I.

One of my posts on reactionaries provoked a very irregular email conversation with Mencius Moldbug, in which his responses to a good number of my objections were along the lines of “I think you’ll find that will make much more sense if you read this 18th century Italian primer on diplomacy” or “The best way to figure that out is to read this 400 page testament by a Prussian military officer.” Finally I asked him to suggest the one book he thought would be most interesting to me, and he chose Chronicles of Wasted Time, the autobiography of Malcolm Muggeridge.

It was a good choice, and not just because its title appropriately described my expectations about reading 500-page books on the recommendation of Mencius Moldbug. Muggeridge is a clear reactionary, but one with the personal and historical credentials to pull it off with the utmost class and credibility.

He describes his birth in 1903 to a family of committed British socialists. Their heroes were Karl Marx, George Bernard Shaw, and Fabian leaders Sidney and Beatrice Webb. These last two I had only the slightest familiarity with, but Muggeridge paints a picture of them as the progressive titans of his day, boasting a combination of Chomsky’s intellectual leadership with the Clintons’ network and political acumen. Throughout Muggeridge’s youth, his family would host meetings, sing socialist songs, run for various minor offices on the socialist ticket, and exchange correspondence with intellectual worthies. They even flirt with, though never quite join, an experimental commune being set up in their area, about which Muggeridge has the best stories:

The land was cheap in those days, and they acquired it by purchase; then, to demonstrate their abhorrence of the institution of property, ceremonially burnt the title deeds. It must have been a touching scene – the bonfire, the documents consigned to the flames, their exalted sentiments. Unfortunately, a neighboring farmer heard of their noble gesture and began to encroach on their land. To have resorted to the police, even if it had been practicable, was unthinkable. So after much deliberation, they decided to use physical force to expel the intruder; which they did on the basis of a theory of detached action, whereby it is permissible to infringe a principle for the purpose of a single isolated act without thereby invalidating it. The intruding farmer was, in fact, thrown over the hedge in the presence of the assembled Colonists. There were many such tragi-comic incidents in the years that followed; as well as quarrels, departures, jealousies, betrayals, and domestic upsets. In the end, the Colonists found it necessary to reestablish their title to the land by means of squatters’ rights, and then proceeded to bicker amongst themselves as to who should have which portion.

But he and his family are convinced that all of this is just a momentary hiccup on the road to Glorious Progress. Indeed, his teenage years are marked by a burning excitement at the Russian Revolution:

We called the Metropolitan Mounted Police ‘Cossacks’, rejoiced over early Soviet films like ‘Mother’ and ‘The Battleship Potemkin’, spoke of workers’ control and cadres and agitprop, and I personally decided inwardly that sooner or later I would go to Russia and throw in my lot with the new and better way of life that, I was confident, was coming to pass there.

Against this enthusiasm, he had only a personal tendency which he describes as a deep-set conviction:

…that I was born into a dying, if not already dead, civilization, whose literature was part of the general decomposition; a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny Eng Lit vultures, and echoing with the hyena cries of Freudians looking for their Marx and Marxists looking for their Freud…a Gaderene descent down which we all must slide, finishing up in the same slough.

By the same token, a strange certainty has possessed me, almost since I can remember, that the Lord Mayor riding in his coach, the Lord Chancellor seated on his Woolsack, Honorable and Right Honorable Members facing one another across the floor of the House of Commons, were somehow the end of a line. That soon there would be no more Lord Mayors, Lord Chancellors, Honorable and Right Honorable Members, the Mother of Parliaments having reached her time of life or menopause, and become incapable of any further procreation…

Doubtless other glories lie ahead. Bigger and better capsules carried to the moon; down in the test tube something stirs; ‘I think, therefore you’re not’ says the computer. We all know, though, in our hearts, that our old homestead is falling down; with death-watch beetles in the rafters, and dry rot in the cellar, and unruly tenants whose only concern is to pull the place to pieces.

This feeling – that everything around him was in a state of permanent decay – was not so far-fetched given that he spent much of his early adulthood in the far-flung territories of the crumbling British Empire. But it soon becomes clear that it’s more than a natural reaction to the political realities of the time. He describes again and again looking on something apparently healthy enough and being overwhelmed with a feeling of impending sickness and decay. He describes T.S. Eliot as “a death-rattle in the throat of a dying civilization”, Shaw as “too encased in his own narcissism, too remote from real life to do more than grimace at it through a long-distance telescope”, and the great reformers and abolitionists of the age as:

…solemn funeral mutes in the long obsequies of western civilization; as they fell by the way, others coming forward to take their places. Now the time has nearly come for the coffin to be actually interred. Then at last their occupation will be gone forever.

I sometimes have patients with very severe depression who tell me that everything they look at is infested by maggots. They won’t eat, because the food is infested with maggots. They won’t hug their children, because their children are infested with maggots. Sleep disgusts them, because the bed is infested with maggots. Et cetera.

And other times, when they have a little more insight, they’ll say something like “Okay, my food isn’t literally infested by maggots, but I get this feeling from it, this overwhelming feeling, such that the feeling would only make sense if the food was infested by maggots. I know deep down it’s not infested by maggots, but it has some metaphysical quality which only things infested by maggots have.”

Poor Malcolm Muggeridge feels this way about everything. One of the most poignant episodes in the book takes place the worst night of the London Blitz, when Muggeridge runs around the burning city, almost euphoric, because finally his inner conviction that everything is on fire and collapsing is reflected in everything really being on fire and collapsing, and nobody can pat his head and patronizingly tell him that it isn’t:

I remember particularly Regent’s Park on a moonlit night, full of the fragrance of the rose gardens; the Nash Terraces, perfectly blacked-out, not a sign of a light anywhere, white stately shapes waiting to be toppled over – as they duly were, crumbling into rubble like melting snow…I felt a terrible joy and exaltation at the sight and smell and taste and sound of all of this destruction; at the lurid sky, the pall of smoke, the faces of bystanders wildly lit in the flames. Goebbels, in one of his broadcasts, accused us of glorying obscenely in London’s demolition. He had a point, but what he failed to understand was that we had destroyed our city already before the Luftwaffe delivered their bombs; what was burning was no more than the dry, residual shell.

The only things that seem to give him any kind of brief reprieve from the maggots are church services, classic literature, quiet domestic life with his wife and 2.4 children, and rural country fields.

And he is convinced, absolutely convinced, that he should be a socialist and go move to the USSR.

This goes approximately as well as you would expect.

After graduating college, which he dislikes because maggots, he gets a couple of jobs at various far-flung British Empire outposts, which he hates. Then, somewhat by coincidence, he ends up in journalism.

His reaction to journalism is an increasing terror that this might be his calling. He is very good at it, takes to it like an old veteran almost immediately, feels in some strange way that he has come home – but the entire enterprise fills him with loathing. He watches in horror how easily the words flow on to the page when his puppet-masters tell him to argue for a particular cause, how fluidly he takes to idioms like “It is surely incumbent upon all of us to…” and “there can be no one here present who does not…”. He writes:

So I began, and the words seemed to come of themselves; like lying as a child, or as a faithless lover; words pouring out of one in a circumstantially false explanation of some suspicious circumstance. The more glib, the greater the guilt…it is painful to me now to reflect the ease with which I got into the way of using this non-language; these drooling non-sentences conveying non-thoughts, propounding non-fears and offering non-hopes. Words are as beautiful as love, and as easily betrayed. I am more penitent for my false words – for the most part, mercifully lost forever in the Media’s great slag-heaps – than for false deeds.

But Malcolm Muggeridge isn’t going to take this lying down! Malcolm Muggeridge has a plan! Malcolm Muggeridge is going to escape this duplicitous charade of lies and petty propaganda. Malcolm Muggeridge is going to move to Stalin’s USSR.

So he does.

He gets a job as The Guardian‘s Russia correspondent and sets off for Moscow with a host of other British intellectuals, heading for what all of them expect is the Promised Land. The mood on their ship is electric; he describes them all singing, sure that they are leaving behind this wretched bourgeois world for the Golden Future:

On their way to the USSR they were in a festive mood; like a cup-tie party on their way to a match, equipped with rattles, coloured scarves and favors. Each of them harboring in his mind some special hope; of meeting Stalin, or alternatively, of falling in with a Komsomolka, sparkling eyed, red scarf and jet black hair, dancing the carmagnole, above all, with very enlightened views on sex, and free and easy ways…oh, to be in Russia, now that Stalin’s there!

His excitement dissipates relatively early; he finds that the Soviet journalistic world fails to live up to his expectations:

Being a correspondent in Moscow, I found, was, in itself, easy enough. The Soviet press was the only source of news; nothing happened or was said until it was reported in the newspapers. So all I had to do was go through the papers, pick out any item that might be interesting to readers of the Guardian, dish it up in a suitable form, get it passed by the censor at the Press Department, and hand it in at the telegraph office for dispatch. One might, if in a conscientious mood, embellish the item a little…sow in a little local colour, blow it up a little, or render it down a little according to the exigencies of the new situation. The original item itself was almost certainly untrue or grotesquely distorted. One’s own deviations, therefore, seemed to matter little, only amounting to further falsifying what was already false.

This bizarre fantasy was very costly and elaborate and earnestly promoted. Something gets published in Pravda; say, that the Soviet Union has a bumper wheat harvest – so many poods per hectare. There is no means of checking; the Press Department men don’t know, and anyone who does is far, far removed from the attentions of foreign journalists. Soviet statistics have always been almost entirely fanciful, though not the less seriously regarded fro that. When the Germans occupied Kiev in the 1939-45 war they got hold of a master Five Year Plan, showing what had really been produced and where. Needless to say, it was quite different from the published figures. This in no way affected credulity about such figures subsequently, as put out in Russia, or even in China.

Hey man, don’t knock China, they’re doing great! Their GDP rose 7% this year! It must be true! The Guardian tells us so!

