Thomas Sowell on intellectuals (with a Bobby Fischer detour)
This weekend we discussed “the elites” on this thread, and I mentioned that Thomas Sowell had written an entire book on the highly related subject of Intellectuals and Society. Here’s a short discussion with him about it, during the Obama years:
I’m not sure what Sowell went on to say after that, but I would add that educated people in the Founders’ day had a solid grounding in ancient history, which contained a great many messages about the dangers of tyrannical governments. They also were quite familiar with the Bible. I doubt the same two things can be said of most of our intellectuals or our “elites” today.
Also, I’ve cued up a short excerpt from this interview:
Maybe this is nitpicking, but I’d like to correct one brief thing that Sowell said at 4:35. Bobby Fischer was not happy to play chess and to stay out of larger pronouncements (although as far as I know, Sowell is correct that Fischer made no larger pronouncements about evolution). In later life, after his retirement from chess, Fischer – always eccentric – became even more so, and more talkative. At that point he opined on a lot of things. For example, shortly after 9/11 Fischer had this to say:
Fischer stated that he was happy that the attacks had happened, while expressing his view on United States and Israeli foreign policy, saying, “I applaud the act. Look, nobody gets … that the US and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians … for years.” He also said, “The horrible behavior that the US is committing all over the world … This just shows you, that what goes around, comes around, even for the United States.” Fischer also referenced the movie Seven Days in May and said he hoped for a military coup d’état in the US: “[I hope] the country will be taken over by the military—they’ll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders.”
But these beliefs did not only emerge after 9/11; they were longstanding. Fischer’s mother was ethnically Jewish although not religious, but his father (whom he did not know) was not Jewish and Fischer never considered himself Jewish. He certainly went quite far in the other direction of rabid anti-Semitism:
Fischer made numerous antisemitic statements and professed a general hatred for Jews since at least the early 1960s. Jan Hein Donner wrote that at the time of Bled 1961, “He idolized Hitler and read everything about him that he could lay his hands on. He also championed a brand of anti-semitism that could only be thought up by a mind completely cut off from reality.” Donner took Fischer to a war museum, which “left a great impression, since [Fischer] is not an evil person, and afterwards he was more restrained in his remarks—to me, at least.”
From the 1980s on, Fischer’s comments about Jews were a major theme in his public and private remarks. He openly denied the Holocaust, and called the United States “a farce controlled by dirty, hook-nosed, circumcised Jew bastards”…In 1999, he gave a radio call-in interview to a station in Budapest, Hungary, during which he described himself as the “victim of an international Jewish conspiracy”. In another radio interview, Fischer said that it became clear to him in 1977, after reading The Secret World Government by Count Cherep-Spiridovich, that Jewish agencies were targeting him….Fischer, at a press conference upon his return to Reykjavik, Iceland, lashed out at Jeremy Schaap, the son of the late Dick Schaap, a sportswriter who had been a father figure to Fischer when growing up, calling his father a “Jewish snake” for doubting Fischer’s sanity in his later writings.
Sowell is correct, however, that Fischer was not an intellectual, and that he certainly had a very small area of expertise and that when he stepped outside it he was way out of his depth. I wonder, though; would most people consider a chess player an intellectual? Chess tends to be correlated with a certain type of high intelligence, but chess players don’t trade in ideas as their main concern – their brilliance is spatial and strategic/tactical/analytical/intuitive, is it not?
Fischer was, without question, a very strange man (as was Paul Morphy, the second finest chess-player in American history). Most experts (albeit not all) seem convinced that his biological father was not Fischer, but actually Paul Nemenyi, a very bright mathematician and physicist of Hungarian Jewish origin.
j e:
Yes, I’ve read that, but only DNA could tell. They actually have Fischer’s DNA from a paternity determination, and the fact that nobody has authenticated those rumors about his father makes me suspect they are probably untrue.
I have a long review of “Intellectuals and Society” here: https://loquitur.substack.com/p/intellectuals-and-society
Chess is generally associated with intellectual pursuits (though it wasn’t always the case), but professional chess players tend to come across like Bobby Fischer when they speak outside of their narrow expertise. Garry Kasparov, despite being involved in politics for years, tends to come across as an average MSNBC viewer when it comes to U.S. politics. Most of them are smart enough to know when to keep their mouths shut or offer anodyne statements.
