Quotulatiousness

September 24, 2019

Bill Belichick’s secret is that he doesn’t have a secret

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

I’m not a Patriots fan so I don’t think of Patriots head coach Bill Belichick as some sort of demi-god … although I have wondered if he’s got some sulfur burns from suspicious handshakes with diabolical representatives … but Severian makes the case that his big secret is that he doesn’t have one:

Head coach Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots watches the preseason game against the Washington Redskins at FedExField on August 28, 2009 in Landover, Maryland.
Photo by Keith Allison via Wikimedia Commons.

Belichick isn’t some kind of super-genius. Nor does he have some unique insight into the game. He’ll never write a book on “The Bill Belichick System,” because unlike every other celebrity coach, he doesn’t have a “system.” He simply does what he needs to do to win, one game at a time, with the pieces he has. That’s just leadership, in the traditional sense of the term, but so few people in our modern Media-driven culture have seen it that it totally fries our circuits. Surely he must have some double-secret grimoire of football excellence that he consults on the sidelines …?

Nope. Belichick’s secret is what he doesn’t have: A huge ego, a “system,” the my-way-or-the-highway mentality that infects nearly everyone given the tiniest smidgen of real power. An example: He once countered (and, of course, defeated) a ferocious defense on crappy field conditions by lining up a sixth offensive lineman as a tight end. Perfectly legal, but nobody else would’ve ever dreamed of doing it.

The Patriots are famous for using their (perennially excellent) tight ends more than any other team in the league, so naturally the opponent spent all week scheming to take away the TE. When Belichick kept his tight ends off the field, the opponent had no idea what to do; their quick cover linebackers got plastered by the extra linemen, and the Patriots’ running backs ran wild.

The lesson from this is twofold: First, that he would think to do it in the first place. Again, it’s perfectly legal. Teams do it all the time, actually, except they do it in goal line situations — instead of cramming the ball up the middle, they send a soft-handed lineman over into the corner of the end zone. He’s too big for anyone back there to cover, so if the QB can get it to him it’s an easy score. All Belichick did was run the same personnel out in the middle of the field. Simple, but football is the most conservative sport in existence — nobody does anything that hasn’t been done a million times before.

The second takeaway is that Belichick had enough control to pull it off. Nobody likes getting his playing time reduced, and tight ends in the modern game are highly-paid gentlemen accustomed to frequent success. Even if they wanted to, most coaches wouldn’t be able to take their glory boys off the field for an extended period — the players would riot, the Media would crucify him, and the fans would go nuts. Belichick’s guys bought in enough to follow the gameplan without complaint. He gave them the credit when the team won, but he would’ve taken the heat if they’d lost. Again, that’s not some special football coaching technique; it’s just leadership.

September 2, 2019

QotD: The abolition conspiracy of the 1850s

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

… the “slave power conspiracy” was a misnomer. Oh, the Southern senators all voted together, but that’s not a conspiracy. “Conspiracy” implies an end, a goal, and the slave power simply didn’t have one. Their actions were purely negative, and if that meant absolutely nothing got done, well, so be it. They were deeply skeptical of federal power anyway; if vetoing anything and everything that might somehow affect slavery meant that the nation would simply drift along, directionless, that suited them just fine.

But there was another conspiracy afoot in the 1850s: The abolition conspiracy. You don’t hear about this one in high school history because the victors write the textbooks, but it was quite real. And this one really was a conspiracy, in that they had a clear goal: The end of chattel slavery. And it was a conspiracy in a more fundamental sense, in that it was illegal. The so-called “slave power conspiracy” was obstructionist to the bone, but it’s perfectly legal for legislators to vote against proposed legislation. It’s not legal to advocate armed insurrection but that’s what the abolitionists did.

On October 16, 1859, a lunatic abolitionist named John Brown led a partisan band in an attack on the Federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. He wanted to distribute the stolen guns to local slaves, thus sparking a race war. We know this because Brown was captured alive, and the great state of Virginia put him on trial, as they were legally required to do. Being a fanatic, and knowing that he was a dead man already, Brown took the opportunity to advertise his cause to the world …

At which point it became obvious that not only did Brown have the financial backing of several prominent Northerners, but he had the moral backing of a large segment of the Northern population. Brown became a martyr, literally — he was frequently compared to Jesus Christ in Northern periodicals. The important thing to note is this: Brown was captured in armed insurrection against the United States, and lots of the country was ok with it. This man simply decided that the legal processes could never result in the outcome he deemed morally necessary, so he took the law into his own hands — with the active connivance of prominent Northern financiers and intellectuals, and the avid approval of many Northern citizens.

