The Iconoclasts

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

No, I’m not going to talk about the people who think they’re edgy and dangerous by breaking statues, in the most traditional habit in history, that of damnatio memoriae, where the memories of people who are disapproved of by those currently in power are expunged from public consciousness. The ancient Egyptians did it, for crying in bed. The problem right now is that this generation is so history illiterate they are trying to erase the memory of the entire past, not just a particular person of whose actions they disapprove.

There are several reasons for this, one of them being that, nope, they don’t know history, but more importantly, they don’t understand that history exists: that is, they completely fail to understand and believe, much less internalize the fact that people in the past weren’t exactly like them, didn’t have exactly the same ideas and the same interests, and were driven by different pressures. They never reasoned, for instance, that slavery was all pervasive in the past, not because people in the past were somehow uniformly evil or stupid (as opposed to their enlightened selves) but because there were different pressures on human society before widespread mechanization. That is, to be fair, everyone (but a very privileged few, did an insane amount of work and there was simply work that was too unpleasant and boring for free people to do it, or that it was impossible to pay people enough to do. Slavery — and as far as the impulse to force others to do what one wants, that’s the oldest sin of mankind — filled that niche. What eventually freed the slaves (which to be fair some religious souls always aspired to do, but there is no society in which “if everyone just” worked, so while the religious souls might have freed their own slaves, preached against slavery, that wasn’t going to make it vanish wholesale) was the mechanization of work. In places in the world where mechanization isn’t common, de facto or de jure slavery still exists.

Anyway, taking slavery as an example, one can understand a feeling of disgust at the practice leading young people to want to destroy, say, statues of famous slave traders (there are none that I know of) but they have gone past that to destroying statues of anyone who might have owned slaves, to statues erected by recently freed slaves, to commemorate their freeing.

That’s just wanting to expunge all memory of the past, partly because they assume all the past is somehow tainted, but also and more importantly because they have imbibed deep the Marxist-neo-Rosseunian ethic that if you destroy everything somehow paradise will emerge.

It is also not that ethic, the “everything in the past was wrong and I’m going to destroy it” that I’m going to talk about, but perhaps the comeback from it.

If I’m right, the time we’re entering could rightly be called “A time of iconolasts.”

Except of course, since it’s coming after a time of the iconoclasts themselves being in power and engaging in wholesale condemnation of what came before, it’s going to look very odd.

To understand what is coming you have to understand what the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did. By being the culmination of the industrial revolution, and bringing in mechanization of all processes, and making a lot of things cheaper via mass-manufacturing, it ushered in an era of unprecedented prosperity. It also ushered in an era therefore in which many of the rules of the past no longer applied. When technology or economics change and make the previously inescapable rules and necessities optional, it becomes easy and natural to imagine that all rules and all social restraint and all the centuries-old ideas of “how things are done” can also be done away with. And because many can indeed be done away with with little harm or harm that only becomes obvious in retrospect, a lot of things get swept away — like the wholesale breaking of statues just because they’re statues.

This was one of the forces of the 20th century. It was further fed by a popular understanding of Darwinian theory (popular and very wrong) that led people to believe that each generation got better or more enlightened.

The other force, because people need and seek “leaders” and wish to believe their leaders are special, was the odd cult of “experts.” It started fairly early, much earlier than any of us will think, if we don’t know about it. It was fed by the idea that there were many discoveries being made that brilliant people were coming up with amazing things every day in which they were experts. While this was absolutely true — to an extent. Many of those “discoveries” were wrong or partially wrong and didn’t connect easily into the “system of everything” that these people tried to create. But never mind. At the time there were discoveries in astronomy, in physics, in biology, and a discoverer could make a pretty good living of lecturing on it. There were also lectures on what we’d consider “Self help systems” including how to improve your memory (That being the one I remember.) This was going on from the eighteenth century at least, but in the mid twentieth century, it coalesced with the prevalence of mass-manufacturing, and the subsequent concentration of power in big cities and a powerful state apparatus, and fed off the subsidence of churches so rulers couldn’t say they were ruling by the power of G-d. A new vast apparatus of “experts” appeared, culminating in all the governmental departments which are supposedly advised and staffed by “experts” and “trained people” and well… “best men.”

I don’t know if “very capable” “best men” were ever involved in any of that. Personally I doubt it. Having been involved in artistic and scientific endeavors of various kinds, the “expert” who “knows everything about” whatever it is usually turns out to be either a sham or grossly exaggerated. And the number of even middling scientists or artists who are willing to leave their field of endeavor to become government bureaucrats is zero, meaning those associated with government are usually useless.

However by the mid century the press was also centralized, and in service of big government, which could burnish those “experts” and make them seem like supermen.

But that is the culture all of us grew up in. I’m sixty one, and I grew up in this mind set of “ask the experts.” By the 90s, we seemed to have “new experts” with “new theories” coming out every day. Most of them of the “self-help” variety. The “wonks” of the 90s made me roll my eyes, because what they kept coming up with amounted to “a new way to collect pocket lint.” However people piously believed it, and if you paid attention, friends and colleagues would tell you “Actually, research proves the best way to collect pocket lint is to–“

Only, as we’ve found out, as the control of the media escaped those (largely Marxists and neo-leftists) who kept the appearance of infallibility and expertise in place, most “scientific research” is falsified (quite literally most of it) particularly in the soft sciences, and most “experts” are no such thing, and most “new way to” is just a variation on rotating the cat.

Long before the watershed of 2020 people had the uneasy experience that those in control of the ship of state had escaped from the proverbial ship of fools and were just old fools in a new floating vessel.

But the last 4 years have been a mind-blowing demonstration of the falibility, incompetence and sheer ridiculousness of the “experts” and “top men” (not to mention “top women” or “top people who aren’t sure what they are.”)

