Influenced by Our Peers

Monday, August 18th, 2014

One of our genetic predispositions, Michael Strong reminds us, is to be influenced by our peers:

The desire for acceptance, recognition, and respect from our peers and from our society is very powerful.

It is largely futile to try as individuals, or even as families, to form isolated bulwarks against the overwhelming force of pop culture. The fundamentalist Christians realize this, which is why they are so insistent on mobilizing en masse on political issues and why they are eager to home school, send their children to Christian schools, and create a voucher system as a first step in eliminating public schools. (It is also the reason why they have created Christian rock, Christian radio, Christian bookstores, Christian television stations, etc. They realize the importance of mounting a coherent, coordinated cultural campaign against pop culture.) Advocates of new culture, advocates of a more just, kind, and humane world, those who believe in human potential, all need to realize that their goals are also best realized by means of freeing education from government control.

Although a certain percentage of the high school population is working hard in order to get into competitive colleges (perhaps 20-30%), the vast majority of high school students are devoting only a small fraction of their intellectual and moral energies towards learning. For most middle and high school students, school is a social activity, a kind of game in which the goal is to obtain adequate grades while doing as little real learning as possible. The number of hours wasted, the number of dollars wasted, and the sum of human energy wasted, is colossal. No other sector of the economy has as great a potential for improvements in efficiency.

As someone who has brought numerous adult professionals into the classroom, I can say that most professional adults, who themselves worked reasonably hard in school and were reasonably polite (they were almost invariably among the 30% who actually worked in school), are shocked when they first teach contemporary students. The level of apathy and indifference to learning — the disrespect for authority — is astounding. “Beavis and Butthead” is a joke very much based in reality. Anyone who doubts this should substitute teach in a local government high school for a week. Be sure to get a course schedule that includes a few non-honors courses; the view from the high end may be misleading.

Posted in Education, Policy | 5 Comments »

Déja vu in Missouri

Monday, August 18th, 2014

It’s déja vu in Missouri, Massad Ayoob says:

The meme started out as sweet, tender 18-year-old Michael Brown about to enter college, murdered by police in front of many witnesses despite no discernible motive.  National uproar and civil disturbance ensues.

The family of the deceased hires Benjamin Crump, the lawyer for Trayvon Martin’s family who engaged a high powered, well connected PR firm to turn that shooting into a national cause celebre, which they did with enormous success.  By the time the truth came out, most of America seemed to still believe that the deceased was a harmless, innocent victim of racism murdered by a monster who deserved to be lynched. That meme seems to be getting a repeat in Missouri.

Only days later, do we learn how savagely the officer was beaten by the physically huge man he shot.  And that very shortly before the incident, the innocent college boy had performed a strong-arm robbery at a convenience store, caught on surveillance video. (This, of course, would not do, so last night looters ravaged that particular convenience store.)  It has been reported that that Facebook images of Brown exist, flashing gang signs indicating membership in one of the nation’s most feared street gang, the Bloods.

Posted in Crime | 1 Comment »

Quantico Shooting Findings

Monday, August 18th, 2014

Weapons Man examines the Quantico shooting of March 2013:

A male Marine who moved from off-post into barracks had a torrid affair with a female Marine. She broke it off and immediately took another male Marine to her bunk. The first guy shot and killed his ex and her new beau in the barracks, then turned the pistol on himself. (As is customary in these triangle cases, he killed himself when his mission was complete). USMC investigators said nothing about the barracks environment of the unit, apparently the 1710th Relentlessly Shagging Battalion, but faulted commanders for not grilling the shooter abour weapons ownership, and disarming him when he moved on post.

Lessons learned:

  • A violent shooter can complete his criminal mission before police can arrive and stop him.
  • The incident ended, as usual, abruptly. This occurred when the shooter completed his intended murders, and killed himself.
  • The cost-benefit profile of a workplace dalliance needs to include edge cases like this.
  • He never was confronted by armed authorities. The victims’ lives were taken when there was no one there but themselves. Only the victims could have saved themselves — and only if they were armed themselves.

Gun Free Victim Disarmament Zone body count:  2. Wound count: 0.