Remember that, and Southern belligerency makes a whole lot more sense. The North was obviously ready to go to the gun in 1861, because they’d already gone to the gun in 1859. The “John Brown Moment,” then, is the point at which violence becomes inevitable, because one significant, influential segment of the country not only passively tolerates it, but actively cheers it.

Severian, “The John Brown Moment”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-16.

August 23, 2019

Reasons to expect an even weirder (and scarier) US election in 2020 than in 2016

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

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains why the First World War was inevitable (because of the fecklessness of all the world leaders at the time) and then points out that the same sort of inevitability seems to be playing out in the run-up to the 2020 US elections:

Donald Trump addresses a rally in Nashville, TN in March 2017.
Photo released by the Office of the President of the United States via Wikimedia Commons.

In short, World War 1 was a massive, indescribably bloody dick-measuring contest between a few inbred yokels. To anyone who has met the Sons of Privilege,* or who is passingly familiar with the Peter Principle, this comes as no surprise. Hell, Lenin saw it, and a guy with his egg head further up his own ass you’ll never find.** All you have to do is look at the people, not the paper.

That’s where the modern political landscape gets so terrifying. Looking at the paper from the establishment Democrats’ point of view, their course of action seems obvious. And credit where it’s due, even Slow Joe Biden and Fauxcahontas are smart enough (or, more likely, have hired people who are smart enough) to see the obvious once it gets rubbed in their faces a few dozen times — Slow Joe is playing the above-it-all unifier, while Dances with Socialism has gone on a Hillary-esque “listening tour” for The Media’s benefit. Should they choose, The Media can now memory hole all the “fake Indian” stuff, and yell “racist!” at anyone who tries to dredge it back up …

… but I don’t think they’ll choose to. The human factor always wins, and the humans (using the term in its strictest biological sense) in The Media are fed up close to bursting. The mask is completely off “The Squad,” and The Media couldn’t be happier. I’m sure that, in their heart of hearts, Nancy Pelosi et al don’t have a problem with BDS, or the Green New Deal, or any of the rest of it. But flying to Israel on the taxpayer’s dime to support Palestinian terrorism just doesn’t play in Peoria, and the Establishment Dems know it. The Media, however, do not — just look at the coverage.

I’m also quite confident that Nancy et al are even, in their heart of hearts, ok with “Antifa” shooting at cops and firebombing ICE offices. Nancy, after all, came up in the heyday of Jim Jones’s San Francisco, so she’s no stranger to political violence. But The Media absolutely cream themselves over “revolutionaries.” They’ve kept this stuff under wraps so far — Nancy et al have convinced them it’ll hurt Donald Trump more than it will hurt them if they keep it bottled up — but every single person in The Media had xhzhyr first wet dream about Che Guevara. I doubt they can keep it in their pants too much longer, especially if — as seems all but certain — “Antifa” commits some gaudy, gross atrocity in the 2020 campaign season.

Nor can we discount the human factor regarding Normals. Every day brings a new insult — Twitter colluding with China to suppress democratic protests in Hong Kong while all-but-openly banning anyone to the right of Mao; gender-and-race-swapping comic book characters; anything and everything to throw sand in Normals’ faces. If Trump’s victory in 2016 was The Great Fuck You, I can’t even imagine what it’ll look like in 2020, after four more years of this stuff ramped up way past 11.

It’s not looking good, but since the idiots in charge have never even thought about looking up from the paper, the whole thing is going to catch them completely unprepared. Forget “that’s how you got Trump;” this is how you get the Somme.

* they’re like the Sons of Anarchy, but effete and usually gay.
** though he basically just stole the idea from Hobson, who, though a goofy love-the-worlder, was actually a pretty smart guy.

