Young fascist, 1950's style, remembered

I think I have one book by Colin Wilson on my shelf - a pretty readable one from perhaps the 1980's about the paranormal, which was a topic that he spent a fair bit of time on in his later career.

I had read that he had hit fame early for writing an angsty British quasi-existential book as a young man - The Outsider.   But I never really looked much into how controversial some of his views were (or had become).   

I see from this essay in Aeon that his controversial status was well deserved.  Here's some background:

Why was The Outsider such a critical hit? In the late 1950s, Britain’s intelligentsia was worried about cultural decline and the lack of postwar movements to rival modernism, or homegrown ideas to rival French existentialism. Here was a 24-year-old working-class autodidact bringing news of the New Thing. And the New Thing turned out to be… recycled modernism. This was reassuring for modernist mandarins in charge of book reviews. His fame was helped by being grouped together with other provincial and working-class writers such as Kingsley Amis and John Osborne, who were dubbed the Angry Young Men. As with existentialism and punk, having a group of people doing more or less the same thing made it easier to write about. Wilson, though a one-off, was part of the zeitgeist.

In addition, Wilson was catnip for the popular press. He told one newspaper he’d written The Outsider while sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath, and obligingly recreated the scene for their photographer. He helped to model the image of the young bohemian, in his polo neck and horn-rimmed glasses.

And then, just as suddenly, the London intelligentsia decided the provincial outsider should stay outside, that his fame was a bubble, that he was a ridiculous and even dangerous figure. His constant declarations of his own genius didn’t help – he was ‘the most important writer of the 20th century’, he said, a ‘turning point in culture’. Nor did his denigration of more established writers – he said Shakespeare was ‘a thoroughly second-rate mind’.

And his worst views:

It’s true that Wilson was a big fan of Friedrich Nietzsche. He believed that humans could ascend the evolutionary ladder and become supermen through sheer will. In practice, only a tiny minority could do this – the ‘dominant 5 per cent’ – and of them, only 0.05 per cent actually would. Like Nietzsche, he had little time for everyone else. Human beings, he wrote in his journal, ‘are pretty trivial insects … No wonder most of them are so mediocre.’

Growing up surrounded by ‘morons’, Wilson felt different and better: ‘I would sit on a bus with the Bhagavad Gita on my lap, and look at the other people, and think: my life is totally different from yours … I know that man can become a superman or God if he makes a hard enough effort.’ He wrote a short story when he was 18, in which Jesus decides ‘these miserable idiots were really not worth dying for, and it had been a mistake to be taken in by pity when they needed a good kicking.’ Like Nietzsche, Wilson thought it would really be a mercy if some of these lesser humans didn’t exist. He wrote in his journal in 1961:

‘the little people’ have sunk so deep into pettiness that it would be an agony for them to cure themselves; like invalids crouching over a fire, the outside world makes them cringe. Without knowing it, they want to die.

This sort of Nietzschean supercilious elitism is typical of modernism, one can find similar passages in H G Wells, George Bernard Shaw, W B Yeats or D H Lawrence. The difference is, Wilson was coming out with it after the Second World War, in 1950s Britain, when spirituality was out of fashion and the cult of the Nietzschean superman even more so.

Wilson’s friend Hopkins, with whom he lived in Notting Hill Gate in the late 1950s, confirmed critics’ fears that the Wilson clique embodied what Allsop called ‘a new mystical absolutism of the extreme Right wing’. Hopkins’s first novel, The Divine and the Decay (1957), was about a fascist leader who murders an opponent. It was clear that Hopkins admired his hero, and in 1958 he started his own far-Right political movement called the Spartacans. They had only one meeting, according to Holroyd, at which Wilson gave a speech insisting that ‘effective political power ought to be in the hands of the 5 per cent minority who were equipped to use it.’

To make matters worse, the British fascist and Nazi apologist Oswald Mosley, seeking to rehabilitate his reputation after the war, wooed the Wilson group, and wrote a glowing 15-page review of The Outsider in his magazine, The European. Flattered, Wilson called him ‘far and away the most intelligent politician I have ever met’ (he was the only politician he had ever met). When Mosley attended the opening night of Holroyd’s first play at the Royal Court, Left-wing critics stormed out, and Wilson was involved in a fracas with them in the pub next door.