There are a few top chess players who are/were accomplished in other fields (Taimanov, Botvinnik), but they are the exception to the rule. Chess can improve certain types of thinking, but after a certain point in the intermediate-expert range, you’re only getting better at chess. As Fischer said, chess is “mental masturbation”. His take on chess echoed early chess phenom, Paul Morphy, who didn’t consider chess to be a worthwhile pursuit.
Strangely enough, both men were rumored to have gone a little off the rails later in their lives (Fischer much more provably so).
But these beliefs did not only emerge after 9/11; they were longstanding. Fischer’s mother was ethnically Jewish although not religious, but his father (whom he did not know) was not Jewish and Fischer never considered himself Jewish.
https://youtu.be/IIvlx2kXiH8
Fischer made numerous antisemitic statements and professed a general hatred for Jews since at least the early 1960s.
He is not just an individual in his thinking …..
This was the norm in the western world… before WWII
OF MILK AND BLOOD
Jews and Muslims in Christian Law and History
“They also were quite familiar with the Bible.”
These days they are mostly not familiar and the ones who are became familiar in an effort to discredit it not even seeing it as a historical source of wisdom. Many gladly pursue eastern mysticism/wisdom but ignore the Bible and often argue that our current freedoms are in spite of Christianity rather than because of it.
Unfortunately, this is true of much of the leadership of several of the mainline protestant denominations as well.
Chess is a game. It’s ferociously complicated which give it some scientific and artistic elements. In terms of classifying Fischer on this topic, I’d go with artistic not intellectual. There’s not a large amount of thought and rational analysis involved … more creative and pattern seeking.
When I was in high school chess was considered a sport, and club players earned varsity letters. Ours was not the only school which did this.
the revolution happened around the publishing of the 1st volume of decline and fall, did it not,
Oh, and Sports Illustrated covered the Fischer-Spasky championship series
I am reminded of an Orwell quote: “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
I was also reminded of that quote when recently reading a Trotskyist take on Allende’s three years in power. The more I read it, the more it sounds like gobbletygook. Not that Trotskyist reasoning is any more absurd than that found in other Marxist-Leninist tracts, mind you.
It’s a sport, perhaps, in terms of physical stress. Pro chess players burn a lot of calories, experience pounding hearts, etc.
But there’s really nothing visible so it’s hard to justify to onlookers as a sport.
Chess players are the closest things to clairvoyants– the ability to see the future.
Intellectual arrogance is the shield of the insecure.
trotskyites have a similar frame of reference to leninists, george galloway is a trotskyite, he was also a tool of the STb, the november 17th terrorists that assasinated richard welch and nordeen the naval attache were trotskyites too,
Wasn’t that much to read in those days………
the modern wave of jew hatred came from the protocols, which was what happens when a late state autarchy like the Romanov’s organ, the okrana would cook up, a tale derived from a french revolution era tract, the scenario was sketched out in umberto eco’s the prague cementary,
I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.
William F. Buckley, Jr.
At least in America, “intellectual” denoted not only above-average intelligence but learnedness. Intellectuals were people who knew things because they had spent many years accumulating that knowledge. So there was some respect given but mixed with contempt for intellectuals being a big “unmanly” and disconnected from reality.
America has replaced the intellectual with the “knowledge-worker,” a person who is not particularly intelligent but is trained in manipulating symbols and rhetoric. They are basically plumbers but with words instead of pipes. But while plumbers serve a natural role in society, the knowledge-worker often does not.
Mike
Sowell’s piece on intellectuals and war goes deeply into their views prior to WW II. One thing he notes is that they all presumed each nation would act in its own interests as defined by intellectuals in some other country.
Generally agreed it would be silly for Germany to go to war again. Look at the map, the industrial, the…….. Therefore, it is not necessary to prepare to defend against Germany.
Sowell does admit the catastrophes of WW I were still with Europeans…deaths, massive numbers of mutilated who, alive due to medical science advancements, would have been dead in earlier wars. Walking reminders. So rartionalizing why it wouldn’t happen again was powerful. But if it were not going to happen again, there was no danger in spending each country’s version of New Deal efforts on defense.
I recall seeing Fischer and others in an article talking about how being in top physical condition helps concentration over long periods. Took that to heart before a six-week field project where each morning you had to decide which wheel had to be reinvented, plus external difficulties although none of it was physical. Got into good shape for it and…paid off. Wouldn’t have bothered otherwise.
There’s plenty of room for logical analysis and reasoning in chess. Endgame theory especially – Dvoretsky’s Endgame Manual is a great example. There is always a certain contrast between the ‘scientific’ and ‘creative’ types of chess players – Botvinnik on the one hand, Tal on the other, for example. But this is a little stereotyped in my experience.
