Entitled to an Opinion

This might be one of the most well-known books I’ve reviewed here (despite ending my last review of a novel by claiming I didn’t expect to do more literary rather than genre fiction), to the extent that the very title is now a well-known phrase for a phenomena. It’s also one whose film adaptation I enjoyed more than any other Mike Nichols movie, much less the completely overrated M*A*S*H, and I didn’t understand the detractors who complained about the book being better. Now having read it, I think they are both good examples of their respective mediums. It has admittedly been over a decade since I saw that, which meant my memory was foggy enough to still be surprised by some things that were in both (possibly it was made worse by the inferior miniseries with a completely different ending).

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Yesterday, Marginal Revolution linked to this tweet on the films with the largest “delta” in men vs women’s rankings on IMDB. I don’t know anybody else who still talks about the Double Feature podcast, since it went completely defunct a while back and had been mostly defunct for some time even prior to that, but precisely because there’s only an archived version of their complete coverage list (although the actual audio files aren’t available), that means it wouldn’t be tweaked in response to such findings.

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I recently had to dig through pages of Hopefully Anonymous’ blog in the Internet Archive in order to find this post. As noted recently, TypePad’s disappearance means that will be the only way to access it. As I’d rather not have to repeat that, I have decided to copy his post below, which I acknowledge is flattering to me. I am not going to copy all the comments below the post, but I recommend readers check out the archive link to see the discussion there.

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The WCI accouncement is here. Marginal Revolution & Overcoming Bias were hosted there long ago, and the long-defunct Hopefully Anonymous still is. I’ve been linking to WCI for well over a decade, so presumably anyone following those links will need to feed them into the Internet Archive in the near future. I will miss Nick Rowe’s posts on “the people of the concrete steppes“, Milton Friedman’s thermostat, Lloyd George’s People’s Budget as antagonist of James Cameron’s Avatar, and a whole series of posts (linked from here) on how government debt is inherited by later generations and whether we really do “owe it to ourselves”.
EDIT NOVEMBER 2025: The last post on the WCI Typepad blog (now only accessible via the Wayback Machine) announces that their new home will be at https://worthwhileblog.ca/ but that doesn’t currently contain any new posts after that.

Richard Hanania just* blogged his Mate Selection Theory of Feminization, arguing that relatively feminine/feminist men are signalling to women that they are more reliable partners in this post-monogamy era of easy divorce and reduced social stigma. It occurred to me that the General Social Survey (see my earlier posts on it) should have some questions showing whether that really does work as a signal. I have generated the data below, but anyone can replicate it by running the same query, which they can also tinker with at the interface I have linked numerous times before.

*I now see the post was from February, and I even used the GSS in a comment there showing that lower IQ men were less likely to have partners.

Row EVSTRAY Have sex other than spouse while married

Column FEMINIST Think yourself as a feminist?

Filter MARITAL(1-4) Marital status (5 is excluded, as never-married)

Filter SEX(1) Respondents sex(=MALE)

Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff’s book is obviously titled after Allan Bloom’s more dated but famous in its time The Closing of the American Mind. Both books are about perceived problems with the kids these days on campus, but I think this would have less narrow appeal. Bloom was a political philosopher with a focus on Plato who somewhat unsurprisingly finds Plato to be vital to then-contemporary issues, but Haidt & Lukianoff are interested in the wisdom of the ancients more broadly, opening by quoting (among others) the Buddha. Neither Harold nor Alan Bloom were especially interested in non-western thinkers (like Saul Bellow, who notoriously asked “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans?”), and the philosophers who were tended to be those Germans (who excelled as Orientalists despite lacking oriental colonies) that Alan thought caused such problems. They do give a humorous nod to the ancient Greeks by inventing an oracle who gave them the Three Great Untruths of the Book, but then admit that backstory was a joke and that the real origin was in noticing a shift exemplified by Columbia students objecting to a course on the western canon as harmful on quasi-medical grounds of the material not being “safe” for them.

As mentioned in my previous post, directly after finishing Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind” I started reading Saul Bellow’s “Ravelstein”, which is a roman a clef about Bloom’s life and death subsequent to the success of that book, for which Bellow (fictionalized as the narrator “Chick”) is given responsibility for convincing Bloom/Ravelstein to write it. Before I read either book, I was aware there was some controversy over Bellow’s outing of Bloom and making it explicit that his standin died of AIDS (in reaction to said controversy Bellow admitted he didn’t actually know whether that was true of Bloom, but merely had that impression and thought that made for a more tragic novel). Bloom’s surviving friends (some of whom have their own standins in the novel, one of whom had their own controversy I wrote about last summer) can consider it defamatory, but I think the issue relevant to the book is that Bellow didn’t actually know Bloom nearly as well as Chick knew Ravelstein, and this ties in with Chick being tasked by Ravelstein to write a memoir about him after his death which would spare nothing (since Ravelstein valued bluntness) and convey all sorts of personal info that Ravelstein provided.
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I had heard that Allan Bloom’s book was a big deal back in the day, but on reading it I can hardly believe that it was. His focus is rather narrowly on elite schools and students of the humanities there, and not because of downstream consequences on the rest of society (though he does place a lot more causal importance on philosophical ideas than I would), but instead because that was his world and what he valued. I studied STEM at a state university, but perhaps my willingness to read Allan last month and Harold Bloom months earlier makes me part of that subset of humanity he’s interested in despite my still being much less interested in Shakespeare than either Bloom (whose shared surname was as good a reason as any to make this a follow-up). Insofar as he would have cared what I thought, Allan would have regarded me as part of the problem: atheism led me to Hobbesian amoralism, an indifference toward actions of others that don’t directly concern me which might be dubbed “moral relativism” (though I’d still reject that label) and is certainly not what this book calls “the good”, and a rejection of the “natural rights” he trumpets to the point my one published bit of writing is about the myth of them. In addition, I am a proponent of Bryan Caplan’s “The Case Against Education”, which points out that students retain little knowledge of what they’re taught, and that the utility of university degrees comes more from their signalling than human capital. Kieran Egan would say in The Educated Mind that the problem is us wanting different things from schools, and that I take the “academic” stance as normative and negatively judge schools for failing at that, while Bloom seems to blend that with a Rousseauian focus on his individual students’ development.

