Bleeding Heart Libertarians is back… now in Substack form!

I previously blogged about BHL shutting down and some of its former members making a couple replacement blogs, but now Matt Zwolinski has revived the old name. I don’t know how many contributors his new Substack will have. I like how Substack has set the stage for something of a mini-revival of blogging after social media undermined it, but I regard the Substack platform as inferior to the standard WordPress of most blogs (Blogspot became obsolescent earlier). I’m particularly irritated at this happening to one of the best, Overcoming Bias, where it was said that comments (which I’d been making for well over a decade) from the old Disqus system would “hopefully […] will get moved soon“, but that still doesn’t appear to have happened.

 

A Canticle for Leibowitz

The other scifi novels I’ve reviewed here have been from authors known for much more than that (although Ayn Rand’s usually weren’t scifi). Walter Miller was more of a one-hit wonder, who basically stopped publishing after he combined three of his short stories into his first (and only, within his lifetime) book. A natural point of comparison to “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is Foundation, as that also depicted an attempt to preserve scientific knowledge (and civilization) after the collapse of a complex society, explicitly modeled on the dark & middle ages after the fall of the Roman empire. Miller & Asimov come at this through radically different perspectives though. Asimov was a scientist (a biochemist, specifically) who served alongside Heinlein as a civilian at the Philadelphia Navy Yard during WW2, and had optimistic Whiggish politics (hence the Foundation inevitably winning regardless of individual actions) entailing a scoffing at the realism of 1984 and fears of too much government. Miller was an engineer who served as a tail-gunner during the war and took part in the (now known to be militarily perverse) bombing of Monte Cassino abbey during the war and converted to Catholicism afterward. So when Miller has the hapless novice Brother Francis stumble upon technical documents in a fallout shelter left by the titular founder of his order, it’s not as purely a good thing as in Anthem when Rand’s protagonist discovers electrical devices underground. The permanently fallen nature of man in a moral sense means that as soon as we regain the capacity for the nuclear war that Leibowitz played a small role in, we are doomed to fall into it again.

 

Permanent post for giving away subscriptions to Substacks

For a while Substack had been giving me 3 subscriptions to Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning, roughly every week, and I was finding takers at Scott Alexander’s Open Threads. In the most recent one Scott said enough, so I instead will do so via comments under this post.

 

Bloodlands

It has taken me longer than usual to write up a review of Timothy Snyder’s book (subtitled “Europe Between Hitler and Stalin”). Partly this is because I wasn’t taking notes as I read it (often while riding public transit), but also partly for the reason I wasn’t taking notes in the first place: it’s bleak material that didn’t inspire me to do much writing myself. I didn’t even initialize this post until nearly two weeks after I finished reading it (on President’s Day). I had no such problem with the last non-fiction book I read, about how pervasive Malthusian warfare has been throughout human existence, but there was a greater feeling of distance to the subjects of archaeology (and anthropology, though the focus was more on the former), plus a framing about how post-WW2 “social scientists” in those disciplines got things so wrong. The cultural impact of the mass murder discussed in the book is such that there’s no need to make people aware of it (in the broad sense), so instead the value it attempts to add is a shift in focus and addition of details neglected in the more shallow takes on the topic common in the west.

 

A comment I would have made at Erik Hoel’s, were I not banned

I attempted to comment on this post about AI, but was blocked with the message that I was “banned from commenting until 100 years from now”. Since one of my first attempted comments there (or perhaps my very first) was a link to Richard Chappell complaining about Erik deleting his comments pointing out how Erik had mischaracterized a source (Richard was also banned, though it’s not clear what policy Erik later referred to that he violated), I suppose that’s very much in keeping. If we were still in the glory days of blogging he’d get a trackback, but unfortunately Substack is bringing back the walled garden. As a bonus, this means I can now use the web markup that Substack’s inferior commenting system lacks.

 

The Handmaid’s Tale

Margaret Atwood’s novel, like Anthem, is supposed to take place in the future but deliberately written without any of the new technology one would expect from scifi (even the dystopian variant). For Ayn Rand, that was precisely because she regarded technological progress as good that her dystopia should be backward. For Atwood, it’s because her novel is not actually about the future, but is instead populated from elements from various times and places of the past. In recent years as the TV series (whose first season I watched in the year it was released) raised the profile of the book there has been commentary about it as a warning about the future, but it wasn’t intended that way and doesn’t really work as one. Frank Herbert could make the universe of Dune an aristocratic one and borrow heavily from Islamic history, handwaving away the absence of computers & firearms with his “Butlerian jihad” (long in the past of his original novel so we don’t need to think about its plausibility) and shield technology somehow vulnerable to melee weaponry. Atwood doesn’t bother with such technobabble, and while her narrator is placed early enough to remember & prefer our familiar society (thus making her closer to Anthem’s narrator than the less relatable one from We) she has limited understanding of how the United States transformed into the Republic of Gilead, and the culturally relativist future academics engaged in “Caucasian Anthropology” at the end (in my favorite section, though it’s only about 10 pages) bemoan their own enormous gaps in knowledge about it.

 

Hollywood cinematographers are less Jewish than actors

In Steve Sailer’s review of The Fabelmans (which I reviewed here) he writes

In Hollywood, Jews tend to dominate the business side, less so the screenwriting side, even less directing, and least of all cinematography and acting

I responded skeptically regarding their representation in acting was as low as for cinematography, and decided to do a quick investigation in the spirit of my earlier look into #OscarsSoWhite (which specifically acknowledged the lack of any listing of Jewish nominees on Wikipedia).

