Author: Severian

How I Garden [guest post by Cale]

It took a while to decide how to write this. Gardening is an enormous topic because there are so many ways to garden, depending on your climate, soil, goals, amount of space available, and other factors. So I went with a stream of consciousness about how I garden, and we can get into other ways in the comments.

I live in the center of the US Midwest, where growing conditions are pretty much ideal. Gardening here is more about keeping things from growing (weeding) than getting things to grow, but there are limits on what can be grown well in any area. That starts by determining your hardiness zone and average frost dates, which you can find online. My zone is 5b and the average final and first frost dates are April 15 and October 15. Plants divide into two basic groups: hardy plants which can tolerate freezing temperatures, and non-hardy plants which can’t. So the growing season here for non-hardy plants like tomatoes and lima beans is generally six months or less, since that April 15 is an average. To extend the season any further, you have to start non-hardy plants inside. Hardy plants like cabbages and broccoli can be started outside early and harvested late, so you might have eight months or more for them, allowing early and late crops.

My garden is in three plots totaling about 3000 square feet. The division is due to where the open spots of land between the buildings are, but it works out well because it lets me rotate different crops through them, not planting the same thing in the same plot two years in a row, which helps prevent disease and pests. I’ve done raised beds when I lived in town, but here there’s no reason to, and it wouldn’t be practical on this scale anyway.

Most of the soil here is good by default, but it never hurts to improve it, especially when you’re harvesting nutrients out of it every year. I fertilize in the form of chicken manure and bedding whenever I clean out the henhouse, tilling it in somewhere that’s clear at the time. I’m not very organized about it, but try to make sure I get every spot covered each year or two. We get enough rain that farmers don’t need to irrigate here, but some vegetables are more water-hungry or have shallow roots, so if there’s a dry spell in the summer, I may run a garden hose and sprinkler or soaker hose out to soak everything once or twice.

For tilling, I have a 50-year-old Troy-Bilt Horse that will probably outlive me. It’s a heavy beast that drives itself, so I just have to follow it and turn it on the ends. I like the *idea* of avoiding tillage, and I do mulch things when I can. But tilling is how my family has always done it, so I always come back to that, at least when it’s time to plant in the spring. I also have a push plow for cultivating between rows when there isn’t room for the tiller, and for getting some exercise.

I buy most of my seeds from a seed catalog (Pinetree the last few years). The seed catalogs come around Christmas, so you can spend January browsing through them and making big plans for spring. I’ll circle everything I might want to grow, and then trim the list down a lot when I place the actual order. Seed catalogs generally have a lot more varieties than you can find sold at the local farm store or nursery, but if you have a local place that sells bulk seed, that can be a lot cheaper than the catalog. Then there are the non-seeds that I buy locally, like seed potatoes (whole potatoes that you cut into pieces and plant), onion sets (little onions that were grown the previous year to about the size of a dime, which you plant and grow to full size), and plants for things like eggplant that I only want a few of. All in all, I probably spend $200-250 on seed and plants every year.

That brings me to the money question: gardening doesn’t pay, if you’re growing for yourself and you count your labor. I’d be ahead if I put the same amount of time into a part-time job and bought all my vegetables at the store. But if you value the time spent outside, the exercise, the ability to grow interesting varieties, and the control over how your food is treated, it can pay many times over. My garden provides most of my vegetables and some fruits for the year, and really could cover it all if I were more organized about it. That’s pretty valuable to me. It’s possible to make money selling your produce if you have the right location, but that’s a separate skill and takes more time. You can also try to make a little to help offset your seed bill by selling extra produce to friends and neighbors, without trying to make it really profitable.

Seeds are expensive, so one way to save money is to save seeds. Some are easy and everyone who grows them should save his own, like beans. Let the beans dry on the vine, pick the pods and shell them out, stick them in the freezer for a couple weeks to kill any bugs, and store in an airtight container somewhere cool and dark. One catch with saving seeds, though, is that you can’t save hybrid seed. Hybrids won’t breed true, but will revert to a parent stock, which probably won’t be what you want. So I stick pretty strictly to “heirloom” seeds, which are older, non-hybrid varieties. If you plant seed saved from Cherokee Purple tomatoes, you get Cherokee Purple tomatoes. In most cases, there are great heirloom varieties that are as good as the hybrids, but in some cases you have to make a choice. In sweet corn, for instance, the super-sweet varieties we’re all used to now are hybrids. Heirloom varieties are sweeter than field corn, but not as sweet as the hybrids, so you have to choose between super-sweetness and being able to save seed.

(By the way, hybrid and GMO are two different things. Hybrids are like cross-breeds: one variety pollinating another to produce a cross of the two. They’ve been around since Gregor Mendel’s experiments 200 years ago. But you’re at the mercy of nature when crossing plants (like animals) — you get what you get. Sometimes you get lucky and get more positive traits from each parent than negatives, giving you a hybrid that’s superior to the parents, but you might get the worst of both. It took decades of trial and error to find the best hybrid combinations, and people are still finding new ones. GMOs are an attempt to cut nature out of the process and speed it up by splicing genes from one variety into another — possibly even from a different species, which hybridization cannot do. For instance, a Brazil nut gene was inserted into soybeans, before they discovered that people with nut allergies started reacting to the soybeans. Most gardening seed catalogs do not sell GMOs, because amateur gardeners very much don’t want them, but they do sell hybrids to varying degrees. Some gardeners (like me) prefer heirloom varieties, but most happily use hybrids for the traits they offer.)

Some vegetables are hard to save seeds from, especially the biennials like cabbage and turnips, which don’t produce seeds until their second year. That means keeping them alive through the winter, either in a greenhouse or careful storage that keeps them dormant but alive, then returning them to the garden in the spring so they can go to seed. I’ve done a little of that, and should do more, but it’s a lot more trouble than saving seed from annuals.