Despite having a WordPress site, there are no WordPress comments, so I could only send a message that might disappear into the void, so I decided to copy it here as well (with some added links to my blog posts):

In advance of the commentary on bloggers reading Middlemarch, I myself had already read Harold Bloom on what makes it one of the “canonical novels” of the 19th century (but I still haven’t actually read any George Eliot that wasn’t someone else quoting her). I had gotten the idea to read Bloom’s famous book (not “The Anxiety of Influence”) back when I read Edward Said and chafed at his literary rather than scientific bent. Bloom never references Said, but he is reacting to critiques of “dead white male” writers from a modern political bent (which he calls the “school of resentment”), including the Marxist (and more specifically Gramscian) strain that Said is explicitly indebted to. He also doesn’t really make a political argument against such critics, but instead an aesthetic one that great writing is great regardless of politics. I am not part of that gaggle, but I think there is a critique to be made of this book as being more “writers and works that Harold Bloom wants to write about” than actually being the western canon, even if some of them are admittedly canonical enough to be cited in the same blog post that suggested I should read Said.

The subtitle of Milorad Pavic’s book is “A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words”, but I wouldn’t say it qualifies as a dictionary/lexicon or novel. Instead it consists of three fictional encyclopedias, with supplementary sections not placed into that tripartite division. There are actual fictional dictionaries like Ambrose Bierce’s “The Devil’s Dictionary” and L. A. Rollins’ tribute to it, “Lucifer’s Lexicon” (contained in a collection to which I contributed an introduction). I discovered this via J. G. Keely’s list of fantasy recommendations, which I only heard about via some fans of A Song of Ice and Fire deriding his elitist disdain for the escapist & bloated tendencies of the genre he traces from Tolkien to Martin (which I discussed with a pro-Tolkien anti-Martin commenter here). I don’t think I’ve reviewed a work of fantasy on this blog before, but I’ve reviewed enough related works that it didn’t feel out of place. I’ve blogged recently about fictional histories (as well as the actual Orientalists who wrote dictionaries & encyclopedias about subjects like this), which this bears some resemblance to as well. The Khazars themselves were a real people, but the depiction of them here is obviously fictional/fantastical, like something out of 1001 Nights (and almost seems designed to go against everything cultural group selection would favor, thus explaining why the Khazars don’t exist anymore), and since some of the entries were real people I guess I could compare it to The Alexandrian Romances. But those texts are expected to be read from beginning to end, which is possible here but not recommended as the optimal method.

I had heard that Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel inspired Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, which I watched back in college before I started this blog, but didn’t feel that much desire to read it until I read Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation. Later on I heard that book was a collection of short stories, unlike the single narrative of the film, but I don’t think that’s quite right either. Instead the the four chapters (after a short introductory in-universe interview providing some basic exposition) have no distinctive titles indicative of them telling a standalone story, but instead just the name and age of the POV character, which in three of those chapters is the “stalker” Redrick Schuart. I haven’t read Olive Kitteridge (only watched the miniseries), and know that was a short story collection despite focusing on one person, but this seems more like a (short) novel in that all of it is about the progression of the career of a stalker (even if a lot of things are skipped over).

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I ended the blog post for my last book review talking about how I had more than a decade earlier referenced Edward Said as part of an oppositional pairing suggested by Matt Zeitlin alongside some anthropologists I read only a couple years ago. I’ve been tardy in reviewing Said in part because I discovered he has his own more direct oppositional pair in Robert Irwin’s book (published years after Said died, and with the alternate title “For Lust of Knowing” in the UK, though as I read a US edition I will use its title), which allows for a dual-review like for those anthropologists. I only heard about Irwin via this article around the time I picked up Orientalism, so it wasn’t pre-planned, and the article in question doesn’t exactly make him seem rational & objective, which is what I wanted after complaining about Orientalism’s reliance on Continental philosophy nonsense like Foucault.

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Cremieux Recueil’s From Caveman to Chinaman is such a Big History post you don’t expect it to be contained in just one blog post. While, as the title indicates, it begins very far back (to The 10,000 Year Explosion of sedentarism & agriculture), I find the latter more interesting, particularly in light of explaining Russian serfdom based on the same factor. The thing emphasized as being different for China is having a big unidirectional threat, vs the multidimensional threats facing Europeans.

I mentioned in my review of The Good War that General Sir John Hackett’s “The Third World War” remained to review in the future, having less definitely implied that in my review of World War Z (since that was inspired by both The Good War & The Third World War). I’d like to say that the future is now, but the Chicago public library system only had the titular book with the subtitle above from 1982, and not his 1978 version (which I’ve sometimes seen referred to as “The Third World War: August 1985”, including in the foreword here). Because I still haven’t read the original, I can’t be certain what’s in it, but Untold Story repeatedly notes that certain things are discussed in more depth in the earlier work, which is cited in the main text as “Sir John Hackett and others”.