Quotulatiousness

March 18, 2024

QotD: Self-hatred (aka “false consciousness”)

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The expectation that a commentator’s views must be in lockstep with his or her ethnic, religious, or sexual identity is always distasteful — particularly when blacks, women, gays, or Jews are labeled “self-hating” when they refuse to toe the perceived party line.

Cathy Young, “When Jews wax anti-Semitic”, Boston Globe, 2005-02-07.

March 17, 2024

QotD: Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany never had a “long game” … but Stalin did

Though both the Germans and the Japanese had every intention of starting major wars, as everyone knows they seemingly put zero thought into what they’d do once they won. I know, I know, [Himmler] had his sweaty wet dreams about Wehrbauern on the vast Russian steppes, but all but the most rudimentary post-victory planning seems to have been beyond the Third Reich’s capacity — the Reich Resettlement Office, for instance, was tiny even when the war looked like it would be over by Christmas. The Japanese were, if anything, even dumber — they honestly seemed to believe they could run China, all of it, and even India Manchukuo-style.

The Russians, meanwhile, never stopped playing the long game. While Goebbels made a few token gestures at rapprochement with “the West” (yeah, they called it that), and to sell Nazism to ditto, his heart wasn’t in it, any more than the Japanese’s heart was in their “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” hooey. Stalin, by contrast, was always pimping Communism to the West — even in the deepest, darkest days of the war, when it looked like the Wehrmacht was about to march into Moscow, the propaganda directed at the West continued full blast.

Like the German and Japanese aircraft industries, the German propaganda industry was ideologically locked into its core mission: To sell Nazism to Germans. And they were aces at it, no doubt … but then the mission changed. The smart thing for the Germans (and Japanese) to have done with their conquered territories was, in the context of the war, to ease up on the Nazi shit for the duration. The Nazis could’ve had zillions of Ukrainians fighting for them in 1941 just as the Japanese probably could’ve waltzed into India in 1941 had they not been so … well, so Japanese, in the rest of the Pacific rim. Stalin would’ve done it in a heartbeat, had the situation been reversed, and to hell with “authentic” Marxism-Leninism. Win the war first; square the ideology later.

As this is running way long, one example should suffice. Goebbels approached the task of selling Nazism to Germans in the most German way possible: He created the Reich Culture Chamber, which controlled all newspapers, radio broadcasts, film distribution, etc. And it worked, as far as it went — Goebbels deserves his “evil genius” rep — but as we’ve seen, that locked the leadership into an ideological straightjacket. Telling the Wehrmacht to ignore the Commissar Order and buddy up with the Ukrainians would’ve been the smart thing to do, militarily, but it was culturally impossible. Goebbels did his job too well … and then the mission changed.

The Soviets had a similar problem inside the USSR, but — here’s Stalin’s evil genius — they had free reign in propagandizing the West. Goebbels hardly bothered, but the Soviets poured massive resources into it. Forget, as far as you can, everything you think you know about “Nazism” […]. Even if you look at it as objectively as possible, it still seems ridiculous, and there’s a simple explanation for that — it’s not for you. Unless you were a pure blooded Aryan, actually living in Germany (or within Germany’s potential military reach), [they] couldn’t care less about you. Which made being a “Nazi” in, say, America uniquely pointless — you just look like a bigot at best, a traitorous bigot at worst.

Being a “Communist”, though? That was universal. Indeed, that made you a Smart person, a very very smart person, and morally superior to boot. Why? Because you care so much that you’ve mastered this large body of deliberately esoteric doctrine, comrade … all straight out of the NKVD playbook. And if actual life as it was lived in the Soviet Union didn’t quite measure up to the promises, well, that’s because they didn’t have the right people — people like YOU — running things. It’s fucking brilliant — a totally ideologically closed, indeed brutal, system at home, presented as the most open-minded, enlightened, tolerant one possible abroad.