Loving “science”

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

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian explains the differences between how ordinary people view science and many progressives “f*cking love” science:

For the benefit of younger readers: If you think Lefties Fucking Love Science(TM) now, you have no idea of the torrid affair they carried on with it back when the USSR was still a going concern. Karl Marx, of course, pretended that his sub-Hegelian flatulence was the only truly scientific world view, and his disciples have been playing along ever since. “The facts have a liberal bias,” you’d routinely be informed, by people who spent $200 to have their chakras cleansed by a Navajo shaman once every two months.

I can’t think of a better illustration of what I call (for lack of a better term) the Left’s grammar problem. Lefties tend to get nouns and verbs mixed up. “Science,” for instance. I’m not going to go all Vox Day here and start making up words, but when normal people say “science,” we generally mean it as a verb:

    “Science” is what scientists do; it’s shorthand for “applying the scientific method.”

This is why, when we’re presented with a startling new find from the white coat guys — that the polar ice caps have all melted, say — we ask to see the lab work. If it’s really science, then we should be able to replicate the experiment ourselves. Or, at the very least, you should be able to show us the satellite photos…

Which nicely highlights the Left’s notion of “science.” To them, it’s a noun:

    “Science” is a fixed body of knowledge; upon which “scientists” operate the way theologians work on the Bible.

What “scientists” do in the Left’s world, then, is what normal people call “hermeneutics.” This is why the bizarre phrase “the science is settled!” makes sense to Leftists. You don’t get to see God’s lab work, after all, and you’re not allowed to make up new Scriptures. To them, an ordinary person challenging a “scientist” on a point of “science” is like a layman challenging the Pope on a point of theology.

August 3, 2019

QotD: The 1968 election and the schizoid break of the American media

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

… in hindsight 1968 was obviously the country’s schizoid break. The Democratic Party didn’t go completely off the rails — cf. all the candidates they ran, 1972-2004, who were the definition of anodyne — but The Media sure as hell did. 1968 was also the year of the Tet Offensive, you’ll recall, with Walter Cronkite proclaiming the war unwinnable. It doesn’t matter if Cronkite was right or not (of course he wasn’t); nor does it matter if his proclamation actually made everyday Americans lose faith in the war. What matters is that The Media believed it, with all their hearts and souls. No profession is dumber, or more addicted to singing hosannas to itself, than journalism. And then they “got” Richard Nixon, and that’s all she wrote — from there on out, The Media decided they were the country’s real rulers, and what they want, they get.

Fortunately for the Democrats, what The Media wanted and what the Democratic Party wanted were in the same ballpark for most of the next three decades. But then Bill Clinton happened, as my students would write. He played The Media’s Messiah fantasies for all they were worth, such that every bobblehead in the country was still defending him as Liberalism’s avatar even as he was governing (in the few odd moments he bothered) as Newt Gingrich’s mini-me and acting like a frat boy on nickel beer night at the strip club.

You just don’t get over something like that.

Which brings us to the elections of 2000 and 2004. Boy do these look different in hindsight! […] I knew The Media was all-in on the Democrat, like they always are. But at the time, I thought that was a tactical decision. That is, I really believed that their attacks on W. were calculated political moves, designed to drag Gore and especially Kerry over the finish line. I thought that only the Mother Jones types were delusional, Iranian mullah-style fanatics.

Nope. The Media — ALL of them — really did see W. as the antichrist, the Twelfth Invisible Hitler (as the Z Man likes to put it) come to destroy the world. So when despite all their sacrifices to Moloch the Chimperor won, The Media went full retard. Like UFO cultists who keep the faith by telling themselves only their fervent prayers staved off the apocalypse, The Media convinced themselves that only more Social Justice would do …

Severian, “The Spirit of ’68”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-01.

May 23, 2019

Those “theories of history”

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

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian starts off talking great-man versus vast-impersonal-forces-of-history then segues into passivity (not Severian’s, but the widespread use of the passive voice):

Lionel Royer (1852-1926). Vercingetorix jette ses armes aux pieds de Jules César (Vercingetorix throws down his arms at the feet of Julius Caesar)
The painting depicts the surrender of the Gallic chieftain after the Battle of Alesia (52 BC). The depiction of Gauls with long hair and mustaches is also called into question today. The horse is a Percheron, although at this time this breed was not in Gaul. The rectangular shield also does not accord with the time when they were mostly oval.
Musée CROZATIER du Puy-en-Velay. — http://www.mairie-le-puy-en-velay.fr/ via Wikimedia Commons.