But getting back to the story…although it is clear to him that the Soviet economy is struggling, every dispatch they are given to send home declares that things are better than ever, that the Workers’ Paradise is even more paradisiacal than previously believed, that the evidence is in and Stalinism is the winner. It doesn’t matter what he makes of this, because anything he writes which deviates from the script is rejected by the censors, who ban him from sending it home. He is reduced to sending secret messages at the bottoms of people’s suitcases, only to find to his horror that even when they successfully reach the Guardian offices back in Britain, his bosses have no interest in publishing them because they offend the prejudices of its progressive readership. Finally, he finds himself a part of the elite fraternity of western journalists on the Soviet beat, who maintain their morale by one-upping each other in how cynical and patronizing they can be towards their Russian hosts and their credulous readers back home:

We used to run a little contest among ourselves to see who could produce the most striking example of credulity among this fine flower of our western intelligentsia. Persuading church dignitaries to feel at home in an anti-God museum was too easy to count. So was taking lawyers into the people´s courts. I got an honourable mention by persuading Lord Marley that the queueing at food shops was permitted by the authorities because it provided a means of inducing the workers to take a rest when otherwise their zeal for completing the five-year plan in record time was such that they would keep at it all the time, but no marks for floating a story that Soviet citizens were being asked to send in human hair – any sort – for making of felt boots. It seemed that this had actually happened.

And he remembers the contempt of these grizzled veterans for the steady stream of Western tourists, intellectuals, and general Stalin fanboys who arrived to gawk over the Glorious New Civilization:

I have never forgotten these visitors, or ceased to marvel at them, at how they have gone on from strength to strength, continuing to lighten our darkness, and to guide, counsel and instruct us. They are unquestionably one of the wonders of the age, and I shall treasure till I die as a blessed memory the spectacle of them travelling with radiant optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about squalid, over-crowded towns, listening with unshakeable faith to the fatuous patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating like schoolchildren a multiplication table, the bogus statistics and mindless slogans endlessly intoned on them. There, I would think, an earnest office-holder in some local branch of the League of Nations Union, there a godly Quaker who had once had tea with Gandhi, there an inveigher against the Means Test and the Blasphemy Laws, there a staunch upholder of free speech and human rights, there an indomitable preventer of cruelty to animals, there scarred and worthy veterans of a hundred battles for truth, freedom, and justice – all, all chanting the praises of Stalin and his Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It was as though a vegetarian society had come outwith a passionate plea for cannibalism, or Hitler had been nominated posthumously for the Nobel Peace Prize.

His final break with the rest of the enlightened progressive world comes when he decides to do something that perhaps no other journalist in the entire Soviet Union had dared – to go off the reservation, so to speak, leave Moscow undercover, and see if he can actually get into the regions where rumors say some kind of famine might be happening. The plan goes without a hitch, he passes himself off as a generic middle-class Soviet, and he ends up in Ukraine right in the middle of Stalin’s Great Famine. He describes the scene – famished skeletons begging for crumbs, secret police herding entire towns into railway cars never to be seen again. At great risk to himself, he smuggles notes about the genocide out of the country, only to be met – once again – with total lack of interest. Guardian readers don’t look at the newspapers to hear bad things about the Soviet Union! Guardian readers want to hear about how the Glorious Future is already on its way! He is quickly sidelined in favor of the true stars of Soviet journalism, people like Walter Duranty, the New York Times‘s Russia correspondent, who wrote story after story about how prosperous and happy and well-fed the Soviets were under Stalin, and who later won the Pulitzer Prize for his troubles.

Muggeridge, on the other hand, penurious from lack of interest in his stories, fearing for his safety from the Soviet government, and generally disgusted with everything – even more so than usual for a world infested with maggots – decides to get the hell out of Dodge. He’s had enough of Russia, enough of Communism, enough of that entire part of the world. He’s going somewhere safe, somewhere decent. He’s going somewhere that will renew his crumbling faith in humanity. He’s going to Nazi Germany right as the anti-Jewish pogroms are starting.

Well, to make a long story short, this doesn’t restore his faith in humanity. He hangs out in Berlin for a while, sending his pieces on the Russian famine to all the newspapers he knows, watching more and more rejections come in each day, earning the ire of all of his leftist friends for apparently deserting the cause and turning traitor. Finally, he tells his boss:

“From the way you’ve cut my messages about the Metro-Vickers affair, I realize that you don’t want to know what’s going on in Russia, or let your readers know. If it had been an oppressed minority, or subject people valiantly struggling to be free, that would have been another matter. Then any amount of outspokenness, any amount of honesty.”

I went on to describe the scene in Berlin, and the Nazis beating up Jewish shops, and everyone with his story of murder and folly, and concluded:

“It’s silly to say the Brown Terror is worse than the Red Terror. They’re both horrible. They’re both Terrors. I watched the Nazis march along Unter den Linded and realized – of course, they’re Komsomols, the same people, the same faces. It’s the same show.”

David Ayerst quotes this correspondence in his book on The Guardian, and says it read “like a letter to end all communication”. So it did; I was finished with moderate men of all shades of opinion forever more.

Leaving Nazi Germany for neutral Switzerland, he says he had a pretty good idea even at the time how everything was going to end. And I believe him. By temperament, he expects everything to end in horror and madness and total collapse of civilization, so props to him for choosing the proper time and place for his temperament to be exactly correct. He writes:

All this likewise indubitably belonged to history, and would have to be historically assessed; like the Murder of the Innocents, or the Black Death, or the Battle of Paschendaele. But there was something else; a monumental death-wish, an immense destructive force loosed in the world which was going to sweep over everything and everyone, laying them flat, burning, killing, obliterating, until nothing was left. Those German agronomes in their green uniform suits with feathers in their hats – they had their part to play. So had the paunchy Brown-Shirts, and the matronly blonde maidens painting swastikas on the windows of Jewish shops. So had the credulous armies of the just, listening open-mouthed to Intourist patter, or seeking reassurance from a boozy sandalled Wicksteed. Wise old Shaw, high-minded old Barbusse, the venerable Webbs, Gide the pure in heart and Picasso the impure, down to poor little teachers, crazed clergymen and millionaires, drivelling dons and very special correspondents like Duranty, all resolved, come what might, to believe anything, however preposterous, to overlook anything, however villainous, to approve anything, however obscurantist and brutally authoritarian, in order to be able to preserve intact the confident expectation that one of the most thorough-going, ruthless, and bloody tyrannies ever to exist on Earth could be relied on to champion human freedom, the brotherhood of man, and all the other good liberal causes to which they had dedicated their lives. All resolved, in other words, to abolish themselves and their world, the rest of us with it. Nor have I from that time ever had the faintest expectation that, in earthly terms, anything could be salvaged; that any earthly battle could be won or earthly solution found. It has all just been sleep-walking to the end of the night.

II.

Muggeridge’s description of World War II is actually super hilarious.

I was not expecting this. When you take one of the darkest and most pessimistic writers of the twentieth century and put him in the middle of one of the twentieth century’s greatest horrors, you might expect the result to have at least a touch of grimness about it, or at least not to leave you rolling on the floor laughing. You would be wrong.

Muggeridge, inspired by some force even he did not understand, decided to enlist in the British military when the war broke out. He’s a bit too old by this point to be a front-line infantryman, and his intellect, connections, and experience with foreign countries catch the eye of Military Intelligence. They recruit him as a spy. His first job is counter-intelligence – hanging around in the army, making sure that there aren’t any secret German spies there. Well, there either aren’t any secret German spies, or else they’re at least not saying that they’re secret German spies, so this task turns out to be kind of a combination of boring, useless, and hilarious. He describes a typical day:

I find it difficult to recall what regular duties I had, if any…Our section was supposed to be responsible for securing the Headquarters from the incursions of enemy agents who might pry out its secrets or subvert its personnel. This gave us a free hand to do almost anything and go almost anywhere. If we went drinking in pubs, it was to keep a look-out for suspicious characters; if we pikced up girls, it was to probe their intentions in frequenting the locality.

A fellow-officer told me of how, on a pub-crawl, ostensibly a security reconnaissance, he got drunk, and, as was his way when in such a condition, pretended to be a foreigner, using strange gestures and speaking with an accent. The next day, badly hung over, he was sent a report of the movements of a suspicious foreigner, and told to check up on them. Tracing the suspect’s movements from pub to pub, it slowly dawned on him he was following himself the night before. When he told me of his adventure, to comfort him I said that it was what we were all doing all the time – keeping ourselves under close surveillance. This was what security was all about.

In a similar vein, another FS officer, idly thumbing over the Security List – a top-secret document containing the names of all subjects who were to be at once apprehended if they tried to get into or out of the country – found he was in it.

Graham Greene was a very famous early 20th century author. Like pretty much every other famous early 20th century author, he was a good friend of Malcolm Muggeridge’s. Greene was working in another branch of Intelligence at the time, and they needed someone for a secret mission, and Greene mooted Muggeridge’s name. He found himself plucked out of his cushy job drinking at pubs and tracking himself, and sent to MI6’s secret spy school at Bletchley Park, where he was taught various hilariously impractical skills like how to make invisible ink out of bird poop. He was then sent on a secret mission to Mozambique, so that just in case anything relevant to World War II were to happen in Mozambique, Her Majesty’s Government would have a secret agent in place.

The Mozambique chapters were among the funniest of the entire book. The Germans and Italians, inspired by the same principle, had also sent agents to Mozambique. It was not at all hard to figure out who they were, nor was Muggeridge’s identity particularly hard to figure out. There was only one nice hotel in Mozambique, so Muggeridge, the German spy, and the Italian spy all got rooms there and spent most of the time glaring at each other during communal dinners, or lying on the beach an appropriate distance away from one another, keeping watch.

Sometimes they would engage in hilarious secret plots against each other. Muggeridge, after chancing into a friendship with a member of Mozambique’s small German community, arranged for his friend to tell the German spy that he was only faking friendship with Muggeridge so he could steal his secrets for the good of The Reich. He then proceeded to “rob” Muggeridge’s house (with Muggeridge’s gleeful consent), producing for his German “master” a trove of documents which, when decoded, suggested that the Italian spy was secretly working for the British. This caused a big fight between the German spy and the Italian spy, which given that there wasn’t really much to spy on in Mozambique, was considered a fantastic success for the British cause and raised Muggeridge’s standing as some kind of intelligence prodigy.

