My city here in North Italy is slowly returning to normal, the streets full of people, albeit people in masks. It is curious how quickly everyone accepted the masks & gloves as not merely a medical necessity but even as somehow acceptable, as normal.
I hate wearing both mask and gloves, so rarely go out even for a stroll. My mask is several weeks old – I was given one for free back in April and have been wearing it every time I go outside; I gather we are supposed to throw them away after a couple of hours. I also recycle plastic gloves for several days, even though they are free at every supermarket.
After watching this video of Dave Cullen’s
my initially mild scepticism has developed into full-blown tinhattery; I think the Wuflu is basically a bad flu, particularly dangerous for East Asians and the elderly, and highly infectious, but otherwise of little import.
I wear the mask to placate the rabble. The other day, tugging it off as soon as I entered the gates of my palace, I reflected that the mask could stand for most of my social interactions – I see no point to it, feel at best uneasily acquiescent, but force myself to comply because it is, after all, what everyone expects.
TV docudrama about the 1986 nuclear plant explosion. Morgoth made a great video about it here:
The series opens just after the initial explosion, with a group of largely bewildered technicians in the control room, their chainsmoking manager Dyatlov alternately blaming them for everything and snapping that it’s just a minor leak (when in fact the core reactor has exploded). The action then moves higher up the chain of bureaucracy, all the way (briefly) to Gorbachov, and then comes to focus on Valery Legasov, Deputy Director of the Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy
and Boris Shcherbina, vice-chairman of the Council of Ministers
It is quite superb.
I enjoyed Chernobyl as study of responsibility through management. The initial manager, Dyatlov, is an appalling, stupid, venomous human being and as such typical of low-level team leaders in every organisation; I had several (female) managers like Dyatlov when I did office work: spiteful ignorant creatures who issue stupid orders and then, as here with Dyatlov, scream, “What did you do?” when things go wrong. I wouldn’t even label him a typical Soviet, he is simply what you get in every organisation if you incentivise quotas over reality. The whole series exemplifies many of Bruce Charlton’s critiques of our Ahrimanic age.
Shcherbina begins as a much higher-level version of Dyatlov, interested only in a skilful cover-up. However, as he is drawn into the horror – and the opening episode has an overwhelming, Cthulhu-esque ambience to it, as if something not merely harmful but actively evil has been unleashed – Shcherbina becomes a fully human man, a man indeed. The crucial point is when hundreds of miners are basically sent to their deaths to tunnel under the reactor, and the leader asks Shcherbina if his men will be taken care of; the correct Soviet/managerial response would be to smile and assure them that everything will be fine. Earlier in the show, the Minister of Coal had arrived in a nice blue suit to send the workers to Chernobyl:
They agree to the job and pat him on the shoulder and face with their coal-smeared hands; as one says:
“Now you look like the Minister of Coal”.
There is a powerful implied contrast between the blue-suited fop and the grimy workers (the latter will later strip naked to toil in the hot tunnel); a contrast between the born bureaucrat, and the men who work.
So when, some days later, the leader asks Shcherbina if his men will be taken care of, and Shcherbina says simply, honestly, “I don’t know”, it is a mark of Shcherbina’s own turning away from lies and “management”; a turning towards work and honesty. It’s a small moment, but Legasov gives him a startled glance, understanding the rarity of such clarity, of Gerontion’s “I would meet you upon this honestly”.
There are other ghastly managers. I especially loathed Viktor Bryukhanov, expertly played by Con O’Neill. He strongly reminded me of an apple polisher I knew at university, 20 years ago, a man who seemed to have been created in a managerial seminar. My apple polisher acquaintance was a thoroughly dishonest individual; he did not indulge in petty lies but rather angled his cunning, cowardly, mendacious self to reflect whatever pose would best serve his interests. Bryukhanov is just such a gloating, self-satisfied bureaucrat, a man thoroughly at home with lies and manipulation – indeed, he would despise the miners as naive simpletons, and be baffled and contemptuous of Shcherbina’s personal redemption; for a man like Bryukhanov, lies & manipulation are merely management tools.
