QOTD

Social media made y’all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it. Mike Tyson

How Does This Land Now?

 

Gratitude

 Quoted by Mike Woodruff at The Friday Update 

 Several hundred years ago, after 17th-century British Bible commentator Matthew Henry was mugged, he wrote the following in his journal: “Let me be thankful: first, because I was never robbed before; second, because although they took my purse, they did not take my life; third, because although they took all I had, it was not much; and fourth, because it was I who was robbed, not I who robbed.”

Groypers

The is a lot of attention being paid to Rod Dreher's recent discussion of left-right extremism including antisemitism at The Critic," Welcome back to Weimar." This includes a statement that 30 to 40 percent of conservative political and think tank staffers under 30 are followers or fellow travelers of Fuentes. 

Grokipedia has an extended article about Groypers, the decentralised group under Fuentes's America First banner. Whether you read it now or come back to it at the end, I recommend it. 

Meanwhile, look, it's Rod Dreher, Jake. I used to like him, three or four Rod Drehers ago, but he has a long history of enthusiasms, plausibly sounding an alarm but then crashing and burning and embracing some extreme for a year or two. I would describe most of these claims as Based on a True Story, but there are a few here who I know would describe that as too generous.  You are free to weigh in in this space to remind the others of your reasons.  When last I heard of Dreher he was trying to convince us that Hungary was a deeply Catholic country, which faith undergirded its "traditionalism," for which they were unfairly maligned. Maybe based on a true story. But not true.

But, dissident alt right Groypers.  How worried should we be about their numbers and influence?  If you look at Dreher's claim in context it keeps weakening with every return glance.  Conservative staffers under 30.  How many is that? - and that is the group most dedicated to trying to take those jobs to shift things its way. What does "fellow travelers" mean?  We know that in the past lots of real antisemites kept trying to hide behind claiming "no, we're just anti-Zionist," or were "isolationists who thought that Israel received disproportionate attention but didn't claim that the number should be zero." Some of those really meant it even then, though when the chips were down most revealed that they just hated Jews. Yet this is a different generation, farther removed from the Holocaust and so counting it for less. For comparable distance, not many people cared about the Belgian Congo Genocide when I was young. Not quite the same for cultural importance in America, I'll admit.  But it gives an added perspective. At least some of the "fellow travelers" are concerned more about isolationism than anything, because I have heard them. If you look at the amount of military action even antiwar presidents like Clinton, Bush, and Obama have engaged in, you can see why that might be high on their list of expensive things to get rid of. Such people at least give a listen to other versions of isolationism.  Those fellow travelers?

Next, look how much of Dreher's evidence comes from alt-right antisemites in Europe - and even then it's in the form of "I talked to some guys who really know about this, trust me." I wrote about the real story behind "the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe" over a decade ago. Color me unconvinced. He is also worried that they might undermine Vance.

I'm convinced the Groypers are bad enough.  I'm not convinced they are numerous enough. Startup groups are often good at trying to create an impression of bigger numbers than they warrant. Thousands of listeners to a daily show, you say? These noise and disruption tactics might well give them outsize influence, and such things can build. But how many agree with them on an issue or two, not everything? Dreher retreats to the idea that some of the supporters just want to "burn it all down?"  Meaning what, exactly?  Real burning?  Restarting conservative definition from scratch? Getting rid of some Washington insiders pulling strings? 

They can do real damage, especially if they have wealthy backers behind the scenes who want to use them for their own purposes though they don't agree with the goals.  Think Russian and Chinese support for Western environmental groups, or Middle Eastern countries which hate the Palestinians but find them useful tactically.

So tell what you know and what you guess.  How many are there? 

Brisk Substack Links

 Art Deco Trains. Love this

Peebo Preboskenes takes back everything negative he said about AI 

Henri Biva saw everything  

The Shrinking Middle Class There are problems with this, but the new phrase is that it is "directionally correct"

I told you so.  Long Walks . Of course, now that the word has been getting out, I am doing less of it.

 

Trivia Contest

 

Sitting Across From Donald Trump On The Subway

Ann Althouse tells Grok her dream.  

Vandy's Crisps

For those of you who want to spend $2.60/oz on potato chips.  No, I have not tried them.

"Pints With Jack"

You may remember that I had this podcast on my sidebar for a long time.  I will be forever grateful to them for guiding me through Till We Have Faces after I had been unable to even like it my first two tries. (I now agree it is Lewis's best, ahead of The Great Divorce.) But in the early seasons they took five minutes of chitchat at the beginning of every episode, which grew to ten minutes and then twelve. It's not that I couldn't reliably just jump ahead, but that landing at eight minutes they sounded like they were just about to get into content, and at ten minutes, and eleven. The irritation was not worth it.

But it is still suggested now and again on my phone, and the topic was going to be Till We Have Faces at the Annual Petoskey CS Lewis Conference, which I have considered going to the last few years. 

At 22 minutes of talking about what beer or tea they were having or chatting with the guests about how they had all met, I gave up. Still not recommended. 

Friday Links

 In case you wanted to know what the worst of leftist radicals are advocating. 

