Anyway, because I’m actually interested in how people are and how they lived, I love “living history”. I know, I know, I’m the one who brought up the Civil War, but though I admire (in a very limited sense) the dedication of “reenactors”, we ain’t going there, lest the comments get way off track. Instead, I’ll refer you to the works of Ruth Goodman. She apparently shows up on a lot of “living history” shows in Britain, which are apparently quite popular over there, and she writes good books about the experience, most with “How to” in the title: I’ve read How to be a Victorian and How to be a Tudor, and they’re both great fun.
The thing you’ll notice right away if you read them is how utterly tedious life was pre-electricity. Actually, no, tedious is the wrong word, since in our usage it implies “mindless” and that’s exactly the opposite of Victorian and especially Tudor life. A much better word is “laborious”, maybe even just “hard”. Life was hard back then. Even the simplest tasks took hours, because everything had to be done by hand. You had a few simple machines, of course — simple in the mechanical sense, though nearly every page brings its “gosh, I never would’ve thought of that!” surprise — but mostly it’s muscle power. If you’re lucky, a horse’s or a donkey’s muscles do some of the heaviest work, but mostly it’s straight-up human effort.
And it’s far from mindless. How to be a Tudor has a long section on baking bread, for instance, and it’s fascinating. There’s a reason bakers had their own guild and were considered tradesmen; it takes a lot of well-honed skill to make anything but the coarsest peasant stuff. And of course that coarse peasant stuff takes a decent amount of skill itself, which is just one of a zillion little skills your average housewife would have. If you read the section on bread-baking and really try to imagine doing it, you’ll find yourself almost physically exhausted … and that’s just one minor chore among dozens, maybe hundreds, that everyday people had to do each and every day.
In other words, everyday Tudor people were “simple”, in the old sense that means “unsophisticated”, but they were never, ever bored. Even the relatively well-off, even when everything was peaceful and prosperous and functioning perfectly, were constantly mentally engaged with the world. They had to be. Imagine if getting your daily bread took not just two hours’ labor, but an actual plan. If you didn’t start your day figuring out how you were going to get fed that day, you wouldn’t eat. They had dozens, probably hundreds, more daily tasks than we ever have, and while any one of those tasks can probably be performed on autopilot if taken in isolation, they were never taken in isolation. Maybe the housewife could bake bread on autopilot, but while her hands were doing that seemingly of their own volition, her mind was lining up the zillion other things she had to do that day. Her mind was constantly engaged.
And “housewife” was a deeply meaningful term back then. The next thing that strikes you, after the sheer amount of effort everything took, is the necessity of communal life. Just the basics of day-to-day living pretty much requires a nuclear family — husband, wife, a few kids. And that’s your hardy yeoman type on the edge of starvation on the forest’s fringes. In any larger settlement, everyone knows everyone, intimately, because your very life depends on it — not only do you know the miller personally, you’ve got a major, indeed mortal, interest in how he lives his life, because if he’s shorting you, you die … or, at least, your already hard life gets a whole lot harder. There’s basically no such thing as privacy, because there can’t be.
Severian, “On Boredom”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-17.
September 8, 2024
QotD: Life in pre-mechanical times
September 2, 2024
QotD: Yes, yes, but does it work in theory?
I told y’all a while back about a friend of mine in grad school, who did his dissertation on an aspect of the Vietnam War. I’m making some of this up, of course, to protect various anonymities, but it’s at least as “fake but accurate” as the Rather Memo. Anyway, he had a long section on how Colonel So-and-So’s actions while attached to MACV-SOG only made sense in the light of his belief that his ARVN counterpart, Maj. Long Duc Dong, was a Communist infiltrator.
To my buddy, this appeared to be a completely unproblematic assertion. After all, he had reams of paperwork from Col. So-and-So, asserting his categorical belief that Long Duc Dong was a communist. Please note that it was absolutely irrelevant, for dissertation purposes, if Long Duc Dong actually was a Communist. It only matters that Col. So-and-So thought he was, and acted accordingly — which was a 100% true fact, about as “proven” as anything gets in the Liberal Arts. It’s actually extremely rare in the History Biz to find someone saying something like “I, Colonel So-and-So, believe X, with all my heart and soul, and I’m staking my entire professional reputation, not to mention the very lives of my soldiers, on this belief,” but that’s what my buddy had.