You could view Chernobyl as a show about men in all their varieties of humanity & inhumanity: the life-shredding radiation unleashed by the uncaring, stupid Dyatlov; only contained through the enormous sacrifice of real workers; all of the credit, naturally, being taken by the management, by just the kinds of apple polishers who created the disaster through their embrace of unreality, their refusal of the real and the human.
A book I found on sale in a 2nd-hand bookshop in Munich a couple of years ago. I like maps so bought it after a quick flick-through; and read it in April on my balcony in the Coronasun. It’s a semi-academic work from 1949; this was a good time for intelligent academic works – scholarly books from between, say, 1945 and 1990 are usually quite disciplined, professional, but still human and approachable. Before World War 2 a lot of academic works tend to the eccentric, and while this is charming it can be offputting, if you’re used to a certain professionalism; round about the late 80s the noxious influence of (((French))) Marxists like Derrida effectively ruined academia, so that post-80s writing is increasingly, stridently ideological (regardless of the ostensible topic); and, just as bad for the sensitive reader, the modern academic writes a rebarbatively dull prose, a kind of literary Brutalism.
Brown’s book is, as the title suggests, a history of maps and mapmaking, beginning in antiquity and ending in the late 1930s; it takes in the political/military implications, and covers scientific/technological points like latitude, time-keeping, etc. The prose is straightforward and capable, e.g.:
One story tells of a loyal Carthaginian sea captain whose ship was pursued and intercepted by a Roman squadron. Rather than let his log and charts, keys to the secret of a lucrative Carthaginian trade, fall into Roman hands, he ran his ship on the rocks and drowned his crew. When he finally reached home he was given a hero’s welcome. This is by no means an isolated example.
This is typical of Brown: there is no thrusting-in of a modern political opinion, no Marxist finger-stabbing or jargon. It is writing from a better age.
Lousy weather here in North Italy, overcast and windy. It now seems mandatory to wear a mask and gloves outside, previously it was only in the few open shops; I would rather stay indoors than go out with a mask and gloves just to get some exercise, and since it’s too cold to sit on my balcony with a book I am becoming increasingly a pale hermit in my cavern.
It is typical of Italy that no one is really sure if you need a mask & gloves to go outdoors; the government change the regulations every few days, so I’ve now filled in three different autodichiarazione (self-declaration) forms in case I’m stopped by the police – each has the same basic info (my address, where I’m going, why I’m going there, and that I haven’t had Coronavirus) but with pointless variations. Probably the latest version is now out of date and I can be arrested and imprisoned for not filling in an almost identical update.
A contrast between German and Italian bureaucracy: both are heavy, but the former eventually makes some sense, as the Hun are a race of engineers in search of function and efficiency; Italian bureaucracy is more akin to a building made up of randomly hurled pasta and old wine bottles and dead prostitutes: it is inefficient, burdensome, and incoherent to the point of insanity. It is as if the Italians wondered at the Germans: “Mario! Come see! The Germana they have-a so many a-moneys! How is possibile? Maybe because of-a all-a tha paperaworka! If-a we have-a many bureacracia we have-a money like-a the Germana!”
Waiting in the local town hall back in early March, the ticket system screen inoperative (someone had probably stolen a cable to sell the copper), the Italian staff wandering slowly around looking grumpy and baffled to be at work, I thought, This is what happens when a low-IQ, low-conscientiousness nation adopts a high-IQ/conscientiousness technology and system. While it wasn’t quite as bad as e.g. some African shithole, it explains the prevalent corruption in Italy: over the last few months I have been repeatedly tempted to just say, Do you want a bribe? Can I pay you 100 Euros and you do your job the way you should, instead of losing all my documents for the third time?
