Quotulatiousness

December 3, 2022

The end of the old “WASP” upper class

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

Scott Alexander is reading Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks and summarized the first sixth of the book:

The daring thesis: a 1950s change in Harvard admissions policy destroyed one American aristocracy and created another. Everything else is downstream of the aristocracy, so this changed the whole character of the US.

The pre-1950s aristocracy went by various names; the Episcopacy, the Old Establishment, Boston Brahmins. David Brooks calls them WASPs, which is evocative but ambiguous. He doesn’t just mean Americans who happen to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant — there are tens of millions of those! He means old-money blue-blooded Great-Gatsby-villain WASPs who live in Connecticut, go sailing, play lacrosse, belong to country clubs, and have names like Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III. Everyone in their family has gone to Yale for eight generations; if someone in the ninth generation got rejected, the family patriarch would invite the Chancellor of Yale to a nice game of golf and mention it in a very subtle way, and the Chancellor would very subtly apologize and say that of course a Newbury-Broxham must go to Yale, and whoever is responsible shall be very subtly fired forthwith.

The old-money WASPs were mostly descendants of people who made their fortunes in colonial times (or at worst the 1800s); they were a merchant aristocracy. As the descendants of merchants, they acted as standard-bearers for the bourgeois virtues: punctuality, hard work, self-sufficiency, rationality, pragmatism, conformity, ruthlessness, whatever made your factory out-earn its competitors.

By the 1950s they were several generations removed from any actual hustling entrepreneur. Still, at their best the seed ran strong and they continued to embody some of these principles. Brooks tentatively admires the WASP aristocracy for their ethos of noblesse oblige — many become competent administrators, politicians, and generals. George H. W. Bush, scion of a rich WASP family, served with distinction in World War II — the modern equivalent would be Bill Gates’ or Charles Koch’s kids volunteering as front-line troops in Afghanistan.

At their worst, they mostly held ultra-expensive parties, drifted into alcoholism, and participated in endless “my money is older than your money” dick-measuring contests. And they were jocks — certainly good at lacrosse and crew, but their kids would be much less likely than modern elites’ to become a scientist, professor, doctor, or lawyer. Not only that, they were boring jocks — they stuck to a few standard rich people hobbies (yachting, horseback riding) and distrusted creativity or (God forbid) quirkiness. Their career choices were limited to the family business (probably a boring factory with a name like Newbury-Broxham Goods), becoming a competent civil service administrator, or other things along those lines.

The heart of the WASP aristocracy was the Ivy League. I don’t think there are good statistics, but until the early 1900s many (most?) Ivy League students were WASP aristocrats from a few well-known families. Around 1920 the Jews started doing really well on standardized tests, and the Ivies suspended standardized tests in favor of “holistic admissions” to keep them out and preserve the WASPishness of the elite. All the sons (and later, daughters) of the WASPs met each other in college, played lacrosse together, and forged the sort of bonds that make a well-connected and self-aware aristocracy.

Around 1955 (Brooks writes, building on an earlier book by Nicholas Lemann) Harvard changed their admission policy. Why? Partly a personal decision by Harvard presidents James Conant, and Nathan Pusey, who sincerely believed in meritocracy. And partly because Harvard’s Jewish quota was becoming unpopular, as increased awareness of the Holocaust made anti-Semitism déclassé. Conant and Pusey decided to admit based on academic merit (measured mostly by SAT scores). The thing where Harvard would always admit WASP aristocrats because that was the whole point of Harvard was relegated to occasional “legacy admissions”, a new term for something which was now the exception and not the rule. Other Ivies quickly followed.

Brooks on the consequences:

    In 1952, most freshmen at Harvard were products of … the prep schools of New England (Andover and Exeter alone contributed 10% of the class), the East side of Manhattan, the Main Line of Philadelphia, Shaker Heights in Ohio, the Gold Coast of Chicago, Grosse Pointe of Detroit, Nob Hill in San Francisco, and so on. Two-thirds of all applicants were admitted. Applicants whose fathers had gone to Harvard had a 90% admission rate. The average verbal SAT score for the incoming men was 583, good but not stratospheric. The average score across the Ivy League was closer to 500 at the time.

    Then came the change. By 1960 the average verbal SAT score for incoming freshman at Harvard was 678, and the math score was 695 — these are stratospheric scores. The average Harvard freshman in 1952 would have placed in the bottom 10% of the Harvard freshman class of 1960. Moreover, the 1960 class was drawn from a much wider socioeconomic pool. Smart kids from Queens or Iowa or California, who wouldn’t have thought of applying to Harvard a decade earlier, were applying and getting accepted … and this transformation was replicated in almost all elite schools. At Princeton in 1962, for example, only 10 members of the 62-man football team had attended private prep schools. Three decades earlier every member of the Princeton team was a prep school boy.

There was a one-or-two generation interregnum where the new meritocrats silently battled the old WASP aristocracy. This wasn’t a political or economic battle; as a war to occupy the highest position in the class hierarchy, it could only be won through cultural prestige. What was cool? What was out of bounds? What would get printed in the New York Times — previously the WASP aristocracy’s mouthpiece, but now increasingly infiltrated by the more educated newcomers?

