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.

 

Reply to Richard Hanania’s reply to Nathan Cofnas

Last month I had a comment too long to fit into the comment box on Nathan Cofnas’ Substack post, so I made it a blog post here. Now Richard Hanania has his own critique of Cofnas (among others), and again there is too much to respond to for me to just comment there. Thus below the fold I will have many quotes from him along with my responses, which is again more difficult to read without the original post above it:

 

Were Tierra del Fuegians more primitive than Tasmanians?

I’ve been very slowly reading Charles Darwin’s “The Voyage of the Beagle”. It’s my first time reading a book on Kindle, and I just don’t feel the need to pick it up when I’m not carrying it somewhere as a hedge against bored waiting. Since I downloaded it from Gutenberg rather than checking it out from a library I also don’t have any deadline to meet. I didn’t feel like blogging about it until I got to chapter 10, on Tierra del Fuego.

 

Reply to Nathan Cofnas

Nathan Cofnas has a rather long post titled Why We Need to Talk about the Right’s Stupidity Problem, which is mostly not about low IQs on the political right (it’s partly about that), but instead his diagnosis that “wokism is simply what follows from taking the equality thesis of race and sex differences seriously”. In some ways he’s close to Richard Hanania, and like Hanania I think he’s wrongly dismissive of culture. My response was too long to fit as a comment, so I’m placing it below (although the quotations will be more of a hassle to trace back to him there).

 

Acceptance

The final novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (following Annihilation & Authority) deviates from the formula set down by those two. The first book strictly followed the POV of the biologist, while the latter followed “Control” dealing with the aftermath of the first novel, but Acceptance has four different maintained POVs, of which only Control and “Ghost Bird” follow chronologically after Authority. Even the third-person narration isn’t consistently maintained: the director/psychologist has her chapters in the very unusual second-person, while the small section containing the biologist’s writing (which should be stylistically distinct from the direct mental access of other chapters) is (understandably) in first-person, and unfortunately reads like the product of a professional writer of prose rather than an antisocial biologist.

 

Authority

Jeff VanderMeer’s sequel to Annihilation is longer, but I wound up reading it over a much smaller number of days. This is not because it’s a better book, I think it’s worse even if it was still worth reading. It’s just that the Southern Reach as an organization is less interesting than Area X, their focus of study.

 

Annihilation

As I noted when I announced my plan to read Jeff VanderMeer’s book, I had already seen the movie on its release and thus comparisons are inevitable. Because it’s the first part of a trilogy, I am going to deviate from my pattern of alternating scifi with non-fiction and continue with the rest of the Southern Reach series (as I did with the Foundation trilogy). Since they were all published together it seems particularly fitting to read them that way (also the TV Tropes page for the books lumps them all together).

 

Postwar

Tony Judt’s magnum opus on “Europe Since 1945” falls just short of 900 pages, and I didn’t take notes while reading it sporadically over these past months. That’s one reason I’m a less than ideal reviewer for it, another is that period of peace is inherently less interesting than the “interesting times” of Bloodlands. There’s not a complete absence of military conflict, and it begins in the wake of WW2, but that is still the broad contrast.

 

Serfdom as a military institution

I tweeted about this back in May, but my mind came back to it a few times as something worth preserving at the blog (whose archives are easier to search than Twitter). Andrea Matranga and Timur Natkhov wrote the paper “All Along the Watchtower: Military Landholders and Serfdom Consolidation in Early Modern Russia“. As my tweet referenced, I had previously thought of it in terms borrowed from Evsey Domar by way of Paul Krugman, analogous to American slavery in which an abundance of newly conquered land makes labor more expensive than the Malthusian usual and thus profits higher for the owner of forced labor rather than merely charging high rent to basically free peasants (who can only have somewhere else to go if there’s a surplus of land).

 

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.