One particular prof on my buddy’s defense committee had a problem with this section. Oh, the evidence was fine, and the conclusions reasonable, and well written, and all that jazz. It was just that my buddy didn’t have enough Theory. That’s how it came back through the mark-up process: “Needs more Theory”.
This is where you need to understand academia’s weird argot, as it’s a window into the Smart People’s world. Normal folks would be scratching their heads at this point. Didn’t my buddy already have a theory, a really robust one? “Col. So-and-So only did thus-and-such because he thought Long Duc Dong was a Communist.” My buddy unearthed literal reams of evidence pointing to exactly that. QED, time to move on dot org …
… but that’s not how “Theory” works in academia. I’ve been very careful to capitalize it, because to them, it’s nothing so grubby as “a hypothesis which can be verified or rejected on the basis of evidence”. No, “Theory” is that highfalutin’ Frog shit. What my buddy really needed was an analysis of Long Duc Dong’s subalternity (or “subalterity”, despite years in grad school I’m still not sure which one is “correct”) vis a vis Col. So-and-So, an examination of the colonial and postcolonial discourses of power between the two of them, a long explication of the Colonel’s hegemony and Dong’s resistance. In other words, a shitload of buzzwords, simply for the sake of having buzzwords.1
That‘s how Smart People operate. The real world of actions and consequences, real people doing real things, is completely irrelevant. If you can’t fit it into Gayatri Spivak’s work on “strategic essentialism”, it doesn’t matter.
That’s why Smart People’s decisions seem so randomly stupid, yet planned, simultaneously. They’re not interested in examining actual facts in the real world. Most of the time, they’re not dealing with what we’d recognize to be “facts” at all. Regarding Long Duc Dong’s “subalternity”, or “subalterity”, or whatever, normal people’s normal response is: Who gives a shit? He himself surely didn’t, not having his PhD in Grievance Studies, and neither did Col. So-and-So. Those dumbasses, being so very very NOT-Smart, were only concerned with irrelevancies like “staying alive” and “winning the war”.
But to the Smart, Long Duc Dong’s subalternity (or whatever) isn’t just a real thing, it’s the only thing. When they’re forced to confront actual facts in the real world, they will put all their mental energy into shoehorning those facts into their paradigm, their “Theory”. Hence, Afghanistan. Did the Totally Legit Joe administration really believe that handing a list of our people to the Taliban was a good idea? Did they really think the Taliban would help them get to the airport, rather than marking them down on their rapidly-growing kill list?
You’re damn right they did. Despite all evidence, despite all reason, because the Afghans are “the subaltern” in the Smart People’s Theory — they have to act in thus-and-such way, because Postcolonial Theory insists they can do no other.
Really. I know it’s mind-boggling, but it’s nonetheless true.
Severian, “Mail”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-27.
1. After talking my buddy down from the ledge — he had, after all, spent years on this, including several trips to frickin’ Hanoi — we got blind drunk together and had great fun writing the “Theory” section of that chapter. My friends, you’ve never seen such incomprehensible polysyllabic buffoonery. The Postmodern Essay Generator itself couldn’t have done better. To this day I have no idea what any of that shit meant — not one word — but it sailed through committee, and my buddy now has tenure at Big State. When he went to publish his diss as his first book, even the editors — no mean SJWs themselves — confessed to being baffled by it, and suggested taking it out.
August 27, 2024
QotD: Who were the good guys?
A movie can get away with showing mostly shades of gray, but in the case of the Valkyrie plot, both shades are pretty damn close to black.
Nor was the 2008 movie, starring Tom Cruise, an isolated case. A few years earlier, Jude Law and Ed Harris squared off as dueling snipers in Enemy at the Gates … set during the Battle of Stalingrad. Who do you root for, the Nazi or the Commie? The producers opt for “commie”, obviously, but their attempts to humanize the Jude Law character are embarrassing — even if we accept Law’s character as totally apolitical, no movie featuring a political commissar in a vital supporting role, not to mention “cameos” by Khrushchev and Stalin himself, can fail to remind viewers that everyone involved was awful. Even the most gripping battle scenes (and to be fair, some of them were pretty good) can’t make up for the fact that the world would be a far, far better place if they somehow both could’ve lost.
