Archive for June 24th, 2006
Saleability Versus Truth
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 06/24/2006
I wrote a piece below called “What Only Amateurs Can Do” dedicated to the proposition that professionals write what present-day opinion and fashion pay them for.
Simmons then asked me about his Peak Oil Theory and my reply was in this vein, as he predicted. Since 1971 the newspapers have been full of oil and the Middle East. So if you have a theory about the future or the past or hte present, you sell it by tying it to oil and the Middle East. We become even more obsessed with oil and the Middle East.
I would therefore be astounded if the real problem that slammed us in the side of the face came from the direction we’re looking at, i.e., oil and the Middle East.
LibAnon?
NOT SPAM
“Intellectual life is an infomercial.”
After making this same point on a previous occasion, you added that the solution to this problem is to subject intellectual life to government oversight, thereby holding intellectuals accountable.
I doubt it’s simply a coincidence that you once happened to serve on the Congressional subcommittee that oversees education. So I wonder: is Bob’s Blog an infomercial, too?
Comment by LibAnon
I never said “intllectual life” should be accountable to government oversight.
I DO believe that if the government puts a dime into something called “education” than that “education” has to be delivered. Exactly the same thing is true of paper clips for goverment offices.
You are talking Libspeak here. The tqxpayers should finance those who call themselves artists or intellectuals, but the taxpayer is being tyrannical if he 1) doesn’t pay up or 2) demands to say what art eeucation ARE. If I pay for paper clips, they better be paperclips.
If I DON’T pay for it, you can have all the invgellectual life you want.
The problem is, of course, that without a publically-granted monpoly and publically-paid money, all those self-styled “intellectuals” would have to do something useful for a living.
Yes, Bob’s Blog must be subjected to the same scrutiny. I pay for it, but I demand criticism.
It will be a long cold day in Hell before any “intellectual” does either of those things.
What Only Amateurs Can Do
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 06/24/2006
We have all heard the term “a ship of the line” from the days when Britain was in absolute command of the seas. The man who invented the “line ahead” formation that wa so instrumental in giving Britannia true control over the waves has one especially interesting attribute. Not only did he never leave Britain, but he was never on a ship in his entire life, even in port.
The famous Brirtish redcoats got their uniform from Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. Cromwell was in his middle age when he developed the New Model Army, training his troops in the methods Gustavus Adilphus had been using in the Thirty Years’ War before he was killed at, I believe, Luetzen. The New Model Army, from its first day in battle, swept every opponent from the field. Cromwell always beat everybody.
Cromwell’s New Model was the basis of all British ground combat for about two centuries.
As I said, Cromwell was a middle-aged man before he led his New Model Army to its first victory. Before that, he had never been in the army, he had never been in a battle, he had never even HEARD a hostile shot fired.
One thing you are NOT going to see emphasized in a military historyis that, when the Brirtish Ampire was at its height and Britannia rules the waves, it might not have ruled anything without the techniques developed by complete military amateurs.
So let’s ask a question. Please note that this is 1) a question with so obvious an answer one feels silly asking it, and 2) a question absolutely no one ever consides when they look at history or anything lelse that doesn’t have the word “Advertisement” written all over it. That question is, “Why wouldn’t a military academy textbook emphasize that the developer of the line ahead formation and the New Model Army were both amateurs?
The obvious answer, so obvious it seems silly to state it, is that those who buy books for military academies want to emphasize how PROFESSIONAL military men are the only ones who know how to run an army or a navy.
Thisis rather obvious, but no one seems to take it into account. For example, when I was young I always heard that absolutely everything was created in the Cradle of Civilization, the Middle East. Even as a teenager, when this belief was absolute, it struck me as unlikely. The Middle East was made up of asbolute, topto-bottom, rigid tyrannies. All intellecutal life was owned bythe priests. How could such a rigid tyranny invent NEW things?
It took me a while to reallize WHY this doctrine ruled. It was taught in schools where the ability to read and write and do arithmetic were also taught. So history said that the societies that read and wrote and followed rules wwere the places where everything began and the only means by which truth triumphed over a mankind that was not better than the apes.
This was not a conscious choice. But that was the hsitory schools at the time would obviously want so that was the history they got.
Isaac Isamov wrote his whole Foundation Trilogy in the early 1950s based on the idea that only an Empire could produce original ideas. After the Fall of Egypt or the Fall of Rome, history said, everything became stagnant and brutal and filthy until a new Empire based on scribes and bureaucracy came again. That is the absolute basis of the Foundation Trilogy, and it is exactly what everybody took to be true history in 1950.
The idea was that only a totally centralized bureaucratic state could INVENT things. New ideas only came from a rigid, bureaucratized state. It was assumed that the only argument against Communism, with everybody reporting Soviet leaps and bounds in production with every Five-Year Plan, was that it took away too much freedom.
No one doubted Communism was as successful as it claimed to be. It was just too mean about it.
Of course, everybody was wrong on every single point.
But how could you PREDICT they were wrong, when every statistic and historical instance and Future Inevitability they all the professionals announced said they were right? The way to do it woul dbe to analyze each and every piece of information, each Theory of History, each Future Inevitably by ONE criterion:
Does anybody have a reaspn to WANT this to be true?
Professional scholars wanted it to be true that only a society which had a huge army of bureaucrats and scribes could accomplish anything. Asimov took this to a laughable extreme, but only laughable TODAY. At the time it was a sober analysis.
Intellectiual life is an infomercial.
Treat it accordingly.
What’s Wrong With This Picture?
Posted by Bob in Coaching Session on 06/24/2006
If you will read the piece below on Revisionism, you will see that you should never read
anything as if it is true.
But it is not wholey untrue, either.
You should read everything produced by the mass media, historical, current, and futuristic, as if it were an infomercial.
And please keep in mind that, as usual, much of what I am about to say SOUNDS like a joke.
But the reason it sounds funny is because it is so TRUE, not because it is false. So on to which history to believe and which not to believe.
On an infomercial, if the person talking says he has a little dog named Scottie, you can be
reasonably sure that, if he does have a dog, its name is Scottie. If he is just telling a
side story that doesnot ERQUIRE that he have a dog,but can be about anything else, you may
be reasonably sure he actually has a dog.
In other words, in an infomercial, the further you get away from the PRODUCT, the more you
can believe what is being said. By hte same token, when reading history or social
commentary or futurology, the further you get from the PRODUCT, which is how the present
intellectual fashion wants to have been or to be or going to be, the more you can believe
what they say.
So if a history book says George Washington was born in February of 1732 instead of June of
1732, there is no reason to doubt it. But if it says he only survived because an old
black slave woman who was later thrown to the wolves came up with a brilliant cure for the
illness he was dying from as an infant and murumurred to herself, “It takes a village to
save a child” in her native Manica language, you can be be pretty sure it’s not true.
All history, all news, and all futurology are infomercials. You know what the Product is.
Simmons and Oil
Posted by Bob in Comment Responses on 06/24/2006
NOT SPAM I guess my “Peak Oil” babble falls into this futurology category?
Comment by Simmons
MY REPLY:
Have mercy!
I have been listening to theories on the Ultimate Oil Crisis since 1972.
It used to be the left which combined the ruin of hte West with its hoggish desire for a high standard of living.
About my twentieth theory of Oil Crisis and Hoggish Desires I sort of fogged out on that. Let me get over the FY2K disaster, and I’ll get back to the oil ones.
3 Comments