Posted in Crime, War | No Comments »

Political Correctness’s Roots

Sunday, August 17th, 2014

Bill Lind explores modern political correctness’s roots in 1930s cultural Marxism:

(Hat tip to our Slovenian guest.)

Posted in Policy | No Comments »

People Crave Guidance

Sunday, August 17th, 2014

Aspirations and ideals are crucial to the psyche of Western civilization, Michael Strong argues:

Marxism exercised such an extraordinary influence over millions of minds because it promised a better world. Indeed, it boggles the mind that the need for aspirations and ideals was apparently so great that a movement that was more murderous than Nazism, whose murders were repeatedly documented over a 70 year period, nevertheless continued to serve as an ongoing focus for idealism throughout 70 years of mass murder. It seems that we crave a vision for a brighter future.

Since the collapse of communism there have been no widely recognized aspirations for society. The nightmare of communism should not prevent us from having humane aspirations.

Environmentalism, multiculturalism, and anti-globalization, those movements in which the spirit of the Left lives on, are wholly inadequate as visions for the fulfillment of human potential. Conservatives mostly fight against the social changes of the last 40 years, without offering much of a positive vision of their own.

There is a large market for books and workshops on how to live a better life. The Chicken Soup for the Soul series and Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People series are but two well-known examples. They have each become small industries in their own right; during a period in the late 90s a list of the top-selling 100 books of the year contained several volumes from each series; more than half the books overall were either inspirational or self-help. M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled has been on the New York Times bestseller list for longer than any other paperback. Apparently people crave guidance.

Many people, perhaps most people, would like to become more successful at “the art of living.” Although individuals may receive inspiration from quotations, inspirational speeches, religious sermons, works of art, or nature, very few individuals are able to learn the art of living from a quotation, a speech, a sermon, a workshop, a work of art, or an experience of nature. They must be provided with experiences in which the inspiring approach to life is constantly supported and re-enforced. Thus the emphasis that many churches place on “fellowship.” It is very difficult for us to create better lives for ourselves in isolation. We usually need peer communities to support our practice of the good, of wellness, of excellence, however we perceive such goals.

Beyond the genetic component, human beings become who they become based on the daily, moment-to-moment, manner in which they live. They learn, or fail to learn, the art of living from those around them. We have no institutions in which young people may learn better ways of living. Schools at present are mostly institutions in which young people learn worse ways of living.

Posted in Education | 1 Comment »

Fort Hood Shooting Findings

Sunday, August 17th, 2014

Weapons Man looks at five shootings from the last five or so years, starting with the Fort Hood Shooting of November 2009:

A radicalized, fundamentalist Moslem carried out the highest sacrament of his faith: mass murder. He was known to all as a supporter of jihad, but no one did anything before his crimes, because an Islamic bean is a pearl beyond price, at least to the beancounters in Army personnel.

As he murdered one unarmed victim after another, at least three brave attempts to charge him barehanded brought a soldier a hero’s death, and a fourth resulted in the soldier receiving crippling wounds. He was finally stopped when armed police officers responded to a 911 call, and shot and critically wounded him. Until he was incapacitated by gunfire, he never stopped killing.

The media, being the media, praised the lady cop that the assailant wounded and disabled, and more or less ignored the male cop who actually stopped him. Amazon narrative, you know.

The Army resisted external investigation, and senior Army officers announced that his faith-driven disloyalty was not on the table in the investigation:  while a few dozen dead and wounded soldiers was kind-of, sort-of a tragedy, it would really be bad if it undermined our blind adherence to the shibboleths of “diversity,” Army Chief of Staff General George M. Casey explained.

Nothing was done to allow the soldiers to protect themselves. Casey and his successors, and the Secretaries of Defense they reported to, have chosen to punish the victims instead. They excluded the survivors from VA combat-vet benefits, and forbade them from receiving the Purple Heart Medal, which has been awarded to victims of terrorism routinely since 1986 — except for these ones.

In addition to alarming his chain of command in the Army steadily since 2005, Hasan had come to FBI’s attention, and that of the Defense Criminal Investigations Service, and they did nothing much at the time. The mad moslem murderer’s communications were intercepted and briefly reviewed in 2008, but the FBI moved on to higher priority intercept targets, like you. Hasan’s Army commanders, the FBI, and the DCIS all dropped their investigations because he was a radical moslem.