It’s true that a lot of chess players, serious ones, have a pretty narrow intellectual focus. There are certainly counterexamples such as Dr. Lasker. On the other hand, I’m not convinced that top players’ political views are really that eccentric on average. I would advise against extrapolating from Fischer, who really was an outlier. It would be perhaps slightly interesting to know how much of his hatred directed toward “Russians” was motivated by and conflated with his perspective on Jews.
(I am thinking here of his (in?)famous retort to, I think, Petrosian maybe, when the latter pointed out to him the varied nationalities of a number of the members of, probably, the USSR Olympiad team at the event: “You’re all Russians to me!”)
Fischer’s My Sixty Memorable Games is one of the classics of the literature, though.
Well thats one explanation is they didnt want to lose another generation on flanders field and the somme
MIguel. So they went and did, because, in part, they listened to the intellectuals. They were, obviously, a ready audience as you point out.
But, justifiably ready or not, they were wrong.
I may have mentioned this earlier: My sister studied in France in the early Seventies. Talking about some issues, she said the French guys struck her as small.
D. C. McAllester, writing about “Strong men” said she was an exchange student in German in the Eighties. Call it 1985 and figure she was eighteen. She’s looking at guys that age or a couple of years older, which would be in her orbit. She found them “frail”. She could not relax until the year was over and she was reunited with the other Americans including the burly guys. I’ve worked with exchange students and we usually didn’t have much luck recruiting linebackers. Ordinary American guys were “burly” compared to the Germans.
Of course, WW II knocked off the bulk of the age group which would have been from older uncles to grandfathers and so masculine influence was probably in short supply and the occasional feminine or at least not particularly masculine reaction to one contingency or another might have been more apparent and looked “frail”.
They didnt need the intellectuals to tell them what they already knew that is the legacy that is what burleighs sacred places concerns itself with
At least in America, “intellectual” denoted not only above-average intelligence but learnedness. Intellectuals were people who knew things because they had spent many years accumulating that knowledge.
You’re referring to ‘scholarship’ or ‘expertise’. “Intellectual’ denotes someone who produces intellectual product but tends to lack expertise (apart, perhaps, of a knowledge of imaginative literature). Circulars hawking the services of Christopher Hitchens said he was willing to write to space and deadline on any subject other than science or mathematics.
One of the problems with many intellectuals is that so many live in a bubble. College professors are an example. A very comfortable bubble when you are surrounded by many who share your political and cultural ideas. Some begin to think they know a lot because they are exposed to students who don’t know much. They look out from their bubble and see what they believe are stupid people who need to be directed and supervised by people like them. They lack insight and humility about what they don’t know.
I have the equivalent of a PhD in being a pilot. 21 years (13 on active duty and 8 on active reserve) in the Navy plus 25 years as an airline pilot. During those years I was always going to schools, learning new information, and upgrading my skills. Yet, I never felt like I had totally mastered the job. Airplanes, weather, pitching decks, and mechanical failures have a way of keeping one humble. Ivory towers don’t create that sort of humility. And the intellectual is usually shielded from the accountability of one who actually does the work.
I always think about Teddy Roosevelt’s “Man in the Area” speech when I think of intellectuals trying to run things.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/63389/roosevelts-man-arena
How do we account for Thomas Sowell? He fits the description of an intellectual, but he has always had the ability to look outside the ivory tower to see and understand the life and work of the average citizen. An uncanny ability that elevates him above most intellectuals. He’s a national treasure.
JJ:
Sowell dropped out of school before he even went to college, was in the Marines, had a lot of jobs and did a lot of things before he went back to school and ultimately became a professor and then all the rest. So he had a lot of life experience first. I also think he always was strong-minded and marched to his own drummer. I read his autobiography and he never suffered fools gladly.
@ Gringo > “The more I read it, the more it sounds like gobbletygook.”
Which is why the Sokal Hoax and its recent incarnations were so successful in getting total gibberish accepted in Leftist academic journals (the only kind there are these days, apparently).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
They skipped some intervening hoaxes in 2018.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/sokal-square-hoax-taking-down-the-grievance-industry-with-parody-and-satire
Read the whole thing for the entertainment value.
The authors are people whose names should be very familiar to the news nerds.
Read more about Sokal III here:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/another-sokal-hoax-the-latest-imitation-calls-an-academic-journals-integrity-into-question?cid2=gen_login_refresh&cid=gen_sign_in
Retracted: Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor pressure in political science, economics, and philosophy
JJ and neo — well abbreviated, Sowell’s bio, I mean.
