How Chinese vs Europeans responded to horse nomads

Cremieux Recueil’s From Caveman to Chinaman is such a Big History post you don’t expect it to be contained in just one blog post. While, as the title indicates, it begins very far back (to The 10,000 Year Explosion of sedentarism & agriculture), I find the latter more interesting, particularly in light of explaining Russian serfdom based on the same factor. The thing emphasized as being different for China is having a big unidirectional threat, vs the multidimensional threats facing Europeans.

 

The Third World War: The Untold Story

I mentioned in my review of The Good War that General Sir John Hackett’s “The Third World War” remained to review in the future, having less definitely implied that in my review of World War Z (since that was inspired by both The Good War & The Third World War). I’d like to say that the future is now, but the Chicago public library system only had the titular book with the subtitle above from 1982, and not his 1978 version (which I’ve sometimes seen referred to as “The Third World War: August 1985”, including in the foreword here). Because I still haven’t read the original, I can’t be certain what’s in it, but Untold Story repeatedly notes that certain things are discussed in more depth in the earlier work, which is cited in the main text as “Sir John Hackett and others”.

 

RIP James Scott

I’m late in blogging this, having heard about it via a Garett Jones retweet, but since I own “Seeing Like a State” and “The Art of Not Being Governed” and reference them a lot, I figure I’d be derelict in not doing so. Via MR, here’s what to expect from his final book project. Oddly enough, Crooked Timber still doesn’t have a post up about him. CT’s Henry Farrell marshaled Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” against Hayek & Tim Lee here.

 

Byrne Hobart on David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs”

I had been annoyed to see people blather about the concept and get retweeted by people who aren’t idiots, which made it extra gratifying to come across this debunking, which is arguably more effort than Graeber deserved. This follows after Peter Turchin debunked Graeber & Wengrow on what would become “The Dawn of Everything”, and the Crooked Timber seminar on “Debt” which highlighted some howlers that are still funny all these years later. I blogged about that back in 2012, and forgot about it until doing a search while writing this post. I also forgot that I mentioned starting to write a review of Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation, and didn’t remember when I blogged about finding a review complete enough not to bother myself, hence the lack of any trackback. Back then I compared him to Jared Diamond, who has been found to be wrong in a number of ways but remains worth reading to me (coincidentally, also the previous thing I blogged about). Graeber has not attained the same status for me, because it seems he was mostly just wrong rather than having ideas worth grappling with.

 

Update on Jared Diamond being wrong about Easter Island

I criticized his book “Collapse” on that subject (and Greenland) back in 2008, gave an update on Greenland in 2009, then added Haiti to the list of islands he seemed to be unreliable on in 2016. Now (via Eli Dourado) I see there’s a New Scientist article claiming that it never had a population explosion or collapse, but instead maintained the fairly low population levels that Europeans first encountered. Even after all but that most recent update, I still continued to read his books as recently as 2022 because Diamond is interesting even while fallible.

 

“The Good War”: An Oral History of World War II

I wrote at the end of my review of World War Z “my main takeaway from the book is that I should really read [Studs] Terkel and perhaps General Sir John Hackett”. I have now read the former’s most famous work, while The Third World War remains for the future. As I read it I recalled an amateur WW2 historian in Youtube saying one of the worst historical sources is a memoir written long after the events (and interviews conducted at that time are only slightly better, although in this case there’s no apparent challenging of claims made by the interviewees), and since this book from the 80s was put together from interviews conducted decades after WW2, it’s subject to that critique. What elevates the book above that is the wide breadth of interview subjects, aggregating together lots of different sources just as an historian would with written records (although in this case there’s no attempt made to reconcile conflicting information).

 

Response to wolfman & Joe Magician on completely made-up incoherent things

Instead of a review of a non-fiction or scifi book, this is a critique of George R. R. Martin’s evolving Song of Ice and Fire that would have been a tweet but would run far ahead of space limits. The immediate tweet I’m responding to is this, which is itself just a link to this (which in turn was responding to me linking to this and this).

 

World War Z

Max Brooks’ World War Z is, of course, a work of fiction, but its emulation of non-fiction oral histories (which I mentioned having little exposure to), particularly Studs Terkel’s on World War 2, made it a somewhat natural follow-up to both the fiction & non-fiction streams of books I’ve been reading lately. It isn’t scientific enough to qualify as scifi in the normal sense: despite the dedication to Romero these ravenous undead are ostensibly the result of infection rather than ordinary death, but the normal laws of physiology don’t apply to them so that destruction of the brain is still necessary to stop them (despite it being said that they hardly use that organ). However, the speculative dystopias I’ve been reading often aren’t too heavy on science either, and if he’s largely reaching into the past (specifically, the Great Depression through WW2) to imagine this future society, the same thing can be said about A Canticle for Leibowitz, The Handmaid’s Tale, and (to a lesser extent, since it’s old enough to be critiquing a modernist attempted utopia) Anthem.

 

How had I never heard of Emil Kraepelin until now?