Those are high-level failures, conceptual mistakes, the kind that professional storytellers simply shouldn’t make. Not only that, though, both movies have unforgivable mistakes in the execution, at almost every level. Tom Cruise, for instance, is comically miscast as Stauffenberg. I’ve written before about how weird it is that casting directors seem to obsess over finding actors who look like even obscure historical figures. Cruise looks a bit like Stauffenberg, I guess, but there’s simply no way a guy with his … ummm … distinctive acting style should be anywhere near a historical drama. Tom Cruise only ever really plays Tom Cruise, so “Tom Cruise dressed up as a Nazi” is really jarring.
And that’s before you consider the accents. Maybe Tom Cruise can’t do a German accent, I dunno. I seem to recall he did an Irish accent in a movie once, and that turned out ok, but again, whatever character he was playing was just “Tom Cruise with an Irish accent.” So maybe if you feel you must cast him as a German, letting him use his “natural” American accent is the way to go. But if you’re going to do that, please, for pete’s sake, make everyone else do an American accent, too. I know Kenneth Branagh can do one. So either cast guys who can do the right accent, or, failing that, who can do each other’s accent. Otherwise you get a huge, distracting mess.
Enemy at the Gates was actually worse: Law, Joseph Fiennes (the commissar), and Rachel Weisz (the love interest) all used their native British accents … but they’re different kinds of British accent, at least in Law’s case. Meanwhile, Ed Harris (the Nazi antagonist) uses the “neutral” American accent, while supporting player Ron Perlman, who is American, does a comically over-the-top Russian … as do the guys playing Khrushchev and Stalin. It’s just weird. In both movies, you’ve got supposedly tight groups of friends (or, at least, co-conspirators) talking to each other in wildly different accents. That kind of thing is bad enough in a movie like Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, which made no pretenses to historical accuracy; it’s movie-destroying in a supposedly serious, historically-based thriller.
Severian, “Storytelling Fail”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-13.
August 21, 2024
QotD: Cyclists at “Flyover State”
But, my friends, the easiest way to obtain an Asshole License is to take up cycling. It must be something about those doofy helmets — anyone willing to wear what looks like a giant athletic supporter jammed down over his eyebrows has to be some kind of douchebag to begin with, and since nut-squashing lycra pants must squeeze out whatever residual testosterone they had left, it’s no wonder that cyclists are such bitches.
Severian, “Luxury Beliefs”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-03.
August 20, 2024
QotD: The printing press was to the Reformation what social media is in the Current Year
The thing about Luther, then, wasn’t what he said, so much as how he said it.
Martin Luther was the world’s first spin doctor. Though he insisted for a long time that his famous 95 Theses were, and were always intended to be, a scholastic debate between clergymen, Luther mastered the use of printed propaganda. His opponents soon followed, or tried to, in an ever-increasing spiral of printed viciousness. Mutatis mutandis, the exchanges between Luther, Erasmus, Thomas More (to say nothing of a thousand lesser lights) and their opponents all sound shockingly Current Year. They’re snarky and waspish at best, grotesque ad hominem at worst. Modern flame wars have nothing on the way Thomas More and William Tyndale tore into each other, for instance, and More and Tyndale were rank amateurs compared to Luther.
As with the Current Year, where being first on social media is the only criterion that matters, so the printing press injected something very like “hot takes” into the late-Medieval intellectual atmosphere. If you tried to respond to your opponents the old-fashioned way — with closely reasoned, heavily cited arguments, on parchment, hand-copied by monks — you might win the intellectual battle … 500 years later, among historians who thank you for providing such a useful glimpse into late-Medieval mentalités, but in your own time you’d get fired at best, get burned at the stake at worst, if you didn’t respond instantly, in kind.
The printing press, in other words, represented a quantum leap in the velocity of information. Those who grasped its fundamentals prospered, while those who fell behind perished. King Henry VIII, for instance, fatally damaged his cherished intellectual reputation when he deigned to attack to Luther in person. Luther hit back with a tirade that wouldn’t be out of place on Twitter1, and Henry responded in kind, and now the king, who was hip-deep in self-inflicted shit by that point, had to drop the fight. Having been publicly abused by a mere ex-monk, he had to quit the field with his tail between his legs.