I don’t think they can recover from this. And of course from such events two courses of results flow. One is that people stop believing in everything. They just devolve to savagery and inability to function. There is some of that, but curiously not as much as you’d expect, and most of it seems to be from that fringe element who would otherwise be mental patients anyway.

What we’re mostly seeing are people who are reaching back, beyond the mid-century and trying to recover what has been lost. People 30 and younger are desperately trying to figure out how things were done, and how things worked.

And yeah, part of it is that tech has changed again, from mass-everything to far more personal, which means what we have doesn’t work and older things might work.

If my feeling is right, the coming era is one at which we dethrone the “experts” and cock a snook at them. (I don’t know what a snook is but I’m itching to cock it.) And instead we try to figure out what used to work, and try it to see if it works. And we study and inform ourselves on whatever we’re trying to do — aided by the internet’s availability of information on everything — and figure out how to do it the best way. Which often is the old way, though perhaps modified for current circumstances.

And if my guess is right it’s going to be glorious.

197 thoughts on “The Iconoclasts”

      1. Yep, that’s the meaning of “cock a snoot” but Sarah wondered about “what’s a snoot”. 😉

        1. I once saw a 1940’s-era cartoon that featured some ants fighting against an anteater (that looked oddly like Hitler for reasons that were surely a complete coincidence…). As they were marching off to the fight, they were singing a song whose chorus went, “We’ll make him cry uncle! We’ll kick him in the snoot!” Or it might have been “punch” or “hit” rather than “kick”. But it makes me pretty sure that snoot was slang for nose.

          1. Goodness gracious, I actually found the cartoon I was thinking of. Let’s see if the Youtube embed feature works.

            1. That opening pan was quite something.

              A recognizable and effective technique.

                1. That’s certainly what it looked like.

                  And thank you, I could not for the life of me remember what it was actually called. XD

          1. This adds (a little) to the information https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095621114 . The snook APPEARS to be the gesture (hand spread, thumb placed near the nose, finger wiggling optional). “Cock a snoot” seems a variant phrasing. I would guess it arose because snook made no darned sense to the speaker where as snoot was a pretty common slang for nose and one does place the thumb on the nose.

            Oddly Snook (or Common Snook, Centropomus undecimalis – Wikipedia link omitted lest I gain the wrath of WordPress) is a large (like bluefish/trout size) fish found in subtropical US waters (Gulf of Mexico Florida and Texas). To my knowledge no one has suggested throwing snook at people as a sign of derision, This may likely be to the Snooks overfished status making them illegal to catch. I fear continuing in this vein is likely to get me carped.

  2. Hi Sarah. Here’s what “cock a snook” literally means, and I have absolutely no doubt that you’ve done it more than a few times, as have I:

    https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/16687/what-is-the-etymology-and-literal-meaning-of-cock-a-snoot-snook

    “The general understanding of what’s meant by ‘cock a snook’ is the spread hand with thumb on the nose, preferably with crossed eyes, waggling fingers and any other annoying gesticulation that comes to mind at the time. It’s what the Americans call ‘the five-fingered salute’.”

  4. I don’t know what a snook is 

    When I started reading, I decided to lookup “iconoclast”. I had an idea of what it meant, but I thought an exact definition would be helpful. Then I scrolled down. Allow me to return the favor.

    / snuk, snʊk /
    Plural (Especially Collectively) snook, (Especially Referring To Two Or More Kinds Or Species) snooks.

    1. any basslike fish of the genus Centropomus, especially C. undecimalis, inhabiting waters off Florida and the West Indies and south to Brazil, valued as food and game.
    2. any of several related marine fishes.
    3. a gesture of defiance, disrespect, or derision.

    I don’t know if “very capable” “best men” were ever involved in any of that. 

    It took me a surprisingly long time to notice/figure-out that Bones was propaganda to that effect. Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981, so “best men” has been a joke for my entire adult life and I still didn’t notice.

    1. Sounds like Cocking a Snook resembles throwing fish at them. Which… yes, I think that’s a fantastic way to treat so-called “experts”

    2. “Cock a snook” means to make that derisive gesture (“snook”), and apparently the gesture in question was thumbing one’s nose. William Safire called up a bunch of UK friends to confirm this.

      Then he found an 1860 slang dictionary which said that the London street urchins would put their thumb on the nose, keep their fist closed, and then wiggle their pinky only (instead of all the fingers, as in modern times).

      Keeping your fist completely closed would make it “the fig,” so I guess wiggling the pinky with the thumb extended to the side of the nose would either be “hook ’em horns” or some variant on biting one’s thumb.

      The “cocking” is putting your thumb at an angle, in this case, like cocking your hat is putting it at an angle.

      However, a drawing from Fraser’s Magazine, Sept. 1837, p. 357, shows pretty much the same “thumbing your nose” as might be seen today.

      https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015005606879&seq=359

      At Hathitrust, if you are in the US. It’s also in the Internet Archive, if you’re not.

      1. Anyhoo… the way Safire put it was misleading, because his UK friends called it “cock a snook,” we call it “thumbing your nose,” and the kids in London who were in the Hotten slang dictionary in 1864 called it “taking a sight.”

        Safire, man. Annoying.

    3. it’s a specific gesture of defiance, disrespect, etc., One cocks one’s snook by placing the thumb on the nose and wagging the fingers. Earliest known use ca., 1790. There’s a theory that snook is from snout, but it could be from the word for pike — the fish — which has quite a prominent snout with big, sharp, nasty, pointy teeth.

  5. People have different idols now. They don’t recognize their behavior is the same, just redirected.

    Catching a cocked snook must be very similar to being slapped with a carp…

  6. One problem. We don’t know about all the single points of failure that crash the system. With “just in time” systems little margin for error, what nail crashes the kingdom from its lack? 3,000 years the world system crashed. They blamed the “sea peoples”. Was it lack of tin that crashed their system.? Today we have many thousands of critical parts, with single point of failures that threaten systemic failure. We don’t know what we don’t know. We trust what we shouldn’t trust. I give you the Texas electrical “system”.