Later in the war, Mozambique actually became sort of relevant as troop convoys started sailing by. Muggeridge bribed local officials to keep a watch out, and ended up foiling a very real German plot to do some sort of vague thing involving ships – as a result, when the war started winding down to the point where maintaining a presence in Mozambique was no longer viewed as entirely necessary, he came home and was promoted into the inner circles of intelligence. His new position was under Kim Philby, the head of the Department Of Counter-Intelligence Against The Soviet Union, who turned out to be a really bad choice for this position given that he, LIKE EVERY OTHER PROGRESSIVE INTELLECTUAL IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY OF BRITAIN, was a secret Soviet spy. But at the time he seemed okay enough, and he sent Muggeridge to France to aid in the Liberation there.

We like to think of the Liberation of France as a nice, happy time, but for Muggeridge it was basically the time when an entire country worth of very angry Frenchmen massacred, pogrommed, lynched, or otherwise descended upon anyone accused of collaborating with the German occupation. Unsurprisingly, everybody turned out to think their personal and political rivals had collaborated with the German occupation, so it was basically the atmosphere of a 17th century Massachusetts witch hunt, only with less restraint.

Muggeridge’s job was, as usual, darkly hilarious – actual spies for the French and British governments usually acted all cooperative toward the German occupation to keep their cover and get a chance of infiltrating enemy ranks; as a result, they were usually First Up Against The Wall When The Liberation Came. Sure, they said “I was just a spy doing it as part of a secret plan,” but of course everybody said that. So Muggeridge had to rush from prison to prison, trying to convince mobs of angry Frenchmen not to execute the people who had just been most instrumental in saving them.

His spy career ended with what seems like maybe the most typical incident in the entire book – somehow P. G. Wodehouse had wandered into Nazi Germany and been stuck in a prison camp there. Then he had wandered out into France, gotten marked as a Collaborator, and was now in serious fear for his life. The British Secret Service picked Muggeridge as their Official Attache For P. G. Wodehouse Related Affairs, showing such exceptional genius in choosing the right man for the job that you would think they would have been able to get AT LEAST ONE ANTI-SOVIET COUNTERINTELLIGENCE AGENT WHO WASN’T A SECRET SOVIET SPY. Anyway, Muggeridge and Wodehouse wander around the cratered, mob-ruled French landscape, having a series of very Wodehousian adventures, until finally the war ends, Wodehouse is deposited safely the United States, and Muggeridge is able to return to Britain.

The book ends with the funeral of Sidney Webb, the early socialist hero his family idolized, who died just after World War II. Muggeridge is invited to the event because his wife is a distant cousin of the Webb family; he has to hold his nose throughout. At the time of his death, Webb is more beloved than ever by a grateful populace. His and his wife’s great works, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation and The Truth About Soviet Russia, have become Bibles of the Left and part of Stalin’s cult of personality. Their opponents, the sorts who say that maybe Stalin isn’t the reincarnation of Christ, have been summarily dispatched – Muggeridge describes one of his friends from the journalism world, a reporter universally respected for helping expose Nazi atrocities, who made the mistake of trying to do the same with Soviet atrocities:

When Voigt turned the furious indignation with which he had lambasted the Nazi terror on to Stalin’s, his former liberal friends and associates discovered in him a Nazi sympathizer. Another liberal newspaper, the News Chronicle, ran an article about [his publication] headlined HITLER’S FAVORITE READING, with pictures of the Fuhrer and Voigt looking amicably across at one another.

In other words, Webb dies at the height of his career, his lies unexposed. George Bernard Shaw writes a letter to the newspapers suggesting that a man of Webb’s standing deserves a national hero’s funeral, everyone agrees, and he and his wife are interred in Westminster Abbey before a crowd of dignitaries including the Prime Minister (despite their own atheism and specific demands not to be placed in a church).

Muggeridge watches the whole sordid spectacle – the Dean of the Cathedral singing the praises of an unrepentant atheist “whose crowning achievement had been to commend to his fellow-countrymen and the whole world as a new civilization a system of servitude more far-reaching and comprehensive than any hitherto known” and ends his book very abruptly, saying only that “Another way has to be found and explored.”

III.

And then he dies before writing any more volumes of his autobiography, let alone telling us what the other way is.

He quotes very approvingly, as the heart of his philosophy, a passage by his friend Hugh Kingsmill:

What is divine in man is elusive and impalpable, and he is easily tempted to embody it in a concrete form – a church, a country, a social system, a leader – so that he may realize it with less effort and serve it with more profit. Yet the attempt to externalize the kingdom of heaven in a temporal shape must end in disaster. It cannot be created by charters or constitutions nor established by arms. Those who seek for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.

And indeed, he writes a lot about how the whole problem started when people started being utopian and getting it into their heads to fix things on earth, rather than seek for “treasure in heaven”.

Some atheists I know write a lot about how religious people think you should hate the world because it’s awful and only some future world, ie Heaven, can be any good. Some religious people I know write a lot about how that’s total poppycock. Certainly G. K. Chesterton would have said something about how the world being sinful and full of flaws is not a reason to hate it, but precisely why we should love it, and Leah Libresco would say something about how hating the world is Gnosticism and Gnosticism is a heresy.

But I think Muggeridge might be pretty close to the atheist straw man on this point, with the key exception that religion isn’t what made him hate the world. He started off hating the world, and religion and mysticism offered him something not to hate, some way to say “Okay, but there’s some divinity buried in all this mess”. He is brilliant, he is compassionate, he is a great writer, it’s impossible to read his autobiography without loving him – but that he hates the world is hard to deny. I write sometimes about how beliefs that we consider abominable can sometimes be therapeutic mental crutches for people with the right cast of mind, and Muggeridge certainly found the idea of the world as a vale of suffering that would soon melt away to be oddly comforting in times of distress.

On the other hand, I’m not sure what to make of his opposition to trying to fix things here on Earth. He clearly hated Stalinism. When he hated Stalinism, he reacted by trying to make there be less Stalinism, which seems like a very reasonable thing to do. But the Communists hated capitalism. They reacted by trying to make there be less capitalism. Other than Muggeridge being right about the object-level issue and the Communists being wrong, it’s hard to see what the difference in principle is between them. The best I can do – and I worry I’m doing great violence to his intellectual uniqueness by rounding him off to my own ways of thinking – is to view him as suggesting some sort of precautionary principle, like that before you make a change you should be sure it’s something that has worked before (like non-Stalinism) and not a totally new idea (like Stalinism). But I am pretty sure if I suggested that to him he would roll his eyes and tell me that I’m such a modern and I don’t get it at all.

@slatestarcodex "But if we stop dumping raw sewage into…" "YOU'RE SO UTOPIAN!" "I just thoug-" "STOP TRYING TO IMMANENTIZE THE ESCHATON!"

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) June 25, 2013

@slatestarcodex One day we shall bring forth a new species of man free from utopian desires and cleansed of belief in human perfectibility.

— Scott Alexander (@slatestarcodex) June 25, 2013

The one thing I can be really sure of is that Muggeridge doesn’t want us to get stuck again in the same position we were in during the 30s and 40s where we totally ignored Stalin’s crimes due to our own political biases. Okay. I respect that. It was really eye-opening seeing exactly how brainwashed the entire European, British, and American Left were, and the whole situation gave me a lot more understanding of how overwhelmingly the Question of Communism dominated intellectual and political life in the first half of the century.

I was born in the 80s, at the very tail end of the Cold War, when we’d all had the decency to put all the Communists in one country and all the capitalists in another and make them express their differences like civilized men – ie by pointing thousands of hair-trigger nuclear missiles at one another. In the early days of Communism, we just didn’t know. Would Russia go Communist? Would Germany? Would France? Would everywhere? Muggeridge talks about how one of Britain’s main concerns in post-Liberation France was that the entire country would just move en masse to Communism as soon as the Nazis were out, which somehow or other mysteriously failed to happen EVEN THOUGH EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THE WESTERN AGENTS SENT TO PREVENT THAT WAS SECRETLY WORKING FOR THE SOVIETS.

And then the Cold War started, and this very gradually settled down to an equilibrium where okay, a lot of the Western intelligentsia stayed Communist, but at least they had the decency to realize that it was unpopular and the Revolution probably wasn’t literally going to happen next week.

By coincidence, just last week I read about the sad death of historian Robert Conquest, the man who was able to succeed where Muggeridge failed and drag Britain and America kicking and screaming into admitting Stalin wasn’t such a great guy. Conquest had one great advantage over Muggeridge, which was that he wrote in 1968 when, far from being our allies in a world war, the Soviets were technically our Cold War enemies and we were sort of okay with hearing bad things about them. But even then, he faced an extraordinary uphill battle. The most famous legend about him involved the second edition of his book, which came out right around the time the Soviet Union fell and its indisputable records of Stalin’s famines and purges became public knowledge. He supposedly asked to have the new version titled I TOLD YOU SO, YOU FUCKING FOOLS.

This part of our intellectual history is kind of forgotten. Who hears about Sidney and Beatrice Webb nowadays? Who hears about Walter Duranty? Yet these people during their times were absolute titans, “thought leaders” in the modern terminology – as per Muggeridge, Duranty “came to be accepted as the great Russian expert in America, and played a major part in shaping President Roosevelt’s policies vis-a-vis the USSR”. We hear a lot about our moral failures in terms of not stopping the Holocaust, but our quarter-century complicity with and even adulation of Stalinism seems like one of those facts that just fell by the wayside.

A lot of people think that I’m too easy on crackpots, or too fond of contrarians, or too interested in protecting witches, or whatever. But hearing all of these stories about the universal progressive Western adulation of Stalin is really scary. It’s way too easy for the darkest and most primal parts of my brain to map neatly onto the modern modalities of rejecting and punishing disagreement. “Really? You think this random journalist who isn’t even a trained Kremlinologist knows more than expert consensus?” “Killing millions of people, oh God, you’re one of those conspiracy losers.” “It’s obvious you’re just a privileged white guy who’s already decided to believe anything that reflects negatively on Slavs and foreigners.” “Although we respect free speech, that doesn’t extend to pro-Nazi propaganda and worker’s-paradise denialism.” Part of my respect for contrarians is that contrarianism is this incredibly fragile and precious art which needs to be kept alive for the times it is needed – rare times, times that hopefully won’t come up in our lifetimes, but times that, when they do come, desperately need a core of people willing to stand up to the establishment. Cultivating contrarianism is a lot like owning a gun – you get a heck of a lot of opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot, but also very occasionally one opportunity to save your life.