My gardening every year, other than planning and buying seeds, starts with putting out a cold frame. A cold frame is any structure with a clear top that warms the soil beneath it. Mine is two old translucent shower doors. I prop one end on a straw bale so they face the southern sky, and put a couple more bales on either side to insulate the space underneath. After that warms the soil for a few days, I work the soil up with a hoe, and plant some early, hardy vegetables under it. This year it has radishes, lettuce, carrots, and beets. As it turned out, we had an unusually hard freeze in mid-March, which killed some of it despite the protection. But I still have some of each in there, and the lettuce is nearly big enough to start using as of mid-April.

After that, it’s a matter of waiting for two things: for the soil to thaw and be dry enough to till, and for the asparagus to start coming up, since it’s usually my first harvest unless some early radishes beat it. Asparagus is a great gardening choice if you like it. I planted 15 crowns 15 years ago (asparagus comes as roots called “crowns”), and that made a row that’s produced around 20 pounds each year. There’s no comparison between the thin, stemmy stuff at the grocery store and what you get from a home plot. Some of mine makes stalks the diameter of my thumb. The other perennial I highly recommend is strawberries. It takes some work to keep them weeded, but once you have an established strawberry bed, strawberries just happen every year, and it’s hard to beat fresh strawberries.

I was able to fit some early tilling in between rains this year, so I got a lot of stuff planted early. Too early, in one case. I planted a bunch of leftover seed that was 2-3 years old on March 1. Seed that old tends to be iffy on germination, so I figured I’d risk it and use them up, and a 14-degree cold snap one night killed most of what might have been coming up. But there’s a nice patch of lettuce that survived, so I’ll till up the rest of the space, and plant the new seeds that I got this year. After that cold snap, I got the potatoes and onions planted, and they’re coming up now. About April 1 I planted sweet corn, cabbages, broccoli, cauliflower, beets, Swiss chard, carrots, turnips, basically all the stuff that can survive a normal frost (the sweet corn can’t, but I saved a ton of sweet corn seed last year, so I could afford to chance it early, and it looks like I got away with it). A lot of that is up now in mid-April, so I got a bit of a head start. I’ll wait another couple weeks to plant the warm-weather crops like tomatoes, beans, melons, and cucumbers, and there will be later “staggered” plantings of some things to spread them out so they aren’t all ready at the same time.

That hard frost brings up the topic of failure. Gardening never goes perfectly; something fails every year. A whole packet of seeds doesn’t germinate, a mole goes down a sweet corn row and eats all the seed, deer or rabbits eat a patch of lettuce, chickens peck holes in pumpkins to get at the seeds… I’ve had all those things happen and more. You just have to roll with it, learn something from it, and enjoy the stuff that doesn’t go wrong. Unless there’s a major disaster, the successful crops should outnumber the failures, and if you don’t have any beets to put in storage this year because deer ate them, you just eat more of something else. The variety keeps it interesting.

Once I get the warm-weather crops planted, the next few months will be all about weeding, harvesting, and preserving (a whole topic on its own). As I mentioned at the start, weeds are always the biggest problem, and before long, I’ll be out there for an hour or so before work every day, weeding a row or two. By July, I’m fighting to stay ahead of them, and mulching where I can with straw or cut grass to keep them down. Other than being ugly, weeds sap moisture and nutrition that your vegetables need, and can choke them out if they get bad enough. Last year I made the foolish decision to plant a few morning glories (a climbing flower with a big purple bloom) on my bean fence, and now I can see hundreds of them just starting to sprout up from the seeds that fell. I’ll need to get them hoed before they get bigger.

Speaking of flowers, I do grow a few flowers, basically to add some color to the garden. I grow a tall, big-headed sunflower variety that’s good for seeds, for me or the chickens to eat. Zinnias are a really easy flower to grow (and save seed from), and they have long stems that make them easy for kids to cut a few for a vase. Marigolds are supposed to help keep away some insect pests, so I try to grow a few of those here and there, although I don’t know how true that is.

Speaking of pests, I don’t try to be perfectly organic, but I try not to spray more than I need to. The two real problem pests here are squash bugs and cabbage worms. Cabbage worms can be controlled with BT, a natural bacteria that kills cabbage worms without harming good insects (or people), but you have to stay on top of them, because it only works on the larval stage. If you forget to spray often enough or rain washes it off too soon and the worms get ahead of you, you have to resort to something harsher. For squash bugs, there’s no organic solution except picking the bugs off, which some very naive people actually recommend. I just break out the Sevin and spray them as soon as I start to see the bugs. Otherwise it doesn’t take them long to kill the plant, and for the long-season varieties like winter squash and pumpkins, you’ll never get a ripe squash before the squash bugs do them in.

Other than those two, I don’t have much trouble with pests. Tomato worms (aka tomato hornworms) can be a problem if you don’t watch for them, but they’re easy to pick off and step on. They’re big green worms the same color as the tomato plant so they hide well, but they eat the leaves so you can spot them by the damage they do. When you see several leaves missing, there will be a tomato worm nearby. By the way, if you see a tomato worm with a bunch of white spike-looking things sticking out from its back, those are the eggs of a wasp that lives on tomato worms, killing them. So don’t kill that one; let it live long enough to feed the eggs and hatch more beneficial wasps. Tomato plants can take a lot of damage; I’ve had plants with half their leaves missing still produce a lot of tomatoes.

I’d recommend that everyone try gardening, on whatever scale is reasonable for you. In a small backyard, a 4’x8′ raised bed can look nice and give you space for several small crops. If that’s not an option, you can plant a few things in pots on a patio, or even a few herbs in window boxes. On any scale, it gives you a chance to “touch grass,” as the kids say. If you’re completely new to gardening, it’s probably best to start small and see how much you can handle.