Lessons learned:

  • A violent shooter can cause considerable trouble before police can arrive and stop him.
  • The incident ended, as usual, abruptly. This occurred when deadly force was applied effectively against the shooter, by the second police officer to arrive.
  • Until then, no one was present but victims, who died because they had no effective means of self-defense.
  • Even soldiers, if unarmed, have trouble dealing with a violent and armed terrorist.
  • If you’re wounded, the Army will have your back unless it threatens diversity mythmaking. In that case, KMAGYOYO.
  • When we sacrificed privacy to get security through FBI/NSA domestic spying, the privacy went but the security is still an unfulfilled promise.

Gun Free Victim Disarmament Zone body count:  13. Wound count: 32.

Posted in Crime, War | 2 Comments »

Which Falls First?

Saturday, August 16th, 2014

Which falls first, William S. Lind asks (44 minutes in), the foreign policy establishment, or the country?

(Hat tip to Outside in.)

Posted in Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Books, and Compassion, From Birth

Saturday, August 16th, 2014

Ginia Bellafonte’s anecdote about books, and compassion, from birth ends with a punchline that, Steve Sailer notes, is a litte too good:

Last year, when I was visiting a public school in Sunset Park in Brooklyn for teenagers with boundless difficulties, my host, a poet who teaches at various city schools, mentioned a student who had become pregnant. Hoping to start a library for the child soon to arrive, the poet told the young woman embarking on motherhood that she would like to give her some books — books of the kind her own grandchildren growing up in a very different Brooklyn had by the dozens. The offer was met skeptically. “I already have one,” the girl said.

“We should concentrate our energies on helping the most vulnerable parents and children beginning at, or before, birth,” she argues. Sailer quips, “How about 9 months and 1 day before birth?”

Posted in Education | No Comments »

The Real League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Friday, August 15th, 2014

Florian Liedtke has produced an opening sequence for a hypothetical League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie based on the original comics:

Posted in Media | No Comments »

Giant Anteaters Can Kill People

Friday, August 15th, 2014

Don’t get complacent. Remember, giant anteaters can kill people:

In a new case report, scientists detail a gruesome anteater attack that left one hunter dead in northwestern Brazil, just two years after another man was killed in a similar confrontation with one of the long-nosed creatures. While such incidents are rare and anteaters usually avoid contact with humans, the attacks should serve as a warning to humans encroaching on anteater turf, the authors wrote in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine this month.

Giant anteaters, which live in savanna-like fields in South America and Central America, are the largest of the four living anteater species, and can grow up to 7 feet (2.1 meters) long in adulthood. They have four sharp claws on both of their forelimbs that they can use to quarry anthills and termite mounds — and, apparently, to inflict fatal wounds on humans.

The creatures assume a standing position when they feel threatened, sometimes referred to as an “anteater’s hug.” On the Internet, anteaters standing messiah-like with arms outstretched have become the benign stars of memes. But in the wild, an anteater posed like it wants a hug is really throwing up a red flag.

On Aug. 1, 2012, a 47-year-old man, who lived in a rubber plantation in Guajará County in Brazil’s Amazonas State, near the border with Peru, went hunting with his two sons. Their dogs cornered an adult giant anteater and it went into its standing pose, wrote the researchers, led by Vidal Haddad Jr., an associate professor at Sao Paulo State University’s Botucatu Medical School.

The man approached, but was worried about accidentally shooting his dogs, so he opted for a knife instead of his rifle. But before the man could make a move, the anteater “grabbed” him with its forelimbs, Haddad and colleagues wrote. The man’s sons eventually freed him from the anteater’s clutches, but he was severely wounded and bled to death at the scene. One of the sons, who also suffered some slight injuries, shot the anteater to death.

When doctors and forensic investigators later examined the victim, they found that he had bruises and lesions on the left side of his neck, two 1.5-inch (4 cm) puncture wounds in his left arm, eight puncture wounds in his left thigh and abrasions on his right thigh. An autopsy revealed severe damage to his left femoral artery, a large artery in the thigh, according to the case report.