It's funny, but I don't recall detecting any problematic politics or philosophy in the book I read.    But yeah, he was, generally speaking, a much more unreliable guide to life than I knew.

 

Oh, a stand up show I liked

One of my recurring themes here is how I don't like stand up comedy much as an art form, even if it is by someone who I find funny and likeable in other formats.

So, I was not at all sure that I would like the Wil Anderson stage show on the ABC last night - Wilogical.  I think I have seen bits of some of his previous shows and not liked it much.

But I actually sat through all of this one, and thought it was pretty good.   The reason has a lot to do with the fact that a major theme was his adventures as a science believer living during Covid on the New South Wales North Coast in one of the nation's biggest anti-vaccination, alternative medicine regions.   

His jokes were therefore often about people who "do their own research" and believing ridiculous things.   This is a rich source of material on which I could feel I was definitely on his ideological side (not something that is all that common for me with stand up material, especially if it is "edgy".)    

Not only that, though, but Anderson comes across as not spiteful in his humour - there was actually a genuine plea at the end that we need people who believe nonsense to come back into the fold of reason, not be cast out forever.    Again, this is not the sort of theme you seem to get in stand up very often.

So, yeah, good on you Wil.

Just too dumb to argue with

This absolute feeble joke of a blogger has not mentioned the "terminate the constitution" tweet of Trump:

And at the post Catallaxy blog of dumbos, reactionaries and wannabe fascists, it's a conspiracy that needs to be corrected by a military takeover:

 

One disappointing aspect

The last line:

 

Did I just win an argument with ChatGPT?

Please explain why so many young people now think that they are transexual

The issue of gender identity and transgenderism is complex and multifaceted, and there are many reasons why a person may identify as transgender. In recent years, there has been increased awareness and acceptance of transgender people, which may have led more young people to feel comfortable expressing their gender identity and coming out as transgender. Additionally, advances in medical technology have made it possible for transgender people to access hormone therapy and other treatments that can help them transition and live more authentically as their true gender.

 

Is there any scientific evidence that "true gender" is fixed by the brain?

There is some scientific evidence that suggests that a person's gender identity may be determined by the structure and function of their brain. Research has shown that there are differences in the brain structure and function of transgender individuals compared to cisgender individuals (people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth). For example, studies have found that the brain structures of transgender individuals are more similar to those of their gender identity than to those of their assigned gender at birth. However, it is important to note that this research is still in its early stages, and more research is needed to fully understand the relationship between brain structure and gender identity.

 

But how different are male and female brains?

The differences between male and female brains are not as great as many people think. While there are some structural and functional differences between the brains of men and women, the vast majority of these differences are very small and have little or no impact on an individual's behavior or abilities. In fact, research has shown that most people have a mix of "male" and "female" brain characteristics, and that there is a great deal of overlap between the brains of men and women. This means that it is not accurate to say that men and women have "different" brains, and that any attempt to make generalizations about the abilities or characteristics of men and women based on their brain structure is likely to be misguided.

 

Hey, doesn't this last answer you gave suggest that "true gender" is not fixed in the brain, after all?

The issue of gender identity and transgenderism is complex and multifaceted, and there is still much that we do not understand about the factors that influence a person's gender identity. While there is some scientific evidence that suggests that a person's gender identity may be influenced by the structure and function of their brain, it is important to note that this research is still in its early stages, and more research is needed to fully understand the relationship between brain structure and gender identity. Additionally, it is important to recognize that gender identity is a deeply personal and individual experience, and that each person's gender identity is unique to them. As such, it is not accurate to say that there is one "true" gender that is fixed in the brain, and that any attempt to make generalizations about gender identity based on limited scientific evidence is likely to be misguided.

 

Things I find very, very easy to ignore (and can't understand why other people cannot do the same)

1.   Harry and Meghan

2.   Drag queens

3.   So-called "reality TV"

Speaking of drag queens, and the ridiculous spectacle in the culture war riven USA of armed men turning up at libraries to dissuade drag queen story hours which, in turn, are pretty silly in that it seems a good bet that few 4 or 5 year olds have ever begged their parent to be taken to such a show:  the question did occur to me yesterday - has any gay or trans adult ever claim to have been inspired to become gay due to seeing a drag performance?   I mean, men in drag has been a Christmas pantomime thing in England for a long time, so the possibility is out there.  But I can't say that I can ever recall any gay person claim that early viewing of a man as a caricature of a woman set them on the path of gay or trans identity.   And if that's true as a general rule, what exactly do the armed men fear from a relatively few liberal parents' kids being dragged (ha) to a show?

