A much more interesting scenario happens when seemingly legitimate, competent rulers find themselves at the helm during a major crisis. Marcus Aurelius has an overinflated rep among the laity, but he was decent at his job … until he wasn’t, thanks to things like the Antonine Plague. This, and a large barbarian invasion, brought all the Empire’s long-term structural problems into sharp focus. Yeah, Marcus is overrated, but it’s no knock on him that he didn’t fix these problems, or cure the plague; those were probably beyond the skill of even the most extraordinary man. His reaction, though, and the reaction of his subjects, is instructive.
Marcus faced no rebellion; no one sought to usurp him. For one thing, Marcus won his wars — no mean feat, considering the plague etc. But for another, it’s hard to blame Marcus for the plague, the weakness of the army staffing system, the structural weakness of the currency. And that’s where it gets interesting, because even though you can’t consciously blame Marcus for this, all those things create excessive anxiety among the people, and that anxiety has to go somewhere …
… so they persecuted Christians.
“The extent to which Marcus Aurelius himself directed, encouraged, or was aware of these persecutions is unclear and much debated by historians,” Wiki informs us, but it doesn’t matter if he had a hand in them or not. The important thing is that the Christians were the perfect target for free-floating anxiety, since plagues etc. were supernatural events and the Christians were ostentatiously opposed to the official belief system. Perhaps Marcus didn’t lose the Mandate of Heaven; perhaps it was stripped from him. Burn the unbelievers, and maybe the world gets back into focus.
This is the pattern whenever the Powers That Be find themselves trying to ride out a massive, structural sea-change — one where it’s obvious to the stressed-out public that something HAS to change, but a mere change in leadership won’t cut it. You’ll have to trust me on this, I guess, unless you’re up on your Chinese history, but almost all their “rebellions” had this mystical character — widespread banditry was assumed, in itself, to be a sign that the Emperor had lost the Mandate of Heaven, and the bandit groups usually ended up looking like the White Lotus sect, who caused endless trouble for something like 300 years. And then there’s the Taiping Rebellion — led by Jesus Christ’s brother! — and by now I’m sure y’all take my point. You can’t really blame the Qing for everyone’s opium addiction, or getting stomped by the British, but you’ve got to blame someone – hence the mystical character of pretty much all Chinese rebellions, certainly including the Maoist.
Severian, “Witch Trial Syndrome”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-27.
May 3, 2021
QotD: Marcus Aurelius and the “Mandate of Heaven”
April 24, 2021
QotD: Marxism and the teenage mind
That’s why the worst thing a teenager can think of is “unfair.” It’s wrong because it feels wrong, and anything that’s wrong must be somebody’s fault — again, how could it be otherwise? Parents can’t afford to let their kids learn big lessons the hard way. Literally can’t afford it, in that teenagers can’t see why, for example, you can’t take that turn at 85 mph on an icy road. You can explain it to them until you’re blue in the face, but as anyone who has spent any time around teenagers knows, there’s a large subset of them that will simply refuse to get it. Alas, those tend to be the brighter ones, and so a large part of the subtle art of teenager management is setting up smaller, less catastrophic situations for them to fuck up, such that they hopefully learn by analogy. Which is still, of course, the grownups’ fault …
A big part of growing up, then, is: realizing that not everything is someone’s fault. Every effect has a cause, that’s a simple truth of logic, but not every event has a cause. The real world, grownups know, is what Buddha said it is, a nexus of causes and conditions. Even the simplest event has innumerable proximate causes, necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions, and so on. If you want to argue, in terms of pure logic, that every event is an intersection of a long series of causal chains that are all, in theory, perfectly discoverable, go nuts, but for all practical purposes, shit just happens. Accepting that is one of the foundation stones of adulthood.
From that perspective, one’s youthful Marxism seems silly, and nothing seems sillier than Marx’s endless ranting against the perfidy of “the capitalists.” Just as your parents aren’t really the capricious tyrants you thought they were when they wouldn’t let you use the car on Friday night, so even the biggest of businessmen are just people. Marx paints them as cartoonishly evil, but though a guy like Andrew Carnegie was a real bastard in his youth, no doubt about that, he too grew up, becoming a staunch philanthropist and anti-imperialist. So, too, with the labor theory of value, which is the closest thing to the quintessence of the teenage mind ever put to paper — those Air Jordans are “overpriced,” no one denies that, but it’s simply not true that selling $5 shoes for $200 is “exploitation.” There’s this thing called “demand,” and … well, you get it.
Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.
April 13, 2021
QotD: The Hundred Years’ War and information velocity
… at least in the early phases of the war. Low information velocity meant that even big changes at the top — the capture of the King at Poitiers, say — didn’t have much impact out in the sticks. By the time you found out about it, you’d been “subjects” of “England” for months, years, decades. Whatever, it didn’t matter, since the whole thing worked like loan sharking in Mob movies. Does it matter if it’s Rocco or Vito who’s collecting the vig this week? Maybe the Godfather got rubbed out, and now all the under-bosses from the Solozzo family report to the new capos of the Corleone family. None of that matters to you. All you know is, the new guy is going to break your legs if you don’t pay, same as the old guy would’ve done.
By the war’s later phases, though, the velocity of information had dramatically increased. Necessity is the mother of invention, and the French have always had a knack for cultural propaganda. Joan of Arc wasn’t worth much, militarily, but it’s one hell of a story, the kind that rallies troops. Nobody cares who the legal King of France is — that is, the guy whose name the lawyers finally hack out of the undergrowth of however-many family trees. The guy who is divinely anointed, though, by a prophet, in person? That’s a big deal. That’s the kind of story that spreads like lightning; the kind of story that makes “France” far more than just the name at the top of the org chart.
Moreover, the new guy — the divinely ordained guy — is competent. You can tell, because he’s winning. Your average feminist scholar knows as much about strategy as she does about heterosexuality, so we can ignore all their claims about Joan’s military genius. There are times when total incompetence is, in fact, a virtue, and this was one of them. Joan’s military strategy didn’t make any sense, because she wasn’t thinking in military terms — which is why it worked. Victory followed victory, until the English got wise … by which point it didn’t matter, because the Dauphin had been crowned as Charles VII and had solidified power behind him. In fact, you don’t have to be Machiavelli to see that Joan’s capture and execution by the English were all to Charles’s benefit — Charles gained a martyr to his cause, but only after Henry VI finally managed to beat a little girl. Information velocity guaranteed that both stories were all over France almost from the minute they happened.
Over in England, meanwhile, it was their turn to have an insane, incompetent king, and we know how that turned out. The point is, you can have a bad king. You can have a mad king. You can even have a bad, mad king and things can still work out ok — see Charles VI, who remained King of France for 42 years of the Hundred Years’ War despite believing he was made of glass — provided your mad, bad king reigns in a period of low information velocity. Not that things were hunky-dory in France from 1380-1422 — you know, Agincourt and all that — but the Charles VII who was anointed by God via Joan of Arc was the mad, bad guy’s direct lineal descendant. Charles VII’s main antagonist, Henry VI, was also a mad, bad king, and his successor, Henry Tudor … well, you know. I don’t think it’s an accident that the printing press was invented in the 1440s and made its first appearance in England in 1476, in the nastiest part of the Wars of the Roses.
Severian, “Crises”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-25.
April 8, 2021
QotD: Thomas Hobbes and his “state of nature”
One reason I had such a hard time teaching this stuff to undergraduates back in my ivory tower days was that, ironically, we can imagine a much more “realistic” State of Nature than Hobbes could. We even had a TV show about it: Lost (in which, I’m told, one of the characters was actually named “John Locke”). A large group of strangers, unrelated by blood or affinity, would never be shipwrecked on a deserted island in Hobbes’s day, but we Postmoderns have no problem imagining a large international flight going down. Assume everyone survives the crash, and there’s your State of Nature – a much better one than Hobbes’s.
Under those very specific conditions, something like what Hobbes says might come to pass. In reality, of course, we seem to be much likelier to pull together in a disaster than to immediately go full retard, but let’s envision the most apocalyptic scenario, in which every guy who can bench press his body weight (assuming such still exist on international flights) immediately tries to lord it over everyone else on the island. There, and only there, the stuff Hobbes says about equality is true – the strong guy can beat up the weak guy, and enslave him, but the strong guy has to sleep sometime …
… so pretty soon there are no more strong guys, only various flavors of weak, clever guys, and now they have to band together, because you need three or four of them to accomplish the physical labor that one strong guy could’ve before they murdered him in his bed. And so on, you get the point, eventually everyone grudgingly lays down his arms and starts working together for mutual survival.