    Civil war will break the system. It will not be easy to rebuild. What replaces it leaves a world with many fewer people, and fewer good things. I fear this is our likely path, since the wreckers keep breaking civilization’s supports. Trust is now an illusion. That is our greatest loss. Civilization requires trust.

    1. Trust on the small scale remains intact. And in some states, there’s trust in some institutions of the state government. From that, a lot can be rebuilt. Other places it won’t be so easy, but I don’t think civilization will entirely collapse.

      Even when the Roman Empire of the west gave up the ghost, people kept striving. It took a while, but Western Europe surpassed Rome. Yes, it was the end of a world, and the dark ages. For others it was Late Antiquity and trade declined for a while but never ceased.

    2. They got their copper from Michigan, and shipped it to Eurasia. Most access to the Americas was cut off by divine fiat 3,000 years ago, only being restored 1500 years ago–partially: full access was restored by Cristobal Colon at the close of the 15th century Anno Domini.

  7. A definition I heard a long time back. Expert: X, in algebra, is an unknown. Spurt, in engineering, is a drip under pressure. Therefore, expert is an unknown drip under pressure. Seems to make more sense as the years go by.

    1. I always heard that as ex, meaning has been, and spurt, meaning drip, so an expert was a has been and all wet.

    2. I prefer ex = former; pert = attractively small and firm, saucy and witty.

      As with tunicates when they leave their larval form, mature experts become bloated and unattractive, and eat their own brains.

  8. The way to know that an “expert” is no such thing but is a hack trying to gain personal power over others and to advance the efforts to gain power of the faction they serve (almost always a leftist one) is that they treat devotion to their “expertise” to be a religious dogma, with those who disagree treated as heretics rather than responded to with rational, evidence based argument.

    A true scientist doesn’t demand that those who disagree be imprisoned; they challenge the findings and propositions of those who disagree by presenting evidence and logical argument. The fact that so many of today’s “experts” response to anyone questioning is to yell “shut up” and to then get media and tech oligarchs to silence such persons, tells you everything you need to know.

    1. It does indeed. The two phrases which have come to hoist the largest red flags for me are “experts say” and “settled science”, especially when either has anything to do with something new. Real scientists have no greater joy than disproving hypotheses, sometimes even their own. Science is a process, not a “thing”.

      1. This is a variant of Clarke’s first law

        When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

        Clarke having come of age in the early 20th century had been seeing this go on for ALL his life, particularly in the world of atomic physics.

        1. Alternately, “Science advances one funeral at a time.”

          Scientists get attached to certain theories. New studies suggest that theory might have flaws. But the old guard of scientists aren’t ready to give up the theory. Thus it’s not until they all pass away that the research updating the theory can progress.

          1. While it might be a strange idea to people who read this blog, most people accept what they are taught, integrate it into their worldview, and then vigorously defend whatever it is from attack, even if it is objectively ridiculous.

            Some people have trouble learning things. But UNlearning is way harder than that.

  9. Perhaps we could use some iconoblasts.

    Would a snook play snooker? Might one address a snook as snookums?

    2. One may only address the snook as snookums if one is VERY familiar. Anything else would be well… fishy.

    1. Looks like “cock a snook” dates to 1791 (at least as written), according to dictionary dot com. Nobody claims to know what “snook” is/was.

      IMHO, I’d class substituting “snoot” for “snook” along with “running the gauntlet” as opposed to “gantlet”. But that’s me. 🙂

  11. Yes. It has the potential to be glorious. I’m going back to original sources. Others are as well.

      1. Let’s start a few years earlier–not forgetting 1787-1789–with an updated version of:

        “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation…”

        Permanent independence from commies and parasitical cretins of every stripe.

        We need to bury that ideological hazardous waste deeper than any nuclear waste ever has been… after all, even the most poisonous nuclear waste can actually be made useful, since it *emits energy*. Seriously… nuclear byproduct is worth more than gold, and we’ve been *throwing it out* for over a century. Makes me crazy.

        1. There are actually several kinds of nuclear waste — everything from nuclear fuel rods that can no longer sustain a chain reaction to machinery, filters and clothing tainted with just a trace of radioactive isotopes.

          We used to reprocess spent fuel rods, separate out the fission byproducts, re-enrich the uranium and put them back in reactors. Jimmeh Cahtah put a stop to that in 1977 by executive order which has never been countermanded. Thus the need to store thousands of tons of nuclear ‘waste’ AND mine more uranium to fuel the reactors. Any president from Reagan on could have undone the idiocy, but so far nobody has.

          Reagan’s other great failing, second only to not abolishing the Department Of Education.

          1. Not just that. How things are declared to be nuclear waste has a strong resemblance to the children’s game of “cooties.” Some things that have been near radiation, but are not themselves radioactive, magically become nuclear waste even though they can’t move the needle on the rad meter.

            1. Practically anything will turn radioactive if it’s bombarded with neutrons. Exposure to gamma radiation has no such effects. There is probably some idiotic government regulation that fails to make any distinction about what type of radiation something is exposed to.

              “We can’t force the government to make laws that conform to reality.”

        2. Well, storing it, not throwing it out. Spent fuel could easily be reprocessed, but as Imaginos1892 notes, Jimmeh the Inept stopped that because it is possible to get plutonium and make weapons from the reprocessing. indeed that was how we got plutonium for all our weapons, via burning uranium in reactors and chemically separating the fraction of plutonium that results. But you can make new reactor fuel rods too, as the ultimate carbon-free recycling.

          Can’t have that. NewKewLer stuff is bad magic.