You can also come at it from the other direction: how much do you want to produce, and how much space will that take? But it’s hard for most people to understand how much food they actually use when they’re buying it week by week and not looking at it all at once. For instance, figure your family needs one quart of vegetables per day. That’s 180 quarts over the six months that vegetables aren’t fresh in the garden, that will need to be grown and then preserved in some way, in addition to what you harvest in-season and eat fresh, to be fully self-sufficient on vegetables. That’s a pretty tall order, but you don’t have to go that far with it to get a lot out of it. Just having fresh vegetables in-season is great too.

It’s also a good project for kids, that gets them outside and teaches something about the life cycle, success and failure, patience and perseverance, and an appreciation for where food comes from. For instance, potatoes. Get five pounds of seed potatoes (or what you have space for), and have the kids help cut them into pieces with 2-3 eyes on each piece, explaining how the eyes are where they grow from. Then they get to dig holes in a row and plant the potato pieces. Two to three weeks later, a little plant will pop out of the ground. After it gets a few inches tall, they get to use a hoe to “hill” them, burying the plant in more dirt, while cleaning up any weeds around them. The potatoes will emerge again, and they can hill them again. Hilling them prevents the growing potatoes from poking through the surface and getting “sunburned,” which causes the bitter and mildly toxic green spots you might see on store potatoes sometimes. After hilling them 2-3 times, let them grow and keep the weeds pulled around them. After a few months the potato plants will start to die. As the plants die, they put the energy into growing the potatoes which are underground. Dig up the first one that gets to half-dead, and you’ll get some small “new potatoes” of the sort that people pay extra for, a little promise of what’s coming. When the plants are completely dead, dig them all up, and you’ll have amazing potatoes unlike anything you can buy, with tissue-thin skins that will scrub right off, but you don’t need to because they’re so thin you won’t notice them. Pick out any that you cut with the shovel or that have any soft spots. Use those first, and spread the rest out in a cardboard box or crate in the basement or other cool place. Send the kids down to get potatoes for meals until they’re all gone.

I think that’s everything I can think of, so I’m gonna head out and do some weeding.

Friday Mailbag

Thanks as always to everyone who sent in questions. Truly, you strive diligently to increase quality outputs.

The Norks are still my favorite Commies. Why, I can’t say. I sure hope this toothsome lass isn’t too influenced by their propaganda… that said, I’d nationalize her means of production, if you know what I mean.

Based5.0 has one that’s long and formatted (said your mom!), so I’m going to excerpt a bit. It starts with this:

And since the stuff after “show more” is important to the poster’s argument, here’s the whole thing:

This post is an excellent litmus test for understanding of just war theory.

Despite the fact that I can see how effective this would be, I must oppose it because the damage it would do to my enemy (who bashes in my mailbox) would far outweigh the good of saving my mailbox. Its disproportionality is opposed by our duty in charity (and even justice) to watch out even for the good of our enemies.

(Yes, by the way, I have had my mailbox bashed in by random vandals.)

Based5.0 writes

So, what say the NBCs? How far is too far in protecting your property from (relatively) minor vandalism?

I’m personally fine with this….I don’t know that I would go to the effort to pack a mailbox full of concrete as shown in the picture above, but I don’t have a problem with it and certainly don’t have a problem with some vandal who hit it with a bat suffering injury as a result.

Blessed Salt’s arguments have ultimately boiled down it just not cricket to use hidden fortifications on your property. If you wanted to indulge in the effort and expense of enclosing your mailbox with bricks and mortar to prevent damage would be fine because vandals would be given fair warning, but doing it the cheap way is a bridge too far.

Discussion yesterday centered around potential legal ramifications — it’s probably not criminal*, but — this being Clown World — you might well find yourself in a civil lawsuit.

*Obviously I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. If you were so dumb as to take legal advice from me, you deserve what you get.

Leaving that aside… not only do I have no problem with it, I think it’s a great idea. The kind of dipshit who would vandalize a mailbox for fun is only capable of learning things the hard way; this is what the Education PhD’s call “child-centered pedagogy.”

But I really wish this “Blessed Salt” person hadn’t brought up “just war theory,” and I bet after a few dozen paragraphs you’ll be wishing it too, because I just can’t resist.

“Just war theory” is horseshit. Always has been. You can tell, because it contains the word “theory.” Thucydides, I believe it was, gave us the only programmatic statement about war that matters: The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must. It’s always a good idea, as a practical matter, to pretend that you’re fighting from some kind of principle — you know, to keep morale up on the home front — but nobody is going to let this kind of thing stop them:

Saint Augustine held that Christians should not resort immediately to violence, but that God has given the sword to governments for a good reason (based upon Romans 13:4)… Augustine argues that Christians, as part of a government, need not be ashamed of protecting peace and punishing wickedness when they are obliged to do so. Augustine regarded intention as the main determinant of whether a war was just or sinful: “What is here required is not a bodily action, but an inward disposition. The sacred seat of virtue is the heart.”

Nonetheless, Augustine asserted that peaceful inaction in the face of a grave wrong that could be rectified only by violence would be a sin. Defense of oneself or the innocent could therefore be a necessity, especially when authorized by a legitimate state authority

Any Very Clever Boy worth his salt could justify The Rape of Nanking under those criteria, in under five minutes. There’s only one criterion which really matters for a war to be “just”: Did you win? Then it was just. Had the Japanese won, the Rape of Nanking would be an unfortunate incident of collateral damage, and Curtis LeMay would’ve been hung as a war criminal (LeMay himself admitted as much… long after the war).

I have to admit, comrades, posts or Tweets or “Xes” or whatever they call them now set my teeth on edge. This “Blessed Salt” person sounds like the worst kind of Christfag. Let me guess: Encasing your mailbox in concrete just isn’t cricket, old bean, but Jesus was an illegal immigrant! “Just war theory,” forsooth. Forsooth, I say!!!