But to be clear, I don't get the point of drag at all - so I Googled the topic yesterday, and found this paper from 2017 makes an argument about them from an evolutionary psychology perspective.  Here's the abstract:

The drag queen cultural phenomenon has been described at length. However, the depiction of outlandish and hyperbolic womanhood and taunting and formidable behavior at the core of drag queens’ public persona has still to be fully accounted for. We argue that these aspects of the drag queen’s public appearance could best be understood in a signaling framework. Publicly donning extravagant woman’s costumes attracts harassment and brings financial, mating, and opportunity costs, generating the conditions for the transmission of honest signals. By successfully withstanding those odds, drag queen impersonators signal strategic qualities to members of the gay community. Data collected among gay and straight participants support a costly signaling reading of the drag queen cultural phenomenon. Participants generally agree that successful drag queens typically incur costs, while gaining specific social benefits.

And a bit more in the introduction:

In a landmark publication on the life of drag queens, Newton (1972) emphasized the conspicuous, confrontational, territorial, and effeminate behavior of drag queens and the discrimination, harassment, and stigmatization that impersonators regularly had to face from both gay community members and outsiders. Most people, including the impersonators themselves, seemed to view the drag queen attitude as extreme and particular (Newton, 1972, p. 6). Despite this stigmatization, participation in the drag subculture appeared to have afforded jobless, young, and poor gays some opportunity to distinguish themselves from lower status individuals such as hustlers or “freaks,” and, for the most successful drag queens, a chance to develop celebrity-like status and social might in the gay community (Newton, 1972, p. 6).

Signaling theory has provided a theoretical framework for better explaining evolutionarily puzzling human behaviors (Bird, Smith, & Bird, 2001; Sosis & Bressler, 2003). We propose to analyze the phenomenon of drag queen behavior in light of signaling theory. Despite the costs involved in publicly endorsing a drag queen persona, marginalized individuals might find it attractive, given the benefits they stand to gain such as an enhanced reputation and increased social capital (e.g., Newton, 1972; Hopkins, 2004). The drag queen phenomenon provides an interesting case study where particular behavioral signals enhance individuals’ reputation and welfare, while being entirely decoupled from any reproductive payoff. The phenomenon can be understood as the partial output of universal cognitive mechanisms for status seeking and partner seeking. Typical organizational features of the gay community also play a role in the emergence of the drag queen cultural practice.

 Sounds kind of plausible?   

Trump took advice from this man

 

By the way, Trump is finished, I reckon.  His candidacy has been strangled by his own hands.   Even before the legal cases have their effect.

Former President Donald Trump on Monday denied he wanted to “‘terminate’ the Constitution,” two days after suggesting “the termination of all rules ... even those found in the Constitution.”

“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES,” Trump said on Monday on his own social media platform, Truth Social.

The post seemed to be a complete denial of his post from Saturday, which remained online as of Monday afternoon: “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” Trump wrote over the weekend, once again falsely asserting that there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

Several of Trump’s fellow Republicans were critical of the post, but few condemned Trump himself or said it would be disqualifying for him to earn their vote — a lack of repudiation that has drawn criticism from Democrats. The post came less than a month after Trump officially declared his plans to run for president again in 2024, and he remains the only major Republican candidate to announce a campaign.

Once again, witness the stunning cowardice of many Republicans, too scared to take on a cult because they benefit from it too. 

Update:   When Marc Thiessen, one of the suckiest of suck ups to Trump, writes a column like this one in the Washington Post, you know he's gone.

 

Lightning rods for park shelters?

As it happens, a couple of weeks ago I was taking cover under a recently built, metal roofed (but otherwise open) dog park shelter from heavy rain, which I feared might include a bit of lightning.  (Fortunately, it didn't, as I hate being outside during storms.)