But then, on the other hand, here’s Muggeridge again:

Solzhenitsyn has provided the perfect parable on this theme with his description of Mrs. Roosevelt’s conducted visit to a labor camp where he was doing time. The estimable lady, who spawned the moral platitudes of the contemporary liberal wisdom as effortlessly and plenteously as the most prolific salmon, was easily persuaded that the camp in question was a humanely conducted institution for curing the criminally inclined. A truly wicked woman would have been ashamed to be so callous and so gullible.

Really? Gullible how? I’m sure the Soviets were moderately competent in making sure Roosevelt didn’t see anything too untoward. So what was she supposed to do?

I think of those people who say the US government is setting up FEMA interment camps as we speak to imprison dissenters against the New World Order. They provide some things that look sort of like evidence – photos (which turn out to be of random prisons or, in one case, an Amtrak station), documents (which turn out to be out of context references to setting up FEMA refugee camps for people displaced by disasters), et cetera. The people talking about this are total loons.

But Type 1 errors trade off against Type 2 errors. Make absolutely sure you’re the sort of person who never misses a Stalinist gulag, and you become the type of person who’s easy prey for the FEMA internment camp theory. Make absolutely sure you don’t believe in FEMA internment camps, and you’re liable to miss a Stalinist gulag as soon as the Soviet government gets Duranty to print “Oh, don’t worry, that’s just an Amtrak station”. Use the heuristic of “just trust expert consensus, experts always know what they’re talking about”, and you are now one of the tens of thousands of grateful readers who helped make Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation into a best-seller.

What I’m saying is – there is no royal road. This is why I think learning rationality and the art of sifting through evidence is so important.

As for Muggeridge? I’m not sure he has much to teach there. Yes, he deserves the thanks of a grateful civilization for being a lone voice in the wilderness warning us about Stalin. But after that, as per his Wikipedia page, he was a lone voice in the wilderness warning us about contraception. After that, he became a lone voice in the wilderness warning us about marijuana. After that, he became a lone voice in the wilderness warning us about blasphemy in The Life Of Brian.

I am glad there are all types of people in the world. I am glad that there are crotchety, contrarian, cynical old reporters who constantly feel like everything is hurling off the precipice into Hell, because when things are actually hurling off the precipice into Hell, these people are the first to notice. In the same way, I am glad that there are dedicated survivalists who stockpile canned food in underground shelters in case of the nuclear apocalypse, because if there is ever an actual nuclear apocalypse, these people will survive and rebuild the human race.

But I am not digging a bomb shelter myself, and I am pretty sure I cannot bring myself to be quite as cynical as Malcolm Muggeridge.

Norman Baker has an article in today's Independent:

It seems extraordinary, just after a general election that produced only a narrow majority for the Conservatives, to countenance a one-party state, but that is what we are now facing. The warning signs are flashing, clearly and urgently. 

In the Commons, the opposition is cowed and aimless. After a terrible result in May, especially north of the border, a future Labour majority now looks like a pipe dream. ... 

The Lib Dems may well have an energetic new leader in Tim Farron, but they were reduced to a pile of rubble at the last election, while the Green Party is stuck on just one MP. The feisty Scot Nats have their tails up, but they lack the legitimacy to challenge the Tory Government over English matters, and have replaced the Labour and Lib Dem MPs who did have that legitimacy.

The depressing thing is that he is obviously right.

Norman ends by saying:

Those interested in the continuation of a viable multi-party democracy need to wake up, act and act together before it is too late.

But what does he propose exactly?

This really is how these stories have to be done.  Not the faux-realism of the movie of Silence of the Lambs.  That approach jars with Anthony Hopkins' (less than entirely successful) attempt to capture the uncanny and semi-demonic nature of Hannibal himself, who was always a creature of evil magic.  Look at Harris' descriptions of him in Red Dragon, with his maroon eyes and his extra finger and his preternatural senses.

What the TV version of the stories has done is capture (with the proper ambiguity) the essentially magical nature of Hannibal and his world.  He lives in a twilight interzone between our world of quotidian normality and the deep, dark pit where human nature as brutish meat intersects with human nature as beset by devils and shades.

Yes, it glamourizes him and his violence, in contrast to real murderers... but that seems a superficial way to look at these stories, even if it's a perfectly valid one which should be given its own space.  Below that, there is more to say.  Treating Hannibal as an uncanny creature who blurs our senses of place and time and knowledge is actually much better in this respect than the 'realist' approach, which ends up straightforwardly making him a glamorous monster.

I love that this show dances on the borderline between diegetic materialism and a diegetic acknowledgement of a supernatural world.  It leaves open to us the possibility that Hannibal truly is a demon, or a demon-inhabited man.  By refusing to foreclose upon the literal supernatural reading, the show leaves the incredible oneiric fertility of the supernatural story open to us.  It does what lesser works like The Babadook and The Innocents fail to do.  It respects the uncanny, and it also allows it a possible existence without making it anything less than numinous and ineffable.  It ultimately asks us to not care - but in a constructive way.  It asks us to recognise the essentially uncanny, weird, gothic, sick, twisted, irrational nature of reality itself as we live it.

Phil Sandifer (I suspect) enjoys the show in terms of Blakean visions.  I enjoy the show in terms of the Gothic Marxist insistence upon the really existing world as a twisted, phantasmagorical and irrational hellscape, but also as a site of the creative and expressive production of phantasms.

Season 3 is surely the fruition of this approach, as begun (falteringly) in Season 1 and continued (far more confidently) in Season 2.  And the great thing is that they've recognised this strain in the original stories, particularly in Red Dragon (which really stands above and apart from the other books), by placing the story of Francis Dolarhyde as the terminus of the season.

Dolarhyde is the figure who, through his Blakean-inflected hallucinations and his status as tragic and enmonstered outsider, allows the categories to crash into each other in horrific but visionary ways.  I love how Harris does all this in the book without ever losing track of Dolarhyde's viciousness, or his essential patheticness.  One uncomfortable thing about the book, of course, is the way it insists upon the victim-status of a violent white man... but this looks set to be reframed by the TV series (as the TV series always does reframe the original stories creatively) by the superb decision to cast a black actress as Reba, which follows the show's splendid line of transmuting male characters into women, and rescuing monstrous female characters from caricature.  (I expect a more nuanced take on Dolarhyde's backstory too.) 

(By the way, I'm sure the actress playing Reba was cast solely on her evident talent... I'm just glad they were open to doing so rather than thoughtlessly following the source material, as many other production teams would have done.)

One thing I'm very interested to see is how they transmute Lecter's helplessness and frustration at his incarcerartion in the book.  In the TV show, Lecter's incarceration is almost voluntary, the next step in his game, a way of staying in Will's life.  I think his frustration (which is very integral to both the plot and his character) can be rescued by reframing it as frustration at Will's refusal to engage with him.

I'll be fascinated to see how they do it.

Language note: If you're here from the epilepsy part of the internet, welcome. If you are just here to tell me that "you HAVE epilepsy, epilepsy doesn't have you!" or any other person first thing--don't. I choose identity first language for a reason. In this case, because yes, epilepsy *does* have me a lot of the time. I have to do a lot of life rearranging because access is miserable. Person firsting me isn't going to change that. I'd argue that person firsting is contributing to the problem, because it creates this picture that I can just leave epilepsy at home. I can't. That's the point of this post.

Time is running out for the ABC (Anbody But Corbyn) campaigners

Although it will be just over a month before the result in Labour’s leadership election will be announced the ballot packs go out on Friday.

The experience of postal voting is that electors tend not to leave their ballots hanging around and fill them in very quickly. So a week today we must assume that a sizeable proportion of the selectorate will have filled in their ballots and put them into the post.

Unless today’s YouGov polling is totally wrong then it is hard to see anything other than a Corbyn victory.

In his commentary on the poll Peter Kellner made a number of points which might indicate that it is not so overwhelming for Corbyn as the number suggest. He observed:-

“Our raw data finds that slightly more people who voted in the last leadership election backed Ed Miliband rather than his brother David, even though David won more votes among individual party members. We have weighted our data to reflect the votes cast five years ago. As Ed’s supporters are far more likely than David’s to back Corbyn, this adjustment has the effect of slightly reducing Corbyn’s overall vote share. If, as some people have suggested, more of David’s supporters have left the party since 2010 than Ed’s, that slight adjustment might be wrong; Mr Corbyn’s support could be slightly higher than we think.

On the other hand, we have three times as many Guardian-reading (and heavily pro-Corbyn) party members as Mirror readers (who divide evenly between Corbyn and Burnham). Could we be exaggerating the power of the Guardianistas and missing some traditional Mirror-reading, Burnham-supporting voters? To explore whether this might affect our findings, we adjusted the data to equalise the number of Mirror and Guardian readers in Labour’s selectorate. This reduces Corbyn’s first-round support by just two points, to 51%, and raises Mr Burnham’s support to 23%…”

All of that could be correct and in the final 2010 leadership polls David Miliband was understated by some margin but nothing on the scale of what would be required with the change required from the current numbers.

Mike Smithson

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“Twee,” in the pejorative sense, means something that substitutes decoration for substance. But it can also refer to something that makes an effort to be sweet and adorbs in addition to whatever else it is, or that communicates something through sweetness and adorability.

Which is to say: it’s high-risk, high-reward. I have zero patience for white kids goofing on ukeleles, or self-conscious weirdos who maintain eye contact for too long as a private experiment to see if they can beam their thoughts into yours. And I hate it when singers put on phony voices to sound more “interesting” than they are (fsodfhisodif), and every year, for decades, hundreds upon hundreds of new rock bands sound exactly like Talking Heads except the singer has a concussion and the lettering on the album cover was written in the dude’s wrong hand.

