Obviously this is going to be one of those. And probably more so than usual, because all I have are very scattered thoughts. But I started thinking about this, from Vizzini’s comment the other day:
There’s an argument to be made that the red/blue rural/urban split is mostly about population density. Seems pertinent to the discussion about what causes leftists we had recently. We talked about caloric surplus and leisure time, but proximity/density may also contribute a significant fraction. Correlation or causation or both?
…
Rural people are effectively just as dependent on the system. We go to grocery stores, get our power from the electric company, have phones, internet, use hospitals. We’re dependent on the county to plow our roads, etc. Most rural people are just as dead as city people in a Mad Max scenario.
So maybe it’s not system dependency directly, just that basic “rubbing of elbows.” Like, if my “neighbor” is blasting his stereo at 4 in the morning, well, it’s a few hundred yards away and I never know about it. It’s interesting to note that even in rural areas, if you’re looking for the leftists, you mostly find them in town, except for the really toney leftists that work for colleges, government, or NGOs and own their little 5-acre “farms” where they can advocate for lots of government programs to “help” the poor hillbillies without having to hang around many icky hillbillies.
That’s one of those ideas that just feels right. To be effective, an idea must propagate, and barmy ideas propagate best — one almost wants to say “propagate only” — in near-anonymity. If you want to spread your barmy idea out in the country, until very recently you needed to do it face to face, where Farmer John can tell you in person that you talk like a fag and your shit’s all retarded.
Same way, it’s hard to be seriously crazy in a Dunbar Number environment. Or, to be more precise, crazy gets addressed a lot sooner, a lot more thoroughly, out in the country, because interactions are much more in-depth. In the city, you have lots of “off” people who can appear normal for a few minutes, and a few minutes’ interaction is all most people get with them (and only once, or very infrequently, whereas in the country you might not have a lot of in-depth interactions, but by default there are a lot of interactions).
Without the Internet, in a community of 500, a Rachel Good would have a much harder time pulling her shit.
So maybe it’s not population density as such, but our old friend the Dunbar Number — the “rubbing of elbows” Vizzini mentions. A rural town is actually fairly population-dense, both as a statistical matter and “interpersonally,” I guess we’ll say. All that stuff your Sinclair Lewis types used to complain about is true, or at least was true pre-Internet: Everybody knows everybody, and has known everybody, for generations; you move out to the sticks, and you’ll be “the new guy” for the next 30 years. You ask for directions out there, and they’ll tell you to hook a left at the old Johnson place; you ask how you’ll recognize the old Johnson place, and they’ll tell you it burned down in ’64; that kind of thing.
So it’s not density per se; it’s density plus anonymity. Or maybe “density plus transience.” For irrelevant and boring reasons I lived in the same apartment for my first three or four years out of college; I must’ve had dozens of neighbors come and go. Hell, it was that way in houses out in the ‘burbs where I grew up — out on the fringes of Techopolis, you learn the true meaning of the Real Estate Agent term “starter home.” Everybody was always moving, in search of the next opportunity, and that (plus the tech thing) is why my high school’s sportsball mascot was Ganesh.
But it’s an odd sort of transience (here we go; I told you it was going to be one of those). It’s the sense of “permanent impermanence,” let’s call it.
I sometimes wonder if Noticing doesn’t come down to the opposite phenomenon, call it “impermanent permanence.” We are all of us “conservatives” — for rhetorical purposes — not because we dislike or fear change. We know better than anybody that all things are always changing — we are born, we grow, we die; nothing remains the same, not for a second… but only for us, personally. Nature doesn’t change. The sun rises and sets; the seasons move in their cycle; the needs of the crops and the animals will always be the same; will always be there.
It’s just we who will someday be gone, and “someday” is right around the corner. Someone like Sinclair Lewis thinks it’s hell, being constantly compared to your great-grandfather — you can never “just be yourself” in a small town, says he. And I don’t doubt that it’s oppressive at times. But it also gives you that sense of “impermanent permanence.” Great-Grandpa was born; he lived his life; he died… and so will you, and that right soon. But 100 years from now, some old lady will be comparing your great-grandson to you.
Everything human changes, but Nature does not change. That’s “conservatism,” I guess, and for lack of a better term. And that’s what causes Noticing, I’m coming to believe. It’s not that we dislike “change” — that would be as absurd as disliking the seasons. We dislike change qua change; change for change’s sake, and that instinctive distaste for change qua change is why we Notice. We have that sense of Impermanent Permanence, so we can’t help but Notice that today’s Current Thing is the exact opposite of yesterday’s.
It’s not “change” in the sense we understand, and instinctively accept — it’s not “change” in the way the seasons change. It’s directed change — somebody decided to do it. And if it’s not immediately apparent who, or why, we are naturally suspicious. We are “based,” if you will, in the Permanent, so we are acutely aware of the deliberate aspects of the Impermanent.
City life gives you the opposite, indeed overwhelming, sense of Permanent Impermanence. Nothing stays the same; the only constant is change. I remember seeing it in College Town, which was not particularly large, population-wise, but had almost all the “amenities” you’d expect from a major metro. Bearing in mind, as always, that “College Town” is a composite of several different places… but they’re all basically the same, and that’s the point.
The first thing that struck me about College Town — that you see in every College Town, coast to coast — was how shabby it was. Even the brand-new apartment complexes (of which there were many, Higher Ed being a growth industry at that time) all looked dilapidated. The next thing I Noticed was the lack of institutions. College Town had every imaginable “amenity” — exotic cuisine, 24 hour everything — but no playgrounds, no ball fields, no churches. Hardly any schools, despite being pretty good size relative to the surrounding area, because why would there be? All that stuff is for people who actually live there, as opposed to the transients, or even the “permanent residents,” if you will, on the faculty (what an unconsciously telling phrase that is!).