Which is why Joey G. needed a huge Reich Culture Chamber that never came close to justifying its budget, and Stalin needed, effectively, nothing. Being so very, very Smart, wannabe “elites” in the West were happy to spread Commie propaganda for free. The NKVD, let alone the Gestapo, ain’t got shit on the Junior Volunteer Thought Police of Twitter and Facebook …

… which forces us to confront the question: Which model of propaganda are our rulers using? Has the one morphed into the other? Is it real, or is it just “German efficiency”?

Severian, “The Myth of German Efficiency”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-26.

March 16, 2024

QotD: “Surface democracies” and “surface monarchies” — how the deep state pretends to be something else

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, History, Japan, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The single-party state has a PR problem, and one solution to it is a more postmodern form of managed democracy, the “surface democracy”.

Surface democracies are wildly, raucously competitive. Two or more parties wage an all-out cinematic slugfest over hot-button issues with big, beautiful ratings. There may be a kaleidoscopic cast of quixotic minor parties with unusual obsessions filling the role of comic relief, usually only lasting for a season or two of the hit show Democracy. The spectacle is gripping, everybody is awed by how high the stakes are and agonizes over how to cast their precious vote. Meanwhile, in a bland gray building far away from the action, all of the real decisions are being made by some entirely separate organ of government that rolls onwards largely unaffected by the show.

Losers and haters are perpetually accusing the United States of being a surface democracy. Enemies of the state ranging from Ralph Nader to Vladimir Putin are constantly banging on about it, but this is a Patriotic Substack and we would obviously never countenance such insinuations about our noble republic. So there’s absolutely no chance it’s even the slightest bit true of the US, but … what about Japan?

Well, awkwardly enough, it turns out that the central drama of preindustrial Japanese history was the growing power of unofficial rulers (the shoguns) who ran the country in reality while the official rulers (the emperors) gradually devolved into puppets and figureheads. A “surface monarchy”, if you will. Of course that all ended with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 (c’mon, it says “restoration” right there in the name) which returned the emperor to being fully in charge … which is why when the Japanese declared war on America in 1941, neither the Emperor Hirohito nor the parliament was even consulted. Hang on a minute!

In fact, yes, prewar Japan may have been reigned over by a monarch, but it was ruled by the deep state — especially the career military general staff and the economic planning bureaucracies. I know it’s hard to believe that drab agencies regulating coal and steel production were able to go toe-to-toe with General Tojo, but just imagine that they were all being staffed by fanatical clans of demobilized samurai or something crazy like that. When MacArthur rolled in with the occupation forces, he had a goal of creating total discontinuity with Japan’s past and utterly bulldozing the government. But a guy needs to pick his battles, and so he obviously focused on getting rid of all those nasty generals and admirals he’d just spent years fighting. The harmless paper-pushers, on the other hand, how much trouble could they be? Maybe they could even help organize the place.

The chapter about the post-war occupation is one of the deadpan funniest in Johnson’s book. The American occupiers are genuinely trying to create a liberal democracy out of the ashes, but have no idea that the friendly, helpful bureaucrats they’ve enlisted in this quest were the secret rulers of the regime they’d just conquered. The stats bear this out — of all the officials who controlled Japan’s wartime industry, only a few dozen were ever purged by the Americans. The most striking example of continuity has to be Nobusuke Kishi,1 but there were countless others like him. These were the men charged with translating the occupiers’ desires into policy, reconstructing Japanese society, and finally drafting a new constitution. Then eventually the Americans sailed off, and the bureaucrats smiled and waved, and went back to ruling as they’d done for hundreds of years, behind the scenes.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: MITI and the Japanese Miracle by Chalmers Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-04-03.


    1 Briefly: Kishi was a descendant of samurai (of course) who became an economic planning bureaucrat (of course) and then the dictator of the Japanese puppet state in Manchuria in the 1930s. During his reign he tried out a lot of the industrial policy ideas that would later fuel the Japanese postwar boom … and also brutalized the population to such an extent that even other Imperial Japanese colonial administrators thought he was excessive. Later he signed the declaration of war against the United States (he was an economic planning bureaucrat, after all), and was briefly imprisoned as a war criminal after the Japanese surrender. Within a few years, however, he was back out, and running the country as prime minister. His brother was also prime minister. Oh … and his grandson was a guy you might have heard of, a guy named “Shinzo Abe”.