Academics, of course, are all in on “social” explanations of historical phenomena. Being weak, ineffective people themselves, with no experience of life, the very idea of a Caesar frightens and repels them… so they construct theories of History in which it is impossible for a Caesar to exist. On this view, “social forces” (what they used to call “the relations of the means of production”) tore the Roman Republic apart; the Empire was its inevitable next stage. Assign whatever name you like to the Imperator — whether Caesar, Marius, Sulla, or Miles Gloriosus, he’s just the temporary face of the vast, impersonal social forces that control our fate. None of this “History is just the biographies of great men” for them!

The eggheads have a point, though, albeit not the one they think they’re making. The Roman elite’s social system was designed to produce a certain type of man. Whether Gaius Julius Caesar was personally the embodiment of that system, or a perversion of it, is irrelevant — the system was designed to produce men like Caesar, fellows with a very particular set of skills. Eggheads have never seen one, but anyone who has kicked around the world outside the ivory tower for a bit has met that type of guy. The skills themselves are fairly common, at least in embryo. Whether a potential Caesar becomes actual might well be merely a question of opportunity and scale.

A terrifying notion, that, when you look around the modern West. The one characteristic all effective elites have in common is the self-knowledge that they are the elite. The British, for instance, thought nothing of sending some 19 year old kid, whose slim formal education was mostly Latin and Greek, off to govern the Punjab. It worked, largely because that kid, whatever his defects of intellect and ability, had character, of the kind you just don’t get without a pedigree stretching back to Hastings.

Again, if you’ve ever met one of the horsey set you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, the most accessible American equivalents are the sons and grandsons of career army officers. Think of Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump, as played by Gary Sinise in the movie. That kind of guy always completes the mission, or dies trying, because it’s simply unthinkable that he won’t. After five generations, West Point is in his DNA…

May 15, 2019

“Our” intellectuals and how they got that way

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

Over at Rotten Chestnuts, Severian says we should blame the eggheads:

Because its goals were impossible, The Revolution didn’t go as planned. For every two self-deluded fools who thought the Soviet Union was a new civilization, there were five who knew exactly what the Communists were about. Bomb-throwing anarchists had terrorized European cities for years before 1917, and Red atrocities during the Civil War were no secret. It was obvious to anyone who cared to look, then, that horrors like the White Sea Canal were features, not bugs, of Communism.

If you’ve read your Festinger, you know what happened next. The True Believers searched frantically for any “explanation” that wouldn’t invalidate their precious Marxism, and Antonio Gramsci gave it to them. Though he didn’t coin the term “false consciousness” (Georgy Lukacs did), Gramsci weaponized it. The reason the Bolsheviks are forced to do all that awful stuff — which we don’t admit they actually did! — is that The People lack the proper revolutionary consciousness. They still believe in stuff like “God,” “free speech,” “not getting starved to death while the Party fatcats drive around in limos,” etc.

And where do they get this “false consciousness,” comrades? Why, it’s the same place the Western proles get theirs, which is also why the Western proles haven’t joined The Revolution (yet!), in fulfillment of the scriptures. Gramsci called the false consciousness installation process “hegemony.” There are a zillion unread academic tomes covering all the nuances, but the basic idea is simple enough: The ruling class controls the institutions; the institutions transmit culture; therefore, the culture takes ruling class values for granted.*

The solution, therefore, is as simple as the diagnosis: Capture the institutions, change the culture.

I trust y’all see where this is going. The best conspiracy theories are the ones that are actually true, and this one is. You want a grand conspiracy to destroy Western Civ? Here it is, laid out as openly as Marxist prose can express it, in excruciating detail. If anything, I’m being unfair to Antonio Gramsci. He put it all together in true kommissar style, but these ideas were everywhere on the Left in the early 20th century. In America, for instance, Progressives like John Dewey had been maneuvering to get control of elementary schools since the late 19th century. Progressives just looooove putting their hands on children. Have you noticed?