So it's of interest to note in this article about lightning at The Conversation ends with this:

A lightning rod invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1752 is basically a thick fencing wire attached to the top of a building and connected to the ground. It is designed to attract lightning and earth the electric charge. By directing the flow through the wire, it saves the building from being damaged.

These Franklin rods are required for tall buildings and churches today, but the uncertain factor is how many are needed on each structure.

Furthermore, hundreds of structures are not protected, including shelter sheds in parks. These structures are often made from highly conductive galvanized iron, which itself attracts lightning, and supported by wooden posts.

The new version of Standards Australia for lightning protection recommends such shelters be earthed.

Next weekend, I shall check to see if I can tell if "my" new shelter incorporates this.  

Pithy

This is also why I had to remove the words "conservative leaning" from my blog title quite a few years ago.   It's a shame it went nuts.

Such a deliberately blind, or dumb, or both, take

Monty, it is impossible to reason with someone who completely ignores screeds of evidence compiled by bipartisan political committee.  Either that or he's just dumb behind his veil of arrogance.  Who can tell?

Musk in the service of stupid right wing talking points

 It seems clear that the Musk promised bombshell of the "Twitter files" regarding the Hunter Biden laptop story is a big fizzer:

But we know what hyperbolic and disconnected from reality reactions we will get from the right:

Why kill or threaten someone when they are busy shooting themselves in the foot?

More generally:

Update:  more summary - 

And this:

The "hard times" meme for the ages

I reckon I must have been a teenager when I first saw some current affairs show or other featuring a pensioner opening a can of dog food to chow down on because he couldn't afford "real" food.  And here we are, 40 years later with this crap again:

It's always annoyed me, because it's so obviously a case of either:

a.    pure media stunt; or

b.    a really stupid person who refuses to buy cheaper human food if their first preference is (usually temporarily) more expensive.

Oh my - Gingrich says something (partly) true

Axios reports that Newt Gingrich has written a column which tells Republicans to stop underestimating Joe Biden:

Republicans must learn to quit underestimating President Joe Biden....

The clarity of winning and losing creates a clarity of analysis about who is doing well and who isn’t.

If you apply that simple model to Biden, you realize how well he is doing by his own definition of success....

...conservatives’ hostility to the Biden administration on our terms tends to blind us to just how effective Biden has been on his terms. He has only built upon and fortified the left-wing Big Government Socialist woke culture system.

We dislike Biden so much, we pettily focus on his speaking difficulties, sometimes strange behavior, clear lapses of memory, and other personal flaws. Our aversion to him and his policies makes us underestimate him and the Democrats....

....Biden and his team executed a strategy of polarizing Americans against Donald Trump supporters.

Of course, Gingrich would never admit, or perhaps see?, his own key role in the nutty polarisation on the Right (as shown in his own language repeated here - about the "Big Government Socialist(s)" that he wants his followers to believe all Democrats are) which has led to Donald Trump, and the inability to reason with his cult supporters.   And it's a bit rich that he's now suggesting that maybe people should stop saying that Biden is suffering dementia - if he hasn't suggested it himself before on Fox News (I don't know if he has, as I did find one link to an article from 2019 where he said media should stop baselessly speculating on politicians' health) he knows that it is his favourite media outlet which has repeated this endlessly during the Biden administration. 

 

 

 

A complicated life

I always had the feeling that AN Wilson is a somewhat interesting character, and not your typical conservative.   

This review of his new memoir (which only covers half of his life) indicates my hunch was correct.   How's this for a start:

“Confessions” opens with a sorrowful portrait of Wilson’s ex-wife, Oxford don Katherine Duncan-Jones, as she gradually descends into dementia: “It is hard to see how you can still believe in a soul when you have seen unraveling on that pitiless scale.” As an undergraduate, the 20-year-old Wilson wed the decade-older Elizabethan scholar because a baby — the future translator of Homer — was on the way. Each was actually in love with someone else. “In the first two years we were married we spent hours and hours weeping, and wishing we had not married.” Nonetheless, the couple stayed unhappily together until Wilson reached his late 30s, when this memoir ends.