March 15, 2024

QotD: The ever-growing state

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“Inconvenience would seem to be a small price to pay for peace of mind.”

That one phrase sums up all the problems we are having with government in this country. It justifies the humiliating personal searches at airports. It justifies the police state tactics of “sobriety checkpoints” or “identification stops”. It justifies the Patriot Act, and the new Intelligence Reform Act, with all their draconian intrusions on personal privacy, including the repulsive, illegal and un-Constitutional parts, such as no-warrant-required searches, a national ID card, federal snooping into our reading habits at libraries and book stores. It justifies any intrusion into private, personal, or intimate matters. After all, if someone has more than one wife (or husband), doesn’t your peace of mind require that that person be harassed, jailed, or otherwise punished for violation of your religious or moral code? It doesn’t matter that the people involved are adults who freely and willingly consent to live in that situation. For that matter, if two men or women live together, doesn’t your peace of mind require that their “immoral and ungodly” lifestyle be exposed, and the people involved publicly pilloried?

Ron Beatty, “Peace of Mind”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-03-06.

March 14, 2024

QotD: Recruiting an army in the Roman Republic

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Before we dive in, we should stop to clarify some of our key actors here, the Roman magistrates and officers with a role in all of this. A Roman army consisted of one or more legions, supported by a number (usually two) alae recruited from Rome’s Italian allies, the socii. Legions in the Republic did not have specific commanders, rather the whole army was commanded by a single magistrate with imperium (the power to command armies and organize courts). That magistrate was usually a consul (of which there were two every year), but praetors and dictators,1 all had imperium and so might lead an army. Generally the consuls lead the main two armies. When more commanders were needed, former consuls and praetors might be delegated the job as a stand-in for the current magistrates, these were called pro-consuls and pro-praetors (or collectively, “pro-magistrates”) and they had imperium too.

In addition to the imperium-haver leading the army, there were also a set of staff officers called military tribunes, important to the process. These fellows don’t have command of a specific part of the legion, but are “officers without portfolio”, handling whatever the imperium-haver wants handled; at times they may have command of part of a legion or all of one legion. Finally, there’s one more major magistrate in the army: the quaestor. A much more junior magistrate than the imperium-haver (but senior to the tribunes), he handles pay and probably in this period also supply. That said, the quaestor is not usually the general’s “number two” even though it seems like he might be; quaestors are quite junior magistrates and the imperium-haver has probably brought friends or advisors with a lot more experience than his quaestor (who may or may not be someone the imperium-haver knows or likes). […]

The first thing to note about this process, before we even start is that the dilectus was a regular process which happened every year at a regular time. The Romans did have a system to rapidly raise new troops in an emergency (it was called a tumultus), where the main officials, the consuls, could just grab any citizen into their army in a major emergency. But emergencies like that were very rare; for the most part the Roman army was filled out by the regular process of the dilectus, which happened annually in tune with Rome’s political calendar. That regularity is going to be important to understand how this process is able to move so many people around: because it is regular, people could adapt their schedules and make provisions for a process that happened every year. I should note the dilectus could also be held out of season, though often the times we hear about this it is because it went poorly (e.g. in 275 BC, no one shows up).

The process really begins with the consular elections for the year, which bounced around a little in the calendar but generally happened around September,2 though the consuls do not take office until the start of the next calendar year. As we’ve discussed, the year originally seems to have started in March (and so consuls were inaugurated then), but in 153 was shifted to January (and so consuls were inaugurated then).

What’s really clear is that there is some standard business that happens as the year turns over every year in the Middle Republic and we can see this in the way that Livy structures his history, with year-breaks signaled by these events: the inauguration of new consuls, the assignment of senior Roman magistrates and pro-magistrates to provinces, and the determinations of how forces will be allotted between those provinces. And that sequence makes a lot of sense: once the Senate knows who has been elected, it can assign provinces to them for the coming year (the law requiring Senate province assignments to be blind to who was elected, the lex Sempronia de provinciis consularibus, was only passed in 123) and then allocate troops to them. That allocation (which also, by the by, includes redirecting food supplies from one theater to another, as Rome is often militarily actively in multiple places) includes both existing formations, but is also going to include the raising of new legions or the conscription of new troops to fill out existing legions, a practice Livy notes.