Severian, “Velocity of Information”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-10.
1. Again, mutatis mutandis. Though this sounds to modern ears like an abject apology on Luther’s part (“especially as I am the offscouring of the world, a mere worm who ought only to live in contemptuous neglect”, etc.), in context it’s a vicious attack. For one thing, what’s a great king like Henry doing responding to a “mere worm”? And Henry had to know, since Wolsey did nothing without his master’s orders … except everyone had heard the rumors that Henry was just a dimwitted playboy, and Cardinal Wolsey was really the king in all but name, so maybe he didn’t know. Either way Henry, who prided himself on being an intellectual, was a fool. That’s the kind of thing that would get you executed in the 16th century, and here’s this “mere worm” publishing it, for all the world to see, with no possibility of reprisal from a supposedly puissant monarch.
August 14, 2024
QotD: The solipsism of the American media
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-09.
August 10, 2024
“Heavy casualties” in a modern western army might count as “a skirmish” in earlier conflicts
I sent a link to Severian a few weeks ago, thinking it might be an interesting topic for his audience and he posted a response as part of Friday’s mailbag post. First, my explanation to him about why I thought the link was interesting:
I know that Edward Luttwak is what the Brits call “a Marmite figure” … people love or hate him and not much in between. I’ve read several of his books and found he had interesting things to say about the Roman and Byzantine armies in their respective eras but I haven’t found his modern analysis to be anywhere near as interesting. This time, however, he might well have found that acorn … is the dramatic casualty-aversion of western nations going to be a key element of future, shall we say “adventurism”?
Clearly, [Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu] can still get their legions moving when they feel they need to, but could [insert current US President here] get the 101st Airborne into a high-casualty environment (let’s not pretend that Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer could or would, and Macron’s posturing is nearly as bad as Baby Trudeau’s total lack of seriousness)?
Anyway, here’s the Marmite Man’s latest – https://unherd.com/2024/06/who-will-win-a-post-heroic-war
Sev responded:
US Army soldiers assigned to 2-7 Cavalry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team (BCT),3rd battalion 1st Division, rush a wounded Soldier from Apache Troop to a waiting USMC CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter during operation in Fallujah, Iraq, during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM.
Photo by SFC Johan Charles Van Boers via Wikimedia Commons.
I’ve often said that, from what I can tell — and bearing in mind my entire military experience consists of a .500 record at Risk! — AINO‘s entire force philosophy amounts to “zero casualties, ever”.
Note that this was true even in the 20th century, when America was still America. “Stupendous casualties” by American standards would hardly rate “a spot of bother” by Soviet. Wiki lists the bloodiest American battle as Eisenborn Ridge (part of the Bulge), with approximately five thousand fatalities.
A Soviet commander who didn’t come home with at least five thousand KIA could probably expect to be court-martialed for cowardice.
That same Wiki article separates “battles” from “campaigns” for some reason. There’s an entire “methodology” section I’m not going to wade into, but even looking at “campaigns”, the bloodiest (by their definitions) is Normandy — 29,204 KIA. That’s an entire campaign, which might rate “a hard week’s fighting” by Soviet, German, or Japanese standards.
Please understand, Americans’ unwillingness to take casualties was greatly to their credit. You want to know about “meat assaults”, ask the Germans, Russians, or Japanese (or the British or French in WWI). George Patton might not have been the best American commander, but he was the most American commander — the whole point of battle is to make the other stupid bastard die for his country. I am 100% in favor of minimal losses, for everyone, everywhere.
But “minimal” does not mean “none”. People die in wars. People die training for wars. People die in the vicinity of the training for war, because it’s inherently risky. It doesn’t make one some kind of monster to call these “acceptable” losses; it makes one a realist. One could just as easily say — and with the same justification — that a certain number of car crash fatalities, or iatrogenic deaths, etc. are acceptable losses, because there’s no way to have “interstate commerce” and “modern medicine”, respectively, without them.