At this point, I need to point out something fundamental about Thomas Hobbes, that y’all probably don’t know. Hobbes always considered himself first and foremost a mathematician. But he wasn’t a very good mathematician. He’d thought he’d discovered a way to “square the circle,” for instance, and that’s not a metaphor – that was really a thing back then, and Hobbes’s attempt got ripped to shreds by real mathematicians, who thought they were thereby discrediting his metaphysics and, by implication, his political philosophy …
… fun stuff, but irrelevant, the point is, Hobbes was a bad mathematician. So bad, in fact, that even I, a former History professor who needs to pull off a sock every time I have to count past ten, can see the glaring flaw in his “geometrical” political theory: IF it’s based on “the State of Nature,” and we legitimize the Leviathan because that’s what gets us out of the State of Nature, then once we are free of the State of Nature, what’s the point of the Leviathan?
Hobbes didn’t see it that way, of course. He thought that we really did revert to “the war of all against all” the minute the social contract was broken, and in his context – the English Civil Wars, recall – that’s not unreasonable. But what about all the periods of “normal” government? You know, those periods of peace we created the Leviathan specifically to secure? If we get those – and there’s no point to the exercise otherwise – then we seem to have created an all-powerful government that, while it CAN do everything, really shouldn’t do anything.
Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.
April 2, 2021
QotD: Sex and the grad student lifestyle
- Show up; and
- Bring beer.
For 75-90% of women under 40, step 2 is optional. It would’ve been for Chloe. Especially in a bar full of grad students, who despite their extensive academic training on “the rhetorics of hegemony” and whatnot, still aren’t quite sure how the naughty bits fit together. She might’ve had to draw the guy a map, but surely that’s no problem for someone so assertively in control of her own sexuality as was Chloe …
And that’s just normal people, who know what pronouns to use and never hesitate when choosing a public restroom. The real freakazoids actually have it much easier, since loudly proclaiming a deviant sexuality is a status symbol in the ivory tower. Perhaps your deepest, most secret fetish involves cocktail onions and a Shop-Vac … and let me stop you right there, I do NOT wanna know, I’m only bringing this up to say that hey, I sympathize, love is real and you’re having a hard time finding yours.
You should consider academia, my friend, where not only are such things not shameful, but they’re positively celebrated. If you’ve actually got video of yourself doing the nasty under those conditions, they’ll pretty much hand you a PhD in Performance Art on the spot …… and yet, nobody does.
I’m not saying people don’t have sex in grad school. If I myself wasn’t getting my ashes hauled every day in the ivory tower, I assure you it wasn’t for lack of trying. What I am saying is that academia is the only place on earth where not only is your fetish — whatever it is — not shameful, but easily satisfied. Those of us who actually enjoy the missionary position with committed partners of the opposite-sex used to joke that ours was the only sexual deviancy so perverse, you’d be shunned by all your colleagues if you admitted to it. These people, on the other hand, talk like their gonads rule their lives, but they never actually do anything about it.
I have no idea why, but finding out would tell us a lot about the psychology of the average Leftist.
Severian, “Gettin’ Busy in College Town”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-04.
March 31, 2021
QotD: The first and only “inalienable” right
It would’ve been far better to have kept the trio in Locke’s original words – life, liberty, and property – but even that wouldn’t have saved us, because the proposition is flawed from the beginning. The full quote is:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …
… and pretty much all of that is wrong.
As we’ve seen, it was a major part of Hobbes’s project to prove that men do in fact have such rights, because it’s not at all “self-evident.” That was the whole point of the Wars of Religion – heretics have NO rights, because they have put themselves beyond the pale of the human community. For the Wars of Religion to end, political legitimacy had to be secularized.
That was Hobbes’s goal. That’s what the “State of Nature” thought experiment was about. Does man has any rights in himself, that flow only from his existence as a human being? In other words, does he have rights NOT endowed by his Creator?
Hobbes argued that we DO have such rights, of course … but, crucially, we only have the full exercise of them in the State of Nature. For Hobbes, all rights are, at bottom, the right to self-defense. Getting out of the State of Nature involves laying at least part of that right down – “alienating” it, in the Latinate English of the 17th century – creating in the process a “corporate person” who “represents” us all. Far from being “inalienable,” then, Life and Liberty, at least, have to be alienated, at least to some degree, if civilization is to exist at all …
… at least according to Hobbes, and do you see what I mean about people trying to adopt his terms while dumping his conclusions?