A similar incident occurred in 2010, when an anteater attacked a 75-year-old man who was hunting in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, the scientists noted. The victim in this case, too, suffered a grave injury to his femoral artery and bled to death. His death was reported in the local media at the time, but scientists did not formally document the animal attack, the authors wrote.

That puts a new spin on the classic Monty Python vocational guidance counsellor sketch (which starts one minute in):

Posted in Animals | 4 Comments »

How Marvel Became the Envy (and Scourge) of Hollywood

Friday, August 15th, 2014

Marvel became the envy (and scourge) of Hollywood through its CEO, Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter:

Under his tightfisted management, Marvel has become one of the most admired, envied and, in some quarters, resented entertainment companies. The 300-employee outfit has thrived despite insistence on ever-stricter creative controls and a reputation for extreme cheapness that strikes many accustomed to old-school industry dealings as disrespectful.

[...]

Perlmutter is not featured on Disney’s website (conversely, the heads of its Pixar and Lucasfilm divisions are), but he has shown no sign of relaxing on fiscal control simply because Marvel has become part of a big conglomerate. When staff moved from Manhattan Beach to the Disney lot in Burbank, a source says Perlmutter declined to upgrade the company’s worn furniture because he did not want to change the culture. “Disney owns Marvel, but Ike gets to control every budget and everything spent on marketing, down to the penny,” says a studio insider.

Disney does not disclose Marvel’s contribution to its bottom line, but a non-Disney executive says Marvel hits are more profitable than tentpoles at other studios because of the company’s deals with talent. “Avengers was a $200 million movie, but they’re not giving away a lot of their back end,” he says.

The Israel-born Perlmutter, who lives in New York and Palm Beach, Fla., with wife Laura, does not give interviews, and photos are all but nonexistent (except for a 1985 portrait in which he appears dark, handsome and slightly fearful-looking). He and fellow Israeli army veteran Avi Arad got into the Marvel business via a toy company they owned during the early 1990s. On the Marvel board, Perlmutter helped steer the company through bankruptcy protection and survived a battle with investor Carl Icahn to become CEO in 2005 — after which Marvel’s plan to produce its own movies was hatched. Perlmutter is said to have attended the Iron Man premiere in disguise and has not been spotted at a Marvel event since. He relishes his reputation as secretive and frugal, according to a top executive who has dealt with him: “It’s things like, ‘Why do you need a new pencil? There’s 2 inches left on that one!’ ”

Some at Disney are so intimidated, says one source, that they believe “he has spies or is listening in on phone calls,” though this person allows that “it could be paranoia.” (Or not: A Marvel veteran says “the way to curry favor is to tell Ike that someone spent more than he should have.”) Perlmutter once complained that journalists at a junket were allowed two sodas each instead of one, and Disney ran out of food at an Avengers media event because of Perlmutter’s constraints, causing reporters to pilfer from Universal’s nearby suite for The Five-Year Engagement.

Perlmutter allows actors traveling on Marvel business only a single companion. A source with ties to the CEO says he makes no apologies. “He’ll pay for the A-list talent — they get to travel with their entourage,” says this person. Otherwise, he rejects Hollywood excess: “He’s seen companies go into bankruptcy, and he thinks shareholders look at this stuff — and he doesn’t believe in it.”

Perlmutter is one of the top individual holders of Disney stock — the company declines to say how much he owns — and is said to have pressed Iger to dismiss studio chief Rich Ross in 2012. (Pixar’s John Lasseter also is said to have lost patience with Ross.) Perlmutter also has been identified as a force behind the 2011 departure of Andy Mooney as head of Disney’s consumer products division. (Perlmutter is said to have felt Mooney was not sufficiently focused on Marvel products and wanted more aggressive deals with licensees. Mooney, now CEO of Quiksilver, declined comment.)

[...]

And according to the FT, when Marvel replaced Terrence Howard with Don Cheadle in Iron Man 2 to save money, Perlmutter was alleged to have told colleagues that no one would notice because both actors are black.

Posted in Business | No Comments »

Did the writer of “True Detective” plagiarize Thomas Ligotti and others?