Why ChatGPT sounds the way it does 

Singal on the Great Feminisation Theory Part II - Soft Spots 

Honest Debate by Scott Alexander in 2017.  I no longer have much confidence. But it's nice to read someone more hopeful.  I think that one of the problems is that people are sure they are willing to listen and fight fair, but quickly aren't. Maybe you first have a series of debates about other subjects, with secret ballots of which of the two is arguing more fairly. After a few rounds you should have a better pool to draw from.

Of the 103 who were asked by a sixth-grade class, only Kurt Vonnegut answered with advice. 

 

 

Recent Gurwinder Quotes

 "The way to use chatbots is not to ask them what’s true but to tell them what you think is true and then ask them for feedback. This lets you learn without eroding your ability to think for yourself."

"Lessons learned are quickly forgotten unless they were learned in terror, or sorrow, or shame. Wisdom can always be rented for free, but it must be purchased with pain."

" ...while unintelligent people are more easily misled by other people, intelligent people are more easily misled by themselves. They’re better at convincing themselves of things they want to believe rather than things that are actually true. This is why intelligent people tend to have stronger ideological biases; being better at reasoning makes them better at rationalizing."

Russia Hoax and Ukraine

Steve Hsu interviews Scott Horton (transcript available) author of Provoked: How Washington Started the New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine .  Horton is a libertarian and antiwar activist and discusses the War in Ukraine at the beginning and end of the podcast, but the bulk of the discussion is about the accumulation of evidence that the Russia Hoax was coordinated by the FBI and CIA feeding information to media sources under the direction of the White House. Particularly disturbing was the amount of information coming from the bottom up, with agents reporting there was nothing to it, only to be told by their highest authorities to keep the investigation going anyway.

New Dog

We adopted a small terrier mix and renamed her Maggie. I mostly just call her "Fish Breath" which made me think of Sweet Molly Malone. 

I always think I won't like the Sinead O'Connor versions, and then she just knocks me flat.

 

Northern Lights

I saw them once in the 80s while camping in the north country in the middle of the night.  Despite many attempts I had never seen them again, and my wife had never seen them.  Over the last few years, the most likely night have turned out to be cloudy. Our sons and their families on the Arctic Circle see them often, including absolutely spectacular sightings.

A FB posting from only minutes before sent us out into the cold, and we did get to see them. One can often see them better through the camera lens, and if one can keep the camera still (I cannot - I have always had tremble) with the aperture open the effect is multiplied. My wife got this shot last night. Not spectacular, but real.

Wednesday Links

 Everything is Television  Social media is becoming constant short form video.  "In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol."

Cognitive Dissonance It has happened again. A new paper, based on a tranche of unsealed historical documents, casts serious doubt on a piece of social psychology research from the mid-20th Century. Shocker!

Herodotus Validated  The Scythians used human leather on their quivers. I never trusted those guys.

How the Letter E Almost Ruined English Poetry  It includes good descriptions of the loss of grammatical endings in Germanic languages and even more in English and how that influenced the accenting of syllables.

Jesse Singal on the "Feminization" Discourse - Part 1 This provides some context on how even mild versions of Helen Andrews claim are utterly rejected in many fields of the academy, with shockingly little evidence.  I know, I know, in our section of the blogosphere we've known this for years.  But it is still new to some people.  Part II discusses how Singal thinks Andrews's overall argument still has holes.  (Leah Libresco Sargeant at The Free Press points out that if the theory were entirely true, highly feminized professions like Pharmacist and Veterinary Medicine would have collapsed. )

Dialing For Dollars

 Early Social Media roping you in.  You had to know "the count and the amount" in Dialing for Dollars.

I wondered when it had gone off the air, because I associated it with the 1970s, and it turns out it hung on for a long time, with some descendants even today. Our memories of the cut-ins will likely be different, because it was local programming with regional variations.

 

 

Tuesday Links

A Review of Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics by Nick Herbert

Ruxandra Teslo on AI and Drug Discovery.  Transformative new drugs are already declining, and AI may not help much. A bit depressing.

In Defense of Men by Will Storr.  The part that continues to surprise and irritate me about this is that I have been reading this for years, but most of America, especially women,  seems to find this new.  Of those who have heard it, many think it is untrue and an example of men whining to even mention it. We don't understand that women have it so much harder that the struggles of men do not even bear mentioning.

Speaking of Organ Donation, this from Sensible Medicine. The Ultimate Medical Drama. One cousin of mine donated a kidney to a sister who has PKD. I am no longer close to either and don't know if the "tyranny of the gift" applied in their case. 

The níðstǫng in Gesta Danorum at Saxo Grammaticus, an entire blog about the Gesta Danorum. This one is about curses, a band a wizards, and a horse's head on a pole. I actually quoted the Gesta Danorum in my final paper for English. I no longer remember what the quote was, but am certain it was not anything I had read myself, not even in translation. I lifted some quote from another source and copied the footnote. It was there purely for show. 

Jonathan Smith at The Orthosphere glares over the top of his glasses at Pope Leo's new "Mass for the Care of the World." Quite the heated discussion follows. You might want to make a stiffish brandy and soda before settling down to this one. 

