Quotulatiousness

June 14, 2021

Movies based on “classic literature”

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

Severian considers the relative glut of movies more-or-less based on the classics of literature from his formative years:

When I was a young buck, there was a fad for making movies out of “classic literature”. Scads of chick flicks, of course — Jane Austen’s complete works, the Brontës, and so on — but they also took a stab at Shakespeare. Mostly they stuck to the comedies — and trust me, watching Keanu Reeves trying to handle Much Ado About Nothing is hilarious, in all the wrong ways — but they’d occasionally give the tragedies a shot. Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is pretty good despite all the distracting cameos, his Othello is at least sincere (ye gods, imagine trying to make that today!), I think I’m forgetting a few. Mel Gibson gave Hamlet a go back in the early 1990s, and so on. Again, I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting a few.

It always struck me as odd. Unless they timed the theatrical releases to midterm and finals week, hoping to hoover up the dollars of desperate sophomores who didn’t do the homework, it didn’t make much sense, marketing-wise. We were a much more culturally literate people once, it’s true*, but there’s just not much of an audience for the Bard anymore. Nor was it a case of SJWs trying to destroy something good just on general principles. I’m sure Gwyneth Paltrow was bad as Emma, but the idea of retconning every single female in the Western Canon into a Strong, Confident Woman(TM) was still in its infancy. My only other guess was that, since college enrollments were skyrocketing, maybe the parents of all those first-gen college kids were feeling mal-educated and trying to catch up …? Lame, I know, but it was the best I could do.

Looking back on it now, I see my problem: I was looking at it from the demand side. Silly and naive as I was, I assumed that Hollywood’s primary concern was making money, so they went out and found what the people wanted to see, then gave it to them. For instance, I thought Titanic was going to be a huge flop. I mean, the boat sinks. We know that. How do you squeeze any dramatic tension out of it? I should’ve realized they’d be playing it as a doomed-lovers tragedy — girls love that shit, what with the big flouncy costumes and all. Once I realized that, I thought I had it all figured out — every girl I, personally, knew found the works of Jane Austen tedious, but that’s because (I reasoned) you have to supply the images for yourself. Put Hunky McBeef up there in breeches and a peruke, Waify Beecup in a Regency dress, and it’s chick crack …

Or so I thought. Looking back on it now, that’s as dumb as my opinion that Titanic would bomb. Hollywood doesn’t care what you want. I doubt if Hollywood has ever cared what you want, but if they ever did, that time probably ended in tandem with Clara Bow’s career. Hollywood wants what they want, and so will you, because whaddaya gonna do, not watch it? The reason they made all those “classic literature” films in the 1990s, then, wasn’t because they thought we wanted (or needed) some cultural uplift.

No, the reason was: By the 1990s, the last of the old guard in Hollywood was dying off, replaced by the new guard, the Baby Boomers. As we know, it’s not enough for Boomers to control everything while making a shitload of money. No no, for them everything has to be deep and meaningful. They thought of themselves as artistes, not entertainers, so they had to put out a bunch of highbrow stuff, and we had to watch it. This is the sole reason goofy-looking Kenneth Branagh and his horse-faced wife (at the time) were a big cultural force. They made Shakespeare sexy, by which I mean, they allowed the studio heads to think of themselves as the arbiters of culture, not the carny trash they were and are. That some decent movies got made because of it, is entirely incidental.**

    *Last summer, during the worst of lockdown mania, I introduced my little nephews to Bugs Bunny. The real ones, from the 40s and 50s, not the crap they put out ten, twenty years ago. I am an educated man by modern standards, but a lot of that stuff flew over my head … and they used to show these in front of popular movies, on military bases, etc.! There’s the classic Wagner one, of course — kill da wabbit!! — but another one involves The Barber of Seville, which I haven’t seen performed and had to look up. Even the “throwaway” music was classical — they could assume, in other words, that your average workaday guy or GI had a fairly large repertoire of classical pieces in his head, enough to recognize bits from Strauss, Chopin, Schumann, etc.

    **I do kinda regret bashing Sir Kenneth, as wiki tells me he now is. I enjoyed Hamlet (again, despite the annoying cameos), and some of his other work was pretty entertaining, even, in a limited way, visionary — a quirky little picture like Dead Again didn’t do much in 1991, but it would clean up now (a PoMo costume drama!). I’m one of the few people who liked Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which again despite terrible casting (Robert De Niro? Seriously?) was loads of fun. Shelley’s novel as written is ludicrous, therefore unfilmable, but Branagh admirably captured the spirit of it. It’s as Goth as can be, in the original sense of “Gothic”. Wonderful stuff.

May 24, 2021

QotD: The internet is rewiring our brains

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

… there’s a reason 99.998% of the Internet is porn, and that reason is: The Internet, itself, has rewired our brains.