October 26, 2022

You apparently only need to worry about inflation if you’re one of the “little people”

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

Tom Knighton was angered by a recent comment from a well-to-do type who is frustrated at all the “needless” worry about inflation when there are “bigger concerns” in play:

I really don’t like talking about my personal life too much, but I kind of feel like I have to. It started a couple of days when Never Trumper Tom Nichols tweeted this:

Frankly, I’m still pissed about it three days later.

You see, it must be nice for Nichols to view this as a problem of perspective, that people just aren’t seeing the forest for the trees because gas is a tad high.

I can’t be one of those people.

For the record, I think of myself as a working-class writer. I don’t make those six-figure salaries and socialize with the elite at cocktail parties. I make enough to support my family of four in what many could generously term a modest lifestyle.

And I’m OK with that. While I want more, I love the fact that my work life is what it is and I have tons more freedom to do what I want throughout the day.

These days, though, things are different.

You see, while Nichols pretends it’s just people a little grumpy about gas prices, I see the harsh reality that people like him never will.

I’m the guy looking at the time before the next paycheck and realizing that we might not have food in the house for a day or two. I’m the one trying to decide how to stretch the last $40 in our bank account to cover those couple of days and praying it will. I’m also the one who knows that two years ago, this wasn’t a problem.

Hell, a year ago, it wasn’t an issue.

And I don’t make awful money, all things considered. I can only imagine what it’s like for those whose families don’t bring in what I normally make.

For Nichols to get worked up because people don’t see any existential crisis but do see the harsh reality slapping them in the face day in, day out sounds an awful lot like “Let them eat cake” to me.

Unfortunately, that’s what folks like Nichols think.

Nichols, who seems to believe in expertise based on his previous work, is talking about stuff he knows nothing about, things he lacks the expertise to comprehend.

The current inflation isn’t just some mild inconvenience. It’s not one of those things where we all can just shrug and push through until better times. It’s real and it’s here and it’s hurting people like me.

That gives me a certain amount of expertise because this is my life and my livelihood. This is how my family suffers.

I’m very much with him on this, as rising inflation is already a pretty big concern for us and it doesn’t look like it’ll get better any time soon.

October 24, 2022

QotD: When the “Grand Tour” gave way to the mere “tourists”

Filed under: Britain, Business, Europe, France, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Few of the many holidaymakers photographing their artisanal breakfast for a sunlit post on Instagram will have heard of Albert Smith. But they owe him a moment’s reflection: for if anyone can be said to have perfected the packaged visuals of a holiday abroad, it is Smith, a showbusiness titan of mid-Victorian London. Smith’s wildly popular panoramic spectaculars of his travels across Europe drew audiences of thousands. He was a prolific journalist, a bestselling novelist, a man-about-town, a mountaineer, and a dandy, but it was Smith’s innovative talent for boiling down his adventures abroad into a collection of vivid and memorable images that proved his biggest crowd-puller. Panoramas — vast paintings showing a 360-degree view of a landscape — had been part of the London scene since the turn of the century, but Smith took the panoramic experience to new levels of immersion: he was the self-appointed star of his own show, dramatising his own adventures against a sliding background of tableaux complete with music and props.

Smith’s most celebrated panorama relived his ascent of Mont Blanc in 1851 — which had been an astonishing physical feat for a clubbable bon viveur (though he had to be dragged to the summit barely conscious, he claimed to have celebrated by drinking a bottle of champagne and smoking a cigar). He pulled out all the stops to recreate Mont Blanc on the stage of the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly in 1852, importing woodcarvers from Chamonix to recreate a Swiss chalet. St Bernards roamed the aisles and during the interval hot baked potatoes were dispensed for those in the audience feeling a glacial chill from the buckets of cold water placed around the hall. The stage was decked with alpine plants; there was a waterfall with real water, a mill wheel and a lily pond; the walls of the theatre were hung with chamois skins. “The Ascent of Mont Blanc” ran for six years and 2,000 performances, and on top of the fortune he made in ticket sales, Smith cannily expanded his repertoire by selling colouring books, fans, board games and miniature models of Mont Blanc.

Smith, an unrepentant populist (he liked to shock Thackeray by saying that Shakespeare was “all rot”), knocked the high culture out of the touristic experience. He made the adventure of foreign parts bite-sized and accessible — if not in reality, at least in dreams. He called it “the Alps in a box”. Figuratively speaking, Smith’s panoramas boxed up the great sights of the classical Grand Tour and sold them in miniature form, building them up with a dramatic flourish then cutting them down to size with a knowing dig in the ribs. Smith’s success runs parallel with the emergence of photography, the industrial manufacture of souvenirs, and the “I was here” frame of the postcard. After Smith, it became possible to think of “buying” the travel experience without actually going very far, framing it, and taking it home with you. Antiquarian high-culturists looked for quiddity and oddity when abroad but Smith encouraged a joyful appetite for mass-produced kitsch. His own apartment off Tottenham Court was a riot of knick-knackery from his travels. There was a figure of a Swiss peasant with a clock-face in his waistcoat, Venetian glasses, miniature Swiss chalets, soap from Vienna in the shape of fruit and a working model of a guillotine.