Nobody’s from there, and nobody stays there. Not even the faculty — they always have one foot out the door, no matter if they’re Department Chairs with 30+ years’ seniority. It is crucial to their amour-propre to believe that they’re always about to get the call from Harvard, which in part explains the weird phenomenon of the “faculty ghetto.” They’ll spend a zillion dollars “restoring” a frankly tiny house in the “historic” district, by which is meant “gutting it, and making it as close to a Current Year McMansion as the physical infrastructure can bear.” Then they’ll spend a zillion more on yearly maintenance, when they could’ve gotten twice the house, with the latest and greatest everything, built to spec on the outskirts of town…
…which is five minutes away; it’s not like they’re facing some huge commute (and it’s not like they walk or even bike to campus, and God forbid they take the bus. No, they’d much rather gut or knock down another old building, just to have a garage in which to park the huge gas-guzzling SUV they drive the 45 linear feet to “work,” because how else would they show off how important they are, without parking in their designated space in the one fucking lot in the entire town?).
In other words, they don’t want to admit that they live there — they are, at most, “permanent residents.” There are no public playgrounds, because their one designer baby isn’t going to rub elbows with the children of the few greasy proles they grudgingly tolerate in the absolutely necessary service industries — you know, the mechanics and plumbers and snow plow drivers and such. There are no churches, just one or two Temples of the Current Thing, and only to the extent that a few of them have paraphilias involving clerical vestments. No ball fields, no Cub Scout packs or Elks Lodges or American Legion posts, because c’mon man. A town that size anywhere else would have a Walmart and a Minor League team and a big rivalry game between the local high schools; College Town has head shops and Egyptian-Thai fusion cuisine and DoorDash.
Permanent Impermanence, in other words. Deliberate impermanence. Nothing lasts, nothing can last, nothing should last. There are some people who find that attitude — which I would call straight-out, shit-flinging nihilism — deeply appealing, and… well… there it is.
Damn wage gains, making it harder for the elites to afford their 3rd yacht.
You want proof that “democracy” simply doesn’t work? There it is. These “people” openly, gleefully hate us… and yet, they say “they’re for the little guy,” and so many dipshits keep voting for them. Representative government requires an engaged citizenry, just like they used to say in Civics class… but nothing is better at disengaging the citizenry than “representative government.”
The next one is too long to blockquote, so everything between the end of this sentence and the separator is from Black:
Reader Black writes –
So Bandcamp has decided to ban AI music from their platform. Since I use AI in my music, they will likely delete it soon.
And here I was thinking the Red Caesar Scenario might be due for a proper album of their own…
I don’t know how long my Bandcamp page will be up. It could last another year, it could be gone tomorrow. No way to know. So if there are any NBCs who want copies of my music before it possibly disappears, I set up a discount of 60%. Also, if you really like my music, you can purchase my entire discography at once – there is an automatic 30% discount, and the 60% discount can be applied on top of that. If 60% isn’t enough, I can make it lower.
Buy as much or as little as you like,. Or nothing at all if it’s not your thing. I’m just trying to make sure anyone who might like it gets a chance to grab it before it’s gone.
The discounts are good for everything – the music on my primary page, and it also covers everything on the Recording Artists Collections side, where EVC and The Red Caesar Scenario and others live… you know, the fun ones, heh.
The code is –
bannedcamp
Type that in at checkout to get the discount. The code is good until the 19th. Note: this offer is legal in Riga, but only on Thursdays.
Thanks for all your support guys (and gal) I appreciate it.
My music – blackskymusic.bandcamp DOT com
EVC, The Red Caesar Scenario, Sonic Booty, and more – recordingartistscollections.bandcamp DOT com
Throw the man some shekels if you can; he’s one of ours. No one has ever done more for the Baltic Vice… no, wait, that didn’t come out right (also kinda like the Baltic Vice), but you know what I mean.
Jacques writes:
In the interests of increasing productivity still further, I offer an observation which you may care to comment on, and one actual question.
The observation: In my extended circle of friends and acquaintances, there is a growing horror at what the USA is becoming, or worse yet, has been for some time but has been hiding until recently. As you can imagine, I don’t hang out with a lot of Leftists (for convenience), liberals, hysterical types, so this is not in response to the ICE stuff or tariffs but mainly a reaction to the increasing disregard for international law, the casual use of force, the out-and-out warmongering. I have lived in Canada most of my life and I have never seen such a hardening of attitude.
I know people who were always pro-American and who are now so put off that they literally don’t want to set foot in the USA. And I imagine Canadians’ beefs are relatively mild, compared to, say, what the mindset must be in Venezuela or Gaza or Denmark. I fear that the USA is making itself hated and feared to a degree which many Americans don’t grasp. What proportion of Americans, in your opinion, realize how very negatively much of the world now looks at the Republic? Or, for that matter, how many care? Anyway, an observation if you care to comment.
The question: I recently saw on YouTube, a video purporting to ask MAGA supporters what the causes of the civil war were. None of them could answer, like no idea. I didn’t take it very seriously as I assumed it was a set-up intended to show how dumb MAGA supporters were, but I wonder about the depth of historical knowledge there. (Here it is pretty abysmal.) Do most people know anything about the causes of the Civil War? Who fought who in WW1 or WW2? How ignorant is the populace of the past, and what are the implications? You have touched on this in the past, so if you feel this is going over old ground, feel free to ignore.
Re: the observation… no, I don’t think many people know. I bet even fewer would care, even if they did know.
I don’t mean that in some Toby Keith, ‘Murrica fuck yeah! kind of way. I mean we’ve been hearing a version of that all our lives. It’s part of the definition of “Eurofag,” which also includes Canada — Eurofags have been saying that since at least 1945, if not 1919. And the American Left “agrees and amplifies,” such that the word “France” gets turned into an insult. Like so:
A Republican President does something, anything, internationally. Some Eurofag tut-tuts him. The American Left screams “See? SEE?!? [Whatever it was] has caused us to lose respect internationally.” And then some Frog starts running his mouth, as they do, and all right-thinking Americans go “Ooooooh, well if France is against it, I guess we’d better stop! Sacre bleu!” And then we all do this:
Never mind that Froggy quite often has a point, usually a pretty good one; it is what it is. After nearly a century of that shit, about every single thing, no matter how minor… welllll, it’s like Holocaustianity, you know? When you scream “It’s just like the Holocaust!” if the drive-thru kid forgets to supersize your fries, that quickly loses all meaning.
