have been so crude, but those guys were pros, and as bad as the USSR was, affront-to-basic-intelligence-wise, this is Clown World.

Sure enough, the stories soon came out that China had cornered the market on PPE gear. It was an obvious short con, but remember: Clown World.

This — the CCP cornering the PPE market — soon prompted the third level of Media bullshit, the ideological level. Not content to merely take orders from their Chinese paymasters, the Media, being ideology-addled prize graduates of American “higher” “education”, started taking it upon themselves to lecture us for our own good. Masks, which were once bad, were now good, and if one mask was good, then two were even better! Thus the flood of stories like the one covered at the old RC, where the woman went on about swabbing her eyelids with disinfectant and whatnot. They got their chance to hector us for our own good, and they will never turn that down.

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