The tourist boom in Chamonix inspired by Smith was viewed with horror by those who thought the mountain were theirs to command. Ruskin found the “white leprosy of hotels” and souvenir shops that followed the visitors into the Alps was a blasphemy against “all the deep and sacred sensations of nature”. Everywhere the new tourists went, reported a journalist in 1856, they brought with them “Cockneyism, Albert Smithery, fun, frolic and vulgarity”. The rise in popular tourism to Europe, sparked most importantly by Thomas Cook, had highlighted a divide which has characterised British travelling ever since. In this paradigm, the tourist is the new bug and the traveller is the old soul. And even when they are gazing at the same view, the latter thinks the former is spoiling the view. The distaste is notable in how often crowds of tourists were, and still are, described in terms of mindless cattle or insects — they come in “herds” and “swarms” and “flocks”.

Lucy Lethbridge, “The snobbery of Brits abroad”, UnHerd, 2022-07-12.

October 12, 2022

QotD: Luxury beliefs

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

Luxury beliefs I define as ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes … The way that people used to demonstrate their social class was through material goods, through expensive items … Today, it’s not necessarily the case … [Affluent] students will often downplay their wealth or even lie about how rich their parents are … [Now,] it’s luxury beliefs. It’s the unusual, novel viewpoints that they’re expressing to distinguish themselves. They crave distinction, that’s the key goal here …

An easy way to show that you’re not a member of the riff-raff, the masses, is to hold the opposite opinion, or a strange opinion that maybe doesn’t make sense, because it shows you’re not one of them. It’s not just the opinion itself, but the way that you express it. If you express it using vocabulary that no-one has ever heard of, for example … You often are not paying the price for your luxury beliefs, but even if you do, it’s still not nearly the same as the cost inflicted on the lower classes if they were to adopt those luxury beliefs too. […]

I talked to a friend of mine who was telling me, “When I set my Tinder radius to one mile, just around the university, and I see the bios of the women, a lot of their profiles say things like ‘poly’ or ‘keeping it casual’ – basically, they’re not interested in anything too serious.” He says something like half of them have something like that in their bio. And then he said, “But when I expand the radius on my Tinder to five miles, to include the rest of the city and the more run-down areas beyond the university bubble, half the women are single moms.” And basically, the luxury beliefs of the former group, the educated group, trickled down and ended up having this outsize effect on the people who are less fortunate, who don’t have the [social and] economic capital of the people who can afford that belief.

David Thompson, quoting from the transcript of a TRIGGERnometry interview with Rob Henderson, David Thompson, 2022-07-11.

September 3, 2022

Theodore Dalrymple on snobbery

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

In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers the various forms of snobbery:

“Snob” by Oldmaison is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Snobbery is the feeling of social superiority on the grounds of some quality over which the person believed to be inferior has little or no personal control, such as birthplace or parenthood. If this feeling is conspicuously displayed rather than merely felt, it is likely to provoke furious resentment, far more so than actual injustice. Disdain causes the rawest of wounds, which seldom heal. That is why people who triumph over snobbery in practice nevertheless often retain within themselves a strong core of resentment toward those of the type (not necessarily the actual individuals) who formerly disdained them. And this resentment often impels them to do seemingly self-destructive things.

In human affairs, it is seldom that there are clear-cut boundaries, so that it is not surprising that snobbery can shade into justified disdain or condemnation, at least for certain kinds of behavior if not for the human beings who display it. Those kinds of behavior are not equally distributed in all social groups, so that it is easy to transfer the disdain from the behavior to the social group itself, and assume that a member of that group will, ex officio, behave in the reprehended fashion.

It is probable that intellectual and aesthetic snobbery are now more prevalent than the more traditional forms that attach to place of birth and parentage. Many of us are appalled by the tastes and interests of others and secretly, and not so secretly, congratulate ourselves on our superiority to them. I am far from immune myself from such feelings. I have to control myself not so much in my outer behavior—that is a relatively easy thing to do — but in my inner feeling, that is to say to limit my own feelings of superiority to the people whose tastes I despise. After all, there is more to people than their tastes or enthusiasms, and I have never talked to anybody who struck me as anything other than an individual. Just as we are enjoined to hate the sin but not the sinner, so we have to try to dislike the bad taste but not the person who displays it. This requires the overriding of emotion by conscious thought and self-control.

The fear of appearing snobbish also has its deformations, as does inverted snobbery. The latter is harmful because it undermines aspiration to anything better or higher than that which the inverted snob already knows or likes. Inverted snobs sneer at what they sense instinctively to be above them, calling it pretentious and elitist. Incidentally, the word elitist is often misused or elided with social exclusivity. Not even the most anti-elitist of persons objects to the elitist selection of sports teams on the basis of superior performance and ability of players, nor does anyone object to being operated on by the best surgeon available, so that only if sport, and to a lesser extent surgery, is of such importance that it is an exception to the necessary suppression of elitism can this exception be justified.

Fear of appearing snobbish is harmful because it threatens the willingness to make judgments between the better and worse; and since the worse is always easier to produce, it contributes to a general decline in the quality of whatever is produced. This fear of appearing snobbish and therefore undemocratic is now very strong and pervades even universities (so I am told), in which one might have supposed that elitism, in the sense of a striving for the best that has been said and thought, would be de rigueur.