Same thing here.
This is not to say I disagree with you. Quite the opposite — this time it’s real, and it’s getting really dangerous. But something something the boy who cried wolf, you know?
As to the question: Both sides do those “ambush” videos purporting to show how stupid the other side is. One of my favorites, that I’ll never tire of linking, is Jimmy Kimmel in his Man Show incarnation, circulating a petition to end women’s suffrage:
The Man Show debuted in 1999, for the record.
Nonetheless, the ignorance is real, and it is profound. Back when I was professin’, I used to have lectures I called “[some huge topic] in five minutes.” I had to. No matter what I was teaching, I simply couldn’t rely on students to know even the most basic basics. My “[topic] in five minutes” series always started with a map, and I mean always, because you can’t count on them to know where, or even what, e.g. “Europe” is.
I’ll remind you that I taught college. These kids had twelve years’ worth of primary schooling, where of course they all got Straight A’s, and that’s where I had to start. I know, I know, you don’t believe me — I was there, and I barely believe it myself; that’s why I don’t often tell Charlie Murphy’s True Academia Stories. But if you want to see a fella totally lost for words, sit through his lecture about British political history, watch his students scribbling down notes (that’s how long ago this was), hear him ask “Any questions?” right before the bell, and watch what happens when some girl raises her hand and asks “What’s ‘Parliament’?”
Now, in this particular case — “MAGA” not knowing the causes of the Civil War — I have to call bullshit, because that’s one of those topics on which all Americans have been drilled in the TORAH: “slavery.” But since you’re only expected to parrot the TORAH, I suppose you could find cases, maybe lots of cases, where people simply don’t remember. It’s like asking someone to remember his first address — you doubtless gave it out a million times, on hundreds of different forms, but you forgot it pretty much as soon as you stopped needing it. That’s American “education” for you — memorize the TORAH, regurgitate it on the test, promptly forget about it.
Ben the Layabout has one that’s really long and formatted (said your Mom!), so everything from the end of this sentence to the separator is his:
Sometimes this topic comes up, that of physiognomy. And that’s exactly the term, too, which Google informs me means “the supposed art of judging character from facial characteristics.” Well, what if there’s some truth to it? It’s one rabbit hole I’ve never gone down; so many holes and just one rabbit, and a lazy one at that.
Might make for an interesting guest post.
This is an ancient belief. It’s mentioned by Plato, allegedly Socrates was involved in such an incident, which Nietzsche humorously reports in one of his essays.
I submit that there IS some truth to it: consider the case of Down’s Syndrome. Anyone can spot these wretches even at a distance by the malformed ears. Usually there is profound retardation and other unhappy consequences going along with those traits.
Is that an extreme case? Maybe. Might it really be possible to tell personality from mere appearance?
I can’t cite you a reference, but I’ve read that the human brain evolved to be so large in part because it gave us the ability to infer the mental state of others by appearance.
We sometimes speak of the progressive’s smirk, or whatever you’d like to term it. From recent news, here’s a sorry example. Now, it’s possible the media chose an unflattering photo. Or it could have been her normal face:
Unlike Plato’s Socrates, who admitted he did indeed have the face of a monster and had a cave of bad appetites, but who had mastered them all, alas the same is not true for other odd ducks:
You’re no Good, you’re no Good, you’re no Good, baby you’re no Good.
Physiognomy is very, very real. It’s one of those things that’s so obviously true, the Powers That Be have gone to enormous lengths to deny it, and your post notes why: It’s one of those obvious consequences of Evolution that must be denied for political reasons.
I like to say I’m the only guy I know who really believes in Evolution, because few things discombobulate the Left worse than that (especially coming from an open, though not particularly good, Roman Catholic). But really, I tell them, Evolution explains so much! You look at dogs, for example, and it’s just obvious that physical and behavioral characteristics are heritable, and strongly correlate. I mean, look at that labradoodle you spent big bucks for, because it doesn’t shed much, and it’s good with kids. What kind of idiot Science Denier ™ would deny that?
Phrase it like that — here we are, the Smart People, agreeing on The Science ™ which is Settled ™ — and they’ll fall all over themselves agreeing with you…
…but the next part is really hard, comrades. And I mean that in every sense, because it’s really tough to hold up your end of the conversation when you’ve got such a huge, throbbing erection. But if you manage to keep it from bursting through your pants and knocking them through the nearest wall, now they’re at your mercy. You can go so many different ways with it.
Personally, I like to segue into “pittie rescues” these days. As in, I can’t believe Jane would let one of those monsters into her home. They’re obviously bred to be fighting dogs… but you can go a million different ways with it, and no matter what, that look they get in their eyes just before they go into total vapor lock is priceless. It’s just Science ™, right?
See what I mean?
I’ve probably written a thousand words on Cesare Lombroso, but if anyone wants a recap — or wants to do a guest post, because Lord knows I am not Expert — let me know.
Quotulatiousness brings us a tweet of note:
"To all Legionaries. When Caesar's gone, so is your job and your immunity. And we, the Optimates in the Senate, won't forget what you did."
"Ok, so we'll just cross the Rubicon and overthrow the Senate then."
I am told that at one point in the video, you can hear Renee Good’s “wife” screaming something to the effect of “Why did you have real bullets?” I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s one of those things that sure feels true, you know?
