Folk and High Culture

This is a guest post by Svar

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I’ve long since realized that the materialistic and reductionist views promoted by both factions of our political system have not only destroyed culture and art and replaced it with pop-”culture” and modern “art”, but they have ruined the genuine Christian faith by incorporating elements of garbage theology(liberal Evangelicism, Dispensationalism, Americanism) into the faith.

Here’s an email exchange between Will S. and I that touches upon this:

Svar:

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/2011/02/09/moldova-a-neo-cold-war-battlefield/

The article isn’t as important as this excerpt: “The Soviet authorities were supportive of the development of a distinct Moldovan culture as a matter of state policy. The fruits were considerable, especially in the field of folk music and literature.”

Interesting how the Old Left actually supported culture, even as a bunch of atheists, unlike the New Left which seeks to destroy all culture. I personally think that the government supporting culture i.e. as in ACTUAL culture in both the folk and high forms is a tremendously good idea. Unfortunately, the shitty Amerikan government supports modern “art” like “Piss Christ”.

To think, the American government helping the people create it’s own unique form classical music or preserving it’s folk art or promoting literature like that of O. Henry, probably one of my favorite writers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Henry

Nowadays, unfortunately, everything is shit.

Will:

Alas…

Agreed about the Old Left: as regards folk music in America, for example, it was the Pete Seegers, the Guthries, and Bob Dylan, who, to their credit, back in the day, re-recorded old folk songs, and helped maintain their popularity. The Right doesn’t give a shit, or at least, it didn’t, until bluegrass became cool, once again.

Also, agreed about the desirability of governments supporting actual culture, as opposed to filth. I don’t hate the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation; it has done a lot of good for Canadian culture, helping promote Canadian culture, in its various forms, nor do I hate the various other Canadian agencies that have also done so. We’re a small country, of only 35 million or so, living next to a cultural giant of 300 million, whose influence is strong, and while I love American culture, I also love our own Canadian culture, and sadly, I know that all too many rank and file Canadians, if Canadian culture weren’t supported by the State, would ONLY consume American culture, which would be unfortunate. As it is, Canadian movies are notoriously unpopular amongst most Canadians – and sadly, neocon Canadians like Karhy Shaidle and Mark Steyn trash them, all the time. Yet these are OUR stories, and so long as they’re good and not leftist agitprop crap, even if a bit subversive and salty, as long as good story-telling, we Canadians NEED to support our own, too.

That said, I’m not opposed to lifting ‘Canadian content’ rules from radio and TV; but, I’d still keep other funding forms in place.

Svar:

I don’t understand why the Right doesn’t care, but then again the American Right is only focused on fellating Big Business and Capitalists, not promoting either culture or faith for themselves, but only as a means to a political end. Preserving, promoting, and developing folk and high art is a part of Conservatism. The paleocons over at Chronicles advocate this. I remember reading a comment by Thomas Fleming saying how Neo-Cons and Libertarians both hate beauty and goodness just as much as socialists do because they don’t believe that the Opera or the symphony have any right to survive because it can not be supported without taxpayer’s money, but shit like…. Tranny GaGa and Christina Aguilera have the right to survive because the Crowd loves that shit and are willing to pay their own money for it. Fuck that.

I’m opposed to Amerikanization. I hate how Amerika has destroyed regional folk cultures in America(like that of the Cajuns, Tejanos, and German Texans) and I hate how it’s doing it to that of other countries like your Canada. I hate how it shows no respect for either folk or high art. You know the band Rammstein? Well, the keyboardist has described Amerika as a “sick and decadent country with no culture”. This is coming from an atheist leftist who’s in a band that talks about BDSM. Says a lot, doesn’t it?

Will:

Oh yeah, love that Rammstein song! :)

“This is not a love song… I don’t sing my mother tongue…”

“nach Afrika kommt Santa Claus, und vor Paris steht Mickey Maus!”

You nailed it; the neocons only care about big business and its profits. Only the paleos get it…

And yeah, funny how even people like the Rammstein members can get it, in some regards at least…

Neither the Neo-”Con” Republicans or the leftist Democrats promote any type of conservatism and both look down upon or silence those that do i.e. paleocons. Stupid party and Evil party, indeed.

Fear and Self Sabotage

I made it through the first day of the Motorcycle Safety Foundation basic course, but only by the skin of my teeth, by manning up, and by acknowledging but not being influenced by the little deaths that bring total obliteration. The fear was not very bad, a collection of small whinging fears, really. But the little fears diverted me into a place I have not been for a long time, a mindset of failure and pre-emptive quitting. A self-sabotaging persona was definitely in play, and he/I almost convinced myself to bail on the riding part of the first day at the point they make you shift into 2nd, then immediately back into first gear.