  12. Yes. It has the potential to be glorious. I’m going back to original sources. Others are as well.

  14. Cult of the Expert was in Victorian England. Apparently that was where they got the idea that if you closed the windows, everyone would suffocate: someone did some math, messed up or missed the indoor / outdoor exchange rate, and got a completely wrong number.

    But it got printed, and everyone in England believed it, so you had to have the windows open in winter or everyone would surely die.

    1. I loved the one in a Spanish-language science book about how a plant in a closed room will kill you in your sleep by absorbing all the oxygen.

    2. Interestingly enough, my aunt and uncle almost died because of that estimate being accurate.

      Carbon monoxide, in the house that their son helped them get as energy efficient as was currently possible… which means it shut out all the drafts.

      Be interesting to see if that may have been involved in the estimate, and if they even had a clue about carbon monoxide.

      1. I’d have to go dig it up, but having lived in a hundred year old house that (as it turns out) did have a CO non-compliant floor heater, the main reason it didn’t do us any harm was because the house was sealed about as well as a colander that the bottom had fallen out of.

        We slowly fixed that, and quickly disconnected that floor heater once we found out, but yeah…. Not very sealed.

        1. Yep. A well sealed old house has no holes a cat can get in through…..

          I’m utterly spooked by CO, even when I’m not in a house that uses gas, so we have detectors all over the place.

          1. Wise choice. I don’t like to park push button cars in the garage, because there have been incidents where the people thought the car was off and it wasn’t and gassed the house. Not good at all.

            1. park push button cars in the garage, because there have been incidents where the people thought the car was off and it wasn’t

              ………

              Huh? Not sure how that happens because our push button cars are very clear when it is on VS off. If you get out of the car when it is on, there is an indication difficult to ignore.

              We rarely have a vehicle in the garage. There is room, just not room for two. Only when we are prepping for a trip, loading items early.

              OTOH our garage is no way fully sealed. Nor is the house. Even with new double pain windows.

              1. A lot of them have ‘engine off when stationary’ and lights that stay on after the car is turned off. If the car has shut the engine off for idle, and you’re not paying attention or otherwise distracted, it’s possible to mistake the car for being turned off, when it is really in an on but engine temporarily turned off state.

                Actually had a couple of times when I was rushing and got our car into a mode where I could not tell if I’d turned it off or not. I gave me an unfamiliar warning indicator, and I couldn’t figure out what was up with it. But I’m someone who always pays attention to indicator lights.

                There are people who honestly could care less that the check engine light is on and will continue to drive it for extended periods of time. They’ll see an unfamiliar indicator and figure they can worry about it late, and walk away. Or they’ll just miss it.

              2. A lot of them have ‘engine off when stationary’ and lights that stay on after the car is turned off. If the car has shut the engine off for idle, and you’re not paying attention or otherwise distracted, it’s possible to mistake the car for being turned off, when it is really in an on but engine temporarily turned off state.

                Actually had a couple of times when I was rushing and got our car into a mode where I could not tell if I’d turned it off or not. I gave me an unfamiliar warning indicator, and I couldn’t figure out what was up with it. But I’m someone who always pays attention to indicator lights.

                There are people who honestly could care less that the check engine light is on and will continue to drive it for extended periods of time. They’ll see an unfamiliar indicator and figure they can worry about it late, and walk away. Or they’ll just miss it.

                1. Our car has the “Idle off”, and it works when “auto hold” is on, but both only works in drive mode. Plus the “Idle off” has a limited duration. I guess I could pull into the garage, trigger “auto hold” and “idle off”, get out, leaving the key in the car, and walk away, ignoring the “engine is on” warning. Possible? Not hardly.

                  Not that I have to worry. Because of all the rules for the “Idle off”, my car rarely (never) triggers it. We took the car in for warranty when that first happened. Took months to get it back. That is never happening again, even if we had warranty on it now. Also learned all the “rules”: driver seat belt on, not too hot or cold, is the driver door firmly closed, is the battery charged high enough, open driver door after turning on. After replacing the battery (twice, first replacement battery was bad, bad), door harness, and finally the car computer (in retrospect, guessing the computer just needed to be rebooted), it worked again for about a year. Neat feature, when it works, otherwise, forget it. Then we learned just drive it for long distance trip, about mid morning the second day (about 1200 miles), magic! It works. Back to not working now. I don’t drive it far enough, regularly enough to keep idle off working. The few trips I’ve driven mom to Portland and back, isn’t enough to magically trigger it to work again.

          2. TBF some victorian houses were well insulated from the get go — ours in the Springs had feathers in the walls, explaining my issues while living in it. — so, it could be that.

      2. They knew about CO. It is a major component of coal gas that they used for heat and light. Yes, there were fatalities.

        1. The interesting thing to me about the period of the introduction of electricity, and the publicity wars between proponents of AC and DC complete with massive scare campaigns, was that there were people dying all the frigging time from CO poisoning right then, but that newfangled electricity stuff is dangerous!

        2. And the “crazy hot” steam heat was on purpose. With that much heat readily available, you could open windows and have fresh air and still be warm.

        3. “Coal gas” was basically carbon monoxide and hydrogen. In some places all you could get was “cooking gas”, which was straight carbon monoxide, which is a lower-energy fuel.

          That’s why those stereotype old English murder mysteries have someone suffocating from sticking their head in the oven. The carbon monoxide was the active factor. In America we’ve almost always used either natural gas or propane. The only way those could kill someone would be if there was so much of it, it replaced the air in the room. Since it’s slightly lighter than air and ovens tend to be low, it would take a long time.

          1. natural gas or propane. The only way those could kill someone would be if there was so much of it, it replaced the air in the room.

            ………………….

            Open flame is the problem with natural gas and propane. No time to suffocate. The “whoosh BOOM!” get you.