Fischer was the American chess icon in my life, getting to the top in an arena like ballet where Russians Soviets inhabited the top, during the Cold War, no less. And therefore a star player that even those uninterested in chess could identify and wonder about.
The Bobby Fischer biopic appeared not many years ago. “Pawn Sacrifice” — based on a bio book? — as film, argues that Fischer was a pawn sacrificed by leaders and institutions of the Cold War. At least the NYTimes claims it to be true.
On viewing it, enjoying all the time-capsule events and icons (eg, President Nixon telephones him), however, my sense of Fischer is less that he was pawn, and more that he himself really chose to play.
But perhaps the establishment decided to read his weird tics — like odd and disruptive demands over time, place, and manner for championship contests — as irrational expressions in the face of greater powers? They may. But I believe the fil demonstrated the opposite — that it, Bobby Fischer’s own wilfulness.
It may be true, as neo indicates, that Fischer didn’t love doing chess. It was merely his special and quixotic gift. And therefore both a blessing and a burden. Yet he was the final decider, strange and extraordinary though his demands — like his achievements — were.
We’ve gone far afield from Sowell’s lesson, which certainly finds its critical expression in Victor David Hanson’s columns, however much or little sharpened by their bi-weekly lunches, who will tell. But Hanson thinks this upper class and upper middles class wealth and lifestyle insulation from the harms of their out-of-touch policy choices deeply affects our increasingly fractious political conflicts today.
Some six months ago this is very much on display in this London Telegraph interview with Hanson SEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdkca09EHRI&t=2229s (start 17-18m).
Before closing out the Bobby Fischer-chess player example, there is a recent fictional echo of note: Beth Harmon, a kind of female version of Fischer’s arc, but filled out by the novelists own personal life struggle with alcohol and drugs, in “The Queens Gambit.”
https://www.regencychess.com/blog/index.php/2022/07/22/queens-gambit-season-2/
From late 2020 into the new year, the 7 part mini-series was the most watched program in 63 countries for Netflix. It was awarded with all but a dozen Prime Time Emmy’s.
It coincided with a near doubling in sales of chess sets, while chess book sale sextuplet.
How is Beth different from Fischer? Chess play style is similar, but anti-semitism is absent. I don’t know if the novel reflected Aspergers Syndrome, but I think the film script does broadly reflect this. (See discussion and clinician agreement in comments https://valneil.com/2020/10/30/accidentally-autistic-the-queens-gambit/ ). During Beth’s Life Magazine interview, she’s asked about apophenia. The term means a hightened visual awareness of invisible connections. Beth Harmon explains her attraction to chess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZzF4WjLhng&t=11s)
Was this also a characteristic or suspicion about Bobby Fischer?
Too many chess games in the novel? Instead, the film makers wanted to develop the theme of the personal sort, “The Cost of Genius: Inside ‘The Queens’s Gambit’” (See up to minute 4, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00e9XX0dpi0)
He is not just an individual in his thinking …..This was the norm in the western world… before WWII
You should get ’round to learning the difference between hatred on the one hand and antagonism, irritation, alienation on the other.
Generally agreed it would be silly for Germany to go to war again. Look at the map, the industrial, the…….. Therefore, it is not necessary to prepare to defend against Germany. Sowell does admit the catastrophes of WW I were still with Europeans…
There was no indication prior to 1933 that the rest of Europe was in danger from the German war machine, such as it was. It required a perfect storm of problems to put Adolf Hitler in the chancellery.
It would seem that without some kind of regulating mechanism (which is precisely what the Constitution AND the SEPARATION of powers…are meant to be), it’s bad enough when “The Best and the Brightest”(TM) are calling the shots; however, when we have, as we do currently, “The Perversest and Curruptest” in positions of almost ABSOLUTE power—whose arch-characteristics are delight in and devotion to a ubiquitous disdain and deviousness whose goal is the degradation and emasculation of the Constitution, on the one hand, and the dissolution of the SEPARATION of powers on the other, all the while driving a fierce and furious DEMONIZATION of their political opponents and their country…then that country is in deep and serious trouble.