During his Oxford days, Wilson began wearing his hallmark uniform — a three-piece suit, which he wryly refers to as his “A.N. Wilson outfit.” It was Duncan-Jones, he writes, “who urged me always to wear a suit, all those years ago, citing [classicist Maurice] Bowra, his eye darting up and down the gray flannels and sports coat of a Wadham Fellow, barking, ‘Why are you dressed as an undergraduate?’” Consequently, throughout the 1970s and ’80s Wilson was viewed as a Tory, a young fogy. That he was exceptionally thin — for a period he suffered from anorexia because of stress and “marital sadness” — only contributed to this conservative image. Yet he was hardly a fan of Margaret Thatcher:

“The paradoxes of political upheaval make the Muse of History appear to be the eternal satirist. … The so-called Conservatives, far from conserving, carved up Britain with motorways, polluted its farmland with dangerous chemicals and, in their avarice, destroyed all that had made up Britain’s wealth in the first two generations of the Industrial Revolution, namely technical skills, exercised in innumerable fields.”

Let me do a bit of "both sides-ing"

First, a spectacularly embarrassing look for the top Fox News/MAGA crowd:

And now for the other side of the culture wars.  I have mentioned Prof Sandy O'Sullivan before, who I don't follow on Twitter, but someone else I follow does, hence I keep seeing their tweets.  And Twitter keeps suggesting I should follow "them".

"Them" because this is the byline:

Challenging gender binaries is anti-colonial work. Aboriginal trans/non-binary/queer/kin & Professor of Indigenous Studies @Macquarie_U   ARC Future Fellow  

Now, I like to think I'm pretty tolerant of universities having humanities schools which can have characters stuck in esoteric areas of research that interest few.   I mean, I'm pretty interested in philosophy as a field, and a lot of that has been spinning its wheels and going nowhere for some time. 

But boy (or "non binary"), I'm pretty sure that if ever you want feelings of "what an extraordinary sheltered workshop and mutual admiration society of academia these people have built for themselves" to feel fully justified, I strongly recommend reading their twitter feed.   

This week, for example, Sandy keep posting tweets about the "Digital Intimacies" conference being held at Macquarie.  I can give you a taste:

 

You get the idea?   Sorry, I found it hard to stop, because nearly every tweet seemed to be asking for ridicule for being such obvious examples of the type of academic endeavour that seems so - what's the word? - introverted? and self serving, mainly in the interests of just providing jobs for the boys (and girls and non binaries.)  

And, I should add, it's not that there aren't areas of interest to them that are worth studying, if you want to see some practical changes, like the safety of indigenous sex workers, or something.  But it's the invention of the terminology which really grates, and gives the strong suspicion that mostly, it's just about writing papers for each other to swoon over.  (Or in some cases, bitch about for not including the "non binary" adequately.)   A bit like blockchain advocates at RMIT!

Update:  another subject covered at the mini conference - 

 

I have no problem with this trailer...

 

I see that one of the main anti-woke movie and TV critics of Youtube (with whom, I have to reluctantly say, I actually kinda/sorta agree.  At least sometimes.  And maybe only broadly, if not always specifically.  While holding my nose at the idea he probably supports Trump and believes BS about Biden) - The Critical Drinker - has complained that there seems to be time travel in the story, as if that is going to ruin it.   Many of his followers seem to agree.

But seriously - if your fictional universe includes the reality of God and (apparently) other gods, supernatural entities in the service of God, eternal life, and aliens as universe artefact collectors, it seems a case of straining at a gnat to then have a big problem with time travel.   (And come to think of it, one other successful franchise, Men in Black, incorporated it perfectly well.) 

Vat sushi

Hmmm:

 

Although I remain very skeptical of how beef or chicken meat grown from cells in a vat can be converted into something with the same texture as the muscle fibres we eat from those animals,  I can imagine how it should be easier to copy the simpler texture of raw fish with vat grown cells. 

This company is still just doing it experimentally.  I don't know if the nutrient broth the cells need to grow in is simpler than that needed for mammalian meat - but I presume it would be.   But I still have my doubts that it is ever likely to be a cheaper or better way of doing it than aquaculture.