One of the forms that snobbery now commonly takes is disdain of simple, repetitive, and unskilled jobs (which are generally ill-paid as well). The educated can imagine no worse fate than to be employed in such a job, no matter how necessary or socially useful it might be — the person at the supermarket checkout (increasingly redundant, of course) being the emblematic example. With a singular lack of imagination and sense of reality about their fellow creatures, they simply put themselves in the place of these people and imagine thereby that they are being empathic. But of course there are people for whom such jobs are not unpleasant and are even rewarding. Not everyone wants to be, or is capable of being, a master of the universe.

August 18, 2022

QotD: Nostalgie de la boue

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

TWS suggests we take a hard look at the concept of nostalgie de la boue:

    Nostalgie de la boue (French: “nostalgia for mud”) is the attraction to low-life culture, experience, and degradation, found at times both in individuals and in cultural movements … Tom Wolfe described a party in New York in 1970: “It was at this party that a Black Panther field marshal rose up beside the north piano — there was also a south piano — in Leonard Bernstein’s living room and outlined the Panthers’ ten-point program to a roomful of socialites and celebrities, who, giddy with nostalgie de la boue, entertained a vision of the future in which, after the revolution, there would no longer be any such thing as a two-story, thirteen-room apartment on Park Avenue, with twin grand pianos in the living room, for one family.”

I think TWS is right:

    It explains everything from those parties where they pretend to eat people and the Podesta brothers love of pedo-murder art to the Jersey Shore and all rap music. People of Wal-Mart and people who enjoy mocking them. The idea covers everything happening.

Back in the days, they called all that “authenticity”. The Working Man ™ was supposed to have an “authenticity”, a raw experience of life, that the Intelligentsia did not, so the Intelligentsia made it their mission to ape “authentic” proletarian manners and mores. That’s why every self-styled “Intellectual” since Marx has carried on like an unbathed schizophrenic hobo — they think they’re being “authentic”.

It never occurs to them that this is grossly insulting to The Workers they’re supposedly helping, because of course they never ever meet any Workers — they imagine how they think a longshoreman would act, and then go do that.

I have far more respect for “the People of Walmart” than I do for those who make fun of them, because “the People of Walmart” have been beaten down and brutalized by the dominant culture. They’ve had all their self-respect kicked out of them by little college snots with Gender Studies degrees. It’s like the peasantry in pre-Revolution Russia: Everything the intellectuals said about the nobility was true … but everything the nobility said about the serfs was also true. It was a chicken-and-egg problem with no solution save one.

I also have some respect for Walmart as an institution. Yeah, I know, it’s cheap Chinese shit, but trust me: Though I didn’t grow up poor, you could see “poor” from my house for a lot of my childhood. I don’t recall having Walmart back then, but K-Mart’s Blue Light Specials improved our day to day quality of life enormously. And when I first got out on my own, I decorated my entire first apartment in Walmart — it wasn’t fancy, but it worked, and I had a hell of a lot more stuff that I could actually use than I ever could’ve afforded any other way.

You want to make fun of Walmart, and the people who shop there? Ok, fine, motherfucker, but first try living in a trailer where your couch is patched up with duct tape, and go to school wearing your California cousins’ hand me down clothes, so that you’re dressed like a surfer when you’re 500 miles from the nearest ocean.

I will never, ever understand this. You can choose to be ugly, and to surround yourself with ugliness. Or you can choose NOT to do that. Why would anyone pick the former?

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-13.

August 9, 2022

When asking a simple, factual question is treated as a direct personal attack

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray explains why just asking for [certain] facts is enough to trigger people who think you’re somehow saying that they’re not “good people”:

Come back to the cultural sewer with me, just for a moment, because here’s the last time I’ll lay a quote on you from Klaus Schwab’s COVID-19: The Great Reset, from a discussion about public health measures to contain the pandemic:

    This is ultimately a moral choice about whether to prioritize the qualities of individualism or those that favour the destiny of the community. It is an individual as well as a collective choice (that can be expressed through elections), but the example of the pandemic shows that highly individualistic societies are not very good at expressing solidarity.

Now: Pharmaceutical products sometimes fail, and sometimes cause serious harm, and it frequently takes a while for reality to get out of the dugout and take the field, so keep taking your FDA-approved Vioxx. It’s safe and effective! I rarely give up on books, but I gave up on Ben Goldacre’s 2012 book Bad Pharma about halfway through — for the same reason you’d stop eating a skillfully prepared shit sandwich. I felt like, yes, I get the point: Sometimes a drug is ineffective, sometimes a drug is outright harmful, and the manipulation of science and of regulatory agencies is more common than you would ever have wanted to know.

But it’s different this time, even while “this time” fits a very long pattern. As much as Big Pharma course corrections are always hard, this one will be infinitely harder. We’re not currently debating the efficacy of a pharmaceutical product, or of a class of pharmaceutical products; instead, we’re debating self-conception, social status, and cultural position. The claim “I don’t think these mRNA injections are as safe as they’ve been made out to be” is a character attack that threatens to take people out at the core like dynamite under a bridge: Are you saying I’m not a good person?