Moreover, far too many “intellectuals” are on board with this project of Destruction and Demonization… (just as they put their weight behind the French and Russian—and other—revolutions)…all of which resulting absurdity, irresponsibility, callousness, murderousness—and TERROR—was unavoidably noticed by the “person in the street” or farm….as American “intellectuals”, to their dismay and dishonor, may deign to scoff at the “Anti-intellectualism in American Life”….
https://www.amazon.com/Richard-Hofstadter-Anti-Intellectualism-Uncollected-1956-1965/dp/1598536591
Perhaps to SAVE the Republic (and more firmly ground the government that purportedly pledged—and was elected—to serve it), we may welI need to establish the position akin to Royal (or, perhaps, Shakespearian) CLOWN as a vital and required cabinet position…this to avoid the ENTIRE government behaving in that role.
To follow TJ’s comment, I know it’s fiction, but I’ve found Netflix’s The Queens Gambit to be a very enjoyable miniseries; so much so I’ve watched it twice. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in chess genius. Anna Taylor-Joy is brilliant in the lead; a very gifted young actress. The attention to detail is amazing for us Boomers growing up in the late 50s through the 60s. The clothes, cars, decor, and they even get the Russian Tupolev 114 airliner correct.
Indeed
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/08/29/thoughts-about-clouds-and-water-vapor/
And on the other topic here: I agree with Neo and JJ’s perception of “intellectuals”. I spent my entire career with these people.
There exist in many a definite lack of real world experience. After talking to many, few ever had a “McJob” either in high school or during the summer in college. Many come from a very rich background so spent summers with the family touring Europe etc.
Many have a very inflated sense of their own importance. But I also thought after dealing with them over the years that this over inflated ego was actually a result of their knowing they really weren’t as smart as they try to project to the world. An example I noted soon after email systems allowed for a standard signature to be put in was the need to tell everyone how wonderful they were. I always judged the shallowness of the originator of the email I received when I looked at the signature line which always went:
Dr. Susan Nobody, PhD, MA, BA
Distinguished Professor of Literature
Holder of the Podunk Chair of Comparative Studies
Literature Department
Overpriced College
I always signed my emails with just my name, and used my nick name.
Art. The Germans were cheating on the military restrictions of the Versailles Treaty within five years of the end of WW I.
And the intellectuals didn’t get themselves right after the remilitarization of the Rhineland in 36.
Given Gemany’s history, you didn’t need Hitler for them to be dangerous. In fact, s’truth, WW I started BEFORE Hitler was in power. Ditto the Franco-Prussian thing, two wars against Denmark, wars of unification, war against Austria.
Balck, the best German general nobody ever head of, mused during his second unsuccessful invasion of France, that if Charlemagne’s reich had not been divided, things would have been better including not having to go to war all the time. And later he lamented, poor Germany, surrounded by stronger powers and forced to strike first. Guys like this were walking around loose in Prussia and later on, Germany. Educated, cultured after his own lights, careful with his soldiers’ lives.
The autobios of German WW II generals seem to miss a chapter: Growing up, education, enlist/commission, troop duty, staff school, promotion, observer at some damned foolishness in the Balkans, troop duty, staff school, travel, married, troop duty, staff school, move to contact. Invariably the chapter on how the copacetic life of a peacetime German officer got into a World War–one or both–has been cropped.
Sowell’s point is that Germany would do the smart and rational thing as the intellectual defined smart and rational for Germany. Anything else would be silly. And so preparing for the possibility was itself silly.
I didnt know tevis had written thr huster and its sequel as well as man who fell to earth
Art. The Germans were cheating on the military restrictions of the Versailles Treaty within five years of the end of WW I.
There’s a distinction between undertaking military recruitment and equipment purchases according to one’s discretion and ordering one’s military as an instrument of a revanchist program. I wouldn’t have blamed the krauts for implicitly telling the allied powers that if you want to limit our troop strength, start firing. I do blame them for conquering Poland and slaughtering a quarter of its population. Tell me which Weimar ministry bought into the lebensraum hooey.
The 18th century didn’t have to deal seriously with class. One could be a radical or a revolutionary and still expect to have servants and keep the lower orders in line. Such intellectuals as there were were part of the educated upper order. They could be very radical in their thinking without believing that would change. They did indeed know ancient history, and for them the mob would always be the mob.
The 19th and 20th century rediscovered class, and intellectuals and artists had to worry about whether they were on the side of the governing bourgeoisie or of a subjugated, suffering class. Often they explicitly constituted themselves as the opposition, the adversary culture. Today, the intellectuals and the governing class are again much closer. They may choose to support some proletariat, but they expect that they, or people very like themselves will have their hands on the levers of power. Even fringe socialists who despise the Democratic Party share that mindset with the people now in power.