Every single insane, culture-destroying, gulag-enabling idea the Left has had in the last 200 years, starting with Karl Marx’s sub-Hegelian flatulence itself, can be traced directly back to some fucking egghead. I’ll repeat that: DIRECTLY. You can find their works, and quote them, because this stuff is in every syllabus of every Humanities class of every college in the Western world. The prose is opaque as only PoMo prose can be, but the main ideas are easy enough to decipher….

…I wrote “ideas,” but there’s really only one “idea.” Since The Revolution obviously ain’t gonna happen — it seems even Leftists can acknowledge one tiny aspect of reality, if you give ’em twelve decades and 100 million bodies — the Left’s entire program, top to bottom, stem to stern, is shit-flinging nihilism. Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go — not because it’s Western, but because it’s Civilization.

May 7, 2019

QotD: Competitive Wokeness

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

I love competitive #Wokeness.

No, seriously — it’s high time you people out in the real world got to experience one of the defining joys of life in the ivory tower. In the ivy-covered halls of academe, the Marxist Postcolonialist Feminsts have longstanding beef with the Postcolonialist Feminist Marxists. They’d each happily feed the other into a wood chipper, even though to outsiders it would look like the pot executing the kettle for counterrevolutionary crimes. If you’re the sort who takes schadenfreudy delight in very obvious folly, university life is hilarious.

It’s even funnier if you take these buffoons at their word. Compared to the pronouncements of your average Angry Studies professor, Pol Pot was a sane and balanced man. In reality, of course, university people are so soft and coddled, they make the Eloi look like the Sons of Anarchy. Spending so much time around college folk is one of the main reasons for my mantra: “Today’s SJW is tomorrow’s obergruppenfuhrer.” They talk a fearsome game, these campus Ches, but they cry if the cafeteria is out of free trade sustainably sourced indigenous grown gluten free soy milk. When the zeitgeist shifts, they’ll be the first to knuckle under.

Severian, “The Reluctant Revolutionary”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-04-05.

March 14, 2019

Life in the modern academic paradise

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

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian recounts his time in the idyllic Ivory Tower of modern academia:

Imagine you’re some kind of Gulliver-type explorer, and you reach an island of perfect bliss. Clear air, gentle breezes, balmy temperatures, and all the delicious food you can eat. And the natives! They live to serve you, completely unconstrained by anything so antiquated as Western sexual morality. Limitless 5G internet. Anything you want to eat, drink, watch, read, do, say, insert, or have inserted, it’s all yours at the snap of your fingers. Got it?

Now imagine that the rulers of this little slice of paradise do nothing but sit on the side of the road all day, smashing their own toes with ball-peen hammers.

That’s life in a college town. The Left run everything. They set the admissions requirements. They have unlimited budgets, and since they do, the entire commercial ecosystem exists only for them. All cuisine is “fusion,” you have to drive to the next burg over to find milk that comes from cows, and every single item of public culture — from sidewalk graffiti to public radio to experimental theater troupe — does nothing but flatter them. There is no fetish so outre, no practice so bizarre, that you can’t find at least one other enthusiastic participant. It’s intersectional genderfluid heaven….

…. and every single person in it is miserable. I’m serious — if it’s not too far out of your way, drive down to your nearest college town, and just watch the faces. You might glimpse a grinning undergrad or two — they’re too young and dumb to know better; they’ll be fully reeducated by junior year — but you can spot the tenured faculty solely by their scowls. The only thing that temporarily alleviates the existential horror of their lives is getting outraged by something, which — since, again, they control everything — means tilting at windmills is their only sport; they play it with a cutthroat intensity the football coach can only dream of.

How can you not be fascinated by that? To utterly refute the view of man as homo economicus, all you have to do is watch the facial expressions of people who are “the 1%” by any measure that makes sense. It’s one hell of a show…

February 1, 2019

Severian explains why he quit teaching

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

Spoiler: it wasn’t fun anymore. As to why it wasn’t fun, it was (say it together with me) the youth of today:

It’s not that kids today are mal-educated, woefully ignorant, and wouldn’t know serious academic work if it bit them on the ass. Those are all true, of course, but that’s the way it has always been — I have no doubt Plato said the same thing about Aristotle (and Socrates no doubt said it about Plato). In my experience, the rueful phrase “back when I was in college” first escapes your lips approximately 36 hours into graduate school.