And hey, since we’re here, how about the Alanis-engorging irony of the whole concept. Ambrose and Augustine developed their “just war” thing in the context of the Late Roman Empire, when The State’s military power was severely limited. It flourished in the Middle Ages, when war as a tool of State power was almost completely impotent.

I know, I know, that seems wrong, they were always fighting in the Middle Ages, but those wars basically accomplished nothing of importance, politically — there’s a reason the Hundred Years’ War ™ dragged on for more than a hundred years, and there it is. Medieval-style positional warfare is a lot like Smooth Operatin’ — it sure looks spectacular, but its ability to effect real political change is basically zilch. You can count “the decisive battles of the Middle Ages” on one hand, and the one thing common to all of them is that somebody was stupid enough to offer battle in the open field. Even there, unless you actually capture the enemy king (Poitiers) or wreck enough of his army that his domestic political problems pretty much destroy his rule (Agincourt), the worst that happens is a Crécy-style pause in hostilities. The Medieval State simply lacked the resources to exploit even the most crushing battlefield victory.

Once States acquired the technological (= technique, not just advances in weaponry) means to win decisive political victories on the battlefield, that “just war” stuff went out the window. A Medieval prince could always cite “just war” as a reason for bringing hostilities to a (temporary) close — either he or his enemy had achieved all that they could reasonably achieve, given the technological (ditto) conditions, and so a pause was necessary to refit and rearm. (Who wants to bet against Trump and Bibi suddenly rediscovering “just war theory” when they run out of missiles?). Once you have the ability to win, really win, ANY war is a “just war”…

…IFF you win.

Speaking of Tweets or Xes or whatever they’re called, Quotulatiousness brings us one of note:

As I like to say, and with no disrespect intended to the Canadian NBCs, whom I love (no homo): Canada is what you get when you turn a massive inferiority complex into a government. At some point in the 1990s, AINO said “We are the fakest and gayest! No one shall ever be faggier than we are!” Canadia said “Hold my Molson, eh?”, and here we are.

Hey, speaking of fake and gay, what do y’all think of applying a little synergy around here? Per Ace of Normies, my doubts about Operation AIPAC Folly have turned me into a Nazi. As we now know, the SPLC is handing out cash to Nazis. Think we can work out a deal? I’ve been told by several NBCs that my site is banned for “hate” on various platforms; can I monetize that somehow?

I don’t know how much the SPLC is willing to spend on a blog with a few hundred readers, but every little bit helps, right? Maybe we could buy a new coat of shellac for the bar, some fancy potting soil for the Tree of Woe. Not to mention the massive, ongoing expense of medal bleach. It’s the lifeblood of the industry, like loafer lightener…

(Remember when The Simpsons still used to be kinda funny? Remember when you could make a joke like that?)

Clayton Barnett has an update for us:

Not a question, but to let the Clubhouse know I’m still plugging along, even with my broken back.  Here’s the Hungarian cover for Amelia.  We’re over throwing governments, one at a time.

Sweet!

HR Farmer asks:

What are the implications of the fact that federal officers feel the need to hide their identities as they go about lawful operations?

If they’re doing this (as I surmise) to protect their families from mob actions that various states and cities will not prosecute, is this one more mostly-missed step on the way to national dissolution?

I struggle with this one myself. On principle, I want to say that no law enforcement agent should be allowed to wear a mask. If it can’t be done in full view of the public, then it shouldn’t be done; that’s one of the cornerstones of a free society.

But we don’t live in a free society. And as for principles: They’re for suckers.

In public affairs, at least, “principles” are just propaganda. They’re retrospective justifications that winners make up to “explain” their victory, and losers make up to soothe their defeat. And that’s the best case scenario, comrades. Here in AINO, “principles” boil down to handcuffs the Left puts on the Right, which the Right is stupid enough to agree to, because the Right are a bunch of fucking losers who follow Leftie around like yappy little lapdogs, wagging their fingers and spinning their bowties while begging for scraps.

Leftie is a great one for principles. He’s forever spinning up elaborate theories of behavior and codes of conduct. But the minute Leftie gets people to agree to a rule, the first thing Leftie does — the very first fucking thing, always and everywhere — is to break it. There has never, ever been an exception to this, and there never will be, because that’s just what “a rule” means to the Left: Something you con the suckers into agreeing to, the better to fuck them over with.

So… yeah. In theory, on principle, whatever, I’m all for maskless cops. And bodycams and all that. I often sound like the goofiest ACLU loon when it comes to the police — I’d have their powers very carefully circumscribed, their actions very heavily monitored. BUT: All that on the understanding that policing is a tough job that requires a lot of judgment calls, up to and including The Ultimate Judgment Call. Should there be a dispute, the cop gets the full benefit of all reasonable doubts (and if there’s a doubt about whether a doubt is reasonable, that one goes to the cop, too).

Just to take the most notorious recent example: from what I could tell as a civilian, and not having watched the full hour or so of tape, I’d have given Derek Chauvin a stern talking-to. Maybe a little more than that, but not much more. Certainly the “reasonable doubt” standard applies to murder, which is just ridiculous on its face. If I’d been on that jury…

…well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? If I’d been on that jury, I’d probably have voted to give him the fucking chair, because Leftie is allowed to burn my house down if I don’t. See what I mean? What “principle” covers that?

Right now, the masked thugs of the Police State are our masked thugs. That’s the only thing that currently matters. Once we’ve done the necessary, and found a… ummm… conclusive Solution to the problem of the 20 which does 100, we can revisit the issue.

Along those lines, TWS asks:

Friday question, What’s the hold up? I was promised WWIII, CWII, camps, or general civil breakdown by now. Look I’ve been promised TEOTWAWKI since I was born. I’ve done everything right, I’ve been unprepared, I’ve ignored every warning, my only preparation is just living like my grandparents.