Sowell is right that intellectuals are more interested in the exhilaration of ideas than in empirical evidence. The mania for literary theory towards the end of the last century is a good example of the passion inspired by ideas that are unprovable and largely useless. Sowell’s idea that we replaced what worked with what sounded good is also relevant. But it’s also true that some free market economists and enthusiasts are exhilarated by their own ideas and visions. That is what gave us management consultants offshoring jobs, NAFTA, and China in the WTO.
Bobby Fischer. What a sad story. He used to have chess columns in the daily newspaper, and even in Boy’s Life, the Boy Scout magazine. I think he probably hated his mother, and hated her Communism as well as her Jewishness. His paranoia may have been grounded in hers, since the FBI had been investigating her. “Chess madness” is something real, the subject of a Soviet silent film, as well as novels by Vladimir Nabokov and Stefan Zweig.
“One of the great tragedies of life is the murder of a beautiful theory by a gang of brutal facts.” — Attributed to Benjamin Franklin, though he probably didn’t say it.
The problem with intellectuals – in addition to their arrogance – is they cannot abide that others, especially ordinary folks, make life style decisions or have beliefs that are not in accord with what intellectuals deem proper or correct.
As a result, many (most?) intellectuals feel it necessary that someone (themselves) or some entity (the govt., of/by them) must control / supervise how ordinary folks must live and believe.
Of course this requires coercion , which intellectuals have no problem implementing / imposing because, well, the ends justifies the means.
It was intellectuals that founded the USA and it was very rare indeed that they created a govt. of limited powers. They could have fashioned a govt. of, by and for the ruling elites – as existed throughout Europe – but they did not.
The “limited” powers of govt concept here in the USA went into the toilet beginning in the early 1900s and it’s been downhill ever since. Today, individuals who have never held employment outside of some govt. position rule the roost in Congress and within the unaccountable govt bureaucracy.
The unaccountable bureaucracy – which makes pretty much all the laws, rules, regulations in the USA – is an ideal setup for members of Congress for it allows them to fob off work / responsibilities onto the bureaucrats and evade responsibility for the result of bureaucratic decisions. .
Congress has essentially become a club composed of sinecural positions.
Speaking of intellectuals speaking from their anal portals, Noam Chomsky is near the top of the list. For him, the Soviets could do no wrong and the USA was the ultimate plague infecting planet earth. He even spent a several years trying to turn Pol Pot into a good guy.
Art. Point is, by cheating, the Germans prepared to go to war…again. Their history justified the Allies’ concerns. See, when some damned foolishness in the Balkans lit off, the Germans looked in their filing cabinet and found they got to invade FRANCE! They’d even staffed it to the last bullet. Wow! O frabjous day!
They could have stayed home. The inevitable cost they’d know they’d incur by winning was acceptable if they got France. To do what with? But their nature was not to miss an opportunity.
I don’t have the font big enough and our hostess wouldn’t allow the vocab for a sentence saying, in effect, they could have stayed home. No WW I.
I don’t know about the Brits, but the French made porcelain face shields with faces on them. You could hang one on what was left of your head if you were going out. They built resorts for guys so hideously mutilated they wouldn’t go out in public.
It was the Germans’ choice and the likelihood it would happen again made the Allies concerned about the ability. Hence the treaty.
Although not provable, it might have been better for the bastards to hang on until the Yanks got there in strength for the 1919 fighting season. And smashed them flat, occupying in post-WW II style. None of this European Usual where the big shots don’t miss a meal and some remain in positions of influence.
There are still Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs duking and princing and making the society pages, marrying money and not needing a 9-5 to put bread on the table.
It took 300k US troops sitting on them for seventy-five years to give them the longest period of peace since the Battle of Tollense.
However, your point is correct. The Allies should have started shooting immediately.
Any resistance in 36–“a single French platoon”–more than likely need a battalion and the Kraut officers would have gone to Berlin and canned Hitler.
But the intellectuals…to return to Sowell’s discussion, said it was both unnecessary and wrong.
So the next one was worse.
I always signed my emails with just my name, and used my nick name.
I’m not understanding your issue with putting your affiliation, address & c. in the autosignature. I did so for years, not to tell people I was wonderful, but to tell them where I worked, why I might have business with them, and how they could contact me above and beyond using email. It never occurred to me that the faculty members who did this were peacocking about. They had business cards too. (If I did have a nickname, I wouldn’t put it on office correspondence).
Art,
OK, but why list all your degrees and your title, and your honorary chair position?