Bad Cattitude has been on fire lately on the topic of elite self-hypnosis and the descent into an “entirely hallucinatory landscape”. Consistent with this shrewd feline analysis, look again at what Klaus Schwab said about lockdowns and the suppression of economic activity in the name of public health: He said that shutting down our open societies was a “moral choice” about “expressing solidarity”. (My mask is for you, your mask is for me!) The discussion isn’t about what works, and has never been about what works. It has never been a discussion about the efficacy of anything; it’s a posture about social character, and always has been. Are you a bad, selfish person, or are you a good person who believes in kindness? The subtext about social class strikes me as too obvious to explicate, because mean people belong in their trailer parks in flyover country, and kind people are high-status. Review the lawn signs if you doubt this.

So when you question the little vial of fluid that goes into a syringe to be injected into your body, you’re not asking questions about the way a medical product works — or at least, you’re not asking questions that are perceived, by advocates of the injections (or the lockdowns, or the masks), as a discussion about safety and efficacy. You say, “Does it work? Is it safe?” — but they process it as an attack on their moral choice to express solidarity:

Are you saying we should have stood up for selfishness? Which means, if we bring the subtext to the surface, Are you saying we should have engaged in low-status behavior?

July 26, 2022

What’s worse than having a nepotistic elite running the country? Having an incompetent nepotistic elite running the country

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

Kurt Schlichter isn’t a fan of the kakistocratic “elite” running most of the western world at the moment:

The things we took for granted decades ago are uncertain, and there’s always an excuse — inevitably one that blames us. Like the new take on air conditioners, which is that they are an extravagance we should learn to live without. What the hell? Why?

And don’t get me started on the bizarre insistence of the resetters that we all need to give up beef and start eating bugs. I have a better idea. How about we eat ribeyes and burgers like Americans instead of crickets and locust like Third World famine victims?

A proper ruling class would see the problems and move to solve them, because the proper relationship between the ruling class and the rest of us is that the ruling class provides prosperity and security and the rest of us let them skim some cream off the top. If they were doing a decent job, their riches and luxuries would not bother us much; but when they have failed yet still expect full pay and benefits anyway, that grates. It is unsustainable.

So why doesn’t the ruling class try to get America moving again instead of telling us that we should settle for less and less? For one thing, because our ruling class is not competent. Joe Biden is, in a way, the perfect president for the resetters — stupid and getting seniler, corrupt, yet absolutely sure of his own genius despite literally no basis for that self-regard. Look, the solutions are there. Want to fix crime? Do what Giuliani did in New York City in the nineties. Want energy independence? Do what Trump did in 2016. Want the economy roaring? Do what Reagan and Trump did. These tactics are not secrets, yet they seem to be too hard for our elite to pull off. Our reset revolt will be to embrace someone who can.

Of course, the incompetence issue assumes that our elite wants to succeed in doing what elites should do. Does it really? Does it really want us prosperous, secure and free? Oh, the elite wants to succeed for itself, and it sure has. The elite is richer than ever. And it intends to stay that way even after you are reset to “Peasant” mode. The elite won’t be taking public transportation among the hobos like you. They will be safe behind armed guards while you are disarmed and victimized — defend yourself at your peril! And they will keep eating steak tartar while you slurp up beetle paste. Yum yum, proles!

The ruling caste has no intention of you living like a civilized citizen. No, you are their sacrifice, to Gaia, the angry weather goddess or whatever other pagan idol that empty void inside them worships. Your pain is the point. Remember, bullies love the raw exercise of power. Making you miserable is a manifestation of their urge to dominate and crush. That’s the genesis of those seemingly insane moves around the world like Sri Lanka giving up fertilizer or agricultural powerhouse Holland evicting farmers. But these moves — including the destruction of our own energy industry — only seem insane if you refuse to accept their ultimate goal. They want to hurt you. Your pain is a feature, not a bug — which will be your next meal if they get their way.

June 21, 2022

“Maybe black people generally prefer black music because it’s far superior to the standard ‘landfill indie’ that ‘Glasto’ is mired in?”

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Spiked, Julie Burchill wonders what happened to Lenny Henry:

“Sign of the times @ Glastonbury Festival” by timparkinson is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Spare a thought for Sir Lenworth George Henry, Commander of the Order of the British Empire and knight of the realm. He works without interruption or unemployment at a job he loves (and in his spare time makes television commercials for Premier Inn hotels – megabucks payday ahoy!) and has done so from the age of 16. He is now 63 and, unusually, is becoming more attractive as he ages. He has sailed a trimaran from Plymouth to Antigua, performed on a record alongside Kate Bush and Prince, and escaped from marriage to Dawn French. Whereas some comedians become sad shadows of themselves – capering clowns who are laughed at, not with – in middle age he became a serious actor. His radio documentary, Lenny and Will, sent him “in search of the magic of Shakespeare”, whose plays he has since performed in to great acclaim. Not only is he very rich, he has also helped raise millions of pounds for charity as co-founder of Comic Relief.

But despite all of this wonderful success, Henry has in recent years taken to griping about things which really aren’t worth bothering about. Sir Len, where did it all go wrong? Well, I’d wager that it went wrong when Henry realised that if he identified as happy people might start thinking that he chose showbiz as a way to show off and get handsomely rewarded for it. And where would that leave him in the Victimhood Olympics? Nowhere near the podium.