  15. Further example of the incompetence and ridiculousness of Top Men/Women/Whatever?

    “The Acolyte”. Critics love it. The audience hates it.

    Warning for the language if you watch the clip, Critical Drinker has reviewed two eps so far and oof, oof, oof.

    1. Just based on the costumes in the still shot, I have seen better fanmade films than this. And you could tell they were using props or handmade clothes, in certain cases. This is just embarrassing.

      1. Indeed. If they really wanted Alphabet Representation, they should have contacted some SW fanfic writers to get a decent plot.

        But no. They’re out to wreck everything about Star Wars. The Sith are oppressed and so they’re the Good Guys; the Force is a thread you can pull on, not a field of energy you can learn to understand; Jedi are idiots who go on purely eyewitness testimony when the suspect was on the other side of the galaxy; force-using witches don’t need men to reproduce….

        (Everyone who loved the Nightsisters probably facepalms in unison at that one. Look! Here are darkside-using witches! Who still need the male half of the species, even if they may not treat them well! Augh!)

        I am honestly wondering when Disney is going to realize this is hitting them below the belt… in the pocketbook.

        1. “…force-using witches don’t need men to reproduce….”

          Okay, as much as I hate what Lucas and his daughter did to Dathomir and the witches as well as the Nightsisters there, THIS takes the cake. And it means war.

          I heard recently that Disney is buying property and not putting their name on it. Said property is a ski resort out in CO they’re refitting but not branding as Disney. So. That’s one way to survive you’re entertainment arm and amusement parks going under, I suppose….

        2. Green and bald up in the pic is apparently the Wife of The Acolyte’s Producer and Former Personal Assistant to Harvey Weinstein Leslye Headland.

          I am certain the famed Hollywood casting couch had nothing to do with her casting in this part. That’s all history now, nothing like that goes on any more, absolutely certain.

        3. …they should have contacted some SW fanfic writers to get a decent plot.

          You are missing the point: Populating the writers room with the appropriate “victim” groups under current theory, then casting similarly, including no white males whatsoever, was the point of this exercise. How that $180 million, which wasn’t going to spend itself, got spread around to the correct people was just the implementation of that diversity imperative.

          The plot does not matter. The story does not matter. The acting does not matter. The squeaky-clean costumes and fires in vacuum and “you can get stuck through and through with a lightsaber and live, but a butter knife two inches into the upper chest is fatal” does not matter. The audience does not matter. The “fans” are toxic, and really don;t matter. “Wait until we make them watch this!” Seems to have been the mantra.

          But the thing is, you can’t make them watch.

          That’s up through the KK level. I guess Iger was too busy fighting Peltz to actually do his job, or he’s in on it, doesn’t really matter which.

          Look back at the first Star Wars, shot in the ancient times of 1976. The clothes, and the ships, and the droids – everything is dirty. Used. Lived-in. The Millenium Falcon is positively grimy. When I saw it in theaters first run, that is what struck me vs. all prior science fiction movies – look at 2001, everything is squeaky clean. Star Wars looked real. Because Lucas cared about his story. I am sure he came to loathe it as he was trapped in it for the rest of his career, even though it made him “more money than you can possibly imagine”, but in the first one he desperately cared about the world and the story in it.

          Iger and KK and especially Headland do not care about this story.

            1. Ditto. “You have this nice thing here that makes people happy. We wants that, precious, and we wants them to pay attention to uuussssss! We hates it for not being about ussss, preciousss. Gollum, gollum! Let’s make it oursssss!”

                1. Yes, pretty much. It’s why I’m picking up any scraps I can to make books on archetypes. Someone’s gotta keep a record. And if I can get my hands on old EU books or old Marvel books in the bargain, to say nothing of older books in general….

                  Then at least I have something to keep working on.

            2. They care about the platform, with which they can more loudly preach the message.

              As long as they’ve captured and continue to hold the platform, they don’t care about the stories.

              This is why the first two seasons of The Mandalorian had to be subverted and stomped in season 3 – that story was distracting from the message.

          3. Comment from a co-worker, who was former Navy Aviation after the first Star Wars was profound appreciation for the realistic look of the fighters, complete with grime and a bit of hanger rash.

          4. I haven’t seen much commenting about this, but Costco now is dropping retail books at the warehouses, apparently due to the labor issues. (The article mentions that most of Costco merchandise is on pallets, but that can’t happen with books, since the incoming (and returns) have to be dealt with by hand.

            I sort of wish I had the painkiller and heartburn medication supply contracts for the TradPub people. Another retail outlet gone.

            Who’s got the really tiny violin?

          5. They would make us watch if they could. Their rage against the audience is palpable.

            2. This. Yes.

              I do feel sorry for Lee Jung-Jae, the Korean actor portraying Jedi Master Sol. From an interview, seems to be an honest to goodness Star Wars fan… and English is not his first language, so I imagine he may be missing a lot of the cultural political mess.

              (I’m told people who have watched it consider him the bright spot in the cast. Darn, someone needs to headhunt him to some good indie films…)

      2. Oooh, boy. I’ve seen high school play costumes that were much, much better than those. And the rest of just piles “horrible” onto “lousy.”

          1. “Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning” is almost twenty years old now, a hobby/fan production, done mostly with volunteers and a bunch of used PCs under Samuli Torssonnen’s kitchen table. It still has better production quality than a lot of real-film-studio movies.

          1. This is also why indy publishing took off, as soon as digital printing of small numbers of books AND Amazon and others began doing eBook readers. There was a crying need for quantities of content, and readers begging for new content, and indy writers were ready to provide, while the Literary-Industrial Complex was still viewing the whole eBook concept as an unfortunate fad which would soon go away.

      4. The thing that’s *wrong* with those costumes is that someone abandoned the classic Star Wars “lived-in universe” standard.

