acb relays an article about anachronisms of typeface in movies. I remembered my glee in spotting Palatino (1950) in a tv episode of Poirot (Thirties), and post-1918 Russian handwriting described as “very old . . . hard to read” in Lovejoy.
it’s a dog-trade-with-dog world
Peter Hollo cites an interview with Richard Dawkins, at an address which has unfortunately gone bad since January 15. Hollo writes:
. . . you can read Dawkins distancing himself from a kind of Thatcherite, “Darwinian”, dog-eat-dog world of the survival of the fittest (which would equate to the extreme laissez-faire capitalist position).
Apples and oranges. ‘Survival of the fittest’ (or, as Ayn Rand would have it, ‘of the fit’) applies in any system; what varies is the meaning of fit. In a world dominated by the ethic of trade, fit means uniquely or efficiently satisfying the desires of others. In a world dominated by so-called Social Darwinism or bureaucratic egalitarianism, fit means playing the rulers’ game.
(‘Social Darwinism’ is a misnomer because its eugenist adherents fancy themselves wiser than slow clumsy Nature in identifying the unfit. Dawkins and Gould are both humbler than that – as is a good libertarian.)
About 1985 I read an essay entitled ‘The Danger of Equality’ by somebody named Gorer. To summarize his dimly-remembered thesis: In a complex society with many kinds of institutions, there are many modes of status-seeking – owning the biggest boat, having one’s daughter presented at the royal court – which are generally harmless; whereas under regimes which seek to abolish all that in the name of equality, like France the USSR, the only road for social-climbers is the quest for power over others, which is corrosive all around.
Compared with how I as a student imagined it, my life has been an abject failure (but don’t get me started on depression); and yet, most of the time, I have been quite comfortable doing low-level work for small firms. (Family kept the wolf of Reality from my door during a couple of years.) In a less chaotic, less dog-eat-dog world, my allergy to conformist authority might well have killed me by now.
The soft leftist I once was might retort: “In a truly egalitarian world you wouldn’t be forced to conform.” See Bellamy’s Looking Backward, or the ‘hate speech’ codes. Would-be social engineers too often mistake the normative for the predictive, or, as linguists would say, the prescriptive for the descriptive.
Poll time: How often do you click on the column of “other blogs” links in other blogs?
I don’t; if I wanted a long list of cryptic links, I have my own bookmark file to go through.
Eventually it occurred to me that by publishing my conversation with ‘Tom’ (here and on several libertarian mailing-lists) I spoiled its evidentiary value. Dammit. I’ll never be Nero Wolfe (though I surpass him in one respect).
I have the impression that, to the police, whatever they do to you is “no harm no foul” so long as you’re not wrongly convicted, no matter what inconvenience and discomfort you’ve suffered meanwhile. But that impression comes largely from television shows sympathetic to the police.
I am usually of two minds about capital punishment, but when a story like this comes along – and this is not the first – it’s a bit easier to decide where I stand.
I suppose it’s too much to hope that the hangman might simply refuse to do the job.