His latest gripe is about Glastonbury. “It’s interesting to watch Glastonbury and look at the audience and not see any black people there. I’m always surprised by the lack of black and brown faces at festivals. I think, ‘Wow, that’s still very much a dominant culture thing'”, he told the Radio Times this week.

Here’s a thought. Maybe black people generally prefer black music because it’s far superior to the standard “landfill indie” that “Glasto” is mired in? And maybe they’re keener on personal hygiene than a bunch of scruffy, middle-class students roughing it on their gap year before going home to a cushy billet arranged by a friend of their father? You won’t find many white working-class people at festivals, either, for the same reasons.

I speak from personal experience. As a teenage reporter at the New Musical Express I got sent to a festival – Reading – as punishment for one of my many juvenile misdemeanours. The moment my stilettos sunk into the mud, I turned back to the station, thus facing a further trouncing from the editor. Every night, after an evening watching some rubbish punk band, I would go home and dance around the room to the sweet soul licks of the Isley Brothers until the awful white racket was forgotten.

I prefer more foreign things than I do indigenous things – from curry to gospel music – but I’m not some self-loathing idiot who believes that this country was worthless when it was white; if diversity is so great, does that mean that India and China and Africa were uninteresting before the West barged in? And don’t bother trying to make the countryside “more accessible” – I’ve never wanted to go on a ramble in my life. Why should I and my fellow mud-dodging citizens of various ethnic heritage be bussed into the racist countryside from the cities we built and love?

June 17, 2022

Oikophobia run rampant

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

In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers the prevalence of oikophobia in western culture:

In an article for the American Mind, Daniel Mahoney draws our attention to a recent book on the phenomenon of oikophobia, the dislike or even hatred of one’s own country or culture, which now seems so prevalent in western academic and intellectual circles as to be almost an orthodoxy or requirement for acceptance into the intellectual class. Of course, no social trend or phenomenon is entirely new or has an indisputable starting point: for example, George Orwell drew attention to English self-hatred many years ago. But the spread of oikophobia has been of epidemic proportion in late years.

It seems to me that Mr. Mahoney’s analysis can be extended. The first question to ask is why oikophobia should now be so prevalent. To this, I should tentatively reply that it is because of the mass intellectualization of society consequent upon the spread of tertiary education. Intellectuals have an inherent tendency to be oppositional to all received opinion or feeling, for there is no point in going to the trouble of being an intellectual if one ends up thinking and feeling what the great mass of the people around one think and feel. Love of country and inherited custom is so commonplace as to appear almost normal or natural, and much of it, of course, is unreflecting.

But intellectuals are supposed to reflect. That is their function, and they are inclined to reject received opinion, not because it is wrong but because it is received. It goes without saying that received opinion can be wrong and even wicked or evil, in which case the strictures of intellectuals are necessary and salutary; but intellectuals themselves may promote wrong or even wicked opinions, partly from the a priori need to distinguish themselves from the run of mankind.

The phobia in oikophobia is the fear of being taken for one of the common run of mankind.

The second question about oikophobia is the old one of cui bono? Again, one must not confuse the psychological or social origin or function of an opinion with its justification or correctness in the abstract, but once one has decided that an opinion is mistaken or deleterious in its effect, it is natural to ask where it comes from and what interests it serves.

In my opinion, oikophobia is generally bogus, that is to say insincere, as is its cognate, multiculturalism. The oikophobe and the multiculturalist are not really interested in other cultures, except as instruments with which to beat their fellow citizens. The reason for their lack of real interest in other countries is not difficult to find and is of very common application. The fact is that it is very difficult genuinely to enter into a culture, or subculture, other than one’s own, even when that culture or subculture is close to or adjacent to one’s own.

June 13, 2022

The idealized EU that British “Remainers” still long for

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

The Brexit debate was at least as much a cultural as it was an economic or political struggle. Many of the people who wanted the UK to remain within the European Union would be instantly comfortable as members of Canada’s Liberal or New Democratic parties, as our “Laurentian elite” are culturally much more attuned to their European elite counterparts than they are to ordinary Canadians. British “Remainers” similarly have much more in common with their Euro counterparts than with ordinary Brits:

For many in the British cultural establishment, Brexit was (and still is) an incomprehensible, foolish rejection of the unqualified benefits of the European Union. The creative industries, according to one noted poll in the lead-up to the 2016 referendum, were 96 per cent in favour of staying in the EU, and many working in the arts and culture have been raging ever since. Britain’s contemporary artists are some of the most outspoken about Britain leaving the EU, to the point that some of them would rather leave Britain. Last week, speaking at an exhibition opening in the Netherlands, famed sculptor Antony Gormley announced that such were his strong feelings over Brexit that he had applied for German citizenship. “I’m embarrassed about Brexit”, he lamented, “it’s a practical disaster, a betrayal of my parents’ and grandparents’ sacrifice to make a Europe that was not going to be divided again”.

[…]

None of our parents and grandparents who experienced the war, and the postwar reconstruction, would have envisioned the EU in its current form. It is a backroom technocracy of elites, making decisions beyond the reach of popular accountability, increasingly hostile to democracy and the aspirations of its millions of citizens. As many of us have always maintained, it’s possible to be for Europe, for fellow Europeans and for European culture – but against the EU.