The consuls, now inaugurated have another key task before they can embark on the dilectus, which is the selection of military tribunes, a set of staff officers who assist the consuls and other magistrates leading armies. There are six military tribunes per legion (so 24 in a normal year where each consul enrolls two legions); by this point four are elected and two are appointed by the consul. The military tribunes themselves seem to have often been a mix, some of them being relatively inexperienced aristocrats doing their military service in the most prestigious way possible and getting command experience, while Polybius also notes that some military tribunes were required to have already had a decade in the ranks when selected (Polyb. 6.19.1). These fellows have to be selected first because they clearly matter for the process as it goes forward.

The end of this process, which as we’ll see takes place over several days at least, though exactly how many is unclear, will have have had to have taken place in or before March, the Roman month of Martius, which opened the normal campaigning season with a bunch of festivals on the Kalends (the first day of the month) to Mars. As Rome’s wars grew more distant and its domestic affairs more complex, it’s not surprising that the Romans opted to shift where the year began on the calendar to give the new consuls a bit more of winter to work with before they would be departing Rome with their armies. It should be noted that while Roman warfare was seasonal, it was only weakly so: Roman armies stayed deployed all year round in the Middle Republic, but serious operations generally waited until spring when forage and fodder would be more available.

That in turn also means that the dilectus is taking place in winter, which also matters for understanding the process: this is a low-ebb in the labor demands in the agricultural calendar. I find it striking that Rome’s elections happen in late summer or early fall, when it would actually be rather inconvenient for poor Romans to spend a day voting (it’s the planting season), but the dilectus is placed over winter where it would be far easier to get everyone to show up. I doubt this contrast was accidental; the Roman election system is quite intentionally designed to preference the votes of wealthier Romans in quite a few ways.

So before the dilectus begins, we have our regular sequence: the consuls are inaugurated at the beginning of the year, the Senate meets and assigns provinces and sets military priorities, including how many soldiers are to be enrolled. The Senate’s advice is not technically legally binding, but in this period is almost always obeyed. Military tribunes are selected (some by election, some by appointment) and at last the consuls can announce the day of the dilectus, conveniently now falling in the first couple of months of the year when the demand for agricultural labor is low and thus everyone, in theory, can afford to show up for the selection process.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How To Raise a Roman Army: The Dilectus“, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-16.


    1. And the dictator’s master of the horse.

    2. On this, see J.T. Ramsey, “The Date of the Consular Elections in 63 and the Inception of Catiline’s Conspiracy”, HSCP 110 (2019): 213-270.

March 13, 2024

QotD: Filthy coal

… coal smoke had dramatic implications for daily life even beyond the ways it reshaped domestic architecture, because in addition to being acrid it’s filthy. Here, once again, [Ruth] Goodman’s time running a household with these technologies pays off, because she can speak from experience:

    So, standing in my coal-fired kitchen for the first time, I was feeling confident. Surely, I thought, the Victorian regime would be somewhere halfway between the Tudor and the modern. Dirt was just dirt, after all, and sweeping was just sweeping, even if the style of brushes had changed a little in the course of five hundred years. Washing-up with soap was not so very different from washing-up with liquid detergent, and adding soap and hot water to the old laundry method of bashing the living daylights out of clothes must, I imagined, make it a little easier, dissolving dirt and stains all the more quickly. How wrong could I have been.

    Well, it turned out that the methods and technologies necessary for cleaning a coal-burning home were fundamentally different from those for a wood-burning one. Foremost, the volume of work — and the intensity of that work — were much, much greater.