Strangely, some ice cream shops are now open. I’d be curious to know the reasoning behind such a choice, a government office somewhere with a group of grumpy, baffled Italian bureaucrats indolently pushing papers about a big table, then one says, Mario! I ‘ave an idea! We can open the gelaterie! and they then spend two weeks creating bureaucracy to this effect. I suppose it might be a good idea to have a phased return to normalcy, and why not begin with ice cream, especially since the weather is so shitty no one would want to stand about eating anything cold anyway.
The Italians seem to accept the dictates of lockdown with their usual cynical equanimity, they don’t like it but then everything the government does is insane anyway, so who cares.
I had forgotten about good old Jordan Peterson until I read this. I was one of the deluded who thought Peterson was legitimate back in 2016, though I never thought him more than a gifted synthesizer of Jung and Piaget (among others), with an especially good take on classic Disney films. I didn’t understand the adoration he aroused, especially among women and cucks.
I watched his lectures and enjoyed them a great deal. They contained many insights and brilliant asides, and he seemed to be a decent enough chap.
I still think Vox Day’s attack on Peterson was to some degree overly polemical and rhetorical, with accusations of occultism, but then VD is a Christian who has either said or strongly implied that meditation is a Satanic practice so there you go, he has higher standards than most. However, I think VD is broadly correct, and there is something rotten in Peterson.
The way I now see it, Peterson was approached by Cabal and offered wealth and fame; and he accepted. He was “created” as opposition to Cabal’s SJW toys, to give normal men a harmless outlet for their natural aversion to the screaming blue-haired landwhales. I think his purpose was to stop young men drawing correct (racial) conclusions, and to create a kind of watered-down, harmless Christianity.
I don’t think he was always an evil, Satanic occultist or whatever VD claims; I think Peterson was merely a fragile, unstable individual with some dark tendencies (the occult aspect would not surprise me, and it is imprudent for the ungrounded & neurotic to “dabble”; however, it is precisely the ungrounded & neurotic who are most drawn to the occult).
The “early” Peterson (2014/5) was an interesting professor in comfy academic woollens and ghastly suits, speaking to perhaps 30 students about Disney films: I liked this Peterson; but when I watched his post-fame stuff it seemed very thin; I felt increasingly ill at ease, as he himself looked uncomfortable and evasive and frankly bizarre at times. As he settled into 10,000 dollar suits and a semi-prophetic beard I found him less & less interesting and just stopped paying any attention to his particular word salad and endlessly recycled concepts and tropes. I wasn’t too surprised to find him speaking at a Trilateral Commission event, looking deeply uncomfortable.
My feeling is that he knew, on some level, that he was selling his soul to the worst people in the world and tried to grit his teeth & get on with it in return for wealth & fame; but being an inherently unstable individual the guilt and shame got to him – nor would I be surprised if Vox’s book was the final nail. There is also the possibility that he was offered the usual trappings & entrapments of the elites – underage sex – and having a strong interest in suffering and horror he suddenly & unsettlingly became aware of the wickedness of his new masters.
Unlike Vox and seemingly most of his readers, who all sensed the Satanic as soon as Peterson opened his mouth, I was taken in and thought, oh good an academic who’s willing to take a stand. I obviously lack the discernment of VD and his readers but I see now a red flag that should have given me pause, back in 2016; it is this video, my first encounter with Peterson on Computing Forever’s channel:
Looking back, I notice how evidently staged Peterson’s speech was; whoever was filming him was using good quality equipment, the speech was either well-practised or well-edited, the audio is oddly perfect; and it was immediately afterwards that he exploded into the edgy but not too edgy Youtube scene, appearing on Stefan Molyneux and then on Joe Rogan; but refusing to talk to Millennial Woes.
I recall Peter Hitchens once remarking of photos of a riot in (I think) Lahore, where protestors were burning Union Jack flags; Hitchens asked, “is there a shop where you can buy two hundred identical, pristine Union Jack flags in Lahore?” As a journalist, Hitchens had noticed the implausibility of the scene; the careful artifice of the photographs. I should have paid more attention to Peterson’s speech, and wondered, “is this organic? is this real? or is this managed?”