They really have no idea. Mx. Good obviously can’t know this, because she’s gone to wherever it is those “people” go, but to the rest of them: Somebody whose name rhymes with “Florge Boros” went to enormous, and enormously expensive, lengths to get you killed. Yes, you fucking idiots, you getting killed was the point. It was the only point. They were really hoping for another George Floyd, but a Renee Good will do in a pinch.
That was the plan. That was always the plan. For whatever psychological reason that’s way above my pay grade, the Left must always feel as if they have been forced to act — you left them no choice but to do whatever horrible shit to you. They need us to fire first, so they’re going to great lengths to make sure we do. The only reason you idiots can’t see it is because you have been trained to mistake Twitter for real life. It’s going to get a lot of people killed.
Darryl Licht has a really long one (said your Mom!; man, that never gets old), with several embeds, so everything from the end of the sentence to the separator is his:
Last week you said you love College Town™. I understand the appeal. Whenever I’m in some place where I find myself thinking “Hmmmmm…. I
could live here” it’s invariably a college town.
But what if you went back into academia and there was absolutely NO college town. Do you think you could deal with teaching at a place like Deep Springs College?
It’s the smallest of small private liberal arts colleges. Located in rural, isolated California it’s a junior college – 2 years – meaning 24 continuous months. No breaks. No leaving the campus. No tuition. It’s also a working cattle ranch where the students are the ranch hands. The nearest town, such as it is, is an hour away.
From what I can tell DSC would be a perfect fit for your teaching style but I have no idea how it would suit your lifestyle or personality.
Interesting list of alumni. DSC might be considered one of the farm (heh) team feeder schools for the ruling class that we discuss on occasion. The diplomatic corps in particular are among those who take an interest and get 1st round draft picks.
Until recently DSC was male only. A long fight to go co-ed at DSC recently concluded. The girls won. I always thought that someone could have tapped Laurene Jobs, Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Melinda Gates, MacKenzie Bezos and the like to purchase and endow a nearby ranch for the wimmens with just loose change from the sofa. But I suppose that’s not really the point, is it.
The teaching philosophy of DSC spawned a few loosely associated colleges the refer to themselves as the League of Nunnian Schools.
Here’s a reminder of what you’ve been missing on campus. I’m a little hesitant to share this with you lest it trigger a PTSD flashback that reduces you to a crumpled, whimpering blob curled up in the fetal position.
TL;DR – Drunk, entitled, combative, delusional faculty member does everything possible to get herself arrested by campus PD. Gets a light community service judgement. Comes back a few months later to bitch-out the cops again.
Oh Lord. This is me right now:
What I wouldn’t give to teach at a place like that!
Which is actually closer to what college was always intended to be. In the Middle Ages, of course, they were training academies for the clergy, or finishing schools for the aristocracy. Either way, this notion that you’re supposed to be nothing but a student is very, very recent — like, 30 years ago recent. Now, I went to an urban outpost of Directional Tech, so it’s not surprising that most of my classmates worked. But unless you went to either one of those “you’re buying not an education, but a Rolodex”-type places, or a legendarily tough Engineering school (or a Service Academy, I guess), you’d find a healthy proportion of the student body holding down jobs while attending class.
In other words, “going to college” wasn’t an end in itself quite yet, the way it is now. You don’t have to buy into all the “character” bullshit in the Latin motto to know that there’s something very wrong with the current attitude — colleges today would fail the Pepsi Challenge vs. the Red October Higher Party Leadership Academy or whatever they called it, and everybody is somehow ok with that. But college was always intended to be the “mens sana” part of “mens sana in corpore sano,” which meant that the corpore sano part was important, too, and the college was supposed to at least not degrade it while upgrading the mens.
BileJones brings us a video of note:
and asks:
Who springs to mind who self identifies as such a person and whose Maternal Grandparents were big in the movement in at that time?
Elon Musk.
Coincidence?
Not at all. That’s been the Priestly Caste’s dream since Karl Marx. Hell, Friedrich Engels even said it, in pretty much those words: under Communism, quoth he, the government of people will be replaced by the mere administration of things.
And, really, isn’t it obvious that everything would be so much better if people were more rational? But alas, if they were more rational, they’d be Vulcans, not people. People are what they are, and unless you’re ok with murdering them wholesale in order to make the spreadsheets work, the spreadsheets are never going to work. As The Swede explains, there’s only one way to make the numbers add up:
(That was an interesting show for a season or two).
Urbando asks:
I admit to watching a lot of youtoob videos (my chief source of video entertainment). The owners/operators shove a lot of videos through the information firehose to see what viewers will click on, and also to push Lefty narratives. Lately my AI antenna has been activated by what I see on that right hand side of the screen. I have clicked on a few videos that looked interesting only to find a commenter making the AI accusation. So now I cast a baleful eye on anything that looks like someone is selling something and withhold my attention.
How long will it take AI to shatter everyone’s confidence in information? You have stated that this would ultimately be a good thing, forcing people to fall back onto the few trustworthy individuals in their circle of acquaintances. But I think the period of eroding confidence in the information stream will be a very painful time. What do you think?
I agree. It’s like the printing press and the Internet, all rolled into one.
As C.S. Lewis points out in The Discarded Image — still one of the best quick primers on The Medieval Mind I know — we don’t credit the Middle Ages for being bookish. Which makes sense in one way, literacy rates being what they were. But on the other hand, because literacy was so rare, the Middle Ages were actually extremely bookish — medieval thought is so weird, in no small part, because they took it on faith that anything written in a book had to be true. So if something in A directly contradicts B, it’s philosophy’s task to reconcile A and B into a higher unity.
The Reformation was so shattering, not because A and B can’t be reconciled — medieval thinkers could reconcile anything; they had dialectical skills that would give Hegel himself a stiffie — but because Luther et al deny the very possibility of reconciliation. A is true, which means B must be false, or vice versa. In other words, and grossly oversimplifying for clarity, now books can be wrong.