The fundamental problem is that coal soot is greasy. Unlike wood soot, which is easily swept away, it sticks: industrial cities of the Victorian era were famously covered in the residue of coal fires, and with anything but the most efficient of chimney designs (not perfected until the early twentieth century), the same thing also happens to your interior. Imagine the sort of sticky film that settles on everything if you fry on the stove without a sufficient vent hood, then make it black and use it to heat not just your food but your entire house; I’m shuddering just thinking about it. A 1661 pamphlet lamented coal smoke’s “superinducing a sooty Crust or Furr upon all that it lights, spoyling the moveables, tarnishing the Plate, Gildings and Furniture, and corroding the very Iron-bars and hardest Stones with those piercing and acrimonious Spirits which accompany its Sulphure.” To clean up from coal smoke, you need soap.

Coal needs soap?” you may say, suspiciously. “Did they … not use soap before?” But no, they (mostly) didn’t, a fact that (like the famous “Queen Elizabeth bathed once a month whether she needed it or not” line) has led to the medieval and early modern eras’ entirely undeserved reputation for dirtiness. They didn’t use soap, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t clean; instead, they mostly swept ash, dust, and dirt from their houses with a variety of brushes and brooms (often made of broom) and scoured their dishes with sand. Sand-scouring is very simple: you simply dampen a cloth, dip it in a little sand, and use it to scrub your dish before rinsing the dirty sand away. The process does an excellent job of removing any burnt-on residue, and has the added advantage of removed a micro-layer of your material to reveal a new sterile surface. It’s probably better than soap at cleaning the grain of wood, which is what most serving and eating dishes were made of at the time, and it’s also very effective at removing the poisonous verdigris that can build up on pots made from copper alloys like brass or bronze when they’re exposed to acids like vinegar. Perhaps more importantly, in an era where every joule of energy is labor-intensive to obtain, it works very well with cold water.

The sand can also absorb grease, though a bit of grease can actually be good for wood or iron (I wash my wooden cutting boards and my cast-iron skillet with soap and water,1 but I also regularly oil them). Still, too much grease is unsanitary and, frankly, gross, which premodern people recognized as much as we do, and particularly greasy dishes, like dirty clothes, might also be cleaned with wood ash. Depending on the kind of wood you’ve been burning, your ashes will contain up to 10% potassium hydroxide (KOH), better known as lye, which reacts with your grease to create a soap. (The word potassium actually derives from “pot ash,” the ash from under your pot.) Literally all you have to do to clean this way is dump a handful of ashes and some water into your greasy pot and swoosh it around a bit with a cloth; the conversion to soap is very inefficient (though if you warm it a little over the fire it works better), but if your household runs on wood you’ll never be short of ashes. As wood-burning vanished, though, it made more sense to buy soap produced industrially through essentially the same process (though with slightly more refined ingredients for greater efficiency) and to use it for everything.

Washing greasy dishes with soap rather than ash was a matter of what supplies were available; cleaning your house with soap rather than a brush was an unavoidable fact of coal smoke. Goodman explains that “wood ash also flies up and out into the room, but it is not sticky and tends to fall out of the air and settle quickly. It is easy to dust and sweep away. A brush or broom can deal with the dirt of a wood fire in a fairly quick and simple operation. If you try the same method with coal smuts, you will do little more than smear the stuff about.” This simple fact changed interior decoration for good: gone were the untreated wood trims and elaborate wall-hangings — “[a] tapestry that might have been expected to last generations with a simple routine of brushing could be utterly ruined in just a decade around coal fires” — and anything else that couldn’t withstand regular scrubbing with soap and water. In their place were oil-based paints and wallpaper, both of which persist in our model of “traditional” home decor, as indeed do the blue and white Chinese-inspired glazed ceramics that became popular in the 17th century and are still going strong (at least in my house). They’re beautiful, but they would never have taken off in the era of scouring with sand; it would destroy the finish.