    2. it’s got lesbian space witches making babies with magic and stuff, what could possibly go wrong?

  16. The big issue that I can see is that we are in an era where a lot of the tools we need require skills and techniques to maintain that it takes true expertise to keep up and running.

    (Not “experts” or “top men.” Expertise in a system that diligent people could probably learn given enough time.)

    The people with the expertise aren’t being replaced or being replaced by “experts” and “expert systems” that require only one or two salaries, not six or seven. Consider most entertainment, where the people with expertise are being thrown out for “experts” in the LGBTQIA+EiEiOh religious cant. This is how you get “sonar in space” for Star Trek Discovery or the various canon breaks in Disney Star Wars. Or the next “Captain America” movie that has done at least three complete reshoots to make something that can be shown.

    This is where you get productions that go overbudget, with their sound levels horribly optimized so that you have to crank it up for dialog-and get your eardrums blown out in the first action scene. And shot so dark that you have to wonder if their lights were being paid for by pennies on the photon.

    This is where you get Sweet Baby, Inc getting in because their fellow “experts” in marketing and DEI content in early to make sure “AAA” games are ready for the “modern audience.”

    When these “experts” fail, we’re going to have to relearn the expertise needed to make things work. It won’t be pretty.

    Just nessisary.

  17. The Reader believes that Disney’s board knows but doesn’t care. They captured Disney to use it as a platform to ‘message’ the American people with the ‘correct’ message. As long as the institutional shareholders are okay with this, they can keep doing it until they run out of other people’s money. And the institutional shareholders are clearly okay with it, otherwise Nelson Peltz would now have two board seats. The bankruptcy of Disney is going to be glorious. The Reader does wonder – which goes first, Disney or Boeing.

      1. It might end up breaking stuff so badly that the thing which makes it possible– the ludicrous length of copyright– gets fixed.

      1. Maybe but the Reader notes that Disney is a bigger boat anchor than the Washington Post. And eventually even the institutional shareholders may be forced to act – hopefully helped along by some shareholder suits against the board in a friendly venue. Say Florida for example.

        1. J Michael Straczynski said 30 years ago that Disney’s nickname in Hollywood was, “Mausewitz.”

          (Back when I was on the Compuserv B5 board and he’d drop by and comment).

          1. Another Chinese property developer went into liquidation today. Dexin holdings was forced into liquidation by China Construction Bank. They were a middle sized developer mostly in the richer coastal cities, albeit not the top ones. In other news, China is just about into outright deflation again. All this despite the “huge” — it wasn’t really — bailout announce only weeks ago. the half life on China bailouts is under a month now.

            As bad as we have it, everyone else is worse, If we can get Trump, alive, past the margin of fraud then that one good shove that would break the CCP might become a reality.

            1. Modi seems to have managed to stay in.

              There’s hear say, which I have not traced, about good outcomes in Euro elections.

              UK is voting in a month.

              And, some noise out of Canada.

              Could all be nothing.

              1. The Reader votes for “…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The elections were for EU parliament, which has no power even over the Brussels version of the deep state. The fix will be in when the parliamentary elections that Macron called are held in France next month. And, barring a miracle, the British are going to vote Labour in next month. Which will get them a complete economic crash, further penetration of their politics by Islam, and the opportunity to freeze in the dark as the ‘green’ policies are pushed even harder. Add to that Labour will undoubtedly negotiate for Britain to rejoin the EU without a referendum, leave NATO, and denuclearize their military and Scotland taking advantage of the situation to declare independence and you have an ugly picture.

                1. The Tories are handing it to Labour. If you wanted to engineer a full discrediting of what passes for the Right in the UK, resulting in a handover to the Labour Party that was so massively discredited back at Brexit, what would you do differently?

                  If I were a subject, I think I’d probably be voting Dalek:

                  https://youtu.be/nj3sFy23CPA

                    2. A British election on July 4? 😛 😀

                      “Do they have 4th of July in Britain?”

                      “Of course they do, it’s the day after the 3rd.”

            2. Even if if Trump is alive and allowed to take office, he will be buried unless he does a “Modi” and destroys the establishment.

              The dems have been wargaming lawfare and military coups in Georgetown and other places.

              If you haven’t stocked up, please do so if you can.

    3. I think the Disney board is caught in this place where if there’s a regime change, they’re looking at jail time. Real jail time, in a Pounded-Up-The-Ass jail and not a Club Fed jail. Between the things going on with DEI funding and probably other scandals…a lot of them could be in for the high jump if it shows up before the statute of limitations runs out.

  18. Well I have to agree that the “experts” sure aren’t. However, there are a couple of additional elements to all this that should also be addressed. There are people, communities, groups, etc. that do know “stuff” and could/should be listened to on some subjects. I’ll wager, for an example, that the Amish have some very useful knowledge and while I won’t label them “experts” I will sure listen to them on living a successful simple life style. Some within my example may be better than others at something so beware of any ‘experts’ that may appear and value results and actual events.

    There are others that also know and practice some specific skill sets that are/will be useful. The local blacksmith is another that comes to mind. While a lot, and I mean a whole lot, of things will break and be gone for a long time (think electronics, etc.) there will be basic KSAs or Knowledge, skills and abilities which can be drawn on.

    The stupid will be strong in the future as well as ignorance and even superstition but a core of knowledge I think will survive and even if it takes a few generations, rebuilding can happen. Work with those around you that have the legacy skills/knowledge and preserve sources of information and tools that will be useful in the future.

    1. Heck, look at the reenactors, maker-fair people, machinery restorers, and the like. DadRed and I did most of the furniture-making work with hand tools once we got the big cuts done with the table saw and so on. And we could do the big cuts by hand if we had to.