I’d heard so much about the father of pseudo-scientific psychotherapy, but never about “the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics“. After the decline of Freudianism one would think he would have moved out of Freud’s shadow, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Wikipedia has a section on his eugenic views (he died in 1927), but plenty of other eugenicists from its hey-day remain famous. Hat-tip to Iain Campbell.

 

Witness

Last month I commented under a different review:

My plan is for my next book to be a work of non-fiction, but also but [sic] a mid-20th century Catholic: Whittaker Chamber’s “Witness”.

This turned out to be incorrect, as he was never a Catholic, but instead a Quaker (despite rejecting their pacifism), and this book even points out different men being members of the two sects and indicators of how different they are. Perhaps I assumed that because I knew he was a Christian (at least by the time he became nationally known) and involved early on with National Review, where he famously panned “Atlas Shrugged”. Since I’ve now reviewed a (short) novel by Ayn Rand, it seems fitting to compare a contemporary detractor.

 

Response to Eli Dourado on Collapse

Eli has read Joseph Tainter and has a blog post on the idea here. I reviewed Tainter more than a decade ago and wasn’t as impressed. As I write this, there are zero comments because only paid subscribers are permitted to. Fortunately, Entitled to an Opinion is founded on the idea that everyone has a blog, and I can respond on my own here.

 

Concluding thoughts on The Voyage of the Beagle

I first blogged about Charles Darwin’s pre-Origin book back in January, and as stated there was only infrequently reading it (I read two fiction books since then, though only one was scifi and thus merited blogging here). I read this first rather than his more famous later works because I thought this order of reading would help me better understand his progression from accumulating stylized facts to developing his theory. As my introduction to Darwin, I think it shows him to have been a pretty good writer even as a young man, though the extreme age of it makes some of the language (and even references to proper nouns no longer existent or common-knowledge) can make it harder to understand today. One of the things that makes it more interesting to read than a lot of contemporary scientific writing is that he has no qualms in saying which species of animals he finds ugly. I think the lack of photographs (though there are referenced figures in the text containing sketches sometimes) pushed him to use more descriptive language, including his aesthetic opinion of what he saw.

 

The Three-Body Problem

After watching the Netflix series last week, I decided to pick up the first book in the trilogy. I had previously been alternating between fiction & non-fiction books (treating the Southern Reach trilogy like one book), but I’ve just been reading The Voyage of the Beagle when away from home. It’s not like I need to finish that in time to return it to the library. I haven’t watched the Chinese version from Tencent, but I don’t know how they made 30 episodes of this book with less than 400 pages, considering that the longest adaptation of War & Peace (also the only version of that I’ve consumed) was only 20 episodes. What follows is going to be heavy on comparisons between the two, so apologies to anyone who just wanted to hear about the book.

 

Atoms vs Bits: AI imagines reality as screenwriters would prefer it

A lot of mockery has been made of Google Gemini. Zvi has a round-up here, but I’ll also quote from (thus acknowledging her existence for the first time) Grimes’ ironic appreciation: “offensive to all, comforting to none […] Art for no one, by no one”. Of course, anyone aware of earlier AIs knows that actual humans reacted against these models sucking up data and recapitulating stereotypes, thus imposing there rather heavy-handed anti-stereotype interventions on top of it. A comparison to the TV series “Bridgerton” was made, because there is actually demand for that sort of ahistorical diversity (something I’d noticed in remakes of classic stories).

This same month, Ginevra Davis reviewed Emmanuel Todd’s “Lineages of the Feminine”, in which she pronounced that feminism had achieved its goals of removing societal barriers to women but that the fundamental facts of having a female body still mean women are “still vastly underrepresented at the very, very top of capitalistic success—the economic equivalent of what [Simone] Beavoir calls “greatness.”” Prior to feminism this would have just been accepted, but now is a disappointment. She imagines a future in which reproductive technology advances enough to fully remove that burden from women and “I think that would be such a funny way for feminism to end—if someday, we get artificial wombs, and parents get to choose the body of their child, and they all choose “male,” and females can be, at long last, wiped from the face of the earth”.

Medical technology is infamously regulated because people care so much (irrationally, as so much of it is wasteful). Peter Thiel is well known for arguing that we’ve had stagnating innovation in manipulation of “atoms” generally because of regulation, while the IT revolution left few constraints on manipulation of “bits”. Since then Congress has gotten more concerned about Big Tech, with both sides of the aisle getting more negative on it (Ted Cruz being something of an exception who warns of us making Europe’s mistake). Congress, activists, and all other inhabitants of far mode may have little ability to reshape the real world as they wish, but they can at least get AI to lie to us about the world, depicting it as they have failed to make it. As people spend more and more time in front of screens, perceiving mediated rather than direct reality, this false world of pleasing fantasies will grow in importance to the real one that has failed to live up to our modern standards.

 

Reply to Imperium Press’ reply to Cofnas

In Nathan Cofnas’ most recent post he responds to Richard Hanania’s critique (as I did here), as well as some other people. One was a Substack I’d never heard of before called “Imperium Press”, and when I attempted to reply there found only paid subscribers could do so. They certainly don’t seem worth any such payment, and dubiously deserve a post, but I’d already written it up in Notepad++, so I include it below.