The Fistagon seemingly denies this. Forget human losses for a moment, and consider mere equipment. You read up on, say, Air Force fighter planes, and you’re forced to conclude that their operations assume that all planes will be fully operational at all times. Again, saying nothing of the pilots, just the airframes. The Navy seems to assume that all ships everywhere will not only be serviceable, but actually in service, at all times. Just recently, they shot off all their ammo at Houthi and the Blowfish … and seemingly had no idea what to do, because as Milestone D walked us through it, it’s impossible to rearm while underway.
Think about that for a second. How the fuck is that supposed to work in a real war? Can we just put the war on pause for a few months, so all our ships can head back to port to reload?
In fact, I’d go so far as to speculate that that’s the origin of the phrase “meat assault”. What The Media are calling a “meat assault” is simply what was known to a sane age as “an assault”. No qualifiers. You know, your basic attack — go take that hill, and if you take the hill, and if enough of the attacking force survives to hold it, that’s a win. People who absolutely should know better, though, don’t see it that way.
Since we’re here … I remember having conversations with some folks in College Town re: the Battle of Fallujah, while it was happening (technically the Second Battle of Fallujah). Now, obviously quite a few of my interlocutors were ideologically committed to the position that this was senseless butchery. And in the fullness of time, I too have come around to the position that the entire Operation Endless Occupation was senseless butchery. But leaving all that aside, the point I was trying to make was a simple one: Total US casualties were 95 killed, 560 wounded.
Every one of them a senseless crime, I now believe, but considering Fallujah strictly as a military operation, that’s amazing. House-to-house fighting in a heavily urban area, against a fanatically committed opponent who was willing, indeed eager, to use every dirty trick in the book … and US forces took 655 total casualties. That’s about as well as it can possibly be done. The Red Army probably lost 655 men on the train ride getting to Stalingrad. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that 655 is the daily casualty figure across the entire front in Ukraine … hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are lots of individual sectors in Ukraine taking those kinds of daily losses. 655 is pretty damn good …
… but I was called every dirty name they could think of for suggesting it. I was called dirty names by people who called themselves conservatives, who were such ostentatious “patriots” that they’d embarrass Toby Keith.
Fallujah was fought in 2004, a time that seems like the Blessed Land of Sanity compared to now. AINO simply won’t take casualties. The Pentagram won’t — lose a tank, and you lose your job. (In battle, obviously. If you abandon it to the Taliban, no problem. And of course if you lose an entire war, it’s medals and promotions for everyone). And because the high command won’t, the field commanders won’t either. And because they won’t … well, “desertion” is an ugly word, but let’s just say Tim Walz won’t be the only guy who suddenly needs to be elsewhere right before it’s time to ship out. And as for the guys actually shanghaied into whatever foreign fuckup … well, “mutiny” is an even uglier word, but does anyone want to bet against it?
August 8, 2024
QotD: The real reason modern music sounds the same
Fast forward a few years, though, and now they’ve got a pretty good idea of what “rock” is. More importantly, they’ve got a pretty good handle on what the market for rock is. At that point, they do what execs in any industry do. Why bother trying to find the hot new thing, when you can just make it yourself?
And that’s why two guys you’ve never heard of, Max Martin and a dude calling himself “Dr. Luke”, have written every #1 pop hit for the last 15 years. I’m sure they don’t work cheap, but it’s a lot cheaper than scouting every bar band in America for a sound / look / stage act that might or might not pan out. Much easier to focus group a few traits, call up central casting, have them send over a made-to-order bimbo, and have him / her / xzhem front Dr. Luke’s latest computer-generated ditty.
And if everything on the radio all sounds exactly the same, that’s because it is exactly the same. Max Martin and Dr. Luke, and their zillion Mini-Mes at every level of the record biz, sometimes write songs for specific people — hey, guys, Katy Perry needs another ballad for her new album, hop to it! But mostly they write on spec, and shop it around. Different singers, different bands, different genres, doesn’t matter — this time it’s the two generic prettyboys in the “country” band Florida-Georgia Line singing it, but last time it was Katy Perry, the next time it’ll be the Backstreet Boys on their triumphant comeback tour, feat. Jay-Z and MC Funetik Spelyn. Same exact song, literally — it’s just that Kenny Chesney needed one more track on his album this time, and Taylor Swift didn’t, so now it’s #5 with a bullet on the “country” chart.
Severian, “Own Goals”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-21.