It’s not the quantity of ignorance, then, but the quality. Generation Snowflake really are New Soviet Men. If you’ve read about life under Stalin, especially, you’ll know what I’m talking about — at once invincibly self-righteous and cringingly subservient, modern students come across like junior volunteer commissars. If they don’t already know it, it’s by definition not worth knowing… and you’re an asshole — to be avoided, undermined, ignored, or (very, very grudgingly) tolerated, as the situation dictates — for trying to make them “learn” something new.

They’re not sociopaths, exactly, but that’s close enough to what they are that we’ll go with it. For instance: They have no problem asking you to move due dates, even for big things like midterm exams, if it inconveniences them. And just them — the rest of the class should still have to take the exam on Friday; it’s just that she, Suzy Snowflake, has a big sorority function that weekend that she really needs to prepare for, so she should be allowed to take it Monday. Nor do they have a problem with lying on spec, just to see if you’ll bite. Tell Suzy no, she still has to take the exam on Friday like everyone else, and there’s a decent chance you’ll be getting a “dead Grandma” email from her over the weekend — my Grandma died suddenly this Friday, I had to go home for the funeral, I’m so broken up, I’m free to take the makeup exam on Monday.

No, I’m not joking, and yes, you can check Suzy Snowflake’s social media and find pictures of her downing shots at the big sorority do Saturday night. And yes, she knows those pictures are out there; Generation Snowflake regards the concept of “online privacy” like your cat thinks about calculus. It’s just that hey, maybe you won’t check. Worth a shot, right? If anyone should be upset it’s her, for making her feel bad by doubting her story. She’ll saunter into class on Monday like nothing happened…. because to her, nothing did. She threw a Hail Mary, it got intercepted, oh well, what’s new in the Netflix queue?

Faced with that, any attempt at education is like King Canute ordering back the tides. It’s excruciatingly pointless, and that’s why I quit. Life’s too short to spend raging against the inevitable.

January 30, 2019

The past is a foreign country, part umpteen-and-one

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian tries to gin up some sympathy for Millennial snowflakes, who feel cheated by fate (and their parents’ generation, but mostly their parents’ generation):

One of the toughest parts of looking at The Past (note capital letters) is grasping the pace of change. Oversimplifying (but not too much), you’d need to be a PhD-level specialist to determine if a given cultural production dated from the 11th century, or the 14th. The worldview of most people in most places didn’t change much from 1000 to 1300. Even in modern times, unless you really know what you’re looking for, a writer from 1830 sounds very much like a writer from 1890.*

Until you get to the 20th century. Then it’s obvious.

This isn’t “presentism” — the supposed cardinal sin of historical study, in which we project our values onto the past.** It really is obvious, and you can see it for yourself. Take Ford Madox Ford. A hot “Modernist” in his day — he was good friends with Ezra Pound, and promoted all the spastic incomprehensibles of the 1920s — he was nevertheless a man of his time… and his time was the High Victorian Era (born 1873). Though he served in the Great War, he was a full generation older than his men, and it shows. Compare his work to Robert Graves’s. Though both were the most Advanced of Advanced Thinkers — polygamy, Socialism, all that — Graves’s work is recognizably “modern,” while Ford’s reads like the writing of a man who really should’ve spent his life East of Suez, bringing the Bible and the Flag to the wogs. The world described in such loving detail in a work like Parade’s End — though of course Ford thought he was viciously criticizing it — might as well be Mars.

We’re in the same boat when it comes to those special, special Snowflakes, the Millennials. A Great War-level change really did hit them, right in their most vulnerable years. While we — Gen X and older — lived through the dawn of the Internet, we don’t live in the Internet Age (TM). Not like they do, anyway.

He does a bit of a Fisking (that’s an olde-tyme expression from when we used to knap our own flint, kiddies) of an article by a Millennial writer trying to make the case that the plight of the Millennials is comparable to that of the Lost Generation. But some actual sympathy is eventually located and delivered:

I titled this piece “Sympathy for Snowflakes,” and finally we’ve arrived. The days of life on the cul-de-sac with the white picket fence are indeed gone… but they’ve been gone for thirty years or more. They were in terminal decline since before Rush started singing about suburbs — that was 1982, if you’re keeping score at home — and what awful conformist hells they are. Ever heard the phrase “sour grapes?” I’m not going to say we invented that — after all, anything worth saying was already said by Dead White Males hundreds of years ago — but that’s why Gen X pop culture is full of rants against “conformism.” Slackers, Mallrats, all of it — sour grapes, buddy. If you in fact grew up on a cul-de-sac behind a white picket fence, your parents, who must’ve been early Gen Xers, were among the lucky few.