I’m essentially a drunk sorority girl walking through the bad part of town and nothing is happening. Are we just being teased? No end of society?

Oh, it’s still on schedule. Right now the Left feels like they’ve got the wind at their backs, largely thanks to Trump’s stupid fucking war. No one has ever stepped on his own dick as often and as hard as the BOM… but whatever, be that as it may, right now Leftie thinks xzhey is going to be in charge again after the midterms. They’ve already got Operation Endless Impeachment ready to go, plus a long list of promised retribution. They don’t feel like they have to go to the gun… yet.

Should their “blue wave” not materialize in the midterms, and especially if they can’t Fortify 2028 For Democracy, watch out.

Vizzini brings us a link of note:

Social Degeneration.

I’ve probably written 50,000 words on Degeneration etc. over the years; at some point we should probably do a “deep dive” into the works of Max Nordau, but a two-volume Teutonic tome takes a level of energy I’m not sure I can muster. I’d love to get Lombroso and Nordau in a room and hit them with my take on Rat Utopia — you know, that “permanent caloric surplus” business I’m always going on about. They weren’t wrong. Everything they said about the fin de siècle is as true now as it was then.

N.b. that, for music blog kayfabe purposes, Degeneration is not to be confused with Disintegration, which is scientifically proven to be the best album ever.

(Also: “her weak point is her nose.” That just hits a bit different here in The Current Year, don’t it?).

(Also also: Credit Robert Smith for taking the piss out of himself, both there and afterwards. He said that his nephews never really believed he was a rock star until he was on South Park. At which point they asked him “What’s Disintegration?” And he told them “It’s something your Uncle Bob did a long time ago”).

Dinodoxy asks:

LLMs produce a phantasm of intelligence by complex predictive algorithms and a wide dataset that assembles phrases based upon statistical probabilities. At first blush the returns sound great, seam insightful and intelligent. But all they are doing is regurgitating the sum of their data input, ie restating a consensus. Which is often accurate, but also prone to hallucinations which makes it dangerous to trust the output without extensive and tedious verification .

Question is, to what extent are all humans nodes in some emergent LLM? We laugh at NP s who regurgitate what their pocket moloch tells them. But we all do the same to some degree. Fit patterns into a preexisting mental paradigm and spit out a canned response. At some level, we have to do that. It would be impossible to carefully evaluate all information coming in before acting.

The technical part is way above my competence (and was covered extensively in the comments yesterday), but I want to say that “humans as nodes in some emergent LLM” is one way of saying “culture.” Culture is — among other things — a set of heuristics. Our brains are wired a certain way; we have a “cognitive architecture,” I guess. Back when Anthropology was a real discipline, they compiled a list of “cultural universals;” that’s something like a wiring diagram of the human brain.

What I find fascinating is the “emergent” part. Our cognitive architecture has been rewired, several times, and in fact I argue that it’s being rewired now, at Ludicrous Speed. That’s certainly debatable, but what isn’t debatable is the transition from “primitive,” as described by Victorian-era anthropologists like E.B. Tylor and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and whatever it is we have now. I’ve written a bunch on this, but the initial riff was P.J. O’Rourke’s:

He wrote about how there are so few vehicles per capita in Africa, yet they have the highest car crash rate in the world. I’m paraphrasing, but his argument was: A White man takes a curve at 60 and nearly puts it in the ditch. His “natural” reaction is forward-looking: I’d better not do that again, lest I go in the ditch next time. The African’s reaction is, if not exactly backward-looking, then kinda static: I took it at 60 and nothing bad happened, so I’d better take all curves at 60 from here on out.

One wants to write that off as uniquely African, but it’s not. You read up on the customs and superstitions and whatnot of the Middle Ages — witchcraft, for example — and it all sounds very similar. In fact it’s bizarre, and kinda trippy, reading these elaborately reasoned, impeccably logical treatises on witchcraft and superstition (I used to love encouraging undergraduate feminists to read the Malleus Maleficarum. They went for the misogyny, but stayed for the stupefyingly thorough Aristotelianism). It’s not quite African, but it’s a lot closer than we’d like to think. The “Scientific Revolution” really did rewire the European brain.

I think that covers it for this week, gang. Thanks as always for reading, and have a great weekend.

Karen Explains the Middlebrow

This is a professional interest, comrades.

One of the reasons Academic History is so tedious is because they’re all Leftists, for whom The Past is one long catalog of ignorance and error… and yet, in a contradiction I could never get my head around, History begins anew each dawn. The Past is always to be judged by the standards of The Current Year, but the Current Year is, somehow, just as hopelessly benighted as The Past. Why, it’s almost as if these defectives are simply incapable of being happy, or even content…

Still, it sometimes leads to some amusing contortions, as here:

How the death of middlebrow culture led to Trump’s barbarism

All the cool people hated middle-class suburban culture — but it looks a lot better compared to what came next

So… you’re saying that one thing, at least, was actually better in The Past?

Those of us of a certain age can remember the middle-class suburban home of the late 1950s and early 1960s. On the coffee table lay a large format book titled “The World’s Most Beautiful Paintings,” or something similar. The bookshelf groaned under the weight of the Encyclopedia Britannica, or perhaps Collier’s Encyclopedia. Alongside it were volumes of the various Book of the Month Club selections. The console where the hi-fi lived might have a Reader’s Digest boxed set of vinyl LPs called “Music of the World’s Greatest Composers” (pressed under contract by RCA), or a Time-Life classical music compilation.

And not just better in The Past, but better in The Fifties ™? You know, the McCarthy Era ™? When Jim Crow was still in force and Betty Friedan said the suburban home was a “comfortable concentration camp” for women?