Another note: I don’t think Peterson is evil, merely weak. And I believe that when such a man “takes the ticket” and sells his soul, he will be destroyed in this life and in this world. The utterly evil (e.g. the Bushes and Clintons) will typically enjoy good health & wealth until death, being undivided and whole in their devotion to evil; but those who are not thoroughly evil will be ruined: they are akin to the Kid in Blood Meridian, who is slain by the Judge because he was not wholly committed to evil:
There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.
In spiritual matters – which includes the selling of one’s own soul – it is all or nothing. Some think they are merely selling a part of their soul, but that is an error: for the soul is fractal. Perhaps one could as it were cut off a little finger and live thereafter maimed, just about; but with Peterson it was as if he began with a finger, then a hand, then an arm, then they wanted his torso. In such a business, either be as the Bushes and Clintons, or do not partake.
A book I’ve heard about for at least a decade, but only now got down to reading after my Kindle broke and I decided to get into my many many unread paper books. It’s a great read, albeit one best taken in small doses; you certainly could read the whole thing in a few afternoons but it’s better to read a few pages then think, I think.
Taleb’s central point seems to be that our humanly-devised models of reality cannot predict everything, and we can’t even determine the limits of our competence; so we don’t know what we can’t predict – at the best, we can assume there are things we can’t predict, which stand on the margins of our science like sea serpents drawn on maps – here be dragons, Hic sunt dracones on the Hunt-Lenox globe.
It is therefore imprudent to build systems which will fail too heavily upon contact with the unexpected.
Taleb’s style is not for everyone. He leads to philosophical points through personal anecdotes, usually about unshaven, hairy-handed working men from the 2nd or 3rd-world who can barely read but are smarter than all the Harvard PhDs; there are several anecdotes about Taleb at conferences where he outrages academics with his blunt manner & wisdom. I don’t really mind the near-constant sense of Taleb’s ego, as he has the ballsiness, achievement, and intellect to justify a certain self-satisfaction; I merely withdraw from his worldliness, his lack of a spiritual dimension. He’s an exemplar of Rene Guenon’s Reign of Quantity, a man who sees everything in quantitative terms; thus missing the element of Fate.
There is nonetheless a great deal to enjoy, many passages I marked, e.g. :
In real life you do not know the odds; you need to discover them, and the sources of uncertainty are not defined.
and
The notion of future mixed with chance, not a deterministic extension of your perception of the past, is a mental operation that our mind cannot perform.
and
Likewise, do not try to predict precise Black Swans – it tends to make you more vulnerable to the ones you did not predict.
Taleb’s worldview is alien to my own; he’s one of these rootless cosmopolitans who lives in major cities – could live nowhere else – even as he talks about his ancestral hometown as the source of his wisdom and clarity. He would probably regard anyone who prefers to be rooted among his folk as a provincial loser and a racist, as if for all his intelligence he cannot quite bear to scrutinise the magic R word (or he doesn’t want to forfeit his conferences and interview requests and literary celebrity).
There is a slight sense of emptiness about his great intellect and learning – I want to ask, what is all this for? why be so smart? just to make more money? But that’s also testament to his greatness – were he a mediocre pop-science writer, the question would not arise.
Season 2 of Paolo Sorrentino’s papal drama, Season 1 being The Young Pope. I was pleasantly surprised at the unpozzed and uncucked Young Pope, so naturally assumed The New Pope would savagely undo all that and revel in degeneracy and filth.
At the close of Season 1, Jude Law’s righteous Pius XIII falls into a coma; Season 2 begins with the decision to elect the meek Don Tomasso Viglietti – Pius XIII’s humble confessor from Season 1 – as the new Pope; he chooses to be known as Francis the Second, and in a horrifying moment the audience realises he looks exactly like Bergoglio.
– the same look of inane, mouse-like niceness, laid over a profound, difficult nastiness.