Yeah, I’m a history guy, not a biologist, and no, I can’t show you the specific spots on the fMRI that prove it, but look, you can test this yourself. Ever been around kids? It’s easiest to see in the early grades, so go to a daycare or afterschool program. Trust me, you can pick out right away, with 100% accuracy, the kids who spend more than 3 hours a day at daycare. This is not a knock on daycare providers, lots of whom are good, dedicated people doing hard work. Rather, it’s a knock on the situation, because if a kid’s in daycare that long, it means the parents both work long-hour, high-stress jobs. How do you think the kid’s home life is, under those conditions?

You know as well as I do that when the kid gets home from day care, he gets plunked in front of a tv, a video game, an iPad, a smartphone, some kind of glowing box. That’s what’s rewiring their brains. That’s not “ADHD,” which doesn’t really exist. “ADHD” is a cope, a bit of shorthand, to describe what’s actually going on, which is: These kids’ heads have been rewired. They need constant stimulation. Everything needs to be in five-minute chunks for them, because they’ve never known anything different. Asking them to sit down and pay attention for any length of time – say, in a 60 minute lecture, like our old Prussian (from the 18th century!) system requires – is like asking one of us to suddenly run a marathon, or bench press 300 lbs. It can’t be done; we don’t have the equipment.

Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.

May 11, 2021

QotD: The (disappointing) sex lives of the rich and famous

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

I suspect […] one of the main reasons rock stars, who really can have the super hot model, always end up cheating on her — because it’s not really her. In their minds, they became rock stars specifically to get that kind of girl … but that’s the thing: That kind of girl doesn’t exist. She’s a 2D image, heavily photoshopped. Oh, I’m sure Supermodel X really IS hot in real life, but she’s also just a person, which means she farts and snores and wakes up with bed head and all that. Plus, rock stars really do live with the equivalent of their own personal Photoshop, in the form of a small army of flunkies who make all of life’s routine frustrations go away. So it must be even more maddening to find out that the Cover Girl really does have myriad small blemishes, because, you know, she’s a real person, and not the fantasy you signed up for when you signed that big record deal.

Severian, “Junkies”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-18.

May 6, 2021

QotD: Bureaucracy and “Dunbar’s Number”

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

    Dunbar’s number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships — relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person … By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, [Dunbar] proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.

    Wikipedia

Let’s stipulate that the “leader” of a “Dunbar Group” can effectively manage ALL of the group’s affairs. In our hypothetical community, “Dunbarville” (note that we’re doing a very Hobbesian “thought experiment” here), our leader – let’s call him Steve – can grasp the essentials of every issue facing the town. He doesn’t need to be an expert without portfolio. He doesn’t have to know all the ins-and-outs of, say, farming to be the effective leader of Dunbarville. However, he has to know that farming is a thing, the basics of how it’s done, understand the importance of well-maintained farms to the community, etc. Steve can delegate the management of Dunbarville’s kolkhoz to an experienced expert farmer, but Steve knows enough to be able to intervene effectively if the farm expert gets too big for his overalls.

Now consider what happens if Steve is any good at his job. Because Dunbarville’s kolkhoz is so well-managed, it can support a much larger population than 150. What does Steve do? Well, he knows that a population greater than 150 will be beyond his capacity to handle 100% effectively … but he also knows that forcing population restrictions on Dunbarville is the fastest way to get himself exiled, after which they’re going to have a baby boom anyway, so Steve does the best he can. In a few years he’s operating at 90% efficiency, then 70%, then 55%, because the community is simply growing too large for any one man to handle.

Now he has to delegate, and the delegation has to be permanent. Steve simply can’t keep up with everything that’s going on in the kolkhoz. So he delegates “kolkhoz management” to Gary. Gary’s not a bad guy – in fact, he’s the dude who managed the kolkhoz so well in the first place. But that task is, itself, now too big for even Gary to handle, so Gary hires some assistants. Worse, Gary knows he’s getting on in years, so to make sure the kolkhoz will keep working at peak, baby-boom-causing efficiency even after he’s gone, he sets up the Gary School of Farm Management …

And so forth, you get the point, we don’t have to run through the whole thing. That’s what I mean by “irreducible complexity” (IC). Once you clear the Dunbar Number, certain tasks have to be independently managed by cadres of experts who are only nominally answerable to the central authority. That’s where bureaucrats come in, and that’s where bureaucrats are good. Steve can’t manage ALL of Dunbarville’s affairs anymore, since it’s now a bustling community of 1,500, but he can manage the 150 bureaucrats who report to him. And since those bureaucrats are supervising only 150 people themselves …

Bureaucrats are, in effect, the re-imposition of a Dunbar Number on an increasingly complex society. When I say that the Roman Empire, for example, was under-bureaucratized, that’s what I mean. Maybe the Emperor had the good sense to limit his high officials to 150, but they had to manage 400 lower officials each, and each of those 400 were responsible for 20,000 peasants, or whatever the numbers actually were. That’s “irreducible complexity,” org-charts version. Unless you’ve got a perfectly balanced ratio of managers to managed, things are going to get very fuzzy at the edges, very fast … and that’s of course assuming complete competence on everyone’s part.

