#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
“If you’re a person that’s willing to change because of the attention, that means you’ve never had attention, and you ain’t built for this.” – Deion Sanders
“What is it about many of us, that we would rather praise and follow the words of a half-reformed, famous prodigal than someone who has been faithful and speaking truth all along?” – Sir Thermite (on SG)
Paul Gottfried expresses his doubts about the Enlightenment concept of natural right defended by Michael Anton:
Michael Anton has reiterated his deep, passionate belief in “natural right” but (alas!) has still not convinced me that I must embrace this idea for the greater social good. I’m also not sure why American youth would find his belief more compelling than other commitments inherited from the past, for example, belief in the Bible as a divinely revealed document or in America’s constitutional foundations.
Supposedly something called “modernity” requires us to opt for Mr. Anton’s answer to social dissolution. The American conservative establishment and Republican talking heads seem to agree with him. They have placed so much rhetorical effort in pushing the idea of inborn individual rights that every time I flip on Fox News someone is solemnly proclaiming a “God-given right.” Whether this has been a wise investment of effort is doubtful, since our ascribed or claimed natural rights continue to multiply, but not always in a way that would please Mr. Anton. Some establishment conservative commentators have been lately characterizing gay marriage as an inborn individual right, and I’ve no doubt that this exercise of choice is already joining the laundry list of the conservative movement’s inalienable rights.
I fully understand the distinction Mr. Anton is drawing between natural right as something that is attached to us by an authority outside of ourselves and which we discover through investigation, and mere “rights” that we presumably invent for ourselves. But like traditional religion, his concept rests on a leap of faith, and its content, as I have already explained, is far from self-evident. Why should his tradition seem more convincing than other traditions that have fallen out of favor? I doubt that his metaphysic of natural right is more compelling to the American public than my invocation of history and tradition. The moral foundations of the American nation were in reality shaped by religion and custom, not by an Enlightenment contrivance.
Mr. Anton is correct that it’s highly unlikely that an early American political figure who invoked natural right would have included gay marriage among his list of inborn human rights. But a progressive today can legitimately argue from a natural right perspective that this may be attributable to our ancestors’ lack of imagination or to a failure to grasp the full implications of natural right thinking. In the present age, the notion of inborn individual rights has led more often in a progressive direction than a conservative one. Furthermore, the revulsion of the 18th-century American for the idea of gay marriage likely came from his biblical morality, not from declarations of natural rights in the political documents of the time. His morality had a deeper and, in the 18th century, more prevalent source independent of talk about natural rights.
I’m deeply skeptical about natural rights myself, due to the poison fruit that has observably grown from their Enlightenment seeds. But I’ll have to read all three pieces before I express my own opinion on the subject. Natural rights tend to strike me more as effective political rhetoric than a strong dialectic foundation for a political philosophy.
And where what Chesterton described as “the democracy of the dead” contradicts the various emanations and penumbras wafting off the stinking pile of natural rights, it’s now obvious that tradition, be it familial, ethnic, or religious, reliably trumps the philosophers’ meanderings.
DISCUSS ON SG
There are two important business lessons here in this story about the success of a humble kitchen tool:
Richard Grace, inventor of one of the greatest tools the kitchen has ever seen, neither knows how to cook nor cares to learn. In the mid-’90s, he set out to make a wood-carving rasper and ended up with a culinary masterpiece called the Microplane: a cheese-grating, citrus-zesting, nutmeg-dusting revelation that today costs as little as $12 on Amazon. He’s an inventor in the truest spirit of the word, someone who treats ideation as a profession, not a calling. He doesn’t speak in buzzwords and has never hosted a TED Talk. He simply makes things and finds uses for them later.
Lorraine, a baker with an affinity for Armenian orange cake, wasn’t happy with her old kitchen grater. So she slid her husband’s Microplane over an orange. She was so astounded by the results, she had the description of the product changed in the store catalog to include its effectiveness at this seemingly niche kitchen task. This is how the story, “Test Kitchen; A Gift for the Cook, or Carpenter,” published by The New York Times four years later, began.