Like I said, gang, this tickles me, for professional reasons. Because that’s the thing about College Town: “culture” is very very very very very Important to them, even though their entire professional existence boils down to the denial of the very possibility of culture. Homie here is going to give us a labored distinction between “high-,” “middle-,” and “lowbrow”

The terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” derived from the 19th-century pseudoscience of phrenology, and the former was first popularized by a New York Sun reporter around 1902, to be quickly followed by the latter. “Middlebrow” dates to the 1920s, first used by the British humor magazine Punch. Virginia Woolf then got into the act, criticizing the BBC Home Service as middlebrow, despite its newsreaders’ plummy Oxbridge accents. Elsewhere she defined the term as “this mixture of geniality and sentiment stuck together with a sticky slime of calf’s-foot jelly.”

and of course he’s wrong about that (phrenology was long dead by 1902; hell it was mostly dead well before the Civil War; the “brow” stuff ACK-shully comes from Cesare Lombroso’s criminology, a very different thing), but whatever, those are now common currency, so let’s roll with them. In Academia, “highbrow” and “White” are synonymous, and you can’t say “White” without immediately following it with “Supremacy”… see what I mean?

And note please that this has always been a problem for the Left, even the old-school hardcore Marxist Left. I’ve said many times that when The Revolution comes, I want Anatoly Lunacharsky‘s old job, “Enlightenment Commissar.” His brief (among others) was to get “Proletkult” off the ground. “Proletkult” was, as you might’ve guessed, a portmanteau of “proletarian” and “culture” (proletarskaya kultura), and it was what you think it was — factory hands writing ideological “poetry” about tractors and shit. (Sometimes, I’d wager, tractors and shit, literally — the Bolsheviks were big fans of fertilizer; all part of the Five Year Plan, comrades).

And again… there it is. Anything produced by an artist with the wrong “class background” is bad, and given that pretty much all art theretofore was produced or commissioned by the middle or upper classes, all previous art was now inadmissible on ideological grounds. The Cultural Marxist obsession with “White Supremacy” just shifts the albedo a bit — instead of factory hands writing poems about tractors, now it’s Obsolete Farm Equipment rapping about bitches and bling.

Everyone sees the problem, I trust? How can one be “cultured” when the first rule of being “cultured” is “there is no culture”? How can you be better than everyone else when the first requirement for being better than everyone else is to proclaim as loudly as you can, as often as possible, that no one is better than anyone else?

The standard College Town maneuver, of course, is to make up a caricature of The Fifties ™, and pretend that we’re all still living in it, and to be ostentatiously against it. Our author here is using “middlebrow” the way Aman-duh et al use “Evangelical” or “MAGA.” It’s John Lithgow as the Preacher in Footloose. If you pretend that America not only was once like that, but still is like that — some kind of “middlebrow” paradise — you can just barely make Academia’s ostentatious anti-culture make sense (smoking a lot of weed helps).

But now here’s Goofy, telling us that The Fifties ™ were ACK-shully good, because Trump.

Of course, a big part of that is because goofball doesn’t understand what Culture actually is. It’s congruity between the inner and the outer man. Back when people understood that, the standard criticism of “middlebrow” “culture” — what Woolf was trying to get at with that “calf’s-foot jelly” nonsense — was that it’s fake. Artificial. Dumbass dimly senses it

Did everyone routinely use the encyclopedia, or read the Steinbeck novel, or listen attentively to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony? That is uncertain, but what it showed was the cultural aspiration of the post-World War II American middle class: People wanted to be seen as interested in those things, whatever their actual level of enthusiasm. 

but he doesn’t understand why people would do that. Which is a problem unique to the PoMo Left: They live in a world where fealty to The Current Thing must be absolute; your social standing depends on how ostentatiously you support it; but The Current Thing can change instantly, without warning, and frequently does.

Real Culture, by contrast, gives you a set of absolute, enduring values. Whether or not Schubert and Steinbeck qualify as “great Art,” the underlying suppositions are 1) that Art is a thing, and 2) appreciating Art is an enduring value.

That’s what Woolf was getting at: People who listen to the BBC Home Service believe that they should be in favor of “Art,” but they don’t know what “Art” is, or — crucially — why one should be in favor of it (Art is one way of ranking and scaling values). The “middlebrow” are no different, mutatis mutandis, than the grasping burghers of the Middle Ages, against whom so many sumptuary laws were necessary — when anyone who can afford it can wear vair and ermine, the outer and the inner man no longer align.

This is commonplace Intellectual and Cultural History, of course. The 19th century was full of this stuff. The Manly Mustache Man

must’ve written a hundred thousand words about “hierarchies of values,” and what he did so bombastically, a thousand lesser lights did restrainedly.

Indeed, you want to know what was really wrong with Hitler, back in the 1920s, at least from the perspective of people like Virginia Woolf? He was terminally middlebrow. He had that awful, kitschy, Wilhelmine taste — he was Austrian, and Gemütlich to the core. If Communism is “Soviet power plus electrification,” then Nazism, at least the way Mustache Guy carried it, is “Biedermeier with a Sturmgewehr.”

Or, you know, “selections from Wagner,” as presented by the BBC Home Service. Mark Twain supposedly said of Wagner’s music that “it’s better than it sounds,” and “Wagnerian” was a word much beloved by both the Nazis and their critics, for opposite reasons. The Kitties really thought Wagner was onto something, philosophically; their opponents thought his stuff was unintentional opera buffa; Orwell came right out and said that nobody in the ’30s could take Hitler seriously, because he was an opera buffa clown.

Note that the bombast applies a lot more to Himmler than Hitler, and one of these days we really should go over how so much of what’s stereotypically “Nazi” is really Himmler, not Hitler — it would’ve been a very, very, very different thing without The Nerd — but whatever, the point is, all of this stuff is basically standard late-19th century cultural criticism dressed up as Orange Man Bad. Hell, our goofy author even dimly senses it:

Why did all of this happen in the early postwar years? There is no way to prove this, but perhaps the cataclysm of the war impressed upon that generation the fragility of civilization and learning, and the need to preserve them.

Yes indeed, Hitler gave us a very different aesthetic vision of Europe (that’s one of the most fascinating books I’ve ever read)… and Alanis just got one that will last way more than four hours, because once again, we have this goofball arguing quite forcefully that The Fifties ™ were good.

To millions of ex-GIs, the war was the greatest adventure of their lives, but also an admonitory lesson; sitting in a classroom listening to some stuffy pedagogue lecturing about Thucydides was certainly preferable to freezing to death in a foxhole in the Ardennes Forest.

The Ardennes, you say? Remind me: who were they fighting over there? The guys who settled Hitler’s hash came home and did The Fifties ™. You know, Jim Crow and this kind of thing

And that’s good now. Because Orange Man Bad. See what I mean with this stuff?

Equally, the need for professors and instructors engendered by the college boom created its own class of intellectuals and intellectual hangers-on. Some of those eagerly sought to enlighten their charges, while a few others grew to see – or claimed to see – an unbridgeable chasm between the ivory tower and mass cultural aspiration.

Again, standard stuff from the turn of the century. The turn of the 20th century. As I’m sure you know, but Current Year Leftists do not know, there was this thing called Fabian Socialism back then, and… well, let me quote you the opening snippet from something called the Great Dictionary of Marxism (but only the opening snippet, because these Commies somehow think you should pay for the rest):

One of the bourgeois reformist political ideological systems prevalent in England at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. It was labeled “socialism”, but was in fact a bourgeois socialist current opposed to scientific socialism…

Wiki’s a little better, because cheaper. This is from the entry on The Fabian Society:

The Fabian Society was founded on 4 January 1884 in London as an offshoot of a society founded a year earlier, called The Fellowship of the New Life, which had been a forebear of the British Ethical and humanist movements… They wanted to transform society by setting an example of clean simplified living for others to follow. Some members also wanted to become politically involved to aid society’s transformation… The Fabian Society additionally advocated renewal of Western European Renaissance ideas and their promulgation throughout the world.

So, you know, typical High Victorian paternalism, but that’s the point, comrades — the Fabians believed that access to Culture, real Culture, was both possible and necessary for underclass uplift. Every borough in Britain had its Workingman’s Society, where earnest Fabians would give lectures on… well, on Wagner and suchlike. Art appreciation, basically (as well as hygiene and birth control and the whole tedious catalog George Orwell — in many ways the prototypical Fabian — called “common sense”).

This is of course opposed to “scientific” socialism, which consigns all that stuff to The Dustbin of History ™, as repressive relics of outmoded bourgeois blah blah blah. And again we see the problem for the Laptop Class, here in our own day: What’s the point of all that very long, very expensive “education,” if you can’t lord it over the peasants?

Funny, too, isn’t it, how we live in an “accelerated culture” (that’s Chuck Klosterman, and yeah, I know, but you have to take wisdom where you find it). David Brooks solved this problem for them 30 years ago, with Bobos in Paradise. Alas for them, they couldn’t have predicted Trump, an actual rich guy, who likes being a rich guy, but with a really strong proletarian streak. As we all know, that’s why they really hate him: He’s a class traitor.

Much blather follows about a cultural critic from the 30s named Dwight Macdonald. Quoth he (Macdonald, not Karen):

The intermediate form — let us call it midcult — has the essential qualities of masscult — the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity — but it decently covers them with a cultural fig leaf. … Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while it in fact waters them down and vulgarizes them.

And now Karen:

Macdonald ends the essay with a rallying cry to his beleaguered intellectual friends to withdraw from society as if they were the monks at Lindisfarne, preserving the nucleus of Western civilization behind the battlements of their fortress-monastery: “This is to recognize that two cultures have developed in this country and that it is to the national interest to keep them separate.”

I love this stuff, Kameraden, I really do. Because of course all that is the fastball, the better to set up the change:

Rather than withdrawing from society, intellectuals have a moral obligation to the things they claim to believe in by participating in society. Far from corrupting high culture, the middlebrow was once the bulwark that protected it. In retrospect, members of the GI generation who struggled to appreciate Mozart or Melville, but who actually enjoyed Rodgers and Hammerstein or Thornton Wilder, served as a social buffer, and the current absence of any such buffer means that America is awash in vileness. The quasi-official culture being imposed on us now (think: UFC cage match on the White House lawn) doesn’t even rise to lowbrow level by 1950s standards; Erle Stanley Gardner is virtually Proust, compared to the contemporary cultural median.

Whatever is one to make of this? The same people who spent the last 75 years desperately vulgarizing anything and everything are now decrying The Death of the Middlebrow. I’d bet every penny I’ve ever earned that Karen here had a good laugh at Tipper Gore slapping warning labels on pop music albums back in the 1980s — so bourgeois!! (Also a good reminder of how recently the Democratic Party wasn’t totally insane). “Awash in vileness,” you say? So… Drag Queen Story Hour, then? Oh, I forgot, that’s “Art” — but which kind? Is that the new “middlebrow”?

The Vietnam War and the culture wars it spawned drove a stake through the heart of middlebrow culture, as well as the high culture it supported, just as it killed progressivism as a mainstream political movement. Almost the entire intellectual class opposed the war, but many in that class seemed to adopt the non-sequitur that because the war was evil, it was a waste of time to enforce the most minimal cultural standards.

There aren’t too many times I’m lost for words, my fellow NBCs, but this is one of them. The Vietnam War killed progressivism as a political movement? And that’s somehow a non-sequitur?

Again, this is why I find Academic History so frustrating, and so fascinating. They have no idea of the History of their own movement, even though they’re the ones who should know it best of all. Not only that, but it’s probably the most Alanis-engorging irony of all time, that the explanation is quintessentially Marxist.