The “little Englander” slur is one of the more ingrained prejudices of cultured Remainers. It has always been a way of expressing their contempt for those stuck with the consequences of the European project, those people unable or unwilling to shift from their “little”, provincial world and attitudes. These are the people, moreover, who the cultural establishment spent two decades up until the referendum patronising and cajoling. Arts policies and newbuild art galleries imagined that culture would rehabilitate the left-behind provincials of post-industrial Britain. Until, that is, post-industrial Britain voted the “wrong” way. (Gormley, with haughty disdain, has previously described Brexit as “a stupid moment of collective fibrillation” and “a disease”.)

Prominent Remainers profess their love for EU free movement, but studiously look the other way when it comes to its less romantic reality. Its only real achievement has been to facilitate the flow of cheap labour from poorer to richer EU states. This is the dominant economic reality of the free movement of labour, not the individualist idyll of foot-loose, self-determining bohemianism, or the career mobility of the well-paid creative. The latest Home Office figures for applications to the EU settled-status scheme reveal the stark trends in where Europeans, settling in Britain post-Brexit, are from: while the table is headed by poorer Eastern European Romania and Poland, these are followed by Italy, Portugal and Spain – southern Eurozone countries which were battered by the consequences of the EU’s stubborn and heedless imposition of the single currency.

While Remainers crow about insularity and “little Englanders”, it turns out that Britain is actually becoming more cosmopolitan, not less, since Brexit – just not in the way they mean it. Not only are 3.2million European citizens now fully settled and 2.6million “pre-settled” (meaning they’ll be fully settled after five years of residence), but also the British population is becoming more international. Recent ONS figures show that the number of workers not born in the UK has increased as a share of the labour force, from 17 per cent in June 2016 to 19 per cent in March 2022, with the increase made up of non-EU workers.

Update: Added the link to J.J. Charlesworth’s article at Spiked.

June 3, 2022

QotD: Snobbery and spying

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

During the Cold War, it was accepted that we would recruit spies and so would they.

Oxford and Cambridge became notorious hunting grounds for the Soviet Union, as they sought out clever young lefties who they might convince to go full retard into communism and then spy for the Motherland.

They had some success with some dapper young gentlemen called Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross – that’s a story for another day.

It was notable that during the whole affair, British intelligence simply refused to believe that one of their own had been corrupted. They could not entertain such a notion, and so the Cambridge Five remained able to betray their country over and over again.

Alex Noble, “Hero Of The European Union”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-04-15.

April 27, 2022

“We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.”

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

Chris Bray has a bit of fun at David French’s expense:

In the 1830s, British merchants with trade routes from India had forced open an enormous market for opium in China, and were pouring the product into the country, producing a lucrative addiction crisis. (Queen Victoria, the first Sackler.) But the Qing Dynasty had run China with a firm hand since the first half of the 17th century, and the emperors of the dynasty had long regarded themselves as, to use an academic term from the field of political science, The Shit. In 1839, Commissioner Lin Zexu sent a huffy letter to the British monarch, warning her that her tedious little pissant country over there in Nowhereville was trifling with a vast and dangerous power:

    Our celestial empire rules over ten thousand kingdoms! Most surely do we possess a measure of godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom! Still we cannot bear to slay or exterminate without previous warning …

The British responded with naval artillery, and the limits of the Qing Dynasty’s power were revealed with the greatest possible clarity. Commissioner Lin had an image of himself, an understanding of his place in the world and the meaning of his nation’s power, that couldn’t survive an encounter with reality.

So: David French. In his own version of Commissioner Lin’s letter, French warns this week that American institutions most surely do possess a measure of godlike majesty which ye cannot fathom, yet ye weak and depraved subjects of these potent institutions offer not thine gratitude. It’s insane. He doesn’t see the world he’s describing, so his description doesn’t have anything to do with the people he’s talking to, and he has no idea.

Before I say anything else, though, I have to point out that I recently described the American crisis like this: “We’re healthy from the bottom up, and sick from the top down.” French does the opposite, describing institutions that are undermined by the dreadful human material beneath them: “Our government is imperfect, but if this republic fractures, its people will be to blame.” Wreckers and saboteurs have undermined the otherwise successful five year plan, you see. The problem is bottom-up.

This is exactly the same beat patrolled by “real conservatives” like Max Boot and Tom Nichols, who endlessly warn that the fat dumb peasants lack the sense to lick the hands of their capable superiors. These are very strange men.

Here, watch French do his thing:

    The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who’ve ever lived. They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.

    It’s simply an astonishing level of discontent in the midst of astonishing wealth and power.

Tell me the comparison to Commissioner Lin isn’t perfect. Does not our wealth and power astonish you!?!?

As French writes about the privileged creatures who live “under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet,” the Taliban rules Afghanistan. A reminder: The Taliban controlled about half of that country in September of 2001; then the most powerful military in the history of the planet invaded, and fought the Taliban for two full decades, at the cost of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars, the result of which is that the Taliban now controls … all of the country. The implosion of the American effort in Afghanistan happened last fucking year, and we’ve somehow already taken care to forget the details of that goat rodeo. What was the plan?