AI is going to do that for video. Television was to modern times what books were to the Middle Ages: We can’t help believing, somewhere deep in our bones, that what we see with our own two eyes must be true. We’re wired that way; millions of years of evolution went into it. It takes a LOT of training, and strenuous effort, to break that conditioning, even a little bit — how many of us, even us, even now, still instinctively trust the TV? You can’t not watch one, not without real effort.
But now AI is destroying that, the way the printing press destroyed the unity of Medieval thought. Now, moving images can be wrong, which means they can lie. Just like Luther! (or, as Luther would say, just like the Papacy).
It took Western Civ a hundred-odd years of brutal sectarian warfare, up to and including WWI-level casualties, the reduction of large areas of Germany to cannibalism, and so on, before we finally got that “Reformation” thing sorted. So… there’s that.
Bwana Simba asks:
Question for the peanuts gallery, are careers worth it nowadays? Moving around for jobs? I am looking at getting promoted, but may have to move to do so. I have moved quite a bit for this company, but I like the rural area I currently reside. However, there aren’t a lot of good job opportunities here, so jumping ship for something more stable doesn’t seem likely.
Iain McGilchrist interviews an authoress who is publishing a book that’s highly critical of feminism. The real entertainment is in the comment section, as there are somehow quite a large number of commenters claiming to be fans of The Master and His Emissary that are shocked by McGilchrist’s sudden descent into reactionary right-wingery.
That’s funny, but their surprise isn’t particularly surprising. Consider pretty much everything I’ve ever quoted by Aman-duh about “MAGA.” It’s always fun to ask “what planet is she living on, and are they taking applications?”, but y’all, their ignorance of “the Right” really is that profound. They have no idea what we actually think about pretty much anything; like Aman-duh, they’re constantly battling straw men that only exist in their heads.
Not only that, but — and I really need to write this piece, if I can figure out how — they’re addicted to what I’ll call “thought-terminating cliches,” for lack of a better term. That’s not quite right, in the sense Lifton uses it, but for various reasons (I really need to write that piece) my old term “parathought” doesn’t cut it either. I guess call it the “propositional” or “intellectual” version of those windmills Aman-duh tilts at: They have this idea in their heads of what “right-wingers” believe, and of course they hate it with the heat of a thousand suns, but it has to be expressed in exactly the right way for the rage switch to flip.
See above, the discussion about labradoodles. You can get them right up to the point of joining the fucking Klan, some of them, before they finally catch on to what you’re doing. It’s not because they’re stupid — this kind of Stupid Professor Trick actually works better on smart people. I think it’s because they’ve been trained, like an AI, with a set of canned “arguments” that they can only bust out in response to a specific trigger. Another analogy I used to use is those old “text-based adventure” games like Zork — to open the door to the dungeon, you have to phrase it in exactly the right way, because the parser is 1979-level tech and won’t recognize metaphors, misspellings, whatever.
I’m still working my way through The Master and His Emissary, but I got the gist of it by like page 3. He never comes right out and says “Liberalism is brain damage,” but if you’re not smiling by page five, and all but laughing aloud at some of his wry circumlocutions by about page 10, you’re reading the wrong book.
They can’t get it though, because of those thought terminating cliches or parser failures or whatever we end up calling it, so it comes as a big shock to them.
HazHap asks:
Question for the mail bag: How should we view Renee Good? A useful idiot for the proggie left, certainly. A mess, personally and psychologically, of course. But also a white woman who had three kids, making her a definite exception to the norm in AINO these days. Those kids are likely seriously messed up (there is a reason she did not have custody of her older two kids), but still — a lot more offspring than most white women produce these days.
I really don’t know anything about her. And this is going to sound Beria-level coldblooded, but I don’t really want to know, because she’s far more useful at room temperature than she ever would’ve been otherwise. My heart would bleed for those kids if I let it, and I am sorry beyond words it has come to this, but… it has come to this.
She was obviously a fucked-up freakazoid. The Left is going to try to turn her into a martyr, of course, but more than that, she’s an aspirational figure for them. That’s your basic AWFL, living her best life, and I’m not in any way kidding.
Remember back in the depths of the Covid mess, when you realized it was going on so long, in no small part, because so many people wanted it to? That they like living like that? So it goes with Renee Good. That’s your Strong, Confident Woman ™, right there. And they can’t see it, so they’re going to end up championing all her batshit insane dysfunction, in the same way they end up championing “Maryland Father,” ‘groids chimping out in DC, Somalis defrauding the taxpayers of billions, and so on. That’s who they are.
Frankly, that’s all to the good (no pun intended). Make them own that shit. It’s going to take a few more of them getting perforated if there’s to be any hope of avoiding… well, you know, and as unlikely as that is at this late date.
I feel like I have to go douse myself in bleach after writing that, but… there it is. It has come to this.
Based on what we know of their looks, talents, and personalities, which of Henry’s wives would you choose?
I would say Anne of Cleaves, with Catherine of Aragon a close second.
That sounds like one hell of a Nerd Fight to me, but I’ll throw it out there now.
As Nehushtan noted, the Holbein portrait of Anne of Cleves
makes her look ok-to-pretty-decent. There’s a cottage industry of “what would they look like now?” AI-assisted “photography”… ah, yes, there’s one of the Original AoC:
6 of 10, would bang. And not to get off on another long tangent about mentalités, but this is one of those areas where we all can be right. Assuming she looks like she did in the Holbein portrait (contemporary opinion was mixed), she might look ok-to-nice to us, and quite blah to them. Consider a roughly contemporary super-babe, Giulia Farnese:
Big, powerful guys (including Rodrigo Borgia, Pope Alexander VI) fought over her; she was pretty much the definition of The Renaissance Hotness, and I’d take Anne of Cleves over her any day. They liked weak chins and high foreheads in the Renaissance, for whatever reason, to the point where women plucked their hair to get that half-bald dome up front. They also seemed to kinda like them exopthalmic, but I don’t have as much evidence for that, and anyway you see what I mean.