August 2, 2024
QotD: The essential target of ideological propaganda
The Third Reich didn’t last long enough to figure it out, but in their 70-odd years the Soviets learned that “the masses” can be more or less ignored. They’re no threat to the regime. Your average Soviet “citizen” — Ivan Sixpack — would follow pretty much any rule, so long as he had a steady and predictable life course. That’s no slander on Ivan; it’s just the way people are. If you want proof, go look around — if I’d told you, back in the summer of 2019, about all the masks and the social distancing and the lockdowns and everything else, you’d have laughed at me. “There will be blood in the streets! No one will stand for it!”
The reaction of “the masses” (a term I hate; it’s patronizing, but it’ll have to do) to COVID was instructive: They either did as they were told, with nary a peep of complaint, or they simply ignored it … with nary a peep of complaint. From the rulers’ perspective, either one was fine, because they’re functionally the same thing. We all know that whatever the ruling class thought they were going to get out of the Kung Flu panic — and it’s not at all clear; we’ll get there — “public health”, as in the actual health of real members of the public, was nowhere on the list. As with “climate change” and all their other “crises”, their highly visible behavior showed how seriously they took it — which was, of course, not at all.
Indeed, from the rulers’ perspective, it was actually better that some large fraction of the underclass didn’t comply — that way, the mental energy of the Karens was channeled down, not up. Karen could start complaining about Whitmer, Newsom, and the rest not living by their own rules, and had she done so, that might’ve posed a problem for the rulers. But thanks to the maskless proles (and, of course, asshole class traitors like me), Karen always had a bunch of much softer targets to hector.
That’s the function of “propaganda” in my sense. It’s designed to create a narrative, the purpose of which is to channel dissatisfaction down the social scale.
What the Soviets learned, and their SJWs successors have internalized, is that you really only need a small cadre of “middle class” (for lack of a better term) producers to keep things running. Those are the targets of narrative-reinforcing propaganda.
Indeed, it’s only a subset of that already small fraction that needs to be propagandized. As the Soviets quickly learned, true technical experts are more or less ideology-proof. That’s because their technical expertise takes up all their time; they’ve oriented their personalities around it. You could read a novel like Red Plenty to get the sense of it (Z Man has a review somewhere if you want it), but I suggest a much easier path: Watch the fun old movie Boiler Room, with Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, and in a brief but memorable scene, Ben Affleck. I’m sure that seems odd — it’s a movie about sell-at-all-costs stockbrokers, based loosely on Jordan Belfort’s Stratton Oakmont scam; what could be more explicitly capitalist?
But note how they live: They own ludicrous cars and live in huge mansions, but the cars hardly get driven, and the mansions are unfurnished. There’s a scene where they all get together in Vin Diesel’s living room to watch a movie (Wall Street, natch). There’s a huge tv and a couch, but everything else is boxed up, and they’re eating takeout pizza. Giovanni Ribisi says something like “did you just move in this weekend?” and the other guys say no, he’s been living here for years, he just never got around to unpacking his stuff. That’s the mindset of the true technical intelligentsia. Those stockbrokers think they’re doing it for the money, and so they have the outward trappings of rich people, but they’re really doing it because that’s who they are — they’d be just as deliriously happy competing for subway tokens or scraps of confetti, so long as they had one more scrap than the guy on the next phone.
Given that, the only group that really needs to be propagandized is — you guessed it — Karen. The entire narrative of COVID was very obviously designed by hormonal cat ladies, for hormonal cat ladies. Cards on the table: Though I thought Kung Flu was overblown and ridiculous from the beginning, since I know a little history, I didn’t base my conclusions on my reading in the medical journals. I didn’t read medical journals, and unless you’re a doctor I bet you didn’t, either. My opposition to the Kung Flu panic was entirely visceral: THIS IS MEAN GIRL SHIT.
Severian, “Narrative Collapse III: Magic Masks”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-07.
July 27, 2024
QotD: The academic “grinder”
Looking back on it, homeboy was more than a little “on the spectrum”, as the kids say nowadays, but he wasn’t a grinder. Nor do long hours, in themselves, make a grinder — med students, for instance, work in the neighborhood of 60-75 hours a week, but though there are lots of grinders in medical school, not all med students are grinders. Long hours in the lab just go with the territory.