It is the nastiness of the loser who is suddenly in the winner’s seat, with a winner’s ability to take revenge. His only mode of power is niceness, so he exercises it with ruthless, long pent-up resentment. He unleashes Franciscans, as the Catholic equivalent of Bolsheviks, to destroy the Vatican from within, confiscating gold and jewellery, freezing bank accounts, admitting “refugees” to the Vatican – for unlike the Cabal puppet Bergoglio, Francis II is a simple idiot and decides to open the Vatican to the hordes; except that the hordes are presented as the media and the affluent white liberal elite imagine them – all women and children and handsome, meek young men who are ready to sexually service menopausal cat ladies and nuns. This was the first point at which I winced, but it probably would have been too Red Pilled to have shown the “refugees” as they truly are:
Francis II is swiftly disposed of, and his replacement is Sir John Brannox, wonderfully played by the wonderfully-attired John Malkovich.
He is a curious character: indolent, vain, passive, largely removed from concerns both worldly and divine; it is as if he is so self-absorbed, so self-centred that his vast estates & wealth mean nothing to him; no more than does God or religion. He comes across as a man for whom God is a bit-part player in the grand drama of Sir John Brannox and his guilt and monumental emotional difficulties.
Brannox advocates “the middle way”, a kind of cuckish non-extremism, which basically means “don’t go too far in any direction.” That is to say, it doesn’t mean anything.
Towards the end of the season, Jude Law’s Pius XIII awakes from his coma. He is a welcome presence, as if a Medieval or Renaissance pope were to appear in the present day. I wasn’t entirely happy with the remaining episodes, which felt to me not wholly clear in intent or execution, but there were many fine moments as the “emeritus Pope” interacts with the enthroned Brannox.
I viewed the series as a study of personality and power. All three popes have different understandings of what it is to wield power. Francis II is a materialist like all Marxists, the Franciscans here being akin to various sects (Fra Dolcino, etc.) – in modern terms he is, like Bergoglio, a Marxist who hates not merely Papal corruption and wealth, but Western civilisation as a whole. His understanding of power is wholly negative: he wishes to destroy, to break down. He views wealth as inherently bad, and wishes to disperse the Vatican’s wealth, not for the benefit of others (since having more money would merely corrupt them) but to ameliorate the original sin of having anything at all; the original sin of existence. For such people, the point of “charity” isn’t to improve the lives of the recipients, but simply to take money away from the rich – they would just as happily burn the money. At its extreme, in the Soviet Union, the triumph of the Left is the triumph of death; life & existence are an affront to the absolute equality of nothingness, the true workers’ paradise of non-being.
Francis II has a very Bergoglian/Blairite love of attention, the approval of the affluent liberal elites. There is nothing remotely religious to Francis II; he is a nihilist and narcissist who wishes to revenge himself upon all the fancy Cardinals, the fancy world which kept him down. Were he to meet God, he would try to dethrone Him.
Brannox’s power is very different; it is the power of detachment, of distance, of indifference. He only cares about his self, his appearance; but it is not your standard narcissism – he doesn’t so much care how he appears to others, as how he appears to himself.
This is a man who spends hours at the mirror every morning, for his own satisfaction. The approval of others is secondary, since everyone outside of his own internal melodrama of self must be, at best, of spectral heft.
His non-action is itself a kind of power; he most wavers when he attempts to act, to impress his will (such as it is) upon others. The Brannox “middle way” is more the absence of action, the absence of decision.
Jude Law’s Pius XIII is as startlingly strange as ever. His power is spiritual. God is as real for him as cosmetics and publicity are for Brannox and Francis.
He is much as I understand pre-Modern Popes and indeed many rich/powerful men to have been – simultaneously spiritual, with a magical/superstitious understanding of reality; and worldly and material. He transcends the materialism of Francis II, and the vanity of Brannox. His worldly luxuriance – insisting on being borne into chambers in a ceremonial throne – is not the mirror image of Francis II’s Marxism; it is rather that, for the pre-Modern, everything exists simultaneously, so there was no felt contradiction between the worldly and the spiritual; indeed, spiritual power should be attended by wealth and splendour.