Before the Microplane brass could blink, they had become a kitchenware company — whether they liked it or not. Penned by Amanda Hesser, who later cofounded the award-winning food publication Food52, this 516-word story was to become Microplane’s crossing of the Rubicon, from carpentry to culinary.
“After the Times article, basically everybody who sells anything contacted us,” Arivett told me. “Williams Sonoma; Bed, Bath & Beyond; Sur La Table — everybody. It was almost too much to keep up with.”
Before the Microplane brass could blink, they had become a kitchenware company — whether they liked it or not. Within the first month following the article’s publication, the brand saw its kitchen customers eclipse its woodworking customers ten times over. Microplane, the wood rasp, sold between $300,000 and $400,000 a year; by 2002, Microplane, the kitchen gadget, did that in a month.
Then came an even bigger boom, one fueled by the power of the original kitchen influencers: celebrity chefs. Martha Stewart, Ina Garten, Rachel Ray and virtually anyone that mattered used a Microplane on their shows, calling it out by name for their audience. Julia Child liked the product so much, it earned a permanent spot hanging on the wall of her kitchen, which was later replicated at the Smithsonian. And Oprah’s personal chef, Art Smith, once called it “the most coveted tool in chefdom.”
But for all the brilliance of the original invention and the Grace family business savvy, they still weren’t sure what they were selling. “None of us were cooks,” Chris said when I asked him if the Grace family was culinarily inclined.
Lesson One: The experts know what has been done before. That’s what makes them experts. However, they do not know what is possible nor are they usually psychologically inclined to explore the various possibilities and tangents related to their knowledge. So, if you’re doing something new, do not permit yourself to be guided solely by their expertise. This is something we’ve been learning with regards to the bindery operation.
Lesson Two: Don’t be married to your business plan. I would bet that less than one-third of the most successful companies are actually successful doing what they initially started out to do. For example, Castalia intended to avoid doing print editions and focus on selling ebooks through Amazon. My favorite example, however, is the Connecticut Leather Company, which started out making leather goods in 1932, and later began producing plastic wading pools, which led to it making children’s plush toys, and eventually, the home video game system called Colecovision.
Of course, Coleco offers another lesson, which is the danger of success. Despite average sales of one million Colecovisions a year for six years, the company that started in and survived the Great Depression collapsed in 1988 after digging a hole for itself with its attempt to produce its own computer.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the importance of exercising skepticism, from an interview with Tim Ferriss:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: I noticed a lot of people are skeptical, particularly conspiracy theorists, they’re skeptical of small things, but not about big ones. So they get taken for a ride. Find me a conspiracy theorist or find me someone who’s naturally skeptical of all things and I’ll show you a turkey. So I wanted to find people who are fundamentally skeptic, being skeptic about important things, not about small things, because —
Tim Ferriss: What would be an example of a big thing that they would be skeptical of?
Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A big thing like — let me give you an example. I wrote a paper, it never ended up in a book, on the stock market and religion. It’s called “The Bishop and the Economist.” And I said that those who are skeptical about the existence of God or the non-existence of God, that are skeptical about religious matters, typically tend to be complete suckers when it comes to stocks. They believe in a stock market, or believe in some kind of pseudo-scientific theory on whatever it is, they believe in, but they don’t believe in religion. And the reverse, and people who are religious typically they’re harder. And there’s some, I don’t have research on that. There’s a guy called [inaudible], I think, who did some studies about skepticism, people go to religion about affairs, skepticism where it matters. And I wrote about it, I think in The Black Swan, skepticism where it matters. And I noticed that a lot of these big skeptics were not skeptical of God and things you can’t do anything about. They were skeptical of the charlatan. They are skeptical of things, of someone trying to take advantage of you. That’s where you exercise your skepticism.
I could not agree more. It’s a pity, nay, I daresay it is a tragedy, that NN Taleb was not more skeptical about the vaxx. But perhaps that was a big thing.
Fawlty Towers is rightly considered one of the greatest television shows in the history of television. So it’s interesting to learn this little detail about it from the man married to the actress who played Sybil Fawlty.
It wasn’t just the lines that Pru and the cast had to familiarise themselves with.
‘In the case of Fawlty Towers, the devil was in the detail.