Indeed, actually working hard is almost an exclusion criterion for grinder-ness. Grinders ostentatiously spend many, many hours hitting the books, but it’s almost literally hitting the books. They “work” the Latin way — lots of activity, almost no accomplishment. Put a big honking stack of the largest, mustiest tomes you can find in front of you in your study carrel. Pick one up, flip through it, take one note, then rotate it to the bottom of the stack. Do this for hours on end, always making sure that your stack is flush with the wall, so that everyone in the room can see how many books you have, and how diligently you’re “taking notes”. That’s a grinder.
And cheat your ass off, it goes without saying. In my day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and “the Internet” was a way for Defense Department nerds to exchange missile schematics with one another, the preferred method was with a graphing calculator. Your dishwasher has more hard disk space than those things, but the mere presence of memory capacity made it ideal for cheating, providing you could come up with some elaborate shorthand to cram all the material in … and providing, of course, you could use it. My friends, you have never seen true comedy until you’ve seen some sweaty Chinese kid begging the teacher to be allowed to use his graphing calculator in Engrish class. Quick, what’s the cosine of MacBeth?
And speaking of begging, that’s the final diagnostic criterion. Have you polished so many apples, your fingers are permanently stained red? Are you so far up the guidance counselor’s ass that you’re banging your skull on her uvula? Have you kissed so much butt, you’ve got a mouth like a lamprey? Would you cheerfully murder your best friend’s dog if it would get you an extra 0.02 on your GPA? Then you, my friend, are a grinder.
Severian, “The Grinder Mindset [expanded]”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-22.
July 21, 2024
QotD: There’s no recovery mode from being a Basic College Girl
Do you have any examples of BCGs recuperating?
Sadly, very few. Part of this is just in the nature of the biz — I don’t see too many former students out and about, since they all leave College Town for the big wide world — but I do know this: Scratch a Karen, find a BCG. In fact, you could go so far to say that “Karen” simply IS the BCG after she hits The Wall. The faster the impact, the bigger the Karen (this is a testable hypothesis — given that our gal Taylor Swift is currently impacting The Wall at about Mach 3, if I’m right, she’ll soon unleash the kraken of Karens on an unsuspecting world).
I also strongly suspect that BCGs can’t recover. As any shrink will tell you, Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders are almost impossible to treat. For one thing, treatment requires believing that you have a problem, and believing you don’t have a problem is pretty much diagnostic of those two syndromes. And while I’m not sure the BCG is clinically diagnosable with either of those, what they actually are is close enough that I’m betting whatever therapies “work” on actual clinical cases would “work” on them … but see above.
Finally, I guess I can’t really blame the BCG for not realizing she’s got a problem, because she obviously doesn’t have a problem. Look around — society rewards this shit. AOC, for example, is going to be La Presidenta por Vida de los Estados Unidos here in a decade or so; if that’s a problem, I can’t really blame them for not fixing it. Eventually, of course, reality will intrude, and your BCG will be screaming for a real man to come save her … but, thanks to her BCG antics, there won’t be any real men around. Or, you know, we’ll all be in the OPFOR, so good luck with that, beeyatch.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag /Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-25.
July 15, 2024
QotD: Sticking it to “the Man” in Collegetown, USA
But it made a certain type of college kid, and of course xzhyr professors, feel good about themselves, sticking it to The Man like that, so they kept on keepin’ on. In the grand tradition of puerile student protest, they’d routinely chalk up the parking lot and sidewalk in front of the building with catchy slogans like “this sidewalk brought to you by socialism!” Yes, they really thought that, and if you’ve followed my “inside the ivory gulag” posts, you can easily suss out why: Sidewalks are public services; public services are paid for by taxes; “conservatives” are against taxes; “conservatives” are also against socialism; therefore sidewalks are socialist.
No, really — I’ve heard more than one professor make a version of that “argument”. If it’s a public service of any kind — police, trash pickup, whatever — it’s by definition “socialist”, because it’s paid for by taxes, and “conservatives” think all taxes, everywhere, are totally illegitimate.
College these days runs about $20K per year on average, by the way. What a deal, huh?
Severian, “Caveat Emptor”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-16.