 

Audiences demand pleasing fantasies

This is copied (with some modifications for links) from a comment I made at Richard Hanania’s going way off track from his post just because this material was on my mind:

 

RIP Jeffrey Friedman

I first heard about his death via Marginal Revolution, which just had it in a links roundup. I commented there about it, but refrained from posting here. I changed my mind after seeing that Ilya Somin at the Volokh Conspiracy had posted a longer remembrance (I checked if there was anything at 200 Proof Liberals, but their most recent post was in March). My former co-blogger Dain would be a better person to write about him than me. I wrote about Jeffrey and “post-libertarianism” a little in the early days of the blog, and while my memory has gotten a bit hazy that might have been what helped draw Dain in.

One of the reasons I hesitated in making a post is because I’d recently found (while expecting to add yet another link to my previous post) to my surprise that I didn’t do that when Henry Harpending died, but since I really only knew him via Greg Cochran and he seems to have been well known to cultural anthropologists perhaps it’s more fitting to note a more niche intellectual like Jeffrey (whom I’ve referring to by his given name not because we were ever on a first-name basis, but because of the existence of more prominent people with his surname) here.

UPDATE: I’ve been linking to Twitter reactions in the comments, but since David Henderson wrote an actual blog post he gets an update in my post instead.

UPDATE 2: Matthew Continetti pays tribute to him here.

 

Constant Battles

I picked up Steven LeBlanc’s “Constant Battles” because I’d been on an anthropological kick and Robert Edgerton’s “Sick Societies”. Based on the title, I had been expecting it to be similar to fellow-archaeologist Lawrence Keeley’s “War Before Civilization” (which LeBlanc cites, along with Edgerton, and which I blogged about here and here) as well as historian Azar Gat’s “War in Human Civilization” (which I blogged here, here and here). It turned out to be surprisingly in sync with Jared Diamond’s “The Third Chimpanzee” in its focus on humans degrading the environment. LeBlanc’s main thesis is that basically no humans until recently have even attempted to live in equilibrium with our environment, so populations have always expanded up to Malthusian limits, ultimately being checked by group conflict over limited resources. I was skeptical of Jared Diamond’s claim that human agriculture had denuded not only the Middle East, but also the Mediterranean, since Italy seems like a normal place despite being heavily settled and even urbanized going all the way back to Roman times. LeBlanc however brings up as examples small Greek islands that once supported agriculture and are now completely barren, so perhaps there are parts of the Mediterranean where that thesis is correct.

 

Anthem

Despite having mocked the philosophy of Ayn Rand more than a decade ago when I wrote that preface to “The Myth of Natural Rights”, I had not actually read any of her books until this one. I said as much when I suggested covering this at the end of my last review of a novel. Part of what makes Rand mockable (as in “Mozart Was a Red“) is her elevation of abstract ideas over concrete reality, so that the concrete things she does value are as symbols. Anthem is an extreme example of that, not even qualifying as her usual “Romantic Realism”, and being entirely a novella of ideas rather than plot. Without a plot it culminates not in an event that would normally end a story, but instead in the protagonist writing a word that Rand likes.

 

The Third Chimpanzee

The Third Chimpanzee is actually Jared Diamond’s first book, but I’m only getting to it now years after reading his more famous “Guns, Germs & Steel” & “Collapse”. I’ve heard the contrarian take that it’s actually his best book, but reading it now it comes across as frequently dated, as well as serving as a preview for those later books (each of which gets a chapter/section covering the same subject). Part of the issue is that I read this so close after The Secret of Our Success, and the material on early humans compared to our closest relatives has a lot of overlap with that less dated book. When I say dated, it’s on multiple levels.

 

Fabio Rojas says goodbye to “Markets, Power & Culture”

Last year I blogged about how Fabio Rojas was leaving his old group-blog OrgTheory for another. Now (or, really, weeks ago) at Markets, Power & Culture he has blogged that he’s moved on to a Substack blog: Temple of Sociology.

 

Peer Vries on Stephen Broadberry & Acemoglu/Johnson

Regular readers will recall that I have blogged about Stephen Broadberry, usually in the context of his critique of Daron Acemoglu & James Robinson’s “Why Nations Fail“. More recently I was alerted to a critique of Mark Koyama & Jared Rubin’s “How the World Became Rich” by Peer Vries (who I had never heard of before). I had some familiarity with Koyama prior to his book’s publication (I’d even blogged about him), but not Rubin. Within Vries’ review is this quote:

“To claim that one knows for example that GDP per capita in China in the year 980 was 840 1990 international dollars whereas in Japan in the year 1150 it was 572 such dollars, as Broadberry, Guan and Li do, is to practice science fiction.”

The footnote for that sentence reads

 

We

In my last review of a scifi novel I mentioned that I should have read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We” earlier, and now I finally have. I first heard of it from a foreword in Orwell’s “1984”, which was explicitly inspired by We. There’s a good reason I was assigned that & “Brave New World” in school rather than We, and it’s not just because those were originally written in English rather than Russian. In his attempt to make the novel feel not contemporary (even if the whole genre was about heightening recent tendencies in industrial society to an extreme), Zamyatin adopts the very alien voice of a true-believer in the dystopian futuristic One State keeping a diary intended for the “Integral” spaceship he’s building to spread the One State to foreign planets. The chapters (which always begin with keywords, except when their author fails to come up with any) are fortunately short (and the book as a whole was only about 200 pages), but their inaccessible nature makes it far from a page turner. Even as builder D-503 gets corrupted by the subversive woman I-330 (everyone has a name consisting of a letter followed by 3 digits), he doesn’t become a normal person more relatable to the reader. He just falls apart at the seams and his writing becomes more difficult to understand, with more paragraphs ending in ellipses than any book I can recall.