March 29, 2022

Giving up vegetables for Lent

Filed under: Food, Health, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Felipe Fernández-Armesto on updating the traditional Christian observance of Lent for our virtue-signalling, social media age:

“Bruegel the Elder, Fight between Carnival and Lent, detail 6” by f_snarfel is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

For Lent, I am abstaining from vegetables. It may seem counter-intuitive, because “Carnival” or “Carni Vale” — which the English in their glum way call “Shrove Tuesday” and the French, more cheerfully, call “Mardi Gras” — means “Goodbye to Meat”.

The worldly, historic purpose of Lent is to eke out deficient livestock, doomed, unless slaughtered, to die, emaciated and inedible, on sparse or frozen pastures. Nowadays, however, vegetables seem a sacrifice both reasonable and pious.

If I wanted to be lampooned in Private Eye, I’d say that vegetables are the new meat: marketed as dietetically superior, and flattering to a moral form of snobbery.

Like meat in the old days, they are the preferred food of people who want to look down on the rest of us. Flesh and fish are now humbling meals, consumed in self-abasement. “Veganuary” and “Dry January” — wicked, secularist attempts to subvert the sanctity of Lent — repel me from conventional kinds of penance.

I want to defy the absurd propaganda of meat-haters, who try to shame the ill-informed into vegetarianism with mendacious allegations about the environmental cost of carnivorism. Scientifically, they’re on a par with Pythagoras’s denunciation of “passion proteins” and the meat-phobic campaigns of the nineteenth-century evangelists who hawked joyless, overpriced breakfast cereals.

I also want to expose the folly of people who, in flight from the butcher’s shop, grab textured soy concentrate from supermarket shelves: theirs is the idiocy of the ersatz. If you want something like meat, have meat. If you don’t want meat, have something unlike it. My sacrifice would be greater, of course, if I disliked rare steaks and juicy roasts. But I like vegetables, too. So that’s all right.

February 24, 2022

The underlying struggle of our time — the “physicals” versus the “virtuals”

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

Kim du Toit linked to this post by N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval, which postulates that the real issue in western society is really a conflict between the laptop class and the working class:

… I noted how from the perspective of those with the most wealth and power, as well as the technocratic managers and the intelligentsia (our “priestly class, keepers of the Gnosis [Knowledge]”), digital technology and global networks seem to have created “an unprecedented opportunity for Theory to wrest control from recalcitrant nature, for liquid narrative to triumph over mundanely static reality, and for all the corrupt traditional bonds of the world to be severed, its atoms reconfigured in a more correct and desirable manner.”

In this mostly subconscious vision of “Luxury Gnosticism“, the “middle and lower classes can then be sold dispossession and disembodiment as liberation, while those as yet ‘essential’ working classes who still cling distastefully to the physical world can mostly be ignored until the day they can be successfully automated out of existence.”

I also quoted a passage from the late Christopher Lasch’s book The Revolt of the Elites that is worth repeating here:

    The thinking classes are fatally removed from the physical side of life… Their only relation to productive labor is that of consumers. They have no experience of making anything substantial or enduring. They live in a world of abstractions and images, a simulated world that consists of computerized models of reality – “hyperreality”, as it’s been called – as distinguished from the palatable, immediate, physical reality inhabited by ordinary men and women. Their belief in “social construction of reality” – the central dogma of postmodernist thought – reflects the experience of living in an artificial environment from which everything that resists human control (unavoidably, everything familiar and reassuring as well) has been rigorously excluded. Control has become their obsession. In their drive to insulate themselves against risk and contingency – against the unpredictable hazards that afflict human life – the thinking classes have seceded not just from the common world around them but from reality itself.

So let’s consider this using the protests as a lens, and vice versa.

To simplify, let’s first identify and categorize two classes of people in society, who we could say tend to navigate and interact with the world in fundamentally different ways.

The first is a class that has been a part of human civilization for a really long time. These are the people who work primarily in the real, physical world. Maybe they work directly with their hands, like a carpenter, or a mechanic, or a farmer. Or maybe they are only a step away: they own or manage a business where they organize and direct employees who work with their hands, and buy or sell or move things around in the real world. Like a transport logistics company, maybe. This class necessarily works in a physical location, or they own or operate physical assets that are central to their trade.

The second class is different. It is, relatively speaking, a new civilizational innovation (at least in numbering more than a handful of people). This group is the “thinking classes” Lasch was writing about above. They don’t interact much with the physical world directly; they are handlers of knowledge. They work with information, which might be digital or analog, numerical or narrative. But in all cases it exists at a level of abstraction from the real world. Manipulation and distribution of this information can influence the real world, but only through informational chains that pass directives to agents that can themselves act in the physical world – a bit like a software program that sends commands to a robot arm on an assembly line. To facilitate this, they build and manage abstract institutions and systems of organizational communication as a means of control. Individuals in this class usually occupy middle links in these informational chains, in which neither the inputs nor outputs of their role has any direct relationship with or impact on the physical world. They are informational middlemen. This class can therefore do their job almost entirely from a laptop, by email or a virtual Zoom meeting, and has recently realized they don’t even need to be sitting in an office cubicle while they do it.

For our purposes here, let’s call these two classes the Physicals and the Virtuals, respectively.

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