Hobbes had plenty of examples to hand, writing as he was in the last, nastiest phase of the Wars of Religion. According to Hobbes, the Leviathan – who, let’s recall, can be a Senate or something just as easily as a monarch – absolutely has the right to your life and liberty, since your voluntary surrender of them is what creates the Leviathan in the first place. How else could wars be fought in the gunpowder age? A medieval king leading his personal affinity into battle didn’t have to worry about political theory. An Early Modern king, fielding armies of tens of thousands, did. Without an animating ideology, they’re just mercenaries – ask Machiavelli how that works out.We’ll skip over that “pursuit of happiness” crap, since that’s probably just Jefferson’s noodle-headed way of alluding to Classical political theory, and circle back to the start: “all men are created equal.” As we’ve seen, this was central to Hobbes’s “State of Nature” thought experiment … but, as is obvious to anyone with real-world experience, it only applies there.
Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.
March 23, 2021
QotD: Marx was right … but not about the proletariat
Those fuckheads achieved class consciousness here in the last 30 years, and now they’re doing what Marx said the Proletariat would – making Revolution, overturning the system, causing the State to wither away as they pursue their own interests against tradition, religion, all enemies foreign and domestic. Theirs is a “Marxism” boiled down to its essence: Nihilistic, suicidal envy.
[…]
Once they achieve class consciousness, the Revolution is inevitable – Marx was right about that, too. There are only so many places in the Apparat, after all, and the number of talented, ambitious people in the Empire — even now, after a century’s worth of mandatory “education” — far exceeds the number of make-work jobs the Apparat, any Apparat, can support. Provided we survive it, it will be some cold comfort, watching the bewilderment in their faces as they’re lined up against the wall. Ever read Darkness at Noon?
Severian, “Skynet Becomes Self-Aware”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-11.
March 18, 2021
QotD: Leftists are generally rebelling against the man … even when they’re in charge
That’s where religion really comes in handy, and it’s no surprise that Leftism has so rapidly curdled into a chiliastic suicide cult. Not to tell guys like Max Müller their jobs, but it’s wrong to call Christianity an “Abrahamic” faith. Yes, it sprang from Judaism in its externals, but its orientation is totally inward. Judiasm, and Islam (which IS an “Abrahamic” faith) are outwardly oriented, communitarian. They’re ideally suited for small, tight-knit communities. So are Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Hinduism, and so forth. All of these are best described as ethnic religions — one doesn’t convert to Judaism or Hinduism; one must be adopted into the group.
Christianity and Buddhism, by contrast, are renunciant religions. From the very beginning they were urban faiths. Their ideal figure is the hermit or stylite, but in practice these men are supported by a small, tight-knit community … as opposed, as ostentatiously as possible, to the hustle and bustle of the big city. (That Europe in the “Christian centuries” was overwhelmingly rural is incidental. Christianity took root in the only place it could — the teeming metropolises of the Roman Empire. It spread out from its urban core, such that it was well established in the hinterland by the time the Empire fell). Christians are specifically commanded to be IN the world, but not OF the world, while the whole point of Buddhism is to escape the world while still somehow being physically in it.
It should come as no surprise, then, that what I call Lifestyle Leftists — those groovy folks who aren’t really political, who only mouth the slogans because they’re still trying to live like college kids well into middle age — all adopted some vague Buddhist-flavored “spirituality” back when. They want to make a big show of being against the dominant culture, but they lack the discipline for any real religious commitment, so they, you know, meditate on their, like, auras, man. Lots of nominally Christian denominations got in on the act, too, and hey, look at that
Despite the professional musicians and the light shows, people couldn’t be arsed to go to church, because why would they? Better to, you know, just kinda, like, do your own thing, man, I’m spiritual but not religious.
Alas for them, they forgot the basic thing we noted, above — renunciant doesn’t mean “doing your own individual thing;” it means “retreating into a monastic community.” The sangha is one of the pillars of Buddhism, and the only reason anyone has heard of the Desert Fathers is because those supposed hermits had large communities built up around them. You simply can’t be a solitary Christian or Buddhist, pursuing your own individual enlightenment without reference to the wider world. It doesn’t work like that.
Severian, “Alienation II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-30.
March 12, 2021
QotD: The modern university campus
… but pretty soon you’ll notice that it’s a very battered, grimy sort of heaven. Nobody’s from there, nobody stays there, everyone’s just passing through on the way to something better. Certainly including the faculty: Every single professor not currently at Harvard
thinksknows xzhe deserves to be at Harvard, and will get there someday. Everything’s on-demand in a college town, because everything’s rented. That “distressed” look hipsters love so much isn’t an affectation on campus; it’s a logical outcome of the transient lifestyle. Why fix a pothole, paint a building, trim a tree, teach a class anyone could ever actually use? Anyone who complains will be gone next semester anyway.Get yours before it’s gone, and if that means skipping town one day ahead of the bill collectors, remember: Capitalism is evil.