There were excuses, my friends, and very good ones. I was the tallest student by at least 3 inches, and we were riding dinky little Suzuki 250cc bikes. My right foot wouldn’t fit on the peg normally without pressing the rear brake, and I had to cock the left leg out at an extreme angle to maneuver my boot around the shifter. I told one of the instructors that I had trouble managing the small footroom on the left, and he said, “Got big feet, eh? So do I,” and waved me on.

So I went on. I was by far the slowest student in the set for the first few exercises. Bike stalls. Pressing the starter button instead of the engine turnoff. Jerky throttle, weaving and wobbling. Finding neutral from first is a bitch.

There has never, in my entire life, been a time when I was the absolute worst at something I tried. Even in middle school tennis there were a guy or two below me, and I once beat the number 2 guy with a series of ridiculous aces and winners.

All I have chosen to do are activities where I excel. Sucking sucks.

Fear sucks. Self sabotage must not be allowed to exist. Do or do not. I managed the gear shifting exercises, and we moved on to the faster, funner, curvier ones. And there, my friends, I blossomed like a twenty-something divorcée finally relieved of the burden of catering to her abusive beer-swilling husband’s every whim.

I like cornering. Pushing the handlebars in the direction you want to turn and accelerating as you lean into the turn sounds wrong, but it feels so good. The instructors put me in the slow group, obviously, and boy were we slow. Speed up (in 2nd), then brake until you are about to enter the turn. Look all the way to the end of the curve; I’m serious, turn your head 90 degrees; push your bike and roll the throttle so smoothly as you careen controlled in the arc that when you roll throttle deeper you swing around and up vertical looking at the next decision you need to make, and you brake to the speed you can enter the next turn looking hard where you want to be. And the guy in front of you never accelerates on the straightaway, so you dawdle where you can, to make time and space for a rushing throttle roll and a time-narrowing brake to just the speed where this time you push a little too hard on the handlebars to see how it works.

Where I am going, I turn my head to see my path, and the fear is nothing, and I remain.

Thinking, “Faster, man, go faster!”

Umlaut Song

Umlaut, macron, grave or acute,
I’ve got a perfect puzzle for you.
Diaeresis, circumflex, breve,
If you are wise you’ll listen to me.

What do you use when two vowels are discrete?
Which diacritic changes vowel quality?
When can you circumflex the antepenult?
Can you make any sense of Blue Öyster Cult?

I don’t think ASCII can do that.

Umlaut, macron, diaeresis,
You had better be minding your glyphs,
You will live in happiness too,
Like the Finnish polymaths do,
Do-ba-dee-doo

A racist, nasty-tongued creep

It’s me!

And speaking of Christian conduct, if you despise Life in Long Legs, I’d think you’d be doubly disgusted with a racist, nasty-tongued creep like [Eumaios] himself who insults his wife (“she’s gotten a little sense”) and her family, as well as a repentant woman with a terrible past.

I will neither confirm nor deny that I found this heartfelt encomium by means of a vanity search. I won’t link to it either, because you can easily find it if you care. Thank you, Will S., for your words in my favor on the thread. I have no doubt that you understand I’m only a distributional-racist. Some of my best friends fall on the right edge of distributions.

My absolute favorite part about the above quote is that the writer in question has professed (and demonstrated) the inability to remember how spell “Eumaios”, yet she feels peppy enough to lecture Will about koine Greek.

Destroying the two-party system

A snip from a comment on a Vox Popoli post about How to Save the United States (in case you felt like doing that):

James Dixon: 10/13/11 7:57 AM:
End the power of the two party system (I have no idea how to go about doing that though)

One remotely plausible approach: forbid the printing of party affiliation on ballots. Straight-ticket voting becomes onerous, requiring a cheat sheet or a good memory. This has little effect on high-profile positions, but great potential for breaking the parties’ grip on local offices.

Further down the same path: Reduce or eliminate the requirements for a candidate to get his name on the ballot. At the extreme end, forbid the printing of names on ballots entirely. Ballots must contain only the titles of the elected positions; all votes are write-ins. De facto literacy test.

This presumes that we don’t scrap voting as a farce in the first place.

Analysis and expansion of the Vox Day socio-sexual hierarchy

The beta in Vox’s socio-sexual hierarchy is completely and totally different from the beta as understood by most of the rest of the reacto-sphere. No beta in the Vox system is actually a beta in the Roissy system (for lack of a better designator). Vox-betas would be called alphas by Roissy et al.

That this is so is largely Vox’s responsibility; I won’t argue with his categories (indeed I think he’s on to something deeper than he has presently analyzed), but he did co-opt the term “beta” for his own uses.

Most men do not understand Vox’s hierarchy, as indicated by the number of Gammas who want to be Sigmas. Women are even less likely to comprehend, not having lived and played in that sphere. I propose, however, that Vox’s system can be generated from a small set of axes; of opposing traits that can be understood independently:

* masculine vs. emasculated
* self-oriented/narcissistic vs. other-oriented
* socially-embedded vs. socially-detached

I’ll hint you three permutations:

* Masculine, self-oriented, socially-embedded: Vox Alpha
* Emasculated, other-oriented, socially-embedded: Vox Delta
* Emasculated, self-oriented, socially-detached: Vox Omega

Questions:

* given these axes, how do you make a Vox Beta?
* what would you term an Emasculated, other-oriented, socially-detached man?
* Masculine, other-oriented, socially-detached?

Meta-question: can you help me better define or better name these axes?

The impetus to open source software

Take, for example, the shareholder model of corporate ownership. Despite their theoretical status as “owners” of the corporation, shareholders have little genuine control over management. In fact, management’s responsibility to shareholders is a legitimizing myth comparable to the claim of the State industrial bureaucracy in the old Soviet Union to represent “the people” or “the workers.” The management of most large corporations is actually a self-perpetuating oligarchy in control of a mass of unowned capital. But their claimed status as representatives of the shareholders, as little basis as it has in fact, serves a useful purpose in insulating management from internal political challenges–especially from internal stakeholders.

As organization theorist Luigi Zingales has pointed out, the main source of corporate book value is shifting increasingly from physical capital to human capital. That means that an increasing share of profit and equity results from the contributions of the workforce–specifically, their tacit, job-specific knowledge and skills. Whether workers are willing fully to invest these skills and knowledge in the firm depends, to a large extent, on whether the governance system recognizes their stakeholder status and rewards them for their contribution to the bottom line. Without contractually defined stakeholder claims to the revenue stream that reflect their contribution to value, workers know it’s quite likely that in a mixed economy with State impediments to free competition, management will expropriate whatever productivity gains result from their special situational knowledge and skills via management bonuses, downsizing, or both. Consequently they are likely to keep to themselves any knowledge that might increase efficiency.

Emphasis mine.

Self-reported Lies of Lying Liars

Gucci Little Piggy cites a study on lying in which Science Proves that men lie more frequently than women. Examination of the study suggests the opposite of its putative results, if anything. It’s like the old logic puzzles where one of your interlocutors always lies and the other always tells the truth.

Say we have groups P and Q, and that we somehow know that members of group P lie significantly more often than the members of group Q. If you survey these groups on how often they tell lies, which do you expect to report accurately? Unless you expect the liars’ group to refrain from lying on surveys, you should assume that the liars will lie about how often they lie.

Such a survey may result in three general outcomes:

1) Group P claims more lies than Group Q
2) P == Q
3) P < Q

I think these assumptions are warranted:

A) Group P under-reports the amount of lying
B) P’s motive in doing so is to lay claim to socially acceptable behavior, not merely to mitigate a high lie-frequency

On those assumptions, Outcome 1 would require Group P to have an upwardly-skewed perception of how much lying is considered acceptable. Now, liars may believe that others lie as much as themselves, but I think they are quite aware of the extent to which lying is socially tolerated. Call that assumption C. Thus if A, B, and C hold, Outcome 1 is not plausible.

Outcomes 2 and 3 are plausible by these assumptions. With a further assumption, Outcome 3 becomes the most likely:

D) Liars who lie about their lying will claim greater honesty than necessary

The short version is that liars may be expected to claim to be more honest than the honest will claim for themselves.

Now, if groups P and Q lie with the same frequency, you might see a difference in their self-reported frequency based on differing calibrations of social acceptability. Another variable here could be a difference in the proclivity of each group to lie when anonymous, which I suppose to be related to the extent to which the members of the group lie to convince themselves.

Therefore, if a survey shows that Group Q lies significantly more often than Group P, these are plausible causes:

* P & Q have similar frequencies, but P has a lower assessment of what is socially acceptable
* P & Q have similar frequencies, but Q is more willing to accurately self-report in anonymous situations
* P actually lies more frequently than Q, and P lies about lying

I reject as a plausible cause the linear explanation: that Q lies more than P. We are discussing relative rates of lying about lying, after all.

