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deadpantroglodytes


				

				

				

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joined 2022 September 05 13:29:17 UTC
				

				

				

				

				

				

					
				

				

				
				
				

				
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deadpantroglodytes


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 13:29:17 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree, not much, but the federal government can definitely avoid exacerbating the problem by limiting supply.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Plain old supply and demand drives CEO pay, for the most part, not value-over-replacement.


Even sub-replacement-level CEOs require an extremely unusual skill set. Large companies are like Game of Fucking Thrones. Running one is like herding cats where one of every three animals is actually a serial killer, a thief, or a company-destroying liability risk and three out of four would sell you for a sandwich, must less a shot at your job. On top of that, you're steering (at best) half-blind in a hurricane, an earthquake, and a tornado at the same time (macro-economically speaking).


There are certainly problems, like back-scratching boards determining compensation, but I don't see obviously superior alternatives.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was vehemently agreeing with this comment, until the unfortunate conclusion:




I trust that combination of judgement [the student's and school's] a fairly high amount, again especially given the asymmetric dangers involved here




This idealized view of educational personnel doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's mired in the present conflict and lacks perspective: institutions have a long history of abusing the trust of children and do not deserve this level of confidence or deference.


It's tawdry to quote myself, but I don't think I can put it better than I did before:




I agree that this is an old phenomenon with a long history: courageous teachers becoming involved with a child's welfare at some risk to themselves. But institutionalizing it changes everything. Guaranteeing state support dramatically reduces the risk to the teacher, which destroys the balance of incentives.






I'm sympathetic to kids trapped in a hellish adversarial relationship with their own parents, but predict that solving their problems by substituting state-approved parental figures will create a different series of problems that will probably affect a much larger number of children. Attempting to solve a tiny minority of problem cases, these laws create a new vector for neglect and abuse, because they cut parents out of the loop, when they are, in most cases, the people most committed to a child's well-being by many orders of magnitude.




I had a lot of great teachers, people that encouraged and supported me, but I also had egomaniacs and narcissists who took great pleasure in driving a wedge between kids and their parents (with no long-term concern for the children). I saw more than a handful of teachers happy to sexually exploit their students*. And I saw a substantial minority of lazy, time-serving clock-punchers.


* And a few relationships that I wouldn't call exploitative, but imagine most would.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree with you, without reservation. Moreover, I loved reading your post I was responding to - the historical perspective is useful and relevant in Hanania's case.


But I stand by my point, which is that while Hanania has come a long way, I don't think it's reasonable to describe him as a convert. Moreover, as you observe, progressive activists would welcome converts - from whatever ideological distance. But the price of conversion is complete submission, not apology or even renouncing myriad specific offenses. I don't think any American intellectual is willing to pay that price, whether it's because of pride, tribal instincts, or the manifest philosophical defects of the social justice worldview, which means we may never see CCP-style conversions. (At least I'm crossing my fingers that it never comes to that.)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Hanania should just say that his views have changed, and that he is no longer the kind of angry young man who wrote those comments




Bullseye.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the only annoying part is that "meritocracy" is both of these things at the same time




I somehow missed this response, but two months later, I need to recognize what an excellent line this is.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I wasn't bored, but as a movie it sucked: it's an artless piece of relentless exposition, a paint-by-numbers Wikipedia adaptation. Nolan doesn't understand the most important unit of cinematic language, the scene, and tries to hide it with garish sound design and 60s-era hallucinations.


It had at least three times too many characters as a movie can really handle. He should have started by cutting Oppenheimer's brother, who adds nothing substantial to the film. If there's no way to tell the story without them, Nolan should have just told a different story, one better suited to the strengths of motion pictures.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Why don't people realize that 'high software profit margins' are fugazi?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is mostly wrong. It's trivial to decompile a large share of contemporary software - the opportunity is there, but it is vanishingly uncommon for competitors to seize those opportunities. Similarly, my company had a large multinational client who availed themselves of the right to purchase our source code and walk after five years of business. They took the source code, then came back into the fold a few years later after throwing resources at their fork, being unhappy with the results, and missing our on all the great stuff we'd added in the same period.


