Understatement

Derb, noting the 60th anniversary of the death of George Orwell, engages in a bit of British understatement (emphasis mine):

Orwell was tubercular from an early age. Writing of his prep-school days: "I had defective bronchial tubes and a lesion in one lung which was not discovered till many years later. Hence I not only had a chronic cough, but running was a torment to me." Things certainly got much worse in those last three years, though. His habit of chain-smoking home-rolled cigarettes, made with the coarsest shag he could find, while living in a drafty stone house on the damp side of Scotland, probably didn't help.

Quote of the day

Noted by Derb:

Exercising the right of occasional suppression and slight modification, it is truly absurd to see how plastic a limited number of observations become, in the hands of men with preconceived ideas.

— Francis Galton, Meteorographica, or Methods of Mapping the Weather (1863), p.5 [quoted in Stigler's History of Statistics, p.267]

Quote chain

I've got little to add to this...

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

- George Orwell

Wherever there is a jackboot stomping on a human face there will be a well-heeled Western liberal to explain that the face does, after all, enjoy free health care and 100 percent literacy.

- John Derbyshire

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

- Thomas Friedman

Of course, we all remember those Friedman columns longing for the party in power to be able to unilaterally impose its "politically difficult by critically important policies" during the Bush administration.

Oh, you don't remember those?

Hmm... Come to think of it, neither do I. Well, when the space ants come, I'm sure that Thomas will welcome our new insect overlords, and be happy to help them round up others to toil in their underground sugar caves. As long as they're Democrats. Or Communists. Or at least not Republicans...



(The Friedman column also contains this howler: "Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist." Yes, a centrist who has taken over the banking and auto industries and is gunning for the health care system. A centrist who has appointed 31 different czars to Cabinet-level duties in such a way that they don't need Congressional approval, including avowed Communist and 911 "Truther" Van Jones. A centrist whose first major piece of legislation was a $750 Billion grab-bag for leftist special interest groups which has provided no stimulus whatsoever to the economy. A centrist who wants to redistribute the wealth, who jokingly threatened to have a college audited, and less-jokingly threatened to allow mobs to attack bankers. That kind of centrist. It's no wonder the people at the Times think that moderates are arch-conservatives if they think that Obama's a centrist.)

UPDATE: Thanks, Jonah, for linking. Welcome newcomers - feel free to take a look around. I've got a bunch of Obama stuff, a lot of linking but some original analysis. I write a lot about the Boston Red Sox, as well, and whatever happens to come up that inspires me...

If I were a Freudian, what would I make of this?

Interesting little "dust-up" in The Corner this morning, which started with Mark Levin posting a little observation:

Attention Christopher Hitchens and the other faith-bashers. The faith-denying Marxist Nirvana known as the People's Republic of China is murdering Tibetans. Just thought you'd want to know ... or maybe not.

Not a big deal, one would suppose. But Andrew Stuttaford and John Derbyshire have, as near as I can tell, completely read something into it which just isn't there.

Stuttaford: "...the current atrocities in Lhasa have little or nothing to do with the communist regime's godlessness and almost everything to with its nationalism, imperialism, and authoritarianism."

Derbyshire: "I am glad to know that Mark has some sympathy for the Tibetans and their religion. He does know that Tibetan religion is atheist, doesn't he?"

Talk about missing the point. Levin, of course, said absolutely nothing about the religion of Tibet. Nor did he suggest that the atheistic attitude of the Chinese was driving the atrocities. What he pointing out, and addressing to Christopher Hitchens and those of his ilk who argue that religion is one of the primary sources of woe in the world, is that the atheistic "faith-denying Marxist Nirvana known as the People's Republic of China is murdering Tibetans." You know, committing atrocities. Not in the name of religion. Not because of Tibet's religion. It isn't a religious clash at all, and he wasn't suggesting that it was. It was counter-example addressed to the proponents of a worldview which holds that religion is the source of evil in the world, that atrocities occur because religious mindsets prevail, that "religion poisons everything."

Which is debatable at best, preposterous at worst. But the objections offered by Mr. Stuttaford and Mr. Derbyshire don't even address Mr. Levin's point. They are non-sequiturs, offered by the two Corner contributors who seem most embarrassed to be associated with religious people whenever the topic of religion comes up, and it would seem to say far more about them and their attitudes than about Mr. Levin, Tibet or China...

If the characters aren't real, it doesn't work

Derb responded to a reader's comment ("I tried one of Clarke's novels once, but couldn't get into it. His characters just didn't seem like real people") on Arthur C. Clarke:

Reading sci-fi for human interest is like reading your newspaper's sports pages for stock quotes. That's not what it's about. What's it about? To quote the title of an Isaac Asimov essay on this very topic, it's about "Those Crazy Ideas."

