Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So, what are you reading?
Still on Future Shock and 12 Commandments. Picking up Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.
Tore through three of the Jutland chapters in Castles of Steel.
God damn. This book needs to be required reading for anyone smugposting about military strategy. Oh, why didn’t Russia do X? Surely the U.S. should have done Y! Forget military strategy—I want to suggest this to the sort of person who insists that a failure to adopt some specific tactic means their opponents are stupid, evil, and/or insincere.
Let me back up. For the unfamiliar: Jutland was the first and only major sea battle of WWI. The UK’s Royal Navy and the Imperial German Navy had been prodding at each other for nearly two years without decisive action. At the end of May 1916, the Germans set a trap, but the British preempted it with one of their own. As with many actions in WWI, the result was a horrendously bloody method of preserving the status quo. It was also a long chain of failures, some of which were unavoidable, and others of which were COMPLETE BLUNDERS.
The British
dick-measuringinfighting.Meanwhile, the Germans
In the end, several thousand men died. The German fleet was never allowed to plan something like this again, which suited the Royal Navy fine. Their newfound free time was devoted to infighting. Someone had to be blamed for at least a few of their unforced errors.
Which brings me back to the modern day. As always, it’s tempting to abuse the power of hindsight: ah, the British ought to have known their ships were death traps. The Germans never should have sailed without a fix on their enemies’ positions. So on, so forth, until we remember that it’s called “fog of war” for a reason and rein in our expectations.
More insidious, though, are the fallacies of planning. Even when we recognize that they simply couldn’t have known what we know—we fail to apply this to the present. We ask questions without knowing they’re the right ones, give orders without realizing they’re ambiguous. Plans disintegrate not on contact with the enemy, but on contact with the air, falling apart even as they first escape our minds.
If you find yourself making a plan that relies on rigorous communication, on individual initiative, on specific reactions from outsiders: your plan will not be implemented as you envisioned it. That’s alright; you can still get a desirable result! But if you think it has to happen your way, you will be disappointed.
This goes double when you’re planning for someone else. You have less skin in the game. You probably have less information, too. So if you consider all this, and you still want to insist that a rational person would already have enacted your plan…
Read this book. Or, for efficiency’s sake, read longtime SSC commenter bean’s blog version. You won’t be disappointed.
More options
Context Copy link
Finished JD Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. The second half is more about his experience at Yale Law and how the social connections he made there provided him tremendous opportunity for advancement, along with various musings on what societal and/or policy shifts might be beneficial for his "hillbilly" communities. Nothing super innovative I suppose, but it is interesting to see the issues these communities have getting more attention.
It could also be considered interesting for what isn't in it. There's hardly a word about any sort of substance abuse by Vance himself, not any drug use or heavy drinking, aside from a brief mention that his urine might not pass a drug test when his mother tries to get some clean urine from him to pass her own drug test. Nothing about any sorts of petty crime either. Also nothing about any romantic or sexual interest or behavior aside from meeting and getting with his now-wife.
The positive and charitable take on this is that it's a book that's supposed to be about the economic and social problems of his community and how he overcame them, not a dramatic tell-all. There's also the cynical take that it was written with at least a hope, if not expectation, that it would lead to a bigger career in politics and so anything that anyone might find offensive or scandalous was left out. He does write a lot about how the social contacts and advice he received at Yale opened a lot of doors for him, so it seems pretty reasonable to assume they continued opening doors to making contact with high-level conservative political influencers and launching a skyrocketing political career.
It's been a few years since I read it, but my impression of Hillbilly Elegy was that it was mediocre as a political polemic (mostly because the book was IMO too short to develop the many points it was trying to stab at, be it his political arguments or his personal story), but that Vance's personal story was very compelling. As someone who voted for the Trump/Vance ticket I was far more impressed with Senator Vance's growth through the 2024 campaign trail than the book, movie, or his Senate campaign.
With that, as someone whose background was "Hillbilly Elegy with the details shuffled and maybe a bit worse" I was not prepared for how much reading Vance's story would me down an emotionally ugly trip down memory lane that left me in tears asking God why we had to be like that.
My big reservation with the book is that I came away from it wondering if he was telling a story about Borderer honor culture or multiple generations of Borderline Personality Disorder in a family in a Borderer context. He mentioned having an ACE score of 7/10, and that is sufficiently severe/rare that I would strongly caution against generalizing about a cultural group (even/maybe especially your own) based on living through that.
I will say that I have a fairly critical view of "Borderer honor culture" because I experienced too much of its extreme, aka. the use of firearms in domestic arguments. That's just not okay. There is no circumstance in which it is acceptable to kill your daughter in a murder-suicide because your wife presented you with divorce papers. Shooting yourself dead in an argument with your girlfriend may well be the most dramatic way to make your point short of murder, but doing so makes you a piece of shit for what that does to her. Both of those things happened to close relatives of mine, and it's not okay. I blanched when the book mentioned his Mamaw (I had a chain-smoking Mamaw named Bonnie too.) lighting his grandfather on fire because that was something Mom would've done to us if it had occurred to her and it was fucking terrifying growing up under the thumb of a screaming, constantly threatening banshee. He captured the toxic push-pull dynamic of dependence and resentment between Mom and Mamaw perfectly.
Vance was right to say that his experience of interpersonal/familial relationships was so different from his wife Usha's that they might as well have been from a different planet. In my experience an ACE score of 7 comes with a bunch of fucked up stories that I now hesitate to tell because they're nuclear-level buzzkills in the typical "Millennial complain about your family" session and because I'm at a place in life where I'd rather not dwell on the shit I'm trying to move on from. If I were to write my own Hillbilly Elegy the cover would feature me sitting in a local reporter's car watching my house burn down and all my belongings with it two weeks before Christmas when it turns out that the fire was set by my mother for the insurance money.
On a side note, I wound up befriending a bunch of second-gen immigrants in high school/undergrad and for whatever reasons their first gen parents, be they Russian/Ukrainian or Indian, tended to instantly like me and trust me as a friend for their children who was capable of handling plebian tasks for them like changing a tire, putting out a fire, or teaching them basics like "how to fry an egg" or "how to do laundry". Likewise, as an undergrad I had certain professors who gave me a lot more leniency than I deserved or asked for (concerning turning in assignments late; writing apologetic emails for late assignments was something I developed into an art form as a student) because they perceived me as "not privileged" because I worked a full-time job as a student.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link