July 9, 2024
QotD: “No official Propaganda Department has ever been half as effective as Twitter and Facebook”
Our overlords figured that out, give credit where it’s due. No official Propaganda Department has ever been half as effective as Twitter and Facebook. But that’s a problem, too, as we’re starting to see. The problem with freelance propaganda is the free market problem of marginal utility.
Facebook and Twitter are SJW cesspools. Everyone knows this. Even your sweet old granny, who is only on Facebook to exchange pie recipes and knitting ideas, knows this, because the #WokeStapo came for knitting years back. When the “trust and safety council” goes so far as to ban the sitting President of the United States, even hermits living in remote Himalayan caves got the message — toe the Party line on social media, or else.
This reduces the value of ALL information on social media to, effectively, zero. Sure, it might be true — and propaganda, as we know, works better the closer to the truth it steers — but given that they’ve even gone after knitting, for pete’s sake, means that any even halfway sorta quasi rational person assumes everything on social media is nothing but propaganda.
Severian, “If They Were Clever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-08.
July 3, 2024
QotD: Mental health and social media
Not only is there an audience for this — which I never would’ve believed — there’s enough of an audience for it that it’s on basic cable. See what I mean? Somehow, the marketing guys determined that yes, there are enough people out there who want to see cysts being cauterized that we can make an entire show out of it. How could they figure it out? Beats me, but unless some suits at TLC had a contest to see what’s the silliest, grossest thing they could actually get broadcast, I’m betting that there was a group of Internet weirdos out there discussing it, and the marketing boys just ran with it.
Applying that to the topic at hand, my guess is that, since it’s so easy for people to be Massively Online these days, the kind of folks with that particular type of mental problem pretty much live on Twitter, where — as anyone who has waded into that cesspit for more than five minutes knows — the Twitterati absolutely cannot distinguish “talking about doing something” from “actually doing something”.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-04.
June 21, 2024
QotD: Identity fetishism
Fussell is almost embarrassingly frank about why he got into bodybuilding: He was terrified. A scrawny, desperately insecure guy, he just couldn’t handle the social pressures of life in New York. He saw muscles as armor. If he made his exterior so intimidating that no one would want to get close to him he’d never have to get close to anyone. The whole thing is a sustained exercise in fremdschämen — Fussell is a hard guy to like before his transformation, and frankly repulsive afterwards. It’s a short read, and fascinating, but it’s not an easy one.
Do slog through it, though, and I think you’ll see what I mean. The thing that prevents so many of us from really getting into the Left’s headspace, I think, is sheer exhaustion. Forget hardcore SJWs for a sec; just think of what it must take to be, say, a hipster. I mean, seriously, just look at this fucking hipster. The time, the money, the sheer goddamn effort it must take! I’m bushed just writing about it, and that’s nothing compared to what Fussell did.
If you’re a weightlifter, you know. If you’re not, trust me, you don’t want to know. Same deal with endurance athletes, of course, and so on — I’m sure “runner’s high” is real, and it’s great, but son, I really don’t want to experience it. I have experienced “the pump”, famously described by Arnold himself as “like cumming”, but trust me, drugs are a lot better if you just want to get high, because getting to “the pump” fucking hurts. A lot. See Fussell for details.1
Much easier, then, to invest all that time and energy and money into an outward show that, though it no doubt costs as much — perhaps more! — isn’t nearly as painful (I’m sure getting elaborate tats hurts, but if the choice was between that or legs day, I’d be The Illustrated Man). Best of all, of course, is one that doesn’t take anything but time — you know, like, say, Twitter …
All that no doubt seems like a long ride for a short payoff, but unlike my infamously lax attitude towards “the Classics”, I’m going to insist that if you want to get the point of this one — and I consider it important enough to have invested all these words in it — you’re really going to have to go read the book. Fussell is self-aware enough to see himself for what he is, and the Twitterati are of course oblivious, but the psychology is the same. It’s a fetishized identity, and it’s terrifying, because those are our rulers.
Severian, “Identity Fetishism”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-24.
1. Worst of all, you don’t get it during “legs day”, the most excruciating part of weightlifting, which is why so many guys skip it. It’s nothing but pain. I was never more than a moderately serious weightlifter back in my youth, but that’s the sole criterion of seriousness — do you skip legs day? If yes, then get back to Planet Fitness, you poseur.