Why not:
Dr. Susan Nobody
Literature Department
Overpriced College
phone number
?
And to include all that nonsense to other faculty colleagues? I have to say 95% of the time it was in the humanities and social studies; generally the scientists would just sign “Pete” etc, especially for any internal college emails.
Richard Aubrey,
I believe that is a gross oversimplification of the wars of German unification and the blame for starting The Great War.
Way back in the 80s, I was doing research in air defense for the USAF. I had a trip to Europe to brief some NATO contractors. Before I left, my father advised me to “never trust the Germans”. I thought that was so strange since his paternal grandmother was a Mecklenburger from Hamburg (i.e., a Hamburger har har).
While I was in Hamburg, I was waiting to cross the street and I remarked to the person I was with how different this was than some of the other cities I had been in in the last few days. Pedestrian crossing controls seem to be more suggestions than rules in those other cities. “Yes” he replied. “Good little Hermans aren’t they”.
Yeah, there were perfectly peaceful and reasonable reasons for the Germans to set up shell companies in Switzerland in the early 1930s (before the H dude came to power) for research and manufacture of machine guns and autocannons (Solothurn IIRC), an activity prohibited by that evil Treaty of Versailles. Or a perfectly reasonable …. for doing secret training in the USSR in the 1930s about tank design, tank warfare, and tactics.
Oh those poor maligned Germans, who knew, Art? Funny how that worked out. The allies just had to flatten all their urban areas and make the rubble bounce before the Germans would quit. My give a “f” is all gone.
Chases. Never got to Germany but I knew a lot of guys who’d done the long tour there, or grew up there when their parents did. They had opinions.
Happened to read about the Battle of Britain in a book by Group Captain–forget the name but he almost married royalty. Mentioned several times that the Germans got a hand from Stalin when he allowed them to start their Luftwaffe at a location in Ukraine when having one was forbidden.
Their 100k man army was a cadre army with each man selected and trained to jump two ranks when the lid was lifted and the training camps started up. In most armies, a good corporal is looked at to see if he’d make a decent buck sergeant. And so forth. But in the cadre army, you didn’t make corporal if you weren’t already known to be a good staff sergeant. That ought to be a tell.
I didn’t say the Germans started WW I. I make the case that, had they stayed home, hardly anybody would have noticed whatever it was in the Balkans or been able to tell if from the last damned foolishness in the Balkans.
Folks, what of the current German folly? They’re facing possible hunger, definite hypothermia, and industrial devastation. And yet, the politicians are still talking like it’s just going to be a bit inconvenient. Many current and past politicians seem to be bought and paid for agents of Russia, via green political funding. The lights are already going out and their Greenies are still demanding the shutdown, never mind blocking the reopening, of the three remaining nuke plants.
The UK is not much better. Energy costs are going to be five to ten times higher than last year. There’s a big conference call, which anyone can join, apparently, about energy and it was baldly stated on it that no one believes what they’re saying.
30 percent of households are telling pollsters they’re not even going to turn on the heat. Firewood in Germany is gone. Those good Hermans are sneaking into their carefully manicured forests to steal whatever they can get.
A lot of people are going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning trying to heat with badly ventilated wood stoves–and probably die of fires, too.
The German winter is long, dark and cold.
Richard Aubrey:
Have recently started reading “Blood and Ruins”
https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Ruins-Last-Imperial-1931-1945-ebook/dp/B098PY895Z
The Germans, Italians, and Japanese lusted and felt compelled to sieze or create an empires from the British, French, Dutch, Soviets or who ever was weaker. A follow on from and correction to Imperial destruction of WWI. neo has written about the German’s plans for eastern Europe they had glimpsed fleetingly that empire when the Russians were defeated in WWI.
I’m only a little way into it so can’t say how the book will fare. Regarding German guilt in WWI, ask the Belgians; they must have forced the Prussian hand (sarc)? Much like the Poles. Some things in German charachter hadn’t changed it seems.
om. An intellectual would say such seizures would be silly since you can buy all the stuff you need a heck of a lot cheaper than paying for a war. Thus, a war won’t happen. So don’t waste money and time preparing for defense.
Now, obviously, this is true, and those who chose war instead have some guilt since they can’t say they were forced to it by lack of raw materials. They just felt like it, however they want to dress it up.
So such Germans who voted Green without being dyed in the wool lefty/green are going to find out something. Like maybe virtue signaling by voting despite reality has its issues. One issue is going to be that the big shots, including Greens who, if not on the Inside would be starving in the dark and cold, are not going to be starving in the dark and cold. Which will be obvious to the others. It’s one thing to have rolling blackouts. It’s another when your kid dies of hypothermia–happened once or twice in Texas last winter, I believe.