The difference between your generation and mine, Mr. Lafayette, isn’t what we wanted once we matured enough to start actually knowing what we wanted. It’s that my generation received rigorous-enough educations to figure out that the house on the cul-de-sac with the white picket fence is an aberration, just a flicker of static. Only one tiny group of people — middle class Americans, born roughly 1945-1965 — ever got to experience it. Young folks in the 1220s probably lived much as their parents did back in the 1180s, but modern life doesn’t work that way. These days, everyone makes do with what he has, gets on as best he can. Your generation, Mr. Lafayette, was taught to regard The Past as one long night of Oppression, and because of that, you never learned to take any lessons from it.

That’s why I’m sympathetic, even as I’m mocking you (but gently, lad, gently). That’s the real parallel between yourselves and the Lost Generation — it was done to you. You had no choice, and unlike the Lost Generation, you can’t even pin the blame anywhere. It just….kinda… happened. No wonder you feel adrift and powerless. No wonder “stand up straight” and “clean your room” seem like adages of life-altering wisdom.

So take an old guy’s advice, and READ. Read just about anything, so long as it’s published before 1950. Don’t think, don’t analyze, don’t snark, just read it. The change will come.

December 6, 2018

“Marx was right”

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

An interesting little bit of history and philosophy over at Rotten Chestnuts:

Marx was right: Society really is shaped by relations between the means of production.

The Middle Ages, for instance, organized itself around defense from marauding barbarian hordes. Fast, heavy cavalry were the apex of military technology at the time; the so-called “feudal” system were the cavalry’s support. The system was field tested in the later Roman empire — medieval titles like “duke” came from the ranks of the Roman posse comitatus — and perfected in the Dark Ages.

When the barbarians had been pacified sufficiently that Europeans had leisure time to think about this stuff, they took the feudal system — at that point a cumbersome relic — as their model for society. Hobbes, Locke, et al saw it as the origin of the Social Contract; Marx saw it as finely tuned oppression. But here’s the fun part:

Hobbes ends his Leviathan with the most absolute monarch that could ever be. He starts* with… wait for it… the equality of man. Marx, on the other hand, ends with the equality of man. He starts with a frank, indeed brutal, acknowledgment of man’s inequality. As much as I love Hobbes (and consider Leviathan the only political philosophy book worth reading), he’s wrong — fundamentally wrong — and Marx is right. Marx went wrong somewhere down the line; Hobbes jumped the track from page one.

Marx only went wrong when he started dabbling in metaphysics. Marxism isn’t the original underpants gnome philosophy, but it’s certainly the best — not least because Marx’s followers were so successful at hiding the deus ex machina that was supposed to bring Communism about. Marx didn’t just say “The Revolution will happen because that’s the way all the trend lines are pointing.” He said “the trend lines are pointing that way, and oh yeah, the animating Spirit of History demands that the Revolution shall happen.” This is so obviously sub-Hegelian junk that his followers dropped it as fast as they could, but to Marx himself it was the key to his philosophy. For all its formidable technobabble, Marxism is just another chiliastic mystery cult.

[…] Enlightenment-wise, Hobbes was the start, Marx the end of political philosophy, and both are flawed beyond redemption. Hobbes sure sounds like a viable alternative to Marx, because Hobbes’s reasoning seems sound, and based on an irrefutable premise: That in the State of Nature, life is nasty, poor, solitary, brutish, and short. But that’s not Hobbes’s premise — the fundamental equality of man in the State of Nature is. Life in the State of Nature is brutal because all men are equal.

* If you’ve read Leviathan, of course, you know he starts the book itself with a long discourse on contemporary physics. Hobbes was an innovator there, too — he’s the first person to put forth his humanistic ideas as the coldly logical deductions of physical science. It’d be fun to taunt the “I fucking love science” crowd with that, except they think Hobbes is a cuddly cartoon tiger and “Leviathan” one of the lesser houses at Hogwarts.

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress