Links Post

[deusvulture]

Time for another links roundup! I find these posts to be a useful exercise, so regardless of who's reading them they're likely to continue.

• Eric S. Raymond on American regional accents - If you read old books that transcribe accents or listen to recordings of Civil War veterans, it becomes clear that at one point there was very little difference between northern and southern pronounciation. What changed? ESR suggests it might have had to do with country music in the mid-20th century. Putting aside that ESR seems to think (for some reason) that he's the first to notice some of these things, I would love to read a more thorough treatment of the subject.


• Why Defend Freedom of Icky Speech? Neil Gaiman weighs in. This article was written in 2008, and I'm sure you couldn't get a public figure to admit to thinking these things today, but I have to agree 100%. Key quote:

  So when Mike Diana was prosecuted -- and, in 1996, found guilty -- of obscenity for the comics in his Zine "Boiled Angel", and sentenced to a host of things, including (if memory serves) a three year suspended prison sentence, a three thousand dollar fine, not being allowed to be in the same room as anyone under eighteen, over a thousand hours of community service, and was forbidden to draw anything else that anyone might consider obscene, with the local police ordered to make 24 hour unannounced spot checks to make sure Mike wasn't secretly committing Art in the small hours of the morning... that was the point I decided that I knew what was Obscene, and it was prosecuting artists for having ideas and making lines on paper, and that I was henceforth going to do everything I could to support the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.

  (h/t glacialtimeframe on tumblr, via jumpingjacktrash.)



• That viral image that suggests photojournalists are grossly exaggerating the violence in Paris is itself fake news, at least in particulars. Not the world's most interesting story, but I've seen a lot of otherwise reasonable people credulously sharing the original image. Constant vigilance!


• Gwern reviews "Japan As Number One", by Ezra F. Vogel, a highly influential book from the 1990s about the threat of Japanese global dominance. Not exactly the top worry on Western minds these days, of course, but Vogel warned that Americans would have to adopt Japan's brilliant educational system and communitarian spirit to keep up. Gwern sees parallels to China hysteria:

  [W]hat happened in Japan is what happened elsewhere repeatedly: nothing but industrialization of a country with relatively high pre-existing human capital catching up to the production frontier. [...] A poor non-industrialized country grows rapidly for a long period, insiders & outsiders ascribe the growth to various idiosyncratic features of that country with the self-congratulatory connivance of political leaders, then growth slows down and stops and attention moves on. That’s all. It’s happened many times before, and I am sure it will happen again. (Perhaps we will read in another two decades of how India’s ethnic diversity is responsible for its blistering growth, or perhaps instead we’ll be hearing about how the legacy of cross-border smuggling networks laid the groundwork for North Korean stock market outperformance…)



• Michel Houellebecq: "Donald Trump Is a Good President" - primarily because he's willing to leave other countries the hell alone. This is a pretty blunt, funny article that's short enough that you might as well just read it. I am now somewhat more interested to read "Soumission", which is the one thing by Houellebecq that anyone ever talks about.


• From the hot-takes-on-cold-subjects department: “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” played a pivotal role in the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, according to Quartz magazine. It would seem that on his visit to America in 1950, the influential Islamist Sayyid Qutb was turned against the ideals of Western culture forever by the degeneracy he saw - degeneracy he summed up with his disgust at the sight of students dancing at a college party to everyone's favorite controversial Christmas song.

  “To most people watching this dance, it would have been an innocent dance of happiness,” documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis observes in his film, The Power of Nightmares. “But Qutb saw something else. The dancers in front of him were tragic lost souls. They believed they were free, but in reality they were trapped by their own selfish and greedy desires.”

  [...] Qutb returned to Egypt a radically changed man. In what he saw as the spiritual wasteland of America, he re-created himself as a militant Muslim, and he came back to Egypt with the vision of an Islam that would throw off the vulgar influences of the West. Islamic society had to be purified, and the only mechanism powerful enough to cleanse it was the ancient and bloody instrument of jihad.

  Qutb eventually became a senior member of the Muslim Brotherhood, plotted to assassinate Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and was executed by hanging in 1966. But his teachings and writings became a primary inspiration for a generation of militant Islamists, including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

  For what it's worth, I sometimes get a similar feeling myself when I'm trapped at a Christmas party.

  (h/t on this one to femmenietzsche on tumblr)

Comments

[oligopsony]

To state the obvious, you can get plenty of public figures to position themselves as defenders of free speech, "including the icky kind." Largely I would say that they are right to do so, if a bit disingenous in how rare or brave they are in this kind of thing.

Houellebecq has always been blackpilly. In Elementary Particles there's a line about how all of the great (or great French, that part doesn't even need to be stated) literary geniuses were reactionary ultra-pessimists and it's clear that he sees himself in that light.

The Qutb thing is hilarious.

[deusvulture]

Re free expression, I don't think someone like Gaiman would answer a question about lolicon in that way in the present climate. Maybe I'm just in a bubble but I feel like public figures, especially those with big online followings like Gaiman, are now hyper-aware of the possibility of being cancelled, sis, and would just avoid the subject at all costs.

The Houellebecq thing is kind of funny because people will often pitch Soumission as "the Islam thing is just a metaphor, it's not actually Islamophobic at all!" -- the first part of which is probably true, but looking into him for even a moment it becomes clear that he's a trollish reactionary who is not exactly a fan of literal Islam either.

[oligopsony]

I think it's less probable that someone like Gaiman would have been okay positioning himself as censorious, is the real change. (But then I think a lot of the terminology we use here is confused - I should probably make a post on this some time.)

He's probably both not-a-fan of Islam and drawn to it in the way the main character is - like many European and especially French reactionaries he's nostalgic for open theocratic rule while not being able to believe himself. (Or at least that's the impression I get from book reviews and from earlier readings of his work, I haven't read Sousmission.)

[rusalkii]

+1 for link posts in general.

[glacialtimeframe]

Agreed!! Definitely like seeing these OP (does the term OP make sense here??? I hope so...)

[alexanderrm]

Re: the Paris burning photos, the interesting thing about that is that people apparently expected photojournalists *not* to be manipulative to some degree. Sure that case would have been especially bad if true, but usually if I hear about riots in Paris with associated commentary like "Paris is Burning" my brain just autofills to "Some people in Paris lit a few fires and police haven't been able to completely stop them yet" and just ignores any photos, since the quality thereof is determined by how good/luck the photojournalists are and not by how bad the situation is.

[mindstalk]

One obvious difference between Japan and China: China has 10x the population, and 3-4x the population of the US. To "beat" the US (e.g. in GDP) Japan would have had to be 3x more productive per capita; China just has to be 1/3 as productive.