Friday, August 15th, 2014

When I saw a headline asking, Did the writer of True Detective plagiarize Thomas Ligotti and others?, I distinctly remembered that Nic Pizzolatto had explicitly mentioned Ligotti as a major influence in interviews:

MD: But isn’t it true that Pizzolatto acknowledged Ligotti’s influence on True Detective and praised his work?

JP: In the many interviews Pizzolatto gave in the lead up to episode three, the show’s influences were discussed by the show’s creator at great length. You know who wasn’t mentioned by Pizzolatto until days after episode three aired? Ligotti.

MD: But in this Wall Street Journal interview, Pizzolatto does talk at length about Ligotti’s influence on the show.

JP: Only under pressure. Here’s what was happening behind the scenes: WSJ reporter Michael Calia and I (and plenty of other Ligotti readers) had already noticed that Rust Cohle’s monologues and other dialogue were peculiarly Ligottian (his prose is very distinctive). In an interview with the True Detective creator, Arkham Digest editor Justin Steele even brought up Cohle’s “Ligottian wordview”, and I was frustrated when Pizzolatto evaded his question, at least as it concerned Thomas Ligotti or his work. Three of nine commenters on that interview page also noticed that Pizzolatto appeared to be evasive in dealing with the Ligotti influence question. At that point, I tried to get an interview with Pizzolatto about Ligotti’s influence on True Detective — writing to his agent — but I was told politely that Pizzolatto was “up to his ears in post-production and working on season two of True Detective.”

Then I started digging. Mr. Calia was coincidentally already working on an article centering on the influence by past and present masters of weird horror tales on True Detective, so I decided to analyze Cohle’s familiar dialogue and compare it side by side with Ligotti’s prose in The Conspiracy Against the Human Race. I quickly sent Mr. Calia the results of my research, and he used just the tip of the iceberg of evidence I had uncovered in his article — perhaps cannily implying that “The Most Shocking Thing About HBO’s ‘True Detective’” was that Pizzolatto lifted text and ideas from an author he had hitherto explicitly refused to acknowledge as an influence.

Shortly after the article’s publication, Calia interviewed Pizzolatto in a follow-up to his original article. It seems that the “too busy” writer suddenly had time for an interview mostly about, you guessed it, Thomas Ligotti. Usually I would give any kind of writer who appeared so praising of Ligotti the benefit of the doubt, but I knew how deep the plagiarism issue ran, and I had no illusions that Pizzolatto suddenly and coincidentally wanted to talk about Ligotti after already having dozens and dozens of opportunities to do so before. Was Pizzolatto in damage control mode (i.e., “I don’t want to get in legal trouble” mode)? Quite suddenly Thomas Ligotti was one of his top literary influences, an acknowledgement that would never be repeated again in a full-length interview or, to my knowledge, elsewhere.

MD: Wait, that interview was the only time Pizzolatto mentioned Ligotti as an influence?

JP: Not quite. He sent Justin Steele a follow-up paragraph clarifying Ligotti’s influence on True Detective just days after Calia’s first article on the connection between the show and Ligotti’s work was published. But after that, Pizzolatto hasn’t mentioned a word about Ligotti. Not one word. Nothing in interviews. Nothing on the DVD commentaries. Nothing. In how many interviews total does Pizzolatto mention Thomas Ligotti or his work? Two — the two I’ve mentioned.

MD: During the one WSJ interview, though, Pizzolatto states that “In episode one [of ‘True Detective’] there are two lines in particular (and it would have been nothing to re-word them) that were specifically phrased in such a way as to signal Ligotti admirers. Which, of course, you got.” How do you respond to his claim?

JP: I consider that justification absurd and disingenuous.

Posted in Media | 1 Comment »

Creating History Is Hard

Thursday, August 14th, 2014

I still haven’t played Dwarf Fortress, but its world-building process intrigues me:

Adams has, over the years, developed an intricate process to simulate eons of complex geologic time, a way of stacking fractal layers and blending them with algorithms to give life to each world.

The first layer plots the annual rainfall of each map location. Then a separate fractal simulates the deposition of mineral elements throughout the underground strata, giving the land itself a kind of texture. A temperature fractal is generated and rough biomes emerge as contiguous tiles on the map that contain a subset of closely related flora and fauna.