How does a young, fit fellow dodge the draft? Even though “medical” deferments seem to have been comically easy to get — Trump and his, what was it, bone spurs? Joe Biden and his bad back — there were still a whole bunch of good middle class kids who were lamentably fit; not even Dr. Nick could find enough to declare them 4F. The other easy dodge is to go to college…. but that’s a problem, because there are only so many things one can major in; only so many classes one can take.

Therefore the Administration must “expand the curriculum,” as it were. But the problem with that is obvious: If we retain that stuff about “high culture,” then you’ll have that one class about Shakespeare, and that one class about, I dunno, Beethoven or some shit, and then it’s goodbye, my sweetheart, hello Vietnam.

Ditch the “highbrow” stuff, and you can make anything into “culture” — and therefore, into an object of Academic study. Which also happens to greatly expand the career prospects of wannabe Academics, and… well… there it is. Which our Karen actually dimly recognizes — this is the very next sentence:

Hence the plethora of comic book studies courses at universities today.

Yeah, it’s a stone cold mystery, how that happened. This is the next sentence after that:

Or they retreated, following Macdonald’s advice, into social irrelevance by adopting dead-end pseudo-philosophies like deconstructionism.

Again, it’s a stone fucking mystery, how they “retreated…into social irrelevance” by creating a massive welfare state for themselves, with guaranteed lifetime employment, in towns explicitly set aside for them, designed to their specifications and catering to their every whim. That’s the strangest fucking “non sequitur” I’ve ever seen, and I know from non sequiturs.

The sworn opponents of high culture did not retreat; they organized. During the 1970s, they latched onto billionaire money and built institutions to transmit their own cultural message, and found millions of Christian fundamentalists who would obediently vote them into power. As I have written elsewhere, this was the pivotal decade when American culture began to stagnate. By the Reagan era, the stasis was obvious; in the first two decades of the 21st century, it began to putrefy.

Link left in for the curious; I personally don’t have the strength. I’d just like to note that, by this “logic,” the cultural high point of Postwar America was roughly 1972. Make of that what you will.

If, say, 1950s authors like Herman Wouk or James Michener were distinctly middlebrow writers of the type Macdonald abhorred, at least their historical novels were grounded in historical reality, plausible plot development, and careful research for factual accuracy. It is difficult to think of any comparable novel of the past quarter century that made a similar impact, save, maybe J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, which was pure escapist fantasy, or Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code,” a risibly falsified novelistic “history” that solemnly tells the reader at the outset that everything in the book is based on fact.

You know, on the one hand, I can’t find it in my heart to feel too sorry for Harry Potter Lady. For one, I can’t feel too sorry for anyone who inhabits that rarefied plane of existence where you’ve got so much money, it actually takes some real effort to find out just how much money you have. For two, she still appears to believe that “Moar Feminism” is the solution, rather than the problem, albeit the “Feminism” of the 80s. But still: What a zap that must put on your head.

For pretty much the entirety of the Social Media Era, every single Leftist on earth communicated in Harry Potter references. You’d have supposedly serious people comparing George W. Bush to Lord Voldemort, and other supposedly serious people would pretend to take it seriously. So much so that everyone on the Right made it into a meme: “read another book!”, we’d yell, by which of course we meant “watch another movie!” (the Left doesn’t actually read), but you know what I mean. Harry Potter was the Left’s One Pop Culture Thing for a long, long, long time… and now she’s persona non grata. “Pure escapist fantasy,” he sneered, which would be news to his coreligionists, who still can’t get over how “problematic” she is re: the troon thing, but forget it, he’s rolling.

(Oh, and also: Remind me who controls the entire “education” system, K-thru-PhD? Seems to me there’s an easy answer for this, if it’s indeed a problem).

Because so many intellectuals failed to uphold their own supposed standards and regarded the inherited legacy of Western culture as an irretrievably flawed embarrassment, the right wing has eagerly filled the vacuum. Now every neo-Nazi and MAGA social-media influencer claims to be defending Western civilization – which might be true if every civilizational development since Copernicus were omitted, and we were only left with witch manias, crusades, and hallucinations induced by ergot poisoning.

Again, maybe it’s just me, but I find this kind of thing bizarrely fascinating. How can anyone to the Left of… well, me, write this kind of thing with a straight face?

In his essay about “the Ishmael Effect,” David Stove partially lets his fellow philosophers off the hook. I don’t remember which particular philosopher he was talking about, but he said something to the effect of “he asks questions that are so long and complicated, he gets lost in his own verbiage, such that he can’t see that he actually already knows the answer.” So it goes with bizarre paragraphs like the one I just quoted. Yo, homie: WHY was it that so, so “many intellectuals failed to uphold their own supposed standards and regarded the inherited legacy of Western culture as an irretrievably flawed embarrassment”?

I’ll make it easier for you. What word appears only twice in your Salon-length screed, both times immediately preceding “House”? Give up? Here ya go:

There’s even a Wiki entry, fer Chrissakes, because of course there is.

Your coreligionists spent the last 75 years insisting that Western Culture, all of it, just IS “White Supremacy.” If they’d defended it, back in The Fifties ™, we’d still have such horrors as Jim Crow and housewives…

…oh, wait, I forgot, those are good now, I guess, because Orange Man Bad.

The very concepts of intellectualism, and of objective knowledge itself, have been debased by a kind of Gresham’s Law, with the bad driving out the good.

Ooooooookay, I think we can stop now, though of course our Karen still goes on (and on and on and on, this being Salon), because we’ve hit rock bottom. Yo, dickless: “Objective knowledge itself” is White Supremacy. See your entire stupid fucking website, every single goddamn day. What more can one possibly say?

Still, comrades, this is interesting. Perhaps even stoyakalicious. If even these goofballs are starting to realize that the negrification of everything was a big mistake…

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started