In addition to writing the dialogue, John and Connie had gone to great pains to explain exactly what was happening in each scene and why. Put it this way: the script for a 30-minute episode of a sitcom would normally be around 60 pages long, but for Fawlty Towers they were something approaching 140.
In other words, the reason Fawlty Towers so often resembled the synchronized perfection of an oft-shown play or musical is because it was essentially written as a play, with the script containing the choreography and the character motivations as well as the dialogue.
While it doesn’t rise to the level of Tolkien’s invented histories and languages, or Umberto Eco’s recreation in string of his monastery in order to time the length of the conversations properly, it does serve as a spur to the creative mind to up his creative game.
Spain won the Women’s World Cup despite its Football Association needing to crush a player revolt by 15 of its top female players by ejecting 12 of them from the national team.
Spain won their first Women’s World Cup final vs. England on Sunday 1-0 but did it without a handful of top players because of an ongoing protest against the Royal Spanish Football Federation.
In September 2022, 15 players sent the federation separate but identical emails asking not to be called up to the national team, citing a lack of professionalism that each player wrote had an “important effect on my emotional state and by extension my health.” They demanded “a clear commitment to a professional project with attention paid to all the aspects needed to get the best performance of this group of players” in the email.
The 15 players were Aitana Bonmati, Mariona Caldentey, Ona Batlle, Patri Guijarro, Mapi Leon, Sandra Panos, Claudia Pina, Lola Gallardo, Ainhoa Moraza, Nerea Eizagirre, Amaiur Sarriegi, Lucia Garcia, Leila Ouahabi, Laia Aleixandri and Andrea Pereira. Three additional players who did not send emails voiced their support for the others: Alexia Putellas, Jennifer Hermoso, and captain Irene Paredes.
According to The Athletic, among the players’ complaints was insufficient preparation for matches, from arriving to host cities too late and traveling by bus when planes would be considered the practical choice. The players also reportedly had issues with several coaches, alleging they were asked them to keep their hotel room doors open until midnight and inspected their bags after they went on excursions during camps. The players never explicitly asked for head coach Jorge Vilda or his coaching staff to be fired, but it was clear the relationship between them was fractured.
Instead of taking the players’ complaints seriously, though, the federation instantly backed Vilda and criticized those who protested. Ana Alvarez, head of women’s soccer at the federation, said that players would need to apologize before they were welcomed back onto the team, and added that “the federation comes first.”
It’s interesting to see how the players revolt – so celebrated in the early stages of the tournament when the team lost 4-0 to Japan in the last round of qualifiers – is being minimized here now that Spain, under the much-vilified Vilda, has won the tournament. Leaving 12 internationals out of the national team in a sport that starts 11 is hardly “a handful”. The media made a lot out of the current players turning their backs on their coach and refusing to celebrate a quarterfinal victory with him, but the observable fact is that there is no way the Spanish team, which had never even reached the quarterfinals before, would have won the World Cup without him.
Female teams are particularly fragile and are much given to self-destructive drama. I doubt it is an accident that Vilda didn’t select 12 of the 15 who initially declared themselves unavailable, as they were troublemakers and drama queens. And it was impressive that he didn’t hesitate to sit down the #1 goalkeeper when she wasn’t playing well, and that he left his star player, arguably the best in the world, on the bench for most of the tournament because she wasn’t 100-percent recovered from injury. Whether they like him or not, his players went on to dominate an English team full of the very sort of troublemakers and drama queens that he ejected from the squad.
A lot of NFL players don’t like Bill Belichick either. But there is no denying he gets the most out of them. Or that he wins championships.
It’s a bit amusing to see some of the bigger names who were left out whining about how they didn’t get the chance to win a World Cup. “What saddens me the most is that I really have to miss out on something when I could have earned it and contributed. It’s a shame.” But it’s not a shame, you didn’t earn it, you didn’t have to miss out, and your contributions were obviously unnecessary.
The lesson of the unexpected Spanish triumph at the Woman’s World Cup is this: the players are never bigger than the team.