Twee is, more often than not, just a way to muddle up something that’s otherwise completely mundane and uninteresting. Because if you learn one thing in art school it’s that if you don’t have an idea, obfuscate! You can coast for years on obscurity, as long as you’re pretty or mean enough to convince people they’re missing something. It can carry you through your 20s and even beyond, if you date younger.

I totally get why people hate twee. Most of the time, I hate it too. As Katrina Onstad wrote in a profile on Miranda July:

Twee fascinations with childhood innocence can mask an unwillingness to tackle life’s darker quandaries. Who wouldn’t be annoyed by a guy who, say, finds a cracked milk bottle, makes a film about it, then silk screens it on a T-shirt and names his band Milk Bottle? The stakes are low. The results are soon forgotten.

The stakes are low because there’s no intention. In this case, “cute” is a lazy tactic that reveals a mutant sense of entitlement and self-regard—your genius runs so deep that even your least considered ideas are precious. Because “cute” is such an easy bluff, twee is cloying and disposable more often than not. And it triggers an instinctive wariness in those who regard it, of being suckered into a feeling that’s not genuine to the work. There’s nothing wrong with a cold, empty aesthetic (take Scarface) but the pretense of “poignant” is unbearable.

That said, some things are cute for a reason. And I love cute, when it earns itself, or just is. If twee is done well and with emotional honesty, it can be as beautiful as it means to be, because sometimes a thing that is painstakingly designed to be pleasant is, in fact, pleasant.

Some of my favorite things are twee. I love Belle and Sebastian. I love the Free Design. I even like the Ladybug Transistor, and the movie Submarine. Oh, and I LOVE Miranda July. I totally love Miranda July. I even liked the movie with the talking cat, and even the part of the movie where the guy talks to the moon about his relationship woes, and by the end I even liked the talking cat itself. Why? Because it worked! Everything made sense relative to everything else. (You and Me and Everyone We Know was a little much.)

Oh, and my favorite instrument is the flute.

Sometimes twee is just the medium. For example, Joanna Newsom, who announced a new album today! I would call her a genius. I would also call her difficult. She is “muscularly adorable,” and it takes some kind of muscle, I guess, to get up there with a harp in a peasant dress and sing like Karen Dalton. I’m not saying you should ever do that, or that it’s not a little bit painful to hold her eye as she leaps through snowy Manhattan, or suffer the twinkle of glockenspiel. I’m just saying that Joanna Newsom knows what the fuck she’s doing, and I believe she could not do it any other way.

"The current Lady Bonkers"? The sly old dog: I had no idea!

Monday

The telephone is brought to me and on the other end of the line is someone telling me what a fine fellow Norman Lamb is and what a poor specimen Farron is. Lamb, it transpires, is in favour of people being allowed to end their own lives and of equal marriage. Farron, by contrast – or so I am informed – is Fundamentally Unsound.

I draw a long breath: “I have no doubt that what you say is true Grant, or whatever your name is, but I would question what is has to do with the leadership of the Liberal Party. Are we really intending to fight the next election under the slogan 'Vote for us and then top yourself'? I know the results in May were dreadful, but surely they were not that bad?

"As to equal marriage, the current Lady Bonkers and I are very happy. The only chap I would want to marry is Alan Beith and he is spoken for by a charming woman who was an MP in Dorset for a number of years. I bid you good day."

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• Armed to the teeth with duck-handled umbrellas

De Montfort University* has got in a kerfuffle after awarding its highest honour to David Cameron in recognition of the importance of same-sex marriage and its impact in social progress.

There's a petition here which has that rare quality of being an online petition I can entirely sign up to the sentiments of despite not having written. Far too many throw in peculiar delusions along the way.

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August 10th, 2015: FUN FACT ABOUT AUGUST: given the world's current population and death rates, well more than 1000 people will die every day in August. THANKS, AUGUST. Friggin' August. – Ryan

How Yvette Cooper could come 3rd on 1st preferences yet still end up as winner

In the last 2 big LAB selections the person top on 1st round hasn’t won. This happened with Harriet Harman in the 2007 deputy race and, of course, when EdM beat his brother five years ago. This was all, of course, because of the party’s alternative voting system when electors are asked to give their second and third choices as well as their first one.

Although the three part electoral college of old has now gone the overall structure of voting remains and what is critical is how the second and third preferences actually split.

So PBers can play around with the AV impact Nojam has created a special widget where you input not only the first preferences but how this might work.

In the first example Nojam’s Mark Hopkins has a first round split of Corbyn 38%, Burnham 27%, Cooper 24% and Kendall 10%. He then makes what I think are very reasonable assumptions on how the lower preferences will go and we get Cooper as winner. Just click on the “AV Result” tab below to see the outcome.

In my example Corbyn gets 41% on first round, Burnham 25%, Cooper 22% and Kendall 12%. Yet Cooper wins based on the lower preferences

What I think is clear is that the lion’s share of the Kendall vote would go to Cooper and this could possibly put her in second place for the final split with Corbyn.

Try for yourself. Remember that many voters are not likely to use all their preferences so transfers do not have to add up to 100%.

Note that you can edit your numbers at any time and test different possible outcomes

Thanks to Mark for creating this for us.

Mike Smithson

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Back in April, a Seattle-based company called Gravity Payments did something novel. The CEO took a $930,000 pay cut in order to raise the minimum salary of all the workers to $70,000 a year. How did that work out for them?

Turns out, not well. Can guess what the problem was?

Give yourself a hand if you guessed, “Whiny assholes who are not content to make $70,000 a year because co-workers they see as undeserving are making the same amount.”

“He gave raises to people who have the least skills and are the least equipped to do the job, and the ones who were taking on the most didn’t get much of a bump,” said the 26-year-old, who helped Mr Price do the sums on whether Gravity Payments could afford the move in the first place.

That’s a 26-year-old kid making $70,000 a year complaining because she wasn’t getting more than everyone else.

“The people who were just clocking in and out were making the same as me,” he told the paper. “It shackles high performers to less motivated team members.”

And that’s a 29-year-old, again making $70,000, upset because he’s now making the same amount as the “slackers”. It’s not that he’s not making enough to meet his needs, it’s that he’s not making more than other people.

Now, Seattle has a high cost of living, so that $70,000 isn’t as huge as it may seem some places, but it’s enough that when this was first announced, these employees were ecstatic. Now, though, it’s apparently not enough, because how can you say you’re being well-compensated for your job if there isn’t some poor dink under you who’s doing worse? What’s even the point of working hard if it isn’t part of a Darwinian struggle to crush your colleagues and hope that Senpai notices you and throws a few more bucks your way?

Note that for both of these people, the solution to someone not carrying their weight is not that the person’s manager should be talked to or that the person should be let go if they’re not performing. In both cases they are merely suggesting that such layabouts should simply be paid less. So it’s not about the goldbrickers making the workload more difficult, it’s about the fact that them also making $70,000 somehow makes the $70,000 these people are making less valuable and special.

These are the same kinds of people who get mad when they see “poor” people with nice cell phones or large TVs. Not because they themselves lack for such things, but because what is the point of having them if other people — especially the undeserving — also have them?

The article mentions the other hazards of these kinds of businesses: long hours and work overload. Nevertheless, there will be a single takeaway here: that you just can’t raise peoples’ salary without making them bow and scrape and tear out each others’ throats for it. “What’s the point of a $15/hour minimum wage,” a person who can’t remember not flying First Class will opine, “That company in Seattle raised the minimum wage to $70,000 a year and it didn’t work!”

It didn’t work because of the same bunch of people who are always ruining things. They aren’t even bitching that someone got a mango popsicle and they didn’t, they’re bitching that someone also got a mango popsicle. So theirs is less tasty now.

“How can I consider myself successful unless someone else is doing shittier than me?” is an evil, poisonous way to live. Nothing good is at the end of that road.

For all I know, my workplace pays a guy my salary to come in and watch Frasier re-runs all day. If that’s the case, good for him. Unless he is interfering with me getting my work done, I couldn’t care less. I’m fairly certain there are people there who do less than I do and make more but it’s not hurting me in any way. I like my work, I like my salary, and I’m doing just fine. I don’t know if that means I gave a good work ethic or a poor one, but at least I’m not whining to the papers because no one’s making me feel like Mommy’s Special Boy.

There’s an article making the rounds now about big Hollywood action movies becoming impenetrable messes with sprawling, convoluted plots. I haven’t seen enough of these movies to have much of an opinion on them, but I’m pretty familiar with this current trend.

The first thing that comes to mind is Doctor Who under Steven Moffat. Under his watch the show’s storylines transformed into overblown complex machines with tons of moving parts but which didn’t actually do anything. It also gained popularity.

None of the big, multi-season Moffat storylines make any actual sense, but they’re full of references and callbacks and “did you notice”s and such, and are therefore regarded as intelligent and crafty. Ask fans to explain what it’s about and you’ll get funny lines, “fuck yeah” moments, and possibly a description of scenes, but no actual story or theme. There are ideas but they’re not tied to anything, and very often parts that are “awesome” separately make no sense or are contradictory when looked at as a whole. Attempt this kind of analysis and you’re told you’re nitpicking, that it’s not about that. The show that was formerly praised as being so intelligent and structurally complex is now a kid’s show, dumb entertainment, just turn off your brain.

This is the feeling I get when I’m playing boardgames such as Russian Railroads or Tzolk’in or Stefan Feld stuff. These are complex games that are quite trendy at the moment, in which there are a myriad of parts one must navigate in order to win. They are often called “point salad” games because usually you score some victory points for successfully working each individual piece, but to really win you have to gain some from everywhere, not just focus on any particular element. When I play these games, I see all these elements and epicycles and gears within gears, but there’s nothing to them. There’s no ultimate point to them other than to appreciate the complexity. They are elaborately designed engines that don’t actually do anything. My personal take on “point salad” designs is that they are such because, as with the Doctor Who scripts, since there’s no overarching goal, you have to try to develop interest in the individual parts. These games are difficult for me for the same reason Doctor Who has become pointless to me: I’m not interested in a series of individual scenes; I want them to unfold into a satisfying — or at least comprehensible — whole.