Witness these conflicts between hi-tech driverless delivery vans and grannies who think right in the middle of the lane on a paved road is a good place to dry their vegetables.
Answer that, and you’ve got the Third World dicked. India is the same way. If you’ve got the money, you can live the very best Western-style life imaginable… until you leave your house, and then you’re in India for real. It’s not a racial thing — they don’t roll that way in Japan, I’m told. My guess is that they don’t have a Liberal Tradition going back 300 years, which — for all its many and obvious faults — makes a fetish of novelty.
I’ll also note that this was one of Chef Boyardee’s big gripes: The Italians were still acting like Third Worlders (of course he didn’t use that term, but you know what I mean). He wanted to modernize them at gunpoint, and he actually did a pretty good job, all things considered; History will be much kinder to Mussolini, once the Current Year retardery subsides.
I think that does it for this weekend, gang. Have a good one, and as always, thanks for reading.
Note: tomorrow’s Friday, so please email mailbag questions (rcseverian AT protonmail dot com) or post in the comments below.
Not to get all HGG up in here with the neologisms, but for now — just for now, I promise — let’s call the Spreadsheet View of Life “economism.” (Someone already coined the term, of course — Lenin attacked it — but it was a long time ago, and anyway who cares what those fags think?). For us, “economism” is the feeling — it hardly rises to the level of a “theory” — that if it can’t be quantified, it’s meaningless, and that it doesn’t matter what the number is, so long as it goes up.
Similarly, for now let us use “biologism” more or less in its dictionary definition: “the use of biological explanations in the analysis of social situations.”
Those seem like useful rhetorical categories, no? In the broad sense, “economism” means “privileging the economic when you shouldn’t.” Liberals (back when they existed) used to love making “economicist” critiques. They weren’t against “business” or “prosperity” or whatever; they just wanted to make sure we didn’t misplace our priorities. “People over profits,” they used to say — google that phrase; you’ll get a lot.
This is one of those “lacunae,” if you’ll forgive a term d’art, that Cultural Historians drool for. It seems like “economicist” critiques were everywhere, back in the days, yet nobody called it “economism.” In fact, I don’t know what they called it, and I was there. A person who consistently said “people over profits” in, say, 1995 would call himself a “Liberal”… but the word “Liberal” carried so much other stuff with it that the “economic” aspect frequently got lost.
Consider abortion. Circa 1995, it was usually presented as a subset of “women’s rights,” which is another area with a big “economicist” component that just got dropped somewhere along the line. Remember that whole thing about how women make 75 cents on the dollar compared to men? It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that one… but back to abortion. You’d occasionally hear someone trying to defend abortion in economic terms, but after a while that too dropped away. One simply couldn’t be a Liberal without being an abortion advocate, and never mind that abortion not only doesn’t seem to have much relationship to the rest of the Liberal program, but actually makes a lot of it incoherent (they never had an answer, for example, when you pointed out that so, so many abortions were done in the “African-American community”).
Stranger still, you don’t see their opponents pushing an “economicist” critique with anything like the force you’d expect. One of the earliest arguments against 70’s-style “Women’s Lib” was one of the best: You’re fighting for the “right” to be wage slaves. Of course the bowtie crowd used a version of it, that they thought was extremely clever: “If women only make 75 cents on the dollar, why don’t the Evil Capitalists fire all the men, and hire women? Instant 25% profit, baby!” But they never pressed hard on even that, and they certainly never took the next — equally obvious — step: A doubling of the labor force cuts wages in half, right?
Indeed, if anything, you’d expect the 1995 “Right” to be all-in on Women’s Lib. They’re all a bunch of corporate boot-lickers, no? Profits before people. Well, doubling the labor force cuts wages in half, and that’s before you shave 25 cents off the dollar. Given how snarky Liberals were — and they were somehow even worse on that score back then; they all sounded like Matthew Perry from Friends — you’d expect to find them making that exact “argument.” You’d expect to see some Clintonista chiding the National Review crowd for not supporting Women’s Lib, to help improve their C-suite buddies’ bottom line….
But instead of using the big, fat, juicy “economicist” critiques that were right there, instead the 1990s kicked off The Culture Wars.
Now, there are a million possible explanations for this, and all of them are correct, or correct-ish (today’s vocab word is, as always, “overdetermination”). Some are obvious: The Left had expended enormous brainpower since 1917 “proving” that Socialist economics were superior to “Capitalist” ones. There were entire libraries’ worth of fat, dense, statistics-laden tomes “proving” that the Five Year Plan not only worked, but was overfulfilled by 500%, and so on. But the Soviets threw in the towel in 1991, and China stopped paying even lip service to Communism — “To get rich is glorious,” CCP Chairman Deng Xiaoping allegedly said, and it doesn’t matter if he actually did, everyone believed it, because China was now making approximately all the consumer goods in the world. Given all that, nobody on the Left had the energy to strap on the green eyeshades for another round.
Still, though, it seems odd that nobody used a weapon that potent…
The likely explanation is much easier in the case of the other phenomenon we started with, “biologism.” The problem with “economism” is that it’s too diffuse, to the point where it seems like a straw man — this being The Internet, there are probably half a dozen ACK-shully comments already, from people who didn’t read this far. ACK-shully, people made “economicist” arguments all the time; pretending it’s a “problem” that they didn’t use the specific word “economicist” is one of those Stupid Professor Tricks. So let me use the case of “biologism” to hopefully highlight what I’m getting at:
“Biologism” had a pretty good run, starting in the 18th century. Check out this Wiki entry on “scientific racism;” you’ll see it right away:
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called “races”, and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority.