The reason why is that most software is in a state of perpetual improvement.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's unfair: atokenliberal's username is a wry commentary on the average orientation of The Motte, plus his/her posting history demonstrates both a solid degree of self-awareness and a reasonable theory of mind of his/her political opponents.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why should there be such a middle ground? "Cancellation" aims to make someone unemployable, which is several steps short of murder but absolutely moving in the same direction, and not in the slippery-slope sense.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Am I wrong to have read the HBD bit at the end as sarcasm? We're supposed to speak plainly here, but every now and then some artiface slips through.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As an aside, I appreciate the link. I've been listening to Huberman a bit lately because I'm starved for good advice about how to deal with an alcoholic family member, and it's been very hard to come by a trustworthy assessment of his podcasts (like Ritchie).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Strategically dishonest" - I don't think you can read his entire body of recent work and come to this conclusion, if you have any exposure to American progressives, or even the mainstream.


For example, the first paragraph of another recent article, "Man Needs Sex and Violence, Not Top-Down 'Meaning'" ends like this:




Me and the boxer became friends after that (last I heard he had impregnated some black girl in Chicago).




This is not how someone that cares about respectability writes in the USA 2023. The fact that he would include the impregnated girl's race at all will stop most left-of-center readers from going any further. The fact that he doesn't think her race is gratuitous opens a chasm of inferential distance between Hanania and the mainstream media, and he, as a self-confessed occasional troll, knows it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thank you. That is an excellent rant, but the comment I was looking for was a fairly long list of media statements that were clearly wrong and/or unfair, similar to "Rittenhouse the white supremacist", though the examples were generally less controversial, thus better for the project of persuasion.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was hoping the search would yield videos of guitarists that do more than look at their instruments, and that audiences find engaging.


That expectation was absolutely reasonable not long ago - five years ago? A decade? Hard to recall. Judging from the response here, people don't believe it, but it's true that, even with shitty searches like that, Google could often approximate my intentions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Those are excellent search tips, but part of my frustration is that my terrible initial queries were good enough not that long ago - to the point that it often seemed like Google was reading my mind or spying on me (and of course, they actually do spy on us, in a low-key but non-metaphorical way).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is not, I'm afraid, relevant to Fruck's (accurate) judgement.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Old Culture War Thread: Your good books list
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Here's a list heavily biased towards the last fifty years:


    

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    In the Shadow of Man by Jane Goodall. Discovery coupled with novelistic drama among our closest relatives. Over the years, Jane Goodall's power over me has attenuated as she's embraced expansive, unfocused activism, but her early research on Chimpanzees is astonishing. I can't think of anyone that can match her powers of observation. Mid way through the book, it develops a novelistic density that made me laugh and cry. I think the follow-up is even better, "Through a Window: Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe", but it hardly makes sense to read it on its own. Don't let anyone tell you that Bonobos are the sexually adventurous primates.
    

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    Chimpanzee Politics by Franz de Waal. What can I say? I chose my username for good reason. This is a retrospective analysis of the author's years studying a chimpanzee colony in a Dutch zoo. I read it fifteen or twenty years ago, browsing Amazon's recommendations for good science writing, before reading Jane Goodall, and it changed my life. The backbone of the story is a contest for political supremacy among the chimps, but that hardly describes what it offers. It covers many other aspects of their lives: the way they play, how they deceive each other, juvenile sexual development, how they comfort each other, and much much more.
    

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    The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs.  I *really *love cities. Jacobs carefully builds an argument for what enables their greatness, based on common-sense observations.
    

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    The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen. Funny, sad, and deeply intertwined with the fabric of America.
    

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    Wolf Hall, by Hillary Mantel. This is a staggering work of imagination that constructs a plausible version of history that more or less inverts the very popular conception of the good Thomas (More) and bad Thomas (Cromwell). One reviewer wrote something along the lines of "I know every twist and turn of this story from high school history and I still can't wait to find out what happens next."
    

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    The Body in Pain by Elaine Scarry. This is an account of why humans torture, go to war (instead of, e.g., settle disputes via chess), and create things. I can't think of many better examples of how to build an argument. In retrospect, it shares a lot with the best of Scott's writings and the best of the Motte.
    

    • 



Add to those, authors I love, whose work I cannot narrow down to a single recommendation: Nietzsche, David Mitchell, P.G. Woodhouse (especially the Wooster and Jeeves stories).