It’s not like I don’t like complexity. One of my favorite boardgames is The New Era, which shares a lot of elements with some of these games. It’s a very complicated game with a lot of moving parts, but the parts fit together and serve the whole. Lords of Waterdeep isn’t a complicated game, but it’s a breeze to teach and learn because each individual part moves towards a specified goal. There aren’t all these exceptions and subrules and complications that only exist to add more pretend depth and complexity to the game. Agricola frustrates me because it’s so close to being something I would really enjoy but then at the last minute it swerves and decides that although it’s going to give you a sandbox to play in, you have to make your sand castle just so or else it doesn’t count.

Beyond boardgames, one of my favorite movies is The Royal Tenenbaums, which seems like a series of individual scenes that are only sort of related, but when you look at the whole you see how each one is a necessary part of the large picture.

Right now we seem to be in a phase where nerd culture (which I’m only singling out because it’s the one I know best) believes that more is more and convolutedness, callbacks, and dropping vague hints that may or may not ever play out are signs of quality. It’s not just enough to get a comic book character on the big screen, the movie has to be part of a “cinematic universe” that bumps up against and sets up further movies. (This is related to the fact that people are more interested in what they think a movie is leading to instead of what they actually got in the movie; there’s forever a promise that something more is happening.) A self-contained, done-in-one movie? That’s kid stuff. And the truly deep and satisfying stories will require at least five seasons on cable to be done right, because you have to make sure there’s enough room for labyrinthine sub-plots and that the in-jokes and catch phrases have enough space to both land and be used-and-re-used.

This is why 15 hours of Firefly is seen as not enough, despite the fact that hardcore Firefly fans seem to be only interested in about four total minutes of it. It’s also why, when I say that Buffy the Vampire Slayer is great for the first three seasons, and then you should stop because that’s a perfect end point, I get told no, the other seasons are absolutely essential, and then am told of three, maybe four episodes from those seasons that are worthwhile, as though that’s a suitable return on time investment. More is more, more is better, more is quality. It doesn’t matter if, in the quest for more, we are just throwing things in that don’t actually fit but will help bulk it out, so long as the things we throw in are awesome enough.

There’s an episode of The Simpsons where the kids are being asked what they want from Itchy and Scratchy and Milhouse says, “You should win things by watching!” That’s where we are now, winning prizes for watching. You get, as prizes, “fuck yeah” moments, references, in-jokes, and yes, VPs, but they’re small prizes designed to simulate a satisfying whole. At the end you’ve amassed a big pile of trinkets, but that’s all. Nothing more satisfying or significant. If you like that, great, it’s your time to shine. That’s not my thing.

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August 7th, 2015: Yes I know this movie came out last year; yes I'm still thinking about it; yes you can look forward to more conversations about this matter until the day I die. – Ryan

Never mind the leadership, the PLP could be transformed

One of the odder features of the Labour leadership election is that the nominations of constituency parties are firstly made and secondly reported. It’s odd because these are almost entirely meaningless given that they play no role in the process. They may be useful to observers if they represent the genuine view of the membership (which isn’t something to be taken for granted), and may help a candidate to build momentum – as, in the case of Corbyn, they have – but it seems like a lot of effort in an election where everyone’s vote is of equal value and cast independently.

However, where they may be a good deal more significant is at parliamentary level. All else being equal, Labour will need 400 candidates to fight seats they didn’t win in May and probably around another 40-50 for seats they did where the MP retires next time. Of the 400 they lost, about 100 would need to be gained in order to win a small overall majority. Put another way, if Labour is to retake power, they’ll do so with half their MPs being newly elected, and – significantly in this context – newly selected.

Not all is equal though. Between now and 2020, the constituency boundaries will be redrawn across the country. That’s going to mean both that Labour needs to gain an even higher number of seats to win a majority, and that many seats that did return a Labour MP this last election will be so affected as to need to select from first principles.

Which is where the constituency nominations may become meaningful. Even though Corbyn’s lead in nominations wasn’t as big as his reported lead in the polls, it was a lead all the same. There has clearly been a leftwards swing in the thinking of Labour members (or perhaps in the priority they give to ideology as against electability). Furthermore, if ideology does matter to a party member, it’s likely to be more relevant at a constituency level where it’s not as important to voters than at a national one.

There are of course many other reasons why people will select candidates beyond their political stance: local sons and daughters, past record, speaking ability, networking ability and many other factors come into play. Even so, a candidate’s responses to key questions on public services funding and provision, tax and the deficit, or foreign and defence policy, will matter at least as much as their willingness to stuff paper through letterboxes or man street stalls. Put simply, it may not just be the leadership that takes a marked jump to the left but the whole parliamentary Labour party.

And this is the big risk for those who think that it’ll be safe to elect Corbyn because he can always be dumped in three of four years, allowing a fresh face to take on the Tories: the party then may be quite different from the party now. Not only that but there’s a feedback effect. A Corbyn-led Labour would encourage those non-members who voted for him to join, while those on the opposite wing lapse their membership. By the time it comes to select candidates for parliament, or to select a new leader, the left may have taken an even firmer grip.

Or not. I’ve not cross-checked the constituency nominations against who holds those seats and by how much. As mentioned earlier, given the boundary review, such an exercise is of limited value. Even so, there can be a tendency for constituency associations in heavily Tory areas to be very left-wing, as social democrat types join the local Lib Dems who often have a stronger presence, leaving the hardliners to debate the relevance of dialectical materialism to the Surrey stockbroker belt in glorious irrelevance.

Even so, whether or not Corbyn wins, the fact that so many activists (not just members, never mind supporters) were willing to back him has to be a sign as to the nature of the cohort of candidates who’ll be selected for 2020: candidates who if Labour is successful will probably make up more than half the PLP.

David Herdson

Theo Clifford is winner of the 18-21 category of the Adam Smith Institute’s 'Young Writer on Liberty' competition,

You can find an example of his writing on the Institute's blog. It ends:

Sweeping deregulation is the only way to provide Britain with the slums it is crying out for.

Yes, he is being provocative - he might even grow up to offer contrarian opinions to a deadline for money - but it is annoying to see Adam Smith's name associated with childish opinions like this.

Smith was a great and subtle thinker, and those who recruit him as a champion of the modern corporation fundamentally misunderstand him.

Here is Smith criticism of the joint-stock company in his Wealth of Nations:

The directors of such companies, however, being the managers rather of other people’s money than of their own, it cannot well be expected, that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own.... Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company.

Recent history suggests he was right.

It is even greater mistake to attach Smith's name to views like Clifford's.

Here are the opening words of The Theory of Moral Sentiments - a book that Smith's modern admirers read even less than Wealth of Nations:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. 

That we often derive sorrow from the sorrows of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous or the humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.

So the young and well-connected should not recruit Adam Smith to champion their own selfishness.

I.

Last week we discussed whether Gary Taubes gets to be admitted to the small but prestigious pantheon of correct contrarians. And the strange part was that there was a lot less argument about how correct he was than about how contrarian he was.

Taubes’ main theory – that low-carb diets could solve the obesity epidemic – hasn’t fared the test of time very well. But some of his supporting points have. Large parts of mainstream nutrition science have eased up on dietary cholesterol, dropped the recommendation against fat, gotten tougher on sugar, and accepted that the science should focus on how to regulate complex satiety mechanisms rather than just counting calories. Given how hard it is to fight the scientific consensus and win, even those few minor victories would potentially be remarkable.

The counterargument is that these are other people’s ideas and he gets no credit for them. Suppose David Icke says that the Queen is a lizard person, and also that the royal family is secretly descended from German nobles and isn’t British at all. A hundred years from now his readers celebrate his genius: although he got the lizard part wrong, the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha theory was remarkably prescient!

If Icke’s book spends just as much time arguing for the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha theory as for the lizard theory, all while inveighing against some supposed consensus of anti-Saxe-Coburg experts, we can imagine the far future finding him pretty impressive, since they might not have done the historical work necessary to realize everyone knew of the Queen’s foreign origins all along. Even though the Queen’s German descent sounds shocking, and even though the average British person probably isn’t aware of it, and even though it’s something nobody really likes to talk about – doesn’t mean Icke “discovered” it in any interesting way. He’s not prescient, he just sometimes reads Wikipedia in between his bizarre ravings.

Thing is, even though the 1990s were like twenty years ago and pretty well-documented, people have had a surprisingly hard time coming to agreement on how novel Taubes’ ideas were back then.

They certainly weren’t perfectly novel – Taubes himself tries to claim he’s just relaying ideas from scientists and researchers to the public, and even his most controversial theories come from other people like Dr. Atkins. And they certainly weren’t perfectly well-known – everyone has a story of their doctor or dietician or something telling them “just eat low-fat foods, cut back on cholesterol, and count calories”. But there seems to be a lot of room in between those two poles.

This is starting to remind me of another debate I got stuck in recently – my argument with Rob Wipond about the serotonergic theory of depression. Wipond argued that psychiatrists irresponsibly promoted a narrative in which depression was a simple serotonin deficiency and so taking Prozac would quickly and elegantly solve the problem. I told him that actually, no, the psychiatric community wasn’t saying that at all, which was why every single example he thought he could find of that turned out to be a garbled out-of-context quote which when investigated honestly was clearly saying the opposite. I got a lot of angry comments that no, people were very sure their doctor had told them that depression was a simple serotonin deficiency.

I think a lot of things are getting obscured by the term “scientific establishment” or “scientific consensus”. Imagine a pyramid with the following levels from top to bottom:

FIRST, specialist researchers in a field. So for example the people doing studies on the effect of dietary cholesterol, or the people dissecting monkey brains to see how much serotonin is in them. These people always have the latest cutting-edge experimental results and a good knowledge of the issues involved in the field.

SECOND, non-specialist researchers in a broader field. Nutrition scientists in general. The guy who is interested in Vitamin B, but goes to the same conferences as the guys studying cholesterol. The research psychiatrist working on schizophrenia, but who maintains a keen interest in what her colleagues over in the depression lab are doing. They know enough about the broad principles of the field to be able to understand and evaluate new ideas more quickly than everybody else, but they still only learn about them the same way everyone else does – by waiting for the specialist researchers to tell them.

