1972 was the year before the great productivity slowdown.
Thanks. Do you think there is anything to Jim’s idea of a technological stagnation? (His examples are silly, but maybe he’s getting the idea from someone else who has made an actual case.)
(via xhxhxhx)
Esther and I checked in on old hatereading standby Jim (the neoreactionary) earlier this evening and his most recent post is, if anything, more baffling than usual.
It starts out with what appears to be a standard-issue rant about climate science, but with climate science inexplicably conflated with science as a whole:
I have long argued, and commenters on this blog have long been disputed, that science died shortly after World War II, replaced by official state religion wearing lab coats as priestly robes, and using test tubes as aspersoria for holy water.
The age of science began with the Restoration and the Royal Society. The Royal Society’s motto was “Take no one’s word for it”. Feynman, in his address “What is Science?”, rephrased this as “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” Now, however science consists of taking the word of secret anonymous committees meeting behind closed doors, committees that refuse to show their evidence, data, calculations, and method of calculation even while demanding trillion dollar programs, gigantic human sacrifice, and challenged by freedom of information requests.
(I think that by “human sacrifice” he really means something like “human costs,” but really, who knows.)
Then we get this:
I have long argued, and commenters on this blog have long been disputed, that since 1972, the west has been in technological stagnation or outright decline in most everyday fields, in an ever increasing number of fields. Yes, DNA reading and computer disk drives keep improving, but clothes washing machines have gone to $#!&, and there is a reason why people are nostalgic for the old muscle cars.
Observe our ability to build and operate tall buildings has been diminishing since 1972.
What exactly happened in 1972, specifically??? I’ve never personally had a single problem with a washing machine???? Jim is posting this on the internet?????? “Computer disk drives”?????????
Hoping for some glimmer of sense, one reads on, only to find a paragraph that sounds like a children’s book about military operations
The highest level of technology is found in war. Soldiers are to take control of or destroy men and assets. Tanks, artillery, mortars and Armored Personnel carriers are to destroy soldiers. Ground attack planes and helicopters are to destroy tanks and armored personnel carriers, and air to air fighters are to destroy ground attack planes, and other air to air fighters.
See Spot take control of or destroy men and assets. Take control of or destroy men and assets, Spot, take control of or destroy men and assets.
I think the thing that most reliably makes me angry in other people is the combination of arrogance and banality
Like, I can deal with arrogance, I actually like it in some people, drive and energy and self-possession and self-mythologizing make life exciting
And I can deal with banality, I think a lot of ordinary sentiments are basically true/important and focus on novelty-in-everything is often misguided
But the personality type that is like “I am smarter and better than all of you, and I will use these qualifications to explain to you that everything actually conforms to some standard worldview you’ve heard a million times, and although you can in fact predict every single word I’m going to say, I will still keep talking because I believe I am blowing your poor uneducated little minds”
is fingernails on a chalkboard
Oh no I accidentally went right through “smug superiority hatereading” into “active frustration and anger hatereading” retreat abort abort abort
It’s really weird when one of the blogs I hateread starts dissing one of the other blogs I hateread, and I end up feeling like coming to the latter’s defense
john c wright’s strong female characters essay is EXCELLENT hatereading material, thank you nostalgebraist
I think my favorite is the repeated emphasis about how men are good for COMBAT AND KILLING THINGS. I have to say in my own life it has never come up that my boyfriends have had to defend me from anything, and if that were the essential masculine nature that seems like a pretty firm argument in favor of lesbianism
That essay just has so many distinct WTF moments. It’s long and doesn’t really have a clear thread of argument and is just him saying lots of stuff and there are all these self-contradictions, odd gaps, etc.
(Some arguments about that essay under a cut since they will almost certainly be superfluous for anyone reading this)
On the plane, among other things, I finished reading John C. Wright’s “Saving Science Fiction From Strong Female Characters” and it was definitely an experience
E.g.
Let us look nationwide: fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, and ninety percent of divorces are initiated by women.
My conclusion is that you dear ladies are unhappy about something.
Many ladies. Very unhappy.
Ready for another statistic? Couples who practice the Catholic method of Natural Family Planning have a divorce rate of about 5%, markedly lower than the 50% divorce rate of couples who utilize contraception. Correlation is not causation, so you may draw your own conclusion about what this statistic means, if anything.
The conclusion I draw is that old fashioned religious Moms who listen to St Paul’s oft misunderstood injunction that they submit to their husbands, and Dads who heed St Paul’s oft misunderstood injunction that Dad be the head of the family the way Christ is the head of the Church, that is, by total self sacrifice, are happier with each other than two liberal-minded and free and equal and rather selfish partners who made an alliance to service their mutual friendship and pleasure and call it a marriage.
Yes, John, correlation is not causation. But if you think for a moment about the doctrines of your own goddamned religion you might hit upon a very plausible causal explanation that does not imply that Catholic married women are any happier than non-Catholic married women
I’ve been hate-reading a lot of John C. Wright lately because he fits into this sweet spot where he’s wrong/bad enough to serve the purpose, but not “close enough to home” to piss me off and make things unpleasant.
I.e., I know there are other people out there like JCW but I never personally encounter them and so he doesn’t set off thoughts like “oh god these people are running the world and we’re doomed” (or “oh god these people are numerous and that means they might be right and I might be wrong and/or evil”)
I know this isn’t universal, but having things like this perceptibly improves my life
So, okay, you’ve been hatereading Pretentious Lit Dudes forever but your current standbys just aren’t outrageous enough for you anymore? Getting tired of dreary old Franzen?
May I recommend William Giraldi, the most ridiculous American writer of the last decade
See for instance this, this, and this. For the most part I don’t have the words to describe any of these but I should note that the last link there is about his Platonic crush on Richard Dawkins