Confucius say that man who stand on toilet bowl get high on pot. But Confucius also say that the solution to most of life’s problems comes down to the rectification of names, and I’m pretty sure his cock just exploded, because just look at that bullshit. “Discrimination,” “inferiority,” “and “superiority” are all qualitative terms. By definition, there cannot be empirical evidence for qualitative terms. I mean… you could write an entire primer on Basic Logic Stuff just from that one sentence. Like, if there’s “empirical evidence” for “superiority” — which there isn’t, and can’t be, but let that slide — then a fortiori there’s evidence for “inferiority,” right?
Again, this is the kind of thing Cultural Historians drool for. When you find yourself asking “fucking editors, how do they work?” about a supposedly authoritative reference work, you know you’ve spotted something important about the Weltanschauung of the time in which the work was composed.
I’m not going to go through the whole thing; I’ll just give you one more example:
In a 2008 essay published by the Linnean Society of London, Marie-Christine Skuncke interpreted Linnaeus’ statements as reflecting a view that “Europeans’ superiority resides in “culture”, and that the decisive factor in Linnaeus’ taxa was “culture”, not race”. Thus, regarding this topic, Skuncke considers Linnaeus’ view as merely “eurocentric”, arguing that Linnaeus never called for racist action, and did not use the word “race”, which was only introduced later “by his French opponent, Buffon”.
That’s a goldmine.
interpreted Linnaeus’ statements as reflecting a view that “Europeans’ superiority resides in “culture”
What statements? I am not Expert on 18th century Sweden, specifically, but I know enough about the period to state with some confidence that writers of that age weren’t shy about expressing their opinions. I’m confident that if Linnaeus thought Europeans were superior to ___, he would’ve said so, and spelled out his reasoning at 18th-century length. Hell, they even quote him as saying this about Africans:
black, phlegmatic, relaxed; black, frizzled hair; silky skin, flat nose, tumid lips; females with elongated labia; mammary glands give milk abundantly; sly, lazy, negligent; anoints themself with grease; governed by caprice.
Uhhhh…ok. Leave aside the godawful grammar (“anoints themself”?); it’s pretty clear that Linnaeus thinks “culture” and “biology” are inextricably linked. Given what he says about Europeans (“gentle, acute, inventive… governed by customs) you can make a pretty good guess as to which ones he thinks are better.
But so what? If you’re reading this in a vacuum, then get out, it’s dark and dusty in there. Ha ha ha (still whacked on cold meds, obviously). But also: if you’re reading this “in a vacuum,” as it were, it’s pretty weird: You’re trying to attribute, or deny, to Linnaeus beliefs he couldn’t possibly have held. Like so:
Linnaeus never called for racist action
What “racist action” could he have called for? Linnaeus died in 1778; he was a Swede. The sum total of non-Europeans residing in Sweden in Linnaeus’s lifetime was, I’d bet any amount of money, a nice round zero. Ditto the number of non-Europeans residing in the Dutch Republic, the only other place Linnaeus ever lived. Even if Linnaeus was a rabid supporter of Dutch colonialism (Sweden had no colonies), he’d urge them to do what, exactly, race-wise?
“Exterminate all the brutes!” Mr. Kurtz yells from the Heart of Darkness… but that was 1899, when we had got, the Maxim gun, and they had not. It just wasn’t on the cards in the 1700s, bwana. Even if Linnaeus were Mustache Guy avant la lettre…
…and there it is, of course. “Biologism,” as I’m calling it, dropped stone fucking dead somewhere in the 1930s. In 1929, not even the loopiest Fabian goofball — Virginia Woolf, let’s say — would’ve argued that there are no differences whatsoever among humans when it comes to innate capacities. She was pretty much as barmy as it was possible to be in 1929, and I’m sure she got all hot and bothered thinking about the plight of the Fuzzy Wuzzy, but even she — I would bet any amount of money — would argue that political equality is the very best we can do. Let go the Raj (for example), welcome them into the community of nations, and… that’s it. What they do with it is up to them; their innate capacities, whatever they are, will prove out.
By 1969, though, it was something close to heresy to suggest that there are any differences whatsoever between Black and White, women and men, and so on, and of course by 2022 you have a Supreme Court nominee declaring, for the official historical record, that she cannot tell you what a “woman” is without a PhD in Biology.
1929 to 2022 is 93 years — a single human lifetime (albeit an unusually long one). A person who conceivably could’ve shaken hands with Mustache Guy in the flesh was born into a world in which Mustache Guy’s views were a bit crude, a bit hyperbolic, but well within the common frame of reference — he’s a bit overboard, they said, but a persyn expressing Current Year views on “race” and “gender” would’ve been locked in a lunatic asylum.
Now, of course, the very word “biology” is in such a bad odor, I’m surprised they still allow college kids to major in it. That’s the kind of change that gives Cultural Historians one lasting waaaaay more than four hours…
Anyway, I hope you all have enjoyed this little exercise in intellectual tumescence. If not, the jokes and such shall resume tomorrow — be sure to send mailbag items! Thanks for reading!
but it’s good “music” blog kayfabe, plus it’s fun, so there it is.
Rather, this is a topic suggested by Graycoat:
From your post today: You have just summed up my life’s motivation, my friend: I do what I do every day, so that “he’s a smart guy but he spent too long in college” doesn’t end up carved on my tombstone. That might make a good Friday Mailbag question: What do you want, or not want, carved on your tombstone? (Assuming you wouldn’t prefer to have your end just be as a pile of bleached bones surrounded by empty brass).
I thought it’d make a better Nerd Fight, and he signed off, so here it is.
For me, I think the best epitaph most of us can aspire to is the traditional one: Beloved son of So-and-So, beloved husband of So-and-So, beloved father to So-and-So. If all of the “beloveds” actually mean it, that’s about as good a life as one can live.
It doesn’t fit with the solemnity of the occasion to list stuff like this, but yeah, in a vacuum I’d also want an acknowledgment of stuff I didn’t do. Along the lines of “Here lies Severian, he didn’t mess up too bad too often.” Or “Here lies Severian, the last thing he heard was Crom laughing.”