It’s not just campus, either. The rest of the lifestyle is just as evanescent, just as ugly. Think of the food. Whatever you do, you can’t eat what the Normals eat, drink what the Normals drink. Here again, foodie culture isn’t a hipster affectation on campus. It’s deadly serious status-jockeying with your temporary — always temporary — peers. You’ve got to win now, because next semester they’ll be gone, probably to Harvard, those cheating, ass-kissing bastards. Sure, it looks, smells, and tastes like cold dog puke, but at least you’re the first to eat it!
Severian, “Politics for Fugly People”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-08-24.
February 22, 2021
QotD: Modern academic “life”
… and never more than to people who know themselves un-beautiful, therefore not good, therefore false, and locked in it. Forever.
These people hate us, not because we’re better looking, more socially skilled, or whatever — this is, after all, the Internet — but because we’ve got options. We’re not all fighting over who gets to be Big Fish in an ever-shrinking pond. We’re different things to different people; we haven’t collapsed our social context down to faculty mixers and the one or two non-hamplanet grad students who are silly enough to apply each semester. We can go days, maybe even weeks, without obsessively comparing ourselves to our peers. We don’t care that we’re not “Chad” or “Stacy,” because we’ve got other settings on the emotional dial than “smugness” and “jealousy.”
But we need to start caring. I don’t mean getting obsessive over our appearance. I mean that, since this is in many ways an aesthetic battle, aesthetics will help us win. I half-jokingly suggested a “Normal Guy Uniform” a while back – an all-white ball cap with the New England Patriots’ logo on it. I’m not really kidding now. The Left wins, in large part, because they’re fugly losers that no normal person could possibly consider a threat … until they bash your skull in, or get you fired, or send a SWAT team to your house.
Severian, “Politics for Fugly People”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-08-24.
February 16, 2021
QotD: Homo electronicus and the falling murder rate
If you don’t feel like going all Thoreau, you can test the effect by simply writing your comments to this post out longhand, and then waiting an hour before typing them up. I bet you’ll find it mildly annoying no matter what, but if you’ve really got some thoughts on this matter, by then end of the hour you’ll be something close to furious. You’ve been rewired, comrade. You’re homo electronicus. We all are.
This stuff is recent — really recent. There was a limit to how screen-addled even the infamous “latchkey kids” of the 1980s could be. I had “latchkey kid” buddies, and although we had everything we needed to veg out in front of the tube in the very best Gen Z style — video games, sugary snacks, cable — we couldn’t sit and play Atari all day. I don’t mean that we didn’t; we were no smarter than any other boys; we sure as hell didn’t do anything for our health. I mean we couldn’t. Playing video games gave us ants in the pants — my Mom always knew when I’d been over at Steve’s — and eventually it got to the point where we had to put the joystick down and go throw around a football or something.
These days, the inability to play Nintendo for hours on end means you’ve got ADHD. Pass the Ritalin.
Three things made homo electronicus:
- modern medicine
- instant communications
- permanent caloric surplus.
Ritalin is actually one of the more benign examples. Back in the days when we were allowed to notice such things, a certain kind of social critic pointed out that falling murder rates have very little to do with crime reduction. Instead, it’s almost all attributable to advances in emergency medicine. It’s much tougher for Shitavious to kill D’L’eondrae over a pair of sneakers these days. The ER docs patch the victim up, and so what would’ve been murder one is now mere ADW, which means — Soros-funded DAs being what they are — both victim and perp are soon back on the streets, ready for round two. This idiot rapper, for instance, survived being shot nine times. That’s not nine separate shootings, mind you, that’s nine slugs in one incident. Granted the slipshod motherfuckers who capped him need to work on their aim, but surviving even nine flesh wounds from modern firearms is one hell of a testimony to the power of modern medicine …
… a power that does not, I suggest, conduce to positive eugenic outcomes.
Severian, “Recent Evolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-09-28.
February 7, 2021
QotD: The greatest sin of the Baby Boomers
If that’s harsh on the Boomers, well, sorry, Moonbeam — History don’t care about your feelings. But “the Sixties” isn’t the gravest charge History can lay against you. This is: After all that, you gave the world us, Gen X, the Dumbest Generation of Narcissists in the History of the World. Yes, you guys are responsible for both “Rocky Raccoon” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Severian, “The Look”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-09.