At least, not any harder than it’s going to be. Karl Denninger, a genuine American hero who saved more lives than anyone else I’ve ever known, warns those under 40 that they’ve never seen the sort of economic challenges that are heading their way:
You’ve never seen tough.
I mean it.
No, 2000 wasn’t tough.
No, 2008 wasn’t tough.
If you’re 33 now you were ten in 2000. If you’re 40 now you were barely an adult in 2000 and not even born or beyond infancy in the last “actual tough” — the late 1970s and early 1980s.
I thought that what we face now was likely coming in 2008. I was wrong. People managed to “kick the can” another time, but in doing so we made it a lot worse. What we had to absorb then was about a late 1970s / early 1980s problem. What we did was greatly increase the seriousness of the damage by deferring it for another 10 or so years, and then we wildly added to that when the virus showed up. Maybe the pandemic response was in some part an intentional attempt to evade taking the economic medicine then and maybe not, but whatever the case may be you can’t go backwards and thus here we are.
What’s coming is going to be worse than the late 1970s or early 80s. It is inescapable. Continuing to try to put it off will simply compound it more and increase the risk that we lose our society entirely. Jerome Powell, chair of The Fed, knows this which is why those who believe he will cut rates “soon” are wrong; he’s not stupid and he is fully aware of what has happened in other nations that kept playing this game one too many times, with no way to know in advance when the next time is “one too many.”
An utterly huge percentage of people I grew up with, who were coming of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, are dead. They’re not dead because of a virus, or just natural “stuff” — they’re dead because they slowly killed themselves, usually with drugs or alcohol. This includes someone in my immediate family and a several more within my growing-up social circle — including people I was extremely unhappy to have to cut loose.
That’s significant because typically other than through accidents or violence (e.g. car wrecks and homicide) statistically nobody dies once you get out of childhood until you get into your late 50s or 60s and the diseases of older age start to catch up with your poor lifestyle or just bad luck and genetics. Yeah, there are exceptions — but not many.
You don’t want that to happen to you as it often comes with years of disability first and there’s still time — if you act now.
Hard times are coming folks.
Now, before the younger generation’s dismiss Denninger’s warning as the customary Boomer dramatics about walking uphill to school both ways in the snow, what he is talking about here is not the way in which the new normal is more difficult than the old normal. Yes, it’s much harder to get ahead now, it’s much harder get a college degree, to get a good job, or to afford a middle-class lifestyle, and the economic mean has observably declined steadily since real wages peaked in 1973.
He’s not talking about the current normal. What he’s talking about is genuine economic crisis, when people who own homes can’t keep them, when there are no jobs of any kind to be found, and when interest rates are not only in the double-digits, but the teens, so any kind of financing for anything is completely unaffordable.
Remember, we didn’t see actual credit deflation after 2008, but mere credit disinflation.
The point that he’s making is that since times are going to be difficult, don’t make them more difficult for yourself and your family by making stupid and short-sighted decisions, because the consequences are likely to be considerably more serious and long-lasting than the average young individual can reasonably imagine.
I’ve seen the casualties among my friends and family too. So be smarter than we were. Be better than we were. Because the one thing, perhaps the only thing, that you have going for you is that the GenXers are providing you with the sort of advice that we should have gotten, but for the most part didn’t get, from our predecessors.
So if you can avoid wasting the decade or so that most of us did, you might actually wind up ahead of the game in the end.
Sarah Hoyt describes the challenges of attempting to make a living doing what you love when the entire system is more or less stacked against you:
I want to talk about the human with a vocation/with a need to do something. The something exists in the world. They can theoretically do it.
Then human meets the broken systems. Which I don’t think are YET at peak broken, but are heading there.
As I said, I’ve seen it happen in writing, in art, in teaching, but I’m seeing it a bit everywhere.
You try, but no matter how much you try, how hard you work, or what you do, it seems like everything is against you. And because no one — no one — talks about it it openly, most people who are failing badly think they’re alone in this, and that everyone else is WILDLY successful: writers, artists, mothers (particularly of boys), teachers, etc. etc. etc.