Just try to avoid this
unless you’ve taken a vow of celibacy, in which case it’s high praise.
Wow, nearly 200 comments yesterday! Note to self: just bash Rod Dreher, then shut up.
In the spirit of not taking my own good advice, this morning I was thinking about monasteries. Specifically, monasteries as the one place in the Middle Ages where you might could test my theories about Information Velocity and Caloric Surplus.
I don’t know whether you need much in the way of background, but since some of you seem to enjoy the “inside baseball” stuff… History, as an academic discipline, has always suffered from a “source base” problem. We deal with artifacts; more specifically with documents. If it ain’t written down… see what I mean? This is why whoever-it-was wasn’t wrong when he said that History is just the biographies of Great Men. It’s the biographies of the best-documented men, anyway. I’m exaggerating for effect, obviously, but you see what I mean.
So when, in the Seventies, we had the “cultural turn,” a whole new series of techniques had to be developed to expand the source base. Some of those were good and necessary. Others… well, Wiki quotes Frederic Jameson, one of the most prominent early-90s obfuscators (Indie band name?):
The very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but it is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the image of culture.
Translated from the PoMo, it’s your standard, tiresome stuff about “critique.” Culture just IS Capitalism, which IS Consumerism, blah blah blah, you know the drill. It’s tedious, but it’s not entirely wrong — what people “consume” (in the egghead sense, not the biomechanical sense) can give us important clues about their world. So long as you avoid the teleological temptation (didn’t they tour with EVC?) of attributing everything to “Capitalism,” you can do good work.
The “problem” with recent history is that the “centers of cultural production” do seem to be identifiable, and so are their motives. They are “Madison Avenue” and “to make money,” respectively, and so it’s easy — and profitable!! — to do the tiresome PoMo CultMarx thing. The further back into The Past you go, though… well, consider this:
As you can see from the caption, that style is called “macaroni” — like from the old song “Yankee Doodle,” which the Colonials appropriated in an early example of “owning the insult.” Wiki sez:
Stereotypically, men in the macaroni subculture dressed, spoke, and behaved in an unusually epicene and androgynous manner. The term “macaroni” pejoratively referred to a man who “exceeded the ordinary bounds of fashion” in terms of high-end clothing, fastidious eating, and gambling. He mixed Continental affectations with his British nature…
…The macaronis became seen in stereotyped terms in Britain, being seen as a symbol of inappropriate bourgeois excess, effeminacy, and possible homosexuality – which was then legally viewed as sodomy. At the time, homosexuality was frowned upon, and was even punishable by death. Many modern critics view the macaroni as representing a general change in 18th-century British society such as political change, class consciousness, new nationalisms, commodification, and consumer capitalism.
You see the typical “critical” blah blah blah there at the end, and it’s not wrong, just tedious, predictable, and tediously predictable. It’s also much harder to find a “purpose” for this behavior. It’s easy to do for the modern analogue of the macaroni, the hipster:
which Wiki documents extensively, because of course they do, it’s right there underneath “macaroni.” But the whole “culture industry” thing wasn’t there yet in the 18th century, so it might actually be down to an individual person. It’d be theoretically possible to find “the first macaroni” — it was the Marquis de Whatever, and he decided to dress like that because reasons, and all the best people decided to copy him, also because reasons, and that’s pretty much all your “cultural turn” can do, because that’s the only documentation we have.
Since we here are not bound by the canons of scholarship, however, we can speculate. I want to focus on this bit about macaronis:
In the 18th century, wealthy young British men traditionally took a trip around Europe upon their coming of age, known as the Grand Tour. Italy was a key destination of these tours. During their trip, many developed a taste for maccaroni, a type of pasta little known in Britain then, and so they were said to belong to the Macaroni Club, founded in 1764 by those returning from the Grand Tour. They would refer to anything that was fashionable or à la mode as “very maccaroni.”
That’s Information Velocity, preindustrial-style. They had to go there personally — or, at the very least, have access to the in-house journals of those who did:
The song “Yankee Doodle” from the time of the American Revolutionary War mentions a man who “stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni”. Dr. Richard Shuckburgh was a British surgeon and also the author of the song’s lyrics; the joke which he was making was that the Yankees were naive and unsophisticated enough to believe that a feather in the hat was a sufficient mark of a macaroni.
In America, only a select few persons would have access to that kind of thing, because only a few would move in those circles.
Go back a bit further, and cultural trends are far less traceable, but “centers of cultural production” are much easier to find, in one specific sense: They’re monasteries. And there you have a group which speaks a common language — extremely rare in the Middle Ages — is literate (ditto), and has something close to, if not caloric surplus, then at least “chronic caloric sufficiency,” I guess we’ll have to call it. Monks worked hard in the Middle Ages, by our standards, but not as hard as the peasantry. They were well-fed, or at least consistently fed, in a way the peasantry weren’t.
In other words, whatever Information Velocity existed in the Middle Ages, they had it. They made a virtue out of circulating books, and all those books were in a common tongue. Since they also produced books — indeed, were pretty much the only ones who did — they were also, by definition, au courant with whatever the high fashions were, because they illustrated the books that were such a crucial part of the aristocracy’s gift-giving culture. How did that affect them?
Same way, they had more leisure and excess calories than just about anybody (for medieval values of those terms, obviously). Combine those two, and we might expect to see some of the Current Year pathologies, mutatis mutandis, in the monasteries. Do we?
It’s a testable hypothesis, at least, given the “cultural turn” techniques we have.
And… that’s it, I guess. That’s what I was thinking about. I can’t really follow up on that right now, but I wanted to get it down on paper, because the best way to follow up a vigorous discussion is a gassy post on some recondite shit that goes nowhere, don’t you think?
Anyway, I’m feeling better, so once I get through this backlog of work I hope to resume making with the dick jokes and stoyak revues and such. Thanks for your patience.
Founding Questions 