The order here is important, because in the next step — drainage — Dwarf Fortress begins to simulate the complex forces of erosion. Only after the biomes have been created can the rivers run, slashing deep valleys as they flow toward unnamed oceans. When they finally meet the sea a salinity algorithm kicks in to define the areas for swampy river deltas, alluvial islands and mangrove swamps.

[...]

In his research for the game Adams learned that in the real world when warm, wet air travels up the side of a mountain it loses moisture. Rain precipitates out creating areas like rain forests and snow capped peaks. On the other side of the mountain deserts form in areas that are called “rain shadows.”

[...]

After the map has been locked into place, the game assigns a kind of energy to each region, ranging from good to evil on a scale of one to 20. It then uses the positive and negative energy of each area to generate place names — The Ocean of Muting sit along the edge of The Jungles of Mire near the Ivory Hills — and on and on creating hundreds of uniquely named regions.

But these are just the names as translated for the player. Adams says that each area of the map has been named by one of four cultures. Human, dwarven, elvish and goblin languages are actually programmed into the game.

Posted in Games, Science | No Comments »

Ayn Rand in the Happy Lab

Thursday, August 14th, 2014

Sonya Lyubomirsky ran an experiment where participants were given a task and then received a performance rating — and were told another participant’s performance rating, too. But — suprise! — the performance ratings weren’t related to their actual performance.

Their reaction depended on how happy they already were, before the experiment:

To analyze the data, I divided my participants into those who, before performing, reported being very happy and those who reported being relatively unhappy. When I examined the “before” and “after” data of my very happy participants, I found that those who learned that they had performed very poorly reported feeling less positive, less confident, and more sad after the study was over. Their reaction to ostensible failure was perfectly natural and not at all surprising. By contrast, the very happy participants who learned that they had performed extremely well (a 6 out of 7) subsequently felt better on all dimensions, and, notably, learning that someone did even better did not dilute the pleasure of their ostensible success.

Things turn Randian, Bryan Caplan says, when they looked at the unhappy participants, who resembled Randian villains:

The results for my unhappiest participants, however, were dramatic. Their reactions, it appears, were governed more by the reviews they had given their peers than by their own feedback. Indeed, the study paints a stark and quite unpleasant portrait of an unhappy person. My unhappiest volunteers reported feeling happier and more secure when they received a poor evaluation (but heard that their peer did even worse) than when they had received an excellent evaluation (but heard that their peer did even better). It appears that unhappy individuals have bought into the sardonic maxim attributed to Gore Vidal: “For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself… One’s friends must fail.”

Posted in Economics, Science | No Comments »

How to Fight a Dog (and Win)

Thursday, August 14th, 2014

Weapons Man explains how to fight a dog (and win), starting with these facts about dogs:

  1. Anybody can fight any dog and win.
  2. Normal dogs do not fight to the death.
  3. Adults killed by a single dog are extremely rare outliers.
  4. The only part of the dog that can hurt you is the teeth.
  5. The dog is extremely vulnerable in the neck area.
  6. If it is a fight to the death, expect to get bitten… don’t let it distract you.

Dogs fight like pack animals:

They run around and try to distract you and get behind you. A vicious dog, behind you, may go for a hamstring. Dogs make darting, slashing attacks and break contact. Dogs fight dogs naturally, but they do not fight to the death, only for dominance. A human who has been knocked down by a dog or a pack of dogs may trigger predation behavior, but one who remains upright and takes the fight to the dog will always prevail.

It helps to have protection on your weak hand forearm; you can then offer that as a target for the dog. Even without protection, offering the weak hand leaves the dog vulnerable to your strong hand. If you get him to snap at that, you have him right where you want him. Get his neck with your strong hand and overturn him.

Your objective is to get him on his back, with you astride him, and both hands on his neck. In this position he cannot bite you and you can choke him out. If you don’t want to kill the dog, you can just choke him. If you do want to kill him, crush his windpipe; end of dog. In fact, in most cases, the dog will give up when overturned by someone who has a grip on his neck.

[...]

Odds are you outweigh him; you have opposable thumbs; you are much more intelligent; you are the apex predator.

Posted in Animals, Martial Arts | 5 Comments »

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