February 2, 2021
When the self-defined elites achieved class consciousness
At Rotten Chestnuts Severian adds to his ongoing series of posts identifying areas where Marx was right:
“Jay Gould’s Private Bowling Alley.” Financier and stock speculator Jay Gould is depicted on Wall Street, using bowling balls titled “trickery,” “false reports,” “private press” and “general unscrupulousness” to knock down bowling pins labeled as “operator,” “broker,” “banker,” “inexperienced investor,” etc. A slate shows Gould’s controlling holdings in various corporations, including Western Union, Missouri Pacific Railroad, and the Wabash Railroad.
From the cover of Puck magazine Vol. XI, No 264 via Wikimedia Commons.
… I liken Karl Marx to one of those bird-masked medieval Plague doctors — he sees the pathology clearly, indeed far faster and better than anyone else, but his proposed “cure” is far likelier to kill you than the actual disease. Worse, what makes Marx’s cure especially lethal is what ends up making his diagnosis essentially right: It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The proletariat is achieving class consciousness, all right — look no further than the GameStop “short squeeze” for proof. But the only reason the proles are achieving class consciousness is because the “capitalists” forced them to, just like Marx said they would. The Elite and the Bureaucracy (usually, but not always, a distinction without a difference) finally achieved class consciousness through the combination of NAFTA and the Louvre Accords. Starting around 1990, then, the Elite self-consciously embraced their role as rootless, stateless, jet-setting parasites (with the wannabe-Elites in the Media, academia, and the bureaucracies signing up for tours of duty as fart-catchers, both to bask in reflected glory and in hopes of being promoted).
In short, our “Capitalists” — really, “financial-ists” or “spreadsheet gangsters,” since they don’t actually make anything, they just bust out existing firms via debt manipulation — behave exactly as Marx described factory owners behaving all the way back in the First Industrial Revolution.In my naivete, I used to think Marx’s ranting was hyperbole. I cited the example of Andrew Carnegie — a real bastard in his youth, who went on to be one of the world’s great philanthropists. That’s human behavior, I said, as opposed to the bloodthirsty caricature of Marx’s fantasies … but I was wrong, comrades. Carnegie happily would’ve sold his fellow Americans down the river, just as Bezos, Gates, and the rest of the pirates-in-neckties are happily selling us down the river now. Only two things prevented it back then: one structural, one cultural.
The structural one is simply technology, and therefore uninteresting. Britain’s “free traders” — you know, the Jardine-Matheson types who started the Opium Wars for fun and profit — would’ve happily outsourced Britain’s entire industrial base to China if they hadn’t been hampered by wind speed. By the time this was technically feasible — which is about 1860, if you’re keeping score — simple inertia had taken over. They didn’t retool until they had to, at which point instant communications and modern ships … well, you know the rest. Like I said, it’s vital, but boring.
The cultural one is much more interesting. You might be tempted to say, as I did, that Jardine and Matheson were always on the lookout for #1, of course, but were sincere British patriots for all that, just as Carnegie for all his faults was an authentic American. I doubt it, comrades. I sincerely doubt it. What kept these guys in check wasn’t patriotism, or even culture. Rather, it was fear.
February 1, 2021
QotD: “Useless things … do not further The Revolution”
Too bad for the Bolshies that it’s in our nature to confuse the messenger with the message. I like to think of myself as an open-minded, tolerant man who takes things as they come, but holy jeeebus, I don’t care what Emma Goldman’s deal is — if she’s for it, I’m against it. I need bleach for my eyes.
We need to use that. It’s no coincidence that Ashley Judd and now Taylor Swift are spouting off about Progtard politics — they used to be cute; now they’re not. See what Social Justice does to you, ladies?
Severian, “The Face You Deserve”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-10-11.
January 31, 2021
QotD: Sixties music wasn’t what you think it was
Tom Jones is great, I love his stuff, but he’s not going to melt your face with his guitar riffs, and he’s there at #8, right in front of “Build Me Up, Buttercup.” Which is one hell of a catchy tune, and compared to “Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet” (#15) it’s practically Slayer, but rock it ain’t. Ray Stevens is at #61, for pete’s sake, with “Guitarzan.” If that hasn’t convinced you that The Sixties were nothing like they show in the movies (and that maybe the Viet Cong deserved to win), I don’t know what would.
Severian, “Entertainers (III): Hair Metal Attains Nirvana”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-08.