You think “the system is broken? Or is it? Am I just making excuses for myself?” And you try harder. But since the system is actually designed NOT to work, (and you’re mostly seeing the successful people who are either flukes, a well polished facade, or people who are having transitory success and will be shredded later) you keep getting beat. Sometimes you have a little success first, but it all breaks apart later.
Another way to “fail” is to have a very strong brand, do very well with it, and then…. well, it falls apart. Either because you changed, and don’t do the thing the way you did it initially, or because — for artists, though I’m sure there’s parallels in other professions — your public changed. Or changed the way they see you.
Let’s say you’re to the right of Lenin (or these days, Stalin) and you’re a writer of science fiction and fantasy (or certain types of romance; or–), working in the indie side, you might very well build a huge audience, who run screaming when they find you’re one of those “evil right wingers” or who at least can’t withstand a loud and sustained cancel campaign. It’s happened to several of us. And then, of course, you start wondering why you feel called to do this, when you have political opinions so at variance with the “community who reads this” (Or at least the loud parts of the community. And this one is complex, because it’s hard to find readers, anyway, and if all readers think sf/f is left, a lot of people who would otherwise enjoy it don’t even try it out. Kind of like I keep running into “Science fiction is porn” which apparently is from…. guess? Oh, you’ll never guess. Clan of the Cavebear, which is neither science fiction nor porn, but some readers of a certain age associate that with both. That will change, as indie makes a dent. Takes time, though. I mean the association of SF/F and “left”.)
Okay, so…. Never mind why your heart broke. One day you wake up and you think “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s been my driving force since…. ever. But I can’t. I can’t anymore.”
What you’re experiencing, unless it’s your very first failure — and it usually isn’t — is … well, I call it a broken heart, but it’s actually ptsd and burnout.
My solution – and I am not recommending it, merely sharing my perspective – is to simply refuse to regard my activity as economic in nature. I’m not bearing down this week in order to finish the 297,500-word final edition of A SEA OF SKULLS this month because some people might buy it or because it might generate some revenue or because it will make a pretty pair of leather books or because some people might be impressed with me as a writer. I literally don’t think about those things at all, and I think that if I did, it would hinder my ability to write.
I’m doing it because I want to do it. I’m continuing the story because the story continues in my head and it isn’t finished yet.
Sarah touches on this tangentially in her piece: This is the secret no one else will tell you: There is no career. The career is a lie.
I don’t consider myself to have “a career as a writer”. I just write books. Then Castalia publishes them. Repeat as desired. As long as the ideas continue to percolate and flow, I will write them down, in part because the smartest girl I ever knew once told her friend that an idea is only a feeling until it is articulated. And I like to articulate my ideas, which necessitates writing them down because talking to other people too often leads to distraction.
Also, in case anyone is interested, I’ve recently written an introduction for an unannounced Castalia History book that I believe will prove enlightening….
Johnny Manziel was given a team iPad where coaches could secretly track the amount of time he spent watching film. But the problem was that Manziel didn’t watch any film. Literally not a minute.
It would probably surprise most of you how few people are capable of performing even the most basic and rudimentary aspects of their jobs. And it’s not as if the solution is necessarily more pay.
Johnny Manziel signed a 4 year, $8,248,596 contract with the Cleveland Browns, including a $4,318,980 signing bonus, $7,998,596 guaranteed, and an average annual salary of $2,062,149.
Note that not even two million dollars per year was enough to get the guy to watch five minutes of game film.
Jack Nicklaus’s bid to reclaim his own name from (((a former business partner))) was rejected by (((a Florida judge))).
In a recent federal court decision, Jack Nicklaus suffered a setback in his attempt to regain control of his name and likeness owned by former partner Howard Milstein. On Aug. 1, Judge Robin Rosenberg of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of Florida ruled that due to a prior decision against Nicklaus by the New York County Supreme Court on the exact same property in question in Nicklaus Companies, LLC v. GBI Investors Inc., he lacked the ability to grant Nicklaus any control of the property in question.
I neither know nor care much about the travails of a rich golfer who lost control of his own name in pursuit of even more riches. But it’s a reminder that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is, and that if there is wording in the contract permitting the other party to a) take full control or b) not pay, the other party will usually find a way to make that happen.