Pius XIII gives a sense of such overwhelming spiritual force that the jewels and magnificence seem somehow irrelevant, as if he could – and he does – step away from them without loss.
My only critique here is that his character is not consistently presented, so he is at times authoritative & puissant, then unsure and human; with no overriding identity to unify the two. It would have been interesting to explore Pius XIII as a man of power who is bereft, unable to sway God, stripped of his titles. For spiritual/magical power is often so – as if it must inconsistently operate in this world, if it is to operate at all.
I was reading Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan on my balcony, in the few hours of direct sunlight I can enjoy,
and found myself repeatedly baffled by his mathematical/statistical explanations. To be fair, Taleb provides warning notes like “the non-mathematical reader can skip to the end of this section”, however he also strives to make it explicable enough to the layman.
Each time my brain came up short, I read on with disengaged gears for a while, then realised I hadn’t taken anything in, and paused. I then went back and re-read, to identify and analyse my mental breaking point. It was always a term that Taleb hadn’t defined and a layman couldn’t possible figure out from the context. I realised I couldn’t make head nor tails of it and just read on to the next patch of firm ground.
I would estimate my IQ as firmly midwit, i.e. about 105-110. I have neither aptitude for, nor interest in, logic or mathematics or abstractions. My cognitive resources are definitely limited, in relation to my ambitions & interests; however, I often outperform people who are clearly smarter than me, I think because of some ingrained habits of thought & study: one of which is, when perplexed, to ask Why don’t I understand? What don’t I understand?
There is a great difference between casting the book aside, and analysing the specific point of difficulty. For example, with Plato my problem is broader, more general: I just don’t get his point, as often there is no point, just Socrates babbling and leering about wisdom at some adolescent boy, and the reader is supposed to be positively struck by it all. With Taleb, it’s always just a question of terminology.
I would recommend the exercise of questioning one’s own cognitive limits: for one thing, instead of feeling utterly retarded, one can identify a specific difficulty; and for another, it most likely sharpens whatever intellect one has.
Living in Italy, I am constantly encountering people called Giuseppe, Giacomo, Andrea, Nicola, Filippo, Francesco, Franco, Marco, Alessandro, Lorenzo, Davide, and so on. There is something deeply traditional about Italy, for all its political Leftism and the usual embrace of smartphones and Facebook; it occurred to me that one could perhaps do a rough approximation of a society’s traditionalism by mapping out given name clusters: so, a non-traditional society like America will have a wider array of names, with lower frequency per item, whereas a highly traditional society like Pakistan will have a narrow cluster of names, each bearing a high volume.
So, in America there will be names like Todd, Ricko, Jamarcus, DeShawne, Tyrone, Chuckie, Tyler, Austin, Brandon, Kyle, Logan, Cody, Brad, Chase, and so on, but in Pakistan everyone will be called Mohammed.
Life continues amidst Plague. Masks are now mandatory to enter the supermarkets, as are plastic gloves. I only have two masks. The pharmacies are often sold out, indeed I only procured my two through charity – a couple of girls were distributing them to anyone they found without a mask; I would otherwise be unable to even go into a pharmacy to ask if they have masks, because I wouldn’t have a mask.
Most supermarkets have now instituted a maximum shopper-number policy, so there are often lengthy queues.
As I walked home, tearing my mask off, I reflected on the curious sense of constraint and spacious freedom – there are so many new rules to obey (I suspect they will soon make it illegal to even go outside without a mask) that everything becomes awkward; and yet the streets are almost empty, as if the city now belongs solely to me.
I find myself largely untroubled, even relishing the atmosphere of emergency. I always felt ill at ease and out of place in peacetime; the smug confidence of the average apple polisher, getting on the property ladder, gonna get a Volkswagen Scirocco, DVD boxset weekend, holiday in the Sarf of France, always (unreasonably) repulsed me. I felt, all the time, as if these people were living in a bizarre fantasy of plenty & prosperity while the Red Army artillery came closer and closer. I am, it seems, not designed to do well in times of peace and plenty.
Remainders 