But if you aren't applying "those Crazy ideas" to humans, if you aren't examining or considering the impact on humans, or human analogues, then how do you get emotionally invested enough to maintain interest?

I have never read any Clarke, and don't have any opinion of his writing ability. I can't comment on either his characters or his ideas. But I do know that, with rare exceptions, characters* that don't feel or seem "like real people" really distract from a work of any type. The term "suspension of disbelief" was apparently coined by Coleridge nearly 200 years ago, but it is accurate and widely accepted - the success of a work of art depends on the audiences ability suspend their disbelief of the settings or subjects, to accept the premises on which the work is based. I have no problem suspending disbelief for technical issues (most of the time), for "those crazy ideas," but if the characters don't feel real then it doesn't matter. (Think about how much suspension of disbelief is required to enjoy the Harry Potter series - but it doesn't matter a whit, because Rowling's characters are so vivid and real.)

In short, the "crazy ideas" may be what the author is in love with, what he's most concerned with, but if he doesn't give the reader a reason to care about someone in the book, it's not going to work for most readers.



* - The characters don't have to be real, but they need to seem real. And they don't need to be human. Watership Down is a tremendous work, with characters displaying real human characteristics despite the fact that they're rabbits. Animal Farm works because, accepting the premise, the characters behavior and dialogue are all true to the logic of the situation.

"Cynicism...is fully justified"

An excellent read over in The Corner, as Derb treats Obama's rhetoric with the contempt it so richly deserves...

Cynicism towards the kind of vaporous flapdoodle Obama trades in is fully justified, and ought to be encouraged. Doubt that an Obama administration will be able to do any better with the nation's issues than a Clinton, McCain, Romney, or Paul administration, is likewise fully justified, given Obama's lack of executive experience, or of experience in any real job; as is doubt that the things Obama says he wants to do, are desirable. Fear that an Obama administration will just take more of our money to sluice away on bureaucratic extravaganzas, ditto.

The man's a hard-left socialist, for Heaven's sake. Anyone falling for this stuff learned nothing from the later 20th century.

Kitchen... light switch... roaches...

Derb has an ... interesting vision of why Hillary is not, perhaps, as prepared for tough questioning as she could be...

Stress mess

Derb treats a New York Times story with the contempt it deserves...

Drinkers and smokers report downing more booze and lighting up more often when feeling the effects of stress.

If these researchers aren't short-listed for a Nobel Prize, I'll want to know the reason why.

Amusing take-down of a generic, typical, inane "study..."

My favorite book

Over in The Corner, John Podhoretz and John Derbyshire and Rick Brookhiser have been discussing the question "what's your favorite book" and asking it of presidential candidates.

My problem with the whole "what's your favorite book" question is that a real reader doesn't have one. If you love to read, you've had a thousand favorite books, because every great book you've read was your favorite while you were reading it. Did I love Les Miserables more than David Copperfield? A Tale of Two Cities more than Prince Caspian? Any Nero Wolfe more than any Brother Cadfael? Summer Lightning or The Code of the Woosters more than Atlas Shrugged or The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant? Witness more than The Grapes of Wrath or Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban? Each of those (and each of 200 others) has been my favorite at one time or another. It's a pointless and un-answerable question...

The Favorite Music of the Deaf!

John Derbyshire wrote an appreciation of Saturday Night Fever (which I've never seen, though I did have the soundtrack back when it was on the charts). The piece is interesting, and has sparked some comment. My favorite of which is this: - "Disco: The Favorite Music of the Deaf!"

But how do you REALLY feel?

I said last week that "the sun has officially set on the British Empire.". As this post in the Corner from Derb shows, my reaction was mild...

My Mum...in one of the last conversations I had with her, said: "I know I'm dying, but I don't mind. At least I knew England when she was England."

I discounted that at the time. Old people always grumble about the state of the world. Now I understand it, though. I even feel a bit the same way myself. I caught the tail-end of that old England—that bumptious, arrogant, self-confident old England, the England of complicated games, snobbery, irony, repression, and stoicism, the England of suet puddings, drafty houses, coal smoke and bad teeth, the England of throat-catching poetry and gardens and tweeds, the England that civilized the whole world and gave an example of adult behavior—the English Gentleman—that was admired from Peking (I can testify) to Peru.

It's all gone now, "dead as mutton," as English people used to say. Now there is nothing there but a flock of whimpering Eloi, giggling over their gadgets, whining for their handouts, crying for their Mummies, playing at soldiering for reasons they can no longer understand, from lingering habit. Lower the corpse down slowly, shovel in the earth. England is dead.