The aforementioned Science Proves It! survey, however, reports that men lie 3 times a day, and women only 2. Statistical significance be damned; a difference of two or three lies per day is trivial and uninteresting. We are, thank Odysseus, free to continue with the prejudice that women lie more than men.

I have refrained from introducing some further factors until now because they pertain to the sanity of the individuals.

1) the person is not aware of consciously and intentionally lying, while still perpetrating falsehoods.
2) the person consciously and intentionally lies, but has an extremely poor model of social norms.
3) the person consciously and intentionally lies, understands and can imitate social normality, and simply does not care. This is psychopathy as depicted in The Mask of Sanity.

In my experience, (1) is the base experience of most females. Even fairly well-tamed women do this. The subconscious has some sort of interrupt routine whereby it can pause the consciousness, emit an egregious falsehood, and yield control back to the consciousness, which does not recognize that anything out of the ordinary has occurred.

(2) is characterized more by the extreme poverty of the social model than by the willingness to lie. In Vox Day’s socio-sexual hierarchy, (2) is the experience of the Sigma or Omega when practicing to deceive.

(3) is outright freakishly weird. You should read the case studies in The Mask of Sanity. The author’s tentative attempt at explaining the behavior of the subjects is interesting, but not necessary, and I recommend skipping over any of his attempts to elucidate until after you’ve read all the case studies.

A Logical Progression to Swearing Fealty?

Mucius Scaevola asked, in response to my comment on his blog, “would you then believe that human faith has a logical progression, or is it so manifold as to be fully indescribable?”

I can answer that question on my terms, but you wouldn’t find it helpful. Faith, as I’m defending it, is simply the fact that I have sworn allegiance to some person. This isn’t merely splitting hairs: if you go through the Greek scriptures and replace every instance of “believe”, “belief”, and “faith” with the appropriate variant of “fealty” or “loyalty”, you end up with a very different form of religion. The line of human demarcation is not (parable of the sheep and the goats notwithstanding) whether you did good or bad, it is whether you swore and kept fealty to Jesus of Nazareth.

N.B.: Some brands of Christians have funny arguments about whether apostasy is even possible.

If you’ll accept those terms, I think the question you want to ask is more along the lines of: “Is there a logical progression that gets a human to swear fealty to a notional Valfather and creator?”

There can be. By their accounts, the gradual conversions of atheists Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Clive Staples Lewis followed a logical path until the tipping point, where they each report receiving some sort of nudge over the edge.

The conversion of a modern atheist writer, John C. Wright, also led down a recognizably similar path, except that at the edge he got snarky and dare-prayed God to give him a sign of His existence. Upon which, Wright writes, he had a heart attack, at the hospital was relieved of pain by his wife’s prayers, and received a series of visions that convinced him of the truth of not merely Christianity, but of full-blown Roman Catholicism. It could be regarded as convenient that he is under orders not to disclose the content of the visions to the public.

Thus in my cosmology, vehement atheists can find their own damned way to water, but they have to get splashed (if not dunked) before they’ll take a drink.

I suspect that merely dispassionate unbelievers don’t require the surprise wetting at the end. Reason, enough skepticism to doubt even your doubts, and an honest approach to ancient history can get you quite a long way down the narrow path.

Moldbug quotes Skinny Puppy

In a discussion about communism. Hands up who’s reactionary and likes Skinny Puppy?

Perfect Injustice

A free paraphrase of Glaucon, in The Republic:

The extreme of injustice is to appear just when one is actually not. Thus our idea of a perfectly unjust woman must include this perfection of injustice: she must be allowed to do her worst and yet to cloak herself in the name of innocence. Whenever she stumbles, she always lands on her feet. Should any of her unjust deeds come to light, she can easily explain them away. She has force on her side, to any extent force is needed, because the rich and powerful will defend her.

Whorish, despondent, and defiant

In the comments to my favorite personal work of cruelty, a woman asks:

Just out of curiosity, is there any way, in your cosmology, for a single woman to be acceptable at all, ever? Or is one simply doomed to being whorish, despondent, and defiant?

“Whorish, despondent, and defiant” is a great turn of phrase. Pity that the rest of the question is such a quintessentially feminine mess.

I’m very pleased with my response, and I hope you will be, too:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman who is a writer, must be whorish, despondent, and defiant.

That should make some pretty little heads asplode with incomprehension.