Severian, “Anticipations and Objections (I)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-16.

May 3, 2021

QotD: Marcus Aurelius and the “Mandate of Heaven”

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

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.

April 24, 2021

QotD: Marxism and the teenage mind

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

Marxism just seems right to teenagers of all ages. Teenagers’ only frame of reference is their parents, and to the inexperienced — as all teenagers by definition are — even the best parents seem willful and capricious, if not outright tyrannical. (The gray, wrinkled teenagers who refuse to learn merely substitute “society” for “their parents” in their emotional incontinence). Teenagers live in a weirdly binary world, where the switches can only be “on” or “off,” yet all terms are undefined.

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

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the reasons the “Hundred Years’ War” lasted so long, they’ll tell you first off, was that it was punctuated by long periods of (relative) peace. Another was the inability of medieval militaries to conquer and hold territory — the feudal system really doesn’t work for garrisons. Most important, though, was the fact that the “countries” fighting were no such thing. In medieval parlance, “France” and “England” meant “the person of the monarch, plus his immediate feudal retinue.” Your average peasant might’ve been aware, in some vague theoretical way, that his lord’s lord’s lord owed homage to some guy called “Edward III” or “Jean II,” but unless ol’ Whatzisface was actually marching through with an army, it didn’t matter in the slightest. “France” was as abstract a notion as “Christendom” …

… 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”

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

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

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

For normal women, getting laid is a two-step process:

  • 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

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

Oversimplifying a bit for clarity, “republican” political philosophy after Hobbes is an attempt to use Hobbes’s tools and methods without arriving at his conclusions. That baloney about “inalienable rights” in the US Declaration of Independence is the most famous of these attempts. If you want to know how we got from there to here – from the Founders to the Tyranny of the Intersectional Genderfluids – just recall what those supposedly “inalienable” rights are: Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness.

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

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

Karl Marx, damn his rotten soul, was right. Or, more accurately, his followers made him right. The Proletariat never achieved class consciousness on their own. Nor did they do it with the assistance of the Vanguard Party, like Lenin thought. In fact, they only did it — incompletely; they’re in the process of doing it now — with the assistance of a bunch of drooling idiots who can’t even spell “Karl Marx.” I’m speaking, of course, of the Apparat, the managerial class, the iron rice bowl perma-bureaucracy that runs the Imperial Capital.

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

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

Leftism is, and always has been, an oppositional identity. “Rebelling” against “the Man” isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, and despite a half-century of practice, Liberals haven’t figured out how to handle the situation when they, themselves, are The Man. It doesn’t compute. Hence the strange spectacle of modern life, where Lefty controls everything but carries on like he’s a tiny, persecuted minority …

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

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

If you haven’t been on campus lately, visit your local citadel of learning. Don’t just drive through; spend some time there. On the surface, things look lovely — ivy covered walls, dorms like 5 star hotels, trendy boutiques selling stuff you can’t afford to buy, undergraduates wearing more than your week’s take-home pay. Light poles and store walls are covered with flyers for causes only the very wealthy and very idle could possibly care about. In short, it’s heaven …

… 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 thinks knows 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”

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

The point of all this isn’t just more academia-bashing (fun as that is, and thank you Jesus for early retirement). The point is: Life deals people bad hands. Many, perhaps most, of the people I know in academia are there because they really can’t do anything else — a combination of (as they feel it) genes and circumstance has landed them there, and while it looks like a really cushy upper-middle-class life materially, spiritually it’s the pits, because it’s aesthetically awful. The Classical Greek adage that the Good is the True is the Beautiful might not be factually accurate, but it sure feels right …

… 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

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

It should be clear to even the dullest social observer that human software has well and truly outstripped our hardware. We’re not built for the world we’ve built. This has been happening for a long time, of course, but it has really taken off recently. Note how hard it is not to watch tv, for instance. Even if you don’t have one in your home, go to a bar, an airport, hell, go to the grocery store — there are blinking screens everywhere, and it takes serious effort not to watch them. Our hardware interprets bright flashing things as a threat — can’t be helped. If you’ve been away from civilization for a few days, like I was recently, you’ll experience fatigue, even nausea when you first come back into town. The low-level-but-constant effort it takes to override your hardware when surrounded by blinking screens wears you out.

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:

  1. modern medicine
  2. instant communications
  3. 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.

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