THIRD, the organs and administrators of a field who help set guidelines. The head of the USDA who’s in charge of looking over the Food Pyramid to make sure it’s accurate. The APA Committee for deciding exactly what wording to use in the guidelines on depression treatment. The head of Harvard Medical School who has to decide what to put in the curriculum. The editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, who has to decide what gets published.

FOURTH, science journalism, meaning everyone from the science reporters at the New York Times to the guys writing books with titles like The Antidepressant Wars to random bloggers.

ALSO FOURTH IN A DIFFERENT COLUMN OF THE PYRAMID BECAUSE THIS IS A HYBRID GREEK PYRAMID THAT HAS COLUMNS, “fieldworkers”, aka the professionals we charge with putting the research into practice. In nutrition this is doctors and dieticians, who directly inform their patients what to eat. In education research this could be teachers and principals who directly decide how classes will get taught. In sociology it might be the police chief trying to institute a new crime-fighting program. Et cetera.

FIFTH, the general public.

A lot of these issues make a lot more sense in terms of different theories going on at the same time on different levels of the pyramid. I get the impression that in the 1990s, the specialist researchers, the non-specialist researchers, and the organs and administrators were all pretty responsible about saying that the serotonin theory was just a theory and only represented one facet of the multifaceted disease of depression. Science journalists and prescribing psychiatrists were less responsible about this, and so the general public may well have ended up with an inaccurate picture.

Likewise, when Taubes published his book, the ideas he wrote about (at least the correct ones) seem to have been accepted by some specialist researchers, known only as vague inklings among non-specialist researchers, poorly reflected at all in the official dietary guidelines, totally new to the world of journalism, totally new to doctors (who mostly still haven’t gotten the message), and totally new to the general public.

This whole process gets even more complicated when you consider enemy action. In psychiatry, drug companies have established defensive chokeholds at various points on the pyramid, trying to promote pro-pharmaceutical results and sink anti-pharmaceutical ones. This isn’t a far-out conspiracy theory – practically every psychiatrist agrees it’s true to some degree, which is why there are so many conflict-of-interest laws to try to minimize the damage. The only debate is whether we’ve successfully contained it to a small effect, or whether it’s hopelessly contaminated the entire process (I tend to lean more toward the optimistic side; for a true pessimist, read Dr. Nardo). The same is true in nutrition, where a lot of studies are sponsored by groups with names like ‘The United Dairy Farmers Council’ or ‘The League For Wheat’. Even when there aren’t official lobbyists, political opinion plays a big part: the social science journals are full of studies that very competently show that certain politically popular ideas are bunk; by the time they reach the ears of voters and policymakers this has mysteriously been transformed into “scientists agree with you that these politically popular ideas need much more funding”. When you have a block in the process like this, the specialist researchers, the non-specialists, the guideline-makers, the fieldworkers, and the public can all remain on totally different pages for a surprisingly long time.

Taubes – and some of the people making the most noise about the serotonin theory of depression – seem to be people trying to transfer knowledge from the highest levels of the pyramid all the way down to the base, skipping over the levels in between. Does that make them contrarians playing Galileo to a hidebound establishment, or responsible science journalists relaying the establishment’s ideas more faithfully and efficiently than their predecessors? Your opinion probably depends on what narrative suits your purpose at any given time.

II.

I think of some of the contrarians who seem to have their heads screwed on straight. Irving Kirsch and Robert Whitaker on antidepressants. Cochran and Harpending on recent human evolution. Judith Rich Harris on parenting. Nick Bostrom on superintelligence.

I don’t agree with all these people, I’ve even written long rants against some of them. But they seem to be of a different breed than crackpots like creationists and parapsychologists and anti-vaxxers. It’s hard to specify how. It’s not just credentialed expertise. Michael Behe and Daryl Bem are both professors, and Andrew Wakefield was an MD who’d done previous published immunological research, but their work falls squarely in the ‘crackpot’ column.

But one thing I do notice about these virtuous contrarians – their reception is surprisingly quiet. We know creationism is wrong partly because half the evolutionary biologists in the world have written books about why creationism is wrong, which they advertise prominently on their blogs about why creationism is wrong. Where are all the developmental psychologists shouting down Judith Rich Harris? I’ve seen a few very specialized psychiatrists argue against Kirsch, but never very heatedly, and usually while granting many of his points. The majority of the profession? Never heard of him and don’t care.

When I first became interested in AI risk around 2007, people told me that no legitimate AI experts were seriously worried. I checked and at the time that was mostly true. On the other hand, no legitimate AI experts were specifically not worried either. AI risk just wasn’t their area, and they were perfectly happy to ignore it and concentrate on things that were. There are two types of “no evidence”, and this was the entirely neutral one. It seemed like a very different situation than vaccines causing autism. There, too, experts in the field aren’t worried – but they’re not worried because every single one of them has an opinion and the opinion is “NO”.

(Sure enough, since then a lot more AI researchers have become interested, in exactly the sort of sea change I don’t expect to see mirrored in the autism field.)

The crackpots seem to be met with violent opposition. The virtuous contrarians seem to be met with – well, almost boredom. No one is particularly interested in adopting their ideas, but no one is particularly interested in arguing against them either.

(on the other hand, Time Cube Guy is met with boredom by serious astronomers, either because he’s too small to be noticed or too small to be worth refuting, so it’s not like it’s a great heuristic)

A while ago, I was reading some stuff about the role of choline in the brain, and I thought: “I wonder if anyone has ever used this to treat bipolar disorder”. Well, I searched the literature, and there was one very small study from 1996 in which choline apparently demonstrated excellent effect treating rapid-cycling bipolar disorder, which is otherwise quite difficult to treat. The study isn’t obscure – it seems to have been cited 110 times – but no one’s followed up on that and you could easily go your whole life studying psychiatry without running into any kind of choline-bipolar connection. It seems like a potentially important idea, which has small but nonzero evidence behind it, but which everyone nevertheless ignores, because it isn’t anybody’s business in particular. There are hundreds of things like this scattered across the literature in pretty much every field.

If I were to announce that small-minded scientists were ignoring the result of their own research and covering up The Truth About Choline, possibly at the behest of lizard-people…well, I could certainly do it in a crackpottish way if I wanted to. But I’d be interesting. I wouldn’t be trivially wrong in the same sense as the homeopath who doesn’t care that all biologists disagree with them.

Thomas Kuhn categorized scientific progress into everyday advances and “paradigm shifts”, the latter being major reconceptualizations like the one between geocentrism and heliocentrism, or from classical mechanics to quantum mechanics.

If I understand right – everyone is doing science, and occasionally they come up with something that doesn’t make sense. Whatever. Half the time people come up with things that don’t make sense, and it usually just means your neutrino speedometer is miscalibrated. They either refuse to publish, because no point in publishing nonsense, or they publish, everyone says “Huh, that’s funny”, and they continue doing what they’re doing. The view of science presented to students in the field, and the one that the luminaries of the field think in most of the time, is the one made up of all of the nice consistent results that make sense, with the noise abstracted away.

Then somebody looks a little closer and sees a pattern in the noise. The studies and ideas everyone else was ignoring actually tell a consistent story which is more plausible than the grand narrative of the field which everyone else is working off of. They propose a new paradigm. There is some fighting and eventually it is determined to be superior to the old one, which is jettisoned in its favor.

Someone does a study on Tibetans and says “it looks like they’re adapted to their mountain environment, but that would require really fast evolution, which we all know practically never happens, so it’s probably some weird fluke.” Someone does a study on Indo-Europeans and says “it looks like they have unique lactose tolerance, but that would require really fast evolution, which we all know practically never happens, so it’s probably some weird fluke.” Someone does a study on Ashkenazi Jews and says “it looks like they have higher-than-average intelligence, but that would require really fast evolution, which we all know practically never happens, so it’s probably some weird fluke.” Then Cochran and Harpending and a few others take a sweeping view of everything, and say “OR WHAT IF REALLY FAST EVOLUTION IS HAPPENING PRETTY MUCH ALL THE TIME?!” They’re not exactly pulling this discovery ex nihilo, but they’re taking what might be the private opinion of a couple of isolated specialist researchers who might not have known one another, synthesizing all the evidence together, and saying the thing nobody else wanted to mention.

One way to be a contrarian without being a crackpot seems to be trying to start these sorts of paradigm shifts. Indeed, I notice that they are often people with enough expertise to understand a field who nevertheless acquired that expertise outside of the field itself. For example, Kirsch is a psychologist, as opposed to the psychiatrists and biochemists who usually deal with antidepressant drugs. Cochran is a physicist by training, although he somehow ended up as an anthropology professor. Harris was pursuing a psychology PhD but quit for health reasons and did most of her research independently. Bostrom is a philosopher, and so has license to stick his finger in pretty much whatever pots he wants.

(Whitaker is a journalist. So is Gary Taubes – and, for that matter, Steve Sailer. Science journalism seems like a good example of how somebody can learn a lot about a field while still having an outsider perspective on it)

At their best, these people can look at a field, find ideas that have been excluded from the narrative, and create a new narrative around them. Sometimes this goes horribly wrong – this is how I think of Graham Hancock, also a journalist, who took every weird archaeological discovery and mysterious ancient monument and fit them together into a brilliant, wacky, but ultimately completely bonkers narrative of ancient supercivilizations. It also seems to be how Taubes blundered into his low-carb fanaticism.

So this can sort of be a red flag. But it’s a much less glaring red flag than when people like homeopaths or anti-vaxxers believe they have discovered a new effect, and continue to maintain it exists despite real scientists’ insistence that it doesn’t.

And these are the people who are most likely to get caught in the trap mentioned in Part I. If they’re doing their job right, all they’re doing is calling increased attention to certain results in the field. They’re not the first people to mention that there’s some evidence for recent human evolution. They might not even be the first people to publish a review paper collecting a bunch of different examples of recent human evolution in one place. They’re the first people to be jerks about it, the first people to say “HEY, YOU WITH THE PARADIGM, YOU SUCK” and force all the lower levels of the pyramid – the non-specialists, the administrators, the fieldworkers, the journalists, and the public – to confront the new possibilities head-on.