      2. Give me power tools or give me death!

        I’ve used hand tools (planes, saws, those push-against-your-abs drill things, etc…), but I wouldn’t want to do that for a living. I just discovered those neat vibrating cutter things that can do what chisels do. Mr. Dremel must have been inspired by G*d. Those things are so handy.

        I am OK with corded power tools. Not everything needs to be battery operated and long extension cords are easy to find.

        Unless it’s a big tree/limb, I do prefer bow saws to chain saws; I’m afraid of chain saws. I’ve seen the old two-man saws, but never used one. They look exhausting.

        1. old two-man saws, but never used one. They look exhausting.
          …………….

          Whip Saws. They are exhausting, and we were only racing cutting slabs off 2′ logs (logging competition forestry club school of forestry). Doubt I could even help get one started now. But then I was 18 – 21, now I’m 67.

  20. I had a fun discussion with a college professor today. First day of an upper level Spanish refresher class I’m taking; my presentation was on current events. I decided to go for the gusto. I presented an article about Javier Milei gutting the womens’ rights and LGHDTV departments in Argentina’s government.

    I said that we all know the average man is much stronger than the average woman physically, which is why we have movements to assure womens’ rights and to protect them from physical abuse etc. But if we’re going to have all citizens be equal, how is it right to have government departments to assure womens’ rights without having one to assure the rights of men too? And I flat-out asked the class what legal rights men have that women don’t?

    I even used a hypothetical example of governmental overreach: if a campesino (hillbilly/redneck/country boy/rancher/what have you) decides to put a toilet in his house, why should he require inputs and permissions from fifteen governmental departments? Why should he have to go to the department of gender equality to make sure his toilet is feminist enough? I said that since I spent a lot of my youth in California, I know what this is like, and Milei has a very good point about the evils of too much government; I also quoted Dennis Prager with, “The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.”

    This was doubly fun since the professor is an Argentine who’s old enough to have grandchildren. To her credit, she talked about the evils of Peronism and actually didn’t find my example of overreach farfetched at all. Another class member (a woman) talked about a brother that had been put in prison because of false domestic abuse accusations, and the discussion veered in the direction of taking allegations seriously without simply believing all allegations. It was quite gratifying. Maybe we can get a few chainsaw-wielding politicians in the United States soon? There may be some hope for academia after all.

  21. I will posit that it is mechanization that allowed women to enter the workforce in large numbers more than birth control and abortion. You could have zero children but what with growing, preserving and cooking your own food, caring for animals and crops, making clothes, keeping a certain level of sanitation, SOMEONE was going to have to be home to do it. And it was going to be the someone who was not strong enough to do all the really tough parts of keeping a household running.

    In the modern life a single woman can contract out with machines to do all the hard work but that was not true decades ago. Heck now, single mothers are more revered than the stay at home variety. Not that they are happier. They are much less so. But it can be done. A single woman 100 years ago would have needed to be quite wealthy to hire enough help to do the necessary things. And if she couldn’t afford enough help to also do her cooking and cleaning, which is a full time job without appliances, she wasn’t going to be able to work either.

    While it is true, you can’t have it all and tradeoffs must be made, it is possible to raise a nice size family and when they are old enough, go for a career.

    I did it, and I’m not particularly special or skilled. But I do have modern conveniences that made it possible that my great grandmothers did not have.

    But the interesting thing about the current times is how many young people coming up are starting to realize that there are other intangibles involved in having someone keeping the home fires burning as their primary occupation. They are discovering that the old ways might actually be best as far as quality of life goes. And also that killing off the next generation may not be in anyone’s best interest in the long run.

    2. I’ve seen a painting of women washing clothes sitting beside a hole in the ice. Today, we toss our laundry into a machine and take it out an hour later, clean. A whole day’s work done in 5 minutes through industrialization. We don’t spend half an hour building a fire under the stove. We turn a handle and take a hot shower in 15 minutes. The dumbshits don’t have a clue how great life is these days.

        2. “What are the best things in life? Hot water, good dentishtry, and shoft lavatory paper.”

          — Cohen the Barbarian

      2. My mother used to bring freeze dried clothes in off the clothes line in -40 degree weather. Me too actually. Love the smell of line dried sheets.

        If it was a nice sunny day, perfect for drying sheets, you did laundry, even if it was colder outside than in your freezer.

        You (and the kids) carried them into the house in your arms because those newfangled plastic laundry baskets broke in the cold.

        I was shocked when I went back to work after all my kids were in school to find out that they couldn’t go outside for recess if it was colder than the 30°.

        What are they made of plastic !?!!

        1. I was shocked when I went back to work after all my kids were in school to find out that they couldn’t go outside for recess if it was colder than the 30°.

          Que?

          I lived in Northern Ontario in 1963, and walked to school (Up hill! Both ways!) at -45F. We’d do recess in just shirts at -20F

          1. Clearly juvenile denizens of the Great White North (eh?) are hardier than I will ever bed, if they eschewed all pants at twenty below.

        2. In most places with HOAs (and some without) it’s a violation to have a clothesline. Not sure how that’s gonna work when dryers are banned to “Save Gaia”… 😒

          HOA (and DNC) delenda est.

  23. OT: I was asked in an overlapping space so just wanted to let people know the shooting was near my office but I WFH today and was never in danger.

  24. “Icon-o-crashers”, those who tip over statuary for “reasons”…

    .

    because they are too chickenshit to attempt cow tipping.

    1. “Cow tipping is passe. If you really want to be on trend? Bull tipping is the way to go.”

      (Not me, but some ranch kids from Westriver, Dakotas vs. city kids who deserved what happened. No permanent harm to either tippers or the putative tippee.)

      1. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

        When I saw the earlier comment about “cow tipping”, I wondered about some idiots attempting “bull tipping”.

        🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

      2. Bull tipping!?!

        Back in MY day we sent the city slickers on snipe hunts.