Settle Down, Now

At a hotel in Montreal, my son and DIL were in a cluster of four rooms at the end of the hall. The second night, the other three rooms were occupied by students preparing to go out after midnight for a Hallowe'en party, in and out of each others rooms noisily. It was bad enough that Ben eventually called hotel security, which improved things a little.  We debated whether with would be better to go out into the hall and make the request oneself rather than call in the fuzz. Which would be more likely to escalate things?  Which would be more likely to work? 

Jen thought that the best solution would be to go out into the hall and saying "Our daughter is having an organ transplant tomorrow and needs to be well-rested."  That seems hard to top. 

The War Between the Sexes

That's what we used to call it, and it had both a serious/angry, humorous/affectionate tone to it, plus plenty in the middle that was pointed. Hearing about a radio celebrity publicly criticising his soon-to-be ex it occurred to me that he would have a ready audience of guys prepared to take his side and believe his version automatically.  His wife could also fin such an immediate audience as well should she choose to.  I sighed. Well, that's the way of the world.  It was ever thus...no, wait a minute a lot of this is new! I am embarrassed that this never occurred to me until I was today-years-old, as the new saying is.

The increase in divorce since about 1965 has created a stable percentage of adults who are divorced. 15+%.  It would be higher, but people remarry.  Add to that the people who have had longterm cohabitations that ended, many unhappily. Counterbalancing this are the previous relationships that were deeply unhappy but they did not divorce. This can hardly have been good for the general opinions men and women had of each other. Still, it seems to have been more contained than now. There are also those who remarry more happily the second time. How the reduced frequency of marrying at all fits into this seems multisided in terms of everyone getting along. However, I note that a smaller percentage of recent generations have to keep at least one person of the opposite sex happy. It would seem that at least one fence of the pasture is down.

I'm not much concerned with the actual measurements of this at the moment, not until I have some idea of the balancing.  Yet I note that this is new, and likely contributes to our national er, discussions more than I had thought to credit before. One more pool of disaffected people.

Shutdown/Reopening

I noticed that two of the eight Democratic senators who voted for reopening were from NH, a very purple state, so I looked up who the others were. Five of the other six were also from very purple states, Durbin of Illinois being the exception. Viewed from an entirely tactical perspective, the usual results when one party decides it needs to cut its losses is that the members in most jeopardy appeal to the leaders and say "You're killing us here. We need to switch or you have to give us something really nice to compensate with our electorate." When the pressure gets too much, the leader gets them a couple more votes from ultra-safe districts where they aren't going to vote for the other party no matter what. 

I don't think this means there are fewer ultra-safe districts for the Democrats this time, but that the ultra-safe districts are worried about primary challenges.  This is also very standard.  When one party dominates entirely in a place, factions within that party become more powerful and important. Dominic Cummings is convinced that most national party politics is about the members in safe districts competing for power within their own party, not against the other party. It Takes a Village You Didn't Build. 

When there are close votes with defectors from purple areas, there are claims of hypocrisy that they never cared about the principles they were shouting about 24 hours ago, only about their own advantage. So now it's all "Har, har! You never cared about hungry people at all, did ya?" I think that is always in the front of the minds of politicians in general, but I don't conclude from that that it is all hypocrisy.  I believe they do care about these things somewhat. I think I am more angry at the hyperventilating from supporters who were shouting "plague o'er the earth" yesterday if the government did not start SNAP benefits immediately who are now upset at the cost to the party of it happening. I'm not thinking of a recent Republican equivalent, but I expect there is one there somewhere. There usually is. 

 

Monday Links

 Wealth, War, and Worse A short history of the Plague

Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia.  We can learn an enormous amount about evolution in general

Sally Satel reviews Unshrunk. She is right because she agrees with me! I suspected from the start that Laura Delano had Borderline Personality Disorder, for which medications are not often useful. As the story unfolded it became inevitable where the story would end. She got off meds, endured the pain of learning to reduce impulsiveness and make good decisions, and got older. All three help.

Good and Evil are Native Pagan Concepts  at Norse Mythology and Germanic Lore 

The green energy myth is condemning Africa to Poverty 

 

 

Sunday Links

 A video of Ted Cruz getting quite exercised about the growing antisemitism on the right.  Good for him.

Highbrow Misinformation   Even without a subscription you can read the part about climate.

The highly-literate and abundantly fertile Psmiths cleverly review a book about why having children should be easier now but is harder. 

Also the Psmiths, reviewing The Real Korea   I did not know this.  Not even a little bit.

The quest for perfect communism was also assisted, ironically enough, by the fact that only half the peninsula was heading that way. In the first years of the two Koreas, the line of demarcation between them was very poorly guarded. This resulted in a vast demographic sorting, analogous to India’s partition, but far more thorough. Many of the most idealistic and educated South Koreans, who tended to harbor leftist and communist sympathies, headed North to create a worker’s paradise. This further added to North Korea’s human capital. Conversely, a torrent of former landlords, entrepreneurs, and Christian activists fled South.  

 Arctic Frost Is a Real Scandal, by Eli Lake.  I'm sure it is, but I think of Bullwinkle