But shouting “YOU SUCK” doesn’t win anybody any friends. Even if their side triumphs in the end, there will be many much more sober academics who were pushing it almost as effectively. And the same perversity of spirit that led contrarians to challenge the field where it was wrong will probably make them overshoot and challenge the field where it is right. Thus, Taubes not only says that fat has been unfairly demonized, but goes further and says that fat is great for you and you can stay at whatever weight you want just by eating fat. Kirsch and Whitaker not only say that antidepressants were less effective than previously believed, they say they’re worthless for most people and will poison you and psychotherapy is great. Judith Rich Harris not only says that quirks of parenting style don’t matter, she also minimizes the effects of divorce – which I think goes too far.

The likely outcome is pretty much what we’ve got. Even when contrarians win, they lose. Members of the field will be celebrated for being the ones who helped usher in the new paradigm. And the contrarians will be remembered as partisans of crazy false ideas, who happened to gain a thin veneer of credibility by also repeating some true stuff already known by domain experts.

(I’m very happy that brilliant AI researchers like Stuart Russell have joined the fight against AI risk. But I fully expect future textbooks to say that Russell is a great hero for discovering AI risk single-handedly, and also there were some weird guys in Berkeley who gained superficial credibility by parroting Russell’s theories, but were really just silly people writing fanfiction.)

John Baez’s Crackpot Index offers thirty points for “fantasizing about show trials in which scientists who mocked your theories will be forced to recant.”

And if you think you’re a true genius who will have the last laugh, the joke’s on you. You won’t get your show trials even if you’re right.

As you read this story, please keep in mind that I was nine years old at the time.

When I was that age, I would sometimes go down the street to play with a girl named Julie. I liked Julie the way a boy of nine can like a girl of eight, which is altogether different from the way he might like her, say, four or five years later. Julie was fun and Julie liked me and the only problem really was that she had way too much energy. You got the feeling that every morning, she's start her day with a nice, healthy bowl of Sugar Frosted Sugar.

If she'd had her way, all we would have done all afternoon was run around. She wanted to run into her backyard and play on the swing set and then she wanted to run out to the front yard and roll on the front lawn and then she wanted to run back into the backyard and play some more on the swing set and then she wanted to run out to the front yard and climb the big tree out there and then she wanted to run back into the backyard for a little more swing set and then run out front to play hopscotch on the front sidewalk and then run back to the swing set…

I had energy at that age too but not like that. She also didn't want to go inside to play board games (which I liked) or to watch cartoons on TV (which I really liked). She always wanted to run around outside. Fortunately, one day I got the power to stop her from doing this.

That afternoon as we were running from the swing set to the front lawn or maybe from the front lawn to the swing set, I suddenly heard Julie scream in terror. It was the kind of scream that makes you think someone has just been murdered. "What is it?" I asked her with huge worry.

"It's…THAT," she shrieked, pointing at the hideous, deadly monster that was looming above us.

It was a dragonfly. In case you've never seen one, they look like this…

She ran from it like her life depended on it and I ran with her because…well, because she was running, I guess. We sprinted to the back of her house where there was a little hiding place behind the garage. She crawled into it and cringed in a fetal position, trembling. After a few minutes of that, she pleaded with me, "Peek out and see if it's gone."

I peeked out and it was gone. "What," I asked, "is so scary about a dragonfly?"

Julie looked at me like I was mad, truly mad. "Don't you know about dragonflies? They sew your mouth shut and you die!" This is apparently an old urban legend even in rural areas — one of those things some people believe based on no evidence whatsoever. I had never heard it before but someone had told it to Julie, thereby inducing nightmares as well as daylight terrors.

I asked, "How does a dragonfly sew your mouth shut? Do they carry needles and thread?"

She answered, "They do it. I don't know how they do it but they do it. They sew your mouth shut and then you can't breathe and you die!"

I asked, "Can't you just breathe through your nose?"

She answered, "Okay, then you starve to death. You can't eat if your mouth has been sewn shut!"

Being way too logical about something this silly, I replied, "You can go a few hours without eating. Couldn't they unsew your mouth before you starved? I once saw my mother take the stitching out of a sweater and it took like three minutes."

By now, Julie was angry with me. "Look! Would you like to have your mouth sewed shut? Even if it didn't kill you, it would probably hurt a whole lot."

I had to admit she had a point. Unless, of course, dragonflies use Novocaine.

Since the evil monster had flown off to go sew someone else's mouth shut, Julie cautiously left the hiding spot and play resumed. But she kept glancing about, ever vigilant for dragonflies of any size or hue. From that moment on, I owned that young woman.

At 4:00, I wanted to go into the house and watch a favorite program — The Webster Webfoot Show on Channel 13. On it, "Uncle" Jimmy Weldon and his duck puppet hosted some of my favorite cartoons. Julie, however, wanted to stay outside and run back and forth between the front lawn and the swing set…and all I had to do was to point at nothing and yell, "Dragonfly!" Julie would scream and we'd run into the house, make sure all the windows were locked and then, while we were in there waiting for the mortal danger to pass, watch cartoons.

After three or four, she was restless and wanted to go outside and run back and forth between the swing set and the front lawn some more. "Go look and see if the dragonfly is still around," she told me. I headed for the window but as I did, I saw on the TV screen the beginning of a Screwy Squirrel cartoon so I told her, "There are dozens of dragonflies flying about outside. They're in squadron formation!"

Julie screamed, ran into her room and hid under the bed while I watched Screwy Squirrel.

This went on for a few weeks, as I recall. I could make Julie do just about anything I wanted by merely pointing to imaginary dragonflies. One day though, I pushed it too far.

I was collecting baseball cards then so I had a lot of gum around the house. I never liked the gum as much as the cards. In fact, the gum was so horrible that given the choice, I'd have preferred to chew the cards. But the gum was light pink and not that far from the color of lips so that gave me an idea.

We were in Julie's house one day playing a board game I wanted to play, hiding from dragonflies I'd "seen" outside. After I won the game, I told her I would go outside and check for dragonflies. She thought I was so brave…maybe the last time any female believed that.

I went outside, chewed up a wad of the gum, smeared it over my mouth, then staggered back inside in a panic, making grunts like I couldn't talk. Julie screamed, "A dragonfly sewed your mouth up!" I nodded in silent agony. Horrified — and before I could stop her — she ran to her mother's room.

All the time I was there playing, her mother was in a little private study doing…well, I'm not sure what. Reading, maybe. She'd check on us every hour or so but mostly, she left us alone. Julie pounded on her mother's closed door and when Mom opened it, Julie cried in desperation, "You've got to do something! A dragonfly sewed Mark's mouth closed!"

I, of course, walked up chewing the gum and saying, "What's going on?" Julie's mother knew exactly what had happened.

"Did Grandma tell you that silly story about dragonflies?" she asked Julie. Julie said, "No, it was Grandpa! He said dragonflies sew your mouth shut and then you can't breathe and you die!" Her mother told her that was a silly superstition, scolded her for believing such nonsense and said, "I'm going to give your father's father a call and give him a piece of my mind." Then she admonished me for scaring Julie so. I said I was sorry and would never do it again.

Julie and I went outside to play and, sure enough, a dragonfly buzzed right past us. She flinched but didn't run and then we talked a little about how people believe things that aren't true. I said, "The problem is that there are things you have to watch out for that are dangerous and when you're watching out for the wrong things, the real dangerous things can get you."

"Real dangerous?" she asked. "Like what?" I told her that a fully-grown crow could pick up a 100-lb. child — like, say, either of us — and fly us off into the sky and we'd never be seen again. She was skeptical but I half-convinced her when I said, "Didn't you see the news last night? It happened to a kid who lived in Culver City!"

Julie looked around and saw several crows sitting on a nearby phone wire. I said, ominously, "Those look pretty well-grown to me!" Taking no chances, Julie insisted we run back into the house and close all the windows.

I know it sounds mean but I had a good reason. It was almost 4:00 and there was a good chance Uncle Jimmy would be running another Screwy Squirrel cartoon.

The post Tales of My Childhood #14 appeared first on News From ME.

A former politics lecturer has hit the headlines for allegedly wearing an orange bra, smoking a cigarette, snorting powder from a woman’s breasts and making rude comments about the prime minister. Bizarrely, this is threatening to cause a constitutional upheaval. John Buttifant Sewel’s behaviour has attracted so much attention because he was a member of the House of Lords, although he has now resigned.

So, this popped up in the “KotakuInAction” subreddit, i.e., “the place where GamerGaters who don’t realize GamerGate is sooooo 2014 hang out”:

Naturally, I had some thoughts.

Seriously, though. How these people get through life without poking their eyes out with spoons is entirely beyond me.

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August 5th, 2015: This weekend I helped my parents launch a boat, and then they forgot to attach a rope to the boat, so I had to jump into the water fully clothed to swim out to the boat and stop it from crashing into ANOTHER boat!! Then I didn't even get to ride in the boat. TRUE STORY. – Ryan

The paranoid style in American politics. (1964)

The following word-stream (it cannot be called a sentence) was uttered by Republican presidential contender Donald Trump on July 21 in Sun City, South Carolina. As far as I can detect it has no structure at all: the numerous conditional adjuncts never arrive at consequents, we never encounter a main verb or even an approximation to a claim. The topic seems to be related to nuclear engineering, Trump's uncle, the Wharton School, Trump's intelligence, politics, prisoners, women's intelligence, and Iran. But it's hard to be sure:

Look, having nuclear—my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart—you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, OK, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world—it’s true!—but when you're a conservative Republican they try—oh, do they do a number—that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune—you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we're a little disadvantaged—but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me—it would have been so easy, and it's not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right—who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners—now it used to be three, now it’s four—but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it's gonna take them about another 150 years—but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

At Slate magazine they are wrongly calling the above a run-on sentence and are asking for help with diagramming it. But (as Sherlock Holmes once remarked to Watson) you can't make bricks without straw. I don't think there's any structure in there. I think this soi-disant "one of the smartest people anywhere in the world," this nasty, racist, golden-quiffed, self-publicizing nutcase, has barely a coherent thought in his head. I don't think there's any structure in there to diagram.