        We didn’t try to kill the poor things. Just scare ’em til they wet their pants.

      3. I have relatives out that way. If the city really want to feel daring, they should try Bison Tipping. It would be a great spectator sport

        1. Bison Tipping

          Going on now at Yellowstone and Teton national parks.

          Current Score: Tourists – 0 Bison – 10

      1. Some of the urbanites have never seen a live deer. I still remember going to a summer party hosted by some older cousins at their place in the Poconos a decade or so back. One of their cousins from the other side was a 50-something year old woman from one of the big California cities. She was utterly amazed when a deer came up to the front yard and grazed by one of the trees, and she couldn’t stop taking photos and raving about how she’d never seen a deer in real life before, and how cool it was, and asking if she was safe taking photos from the second floor deck. Then one of my cousins said something like “You should see it when a bear is climbing the trees” and she looked worried and had to be reassured that a bear would probably not be intruding that afternoon.

  25. I’ve noted my nephew, who was told by the Woke to open his eyes and see the truth decided to do just that and found the Woke are lying their asses off. Someone he liked musically was being canceled for saying something and he looked into it and found, A: not exactly what he said, and B: all of it taken out of context.

  27. Famous slave traders? Bedford Forrest. That’s how he made his living before the American Civil War. (Afterwards he headed the KKK.) And, yes, there are statues to him.

    A disgusting human being, even if he was an outstanding general. Lucifer probably recruited him to lead Hell’s army in the afterlife because I don’t think he could find better in Hell.

    That said, his statues have a place in our history.

    1. You need to remember the scum sucking Democrats, Instead of tearing down statues because they offend you, Put Up Your Own. Demand they put up Statues of Abolitionist Americans, Americans of African descent, and others. George Washington Carver, Rosa Parks, the list is almost endless. For every statue you hate, put up one you like.

      They won’t do it of course, because that means work and it also shows have petulant and childish these Liberal Scum Sucking Demons from hell really are. You don’t need to fear them, all they need is a good spanking, hopefully they don’t follow you home afterwards.

        2. BLM trashed a statue of Frederick Douglass. Of course, given the state of modern education, they might not have realized who he was.

      2. Actually, that’s a good idea. Restore the old statues, but also, put up new ones again. Fund our own, beautiful art and statues. And put them up in our own spaces, but visible. Or get them in public places. They pull down, we build up. Where we are, not nationally or using govt funding.

        1. Putting up statues of Ronald Reagan, Thomas Sowell, Donald Trump, and Milton Friedman would be a good start.

        2. Private parks visible from public lands. That way if they damage something they can be directly sued for the repairs. Even deep pockets like Soros will tire paying for that/ Have several hidden cameras. Oh and hide a 5g cell antenna nearby that serves all the major carriers. That way carriers can be subpoenaed for cell data at the time of the damage. Some of these folks will have burner phones or turn them off, but many are trying to be cool on social media and really aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer.

          1. I have no problem with public funding to support the arts, so long as it is locally funded, and they get matching funds from the local public. Locally seems to be the better way to go, more accountability. Also if it is done with matching funds. then the public should have a say in it. I,E. If no one will support a tranny statue, there you go, don’t build it. I think every city should have a statue park or memorial park, not just for veterans, for everyone who helped that city and it’s people. Cops, Firemen, famous America’s. Native/First Americans. I want them all big, especially the Native/First Americans. That way they can’t be ignored, you feel bad about the plight of Native/First Americans so much, then do something about it, don’t remove all the Native/First American visuals so you can now ignore it, that my friend is what we used to call a cop-out.

          2. One article about “The Embrace” said: “The 20-foot-tall, 25-foot-wide artwork differs from the singular, heroic form of many memorials to Dr. King and others, instead emphasizing the power of collective action, the role of women as leaders, and the forging of new bonds of solidarity out of mutual empathy and vulnerability.”https://www.boston.gov/news/embrace-unveiled-boston

            This is a case of describing something as the opposite of it actually is. It might actually have been a good memorial if they actually had made a statue showing the Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King embracing. But that’s not what they showed.

            What they actually showed was a man’s disembodied shoulders and arms, headless, around a cylinder that does not even look human, let alone like a woman, and smaller hands on the back of his shoulders. They have reduced Martin Luther King to nothing but a man’s shoulders, arms, and hands, and Coretta to something that is not even recognizable as a human being, let alone a woman. In fact, she is just a “thing” being held by Martin, and a disembodied hand on his shoulder.

    2. Mr. Forrest repudiated his creation, and greatly tempered his views late in life. Not a saint, but he did reform himself considerably.

      And his revolutionary contributions to the Cavalry art were major components of our subsequent successes in WW2.

    3. Uhm, no, he wasn’t. I believe he was INVOLVED with the KIan, but that congressional inquiry found nothing. (You can find the records if you look. Talk about a biased court.) Another lie is that he founded it–nah, the founders’ names are KNOWN. Forrest wasn’t one of them.

      I think I remember his involvement with an early rights organization called the Pole Bearers, but I could be misremembering. Anyway, my point is that he was demonized and propagandized to a fare-thee-well. He did in fact trade in sIaves before The War, but that was used by the Pious Causers as a launching point for all kinds of slander. Don’t buy into it.

      1. One of the reasons he was hated was because he was a good General. You can still be a scumbag and be a good general.

      2. A whole lot of people “traded in slaves.” It was a legitimate business, like farming or ranching. Even someone not directly involved in the trade might own shares in a company that dealt in slaves.

        1. That vile “business” soils, then corrupts, everyone and everything that participates.

          Blessedly, some repented of it and turned away. Some at least acknowledged error.

          It has no place on Free soil.

  28. Citizens for the Liquidation of Iconoclastic Tyrants heartily approve of this post.

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