It’s enlightening to look at a map. Berlin’s latitude is just short of that of the south shore of Hudson Bay. The shortest day is just over nine hours. York, in England is a bit further north with a slightly shorter winter’s day.
You get tired of being cold. Even just chilly for hours and hours……
How many folks will remember to have their water running…all the time? Forget that in a fourth-floor apartment….
It’s going to be very tough. Too bad they listened to Trump. Wait….never mind.
Germany unlike Great Britain doesn’t have the Gulf Stream to moderate their weather. Hypothermia kills more people than heat stroke. Same as with CO poisoning or chimney fires from creosote build up (chimney sweeps anyone). Chimney sweeps used to have high morbidity from exposure to carcinogens in coal tar and ash IIRC. And probably from falling off rooves.
Physicsguy, thanks for your observations on “The Queens Gambit.” (@ 8:16AM)
You say you’ve watched the 7 part series twice. I’ve watched it three times (if only to sit with others new to this 2020 gem).
Physicsguy celebrates the period settings of the 1950s and 1960s.
“To follow TJ’s comment, I know it’s fiction, but I’ve found Netflix’s The Queens Gambit to be a very enjoyable miniseries….The attention to detail is amazing for us Boomers growing up in the late 50s through the 60s. The clothes, cars, decor, and they even get the Russian Tupolev 114 airliner correct.”
Here’s a shocker. Walter Travis lived in the Lexington, Northern Kentucky, and Ohio region. And these are where nearly all of the Queen’s Gambit story is set — save for chess matches in Vegas, New York City, Paris, Mexico City, etc.
But in fact it was almost entirely timed in Berlin, Germany! Yes, I’ll call this a shock to me.
Walter Travis wrote six novels, three of which became popular films — like “The Hustler,” “The Color of Money,” as well as “The Man Who Fell to Earth” — yet his fourth and last, “The Queen’s Gambit,” contains the most autobiographical and psychological parts ever.
Within weeks of the series streaming release “The Queen’s Gambit”, it got the vblogger-fan plot and character development synopsis treatment, which is clip heavy, and sees 550 minutes reduced to 28 minutes (CAUTION — TOTAL PLOT SPOILERS — the vblogger has even read the novel, confirming many suspected improvements in the tale) “The Queen’s Gambit and Self Destruction | Best show of 2020 Explained”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIdxbLFkkk0
Physicsguy may enjoy it — I have.
Back to the unique themes of talent and genius versus emotional and social needs — and the trickieness for the gifted or near-gifted’s great hurdle of reconciling the two.
There is a single “House, MD” TV episode dealing precisely with this dilemma. But first, does it really exist? Mental illness does indeed interfere with creativity — true. But at the same time, once IQ is 1.5 standard deviations away from the norm (or is it one SD), the ability to socially relate and therefore emotionally connect with others gets stressed and can cease completely.
THIS is the tragedy of the SWJ obliteration of Gifted and Talented school programs in California and increasingly everywhere in the US, going on now. Previously, giftedness was treated as merit, and therefore a natural human capital resource which we might all benefit from developing and socially indulging. No more…under John Rawls ethical maxims.
The House, MD episode adroitly explains this dilemma, from 2009, entitled “Ignorance is Bliss.” MORE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignorance_Is_Bliss_(House)
Does this interpersonal and developmental conflict actually manifest, recognisably? I could go on about my three plus friends for whom it certainly has. For now, please enjoy these fictional imitations of real life. Thanks for indulging my digression, neo.
No more…under John Rawls ethical maxims.
Chuckles. John Rawls doesn’t influence school administrators or any of the other issue of teacher’s colleges. They’re mediocre people who despise personal accomplishment and robust operational measures of competence. No need to tart it up with the difference principle.
And to include all that nonsense to other faculty colleagues?
You mean you want them to have one autosignature for outside correspondence and one for correspondence with other faculty?
It’s the modal practice to close your e-mail with your initials or some such, with the autosignature appearing below and to the left. (I did have multiple autosignatures at one point, adding a motto to some correspondence. Did get asked for an explanation of that Hunter Thompson quote).
IMO, one of the minor annoyances about latter-day faculty is the men’s contrived informality. Put on a coat, tie, and dress shoes.
Bobby Fischer besides being an execrable person suffered from severe Aspergers.