Controlling weevils must be harder than I knew

My goodness, I learn some unusual things by watching CNA.   I had no idea at all about the fumigation of rice being a thing, and especially that they have to keep re-fumigating it while it's in storage:

Singapore's largest rice stockpile contractor is using its own patented tech to defend against bugs. Rice sacks had to be fumigated every five weeks previously, but they can now be kept for up to a year. Singapore Storage & Warehouse houses its grains in these boxes that can keep oxygen levels inside low. This is crucial because insects like weevils need oxygen to survive. Currently, only half of the pallets in the company's rice storage warehouse are enclosed in these boxes. The firm plans to scale up and cover its entire inventory.

Here's the short video about it (and man, what a clean looking facility for rice storage):

Here's an Australia site that talks about using the poison gas phosphine to fumigate all grains.

Guess I had no idea that one of our basic foodstuffs needed so much exposure to poisons.    

Seems to be sort of thing that might attract rumours of danger to health from time to time.   And yes, it does -  here's a story from the Bangkok Post in 2013 about how rumours spread on the net about over-fumigated rice being unsafe to eat.   

Kind of makes me wonder why I haven't spotted a weevil in any foodstuff for many a year.  They are obviously pretty hard to control. 

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I still doubt that the reasons for the speed of the change are really well understood, but it was fast:

Compared to the decades and decades it took to dismantle Jim Crow laws or secure women's right to vote, America's about-face on same-sex marriage happened in the blink of an eye.

The big picture: Just 27% of Americans supported same-sex marriage in 1996, the year President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal recognition to same-sex marriages.

• That's flipped on its head: 71% now tell Gallup that same-sex and opposite-sex marriages should have the same legal recognition.

Driving the news: The Senate voted 61-36 on Tuesday to codify the rights to same-sex marriage and interracial marriage into federal law. The House is expected to quickly follow.

• Twelve Senate Republicans voted for the bill. All 36 no votes came from Republicans.

 

Pathological liars considered

Interesting article in the New York Times about one example of a guy who compulsively lies, as a mental health type problem that he recognises.  I will gift the link, but here are some interesting parts:

In 1891, the German psychiatrist Anton Delbrück coined the term pseudologia fantastica to describe a group of patients who, to impress others, concocted outlandish fabrications that cast them as heroes or victims.

That argument is advanced in a new book by the psychologists Drew A. Curtis and Christian L. Hart, who propose adding a new diagnosis, Pathological Lying, to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Psychiatry, they argue, has long misidentified this subset of patients. Rather than “dark, exploitative, calculating monsters,” they argue, pathological liars are “often suffering from their own behavior and unable to change on their own.” These liars, the psychologists argue, could benefit from behavioral therapies that have worked with stuttering, nail-biting and trichotillomania, a hair-pulling disorder....

Just before his fabrications were exposed, Mr. Massimine checked into a psychiatric hospital, where he was diagnosed with a cluster B personality disorder, a syndrome which can feature deception and attention-seeking. For many of the people close to him, a diagnosis made all the difference.

 More generally on the topic:

In 2010, when researchers from Michigan State University set out to calculate how often Americans lied, they found that the distribution was extremely skewed.

Sixty percent of respondents reported telling no lies at all in the preceding 24 hours; another 24 percent reported telling one or two. But the overall average was 1.65 because, it turned out, a small group of people lied a lot.

This “small group of prolific liars,” as the researchers termed it, constituted around 5.3 percent of the population but told half the reported lies, an average of 15 per day. Some were in professions, like retail or politics, that compelled them to lie. But others lied in a way that had no clear rationale.

This was the group that interested Dr. Curtis and Dr. Hart. Unlike earlier researchers, who had gathered data from a criminal population, the two psychologists set about finding liars in the general public, recruiting from online mental health forums. From this group — found “in mundane, everyday corners of life,” as Dr. Hart put it — they pieced together a psychological profile.

These liars were, as a whole, needy and eager for social approval. When their lies were discovered, they lost friends or jobs, which was painful. One thing they did not have, for the most part, was criminal history or legal problems. On the contrary, many were plagued by guilt and remorse. “I know my lying is toxic, and I am trying to get help,” one said.

This profile did not line up with the usual psychiatric view of liars, who are often diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder, a group seen as manipulative and calculating. This misidentification, the authors argue, has led to a lack of research into treatments and a general pessimism that habitual liars are capable of change.