But more important than what and how you were cleaning was the sheer volume of the cleaning. “I believe,” Goodman writes towards the end of the book, “there is vastly more domestic work involved in running a coal home in comparison to running a wood one.” The example of laundry is particularly dramatic, and her account is extensive enough that I’ll just tell you to read the book, but it goes well beyond that:

    It is not merely that the smuts and dust of coal are dirty in themselves. Coal smuts weld themselves to all other forms of dirt. Flies and other insects get entrapped in it, as does fluff from clothing and hair from people and animals. to thoroughly clear a room of cobwebs, fluff, dust, hair and mud in a simply furnished wood-burning home is the work of half an hour; to do so in a coal-burning home — and achieve a similar standard of cleanliness — takes twice as long, even when armed with soap, flannels and mops.

And here, really, is why Ruth Goodman is the only person who could have written this book: she may be the only person who has done any substantial amount of domestic labor under both systems who could write. Like, at all. Not that there weren’t intelligent and educated women (and it was women doing all this) in early modern London, but female literacy was typically confined to classes where the women weren’t doing their own housework, and by the time writing about keeping house was commonplace, the labor-intensive regime of coal and soap was so thoroughly established that no one had a basis for comparison.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.


    1. Yeah, I know they tell you not to do this because it will destroy the seasoning. They’re wrong. Don’t use oven cleaner; anything you’d use to wash your hands in a pinch isn’t going to hurt long-chain polymers chemically bonded to cast iron.

March 12, 2024

QotD: Isaiah Berlin on Niccolò Machiavelli

When asked about Machiavelli’s reputation, people use terms like “amoral”, “cynical”, “unethical”, or “unprincipled”. But this is incorrect. Machiavelli did believe in moral virtues, just not Christian or Humanistic ones.

What did he actually believe?

In 1953, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin delivered a lecture titled “The Originality of Machiavelli”.

Berlin began by posing a simple question: Why has Machiavelli unsettled so many people over the years?

Machiavelli believed that the Italy of his day was both materially and morally weak. He saw vice, corruption, weakness, and, as Berlin says, “lives unworthy of human beings”. It’s worth noting here that around the time that Machiavelli died in 1527, the Age of Exploration was just kicking off, and adventurers from Italy and elsewhere in Europe were in the process of transforming the world. Even the shrewdest individuals aren’t always the best judges of their own time.

So what did Machiavelli want? He wanted a strong and glorious society. Something akin to Athens at its height, or Sparta, or the kingdoms of David and Solomon. But really, Machiavelli’s ideal was the Roman Republic.

To build a good state, a well-governed state, men require “inner moral strength, magnanimity, vigour, vitality, generosity, loyalty, above all public spirit, civic sense, dedication to security, power, glory”.

According to Machiavelli, these are the Roman virtues.

In contrast, the ideals of Christianity are “charity, mercy, sacrifice, love of God, forgiveness of enemies, contempt for the goods of this world, faith in the hereafter”.

Machiavelli wrote that one must choose between Roman and Christian virtues. If you choose Christianity, you are selecting a moral framework that is not favorable to building and preserving a strong state.

Machiavelli does not say that humility, compassion, and kindness are bad or unimportant. He actually agrees that they are, in fact, good and righteous virtues. He simply says that if you adhere to them, then you will be overrun by more unscrupulous men.

In some instances, Machiavelli would say, rulers may have to commit war crimes in order to ensure the survival of their state. As one Machiavelli translator has put it: “Men cannot afford justice in any sense that transcends their own preservation”.

From Berlin’s lecture:

    If you object to the political methods recommended because they seem to you morally detestable … Machiavelli has no answer, no argument … But you must not make yourself responsible for the lives of others or expect good fortune; you must expect to be ignored or destroyed.

In a famous passage, Machiavelli writes that Christianity has made men “weak”, easy prey to “wicked men”, since they “think more about enduring their injuries than about avenging them”. He compares Christianity (or Humanism) unfavorably with Paganism, which made men more “ferocious”.

“One can save one’s soul,” writes Berlin, “or one can found or maintain or service a great and glorious state; but not always both at once.”

Again, Machiavelli’s tone is descriptive. He is not making claims about how things should be, but rather how things are. Although it is clear what his preference is.

He writes that Christian virtues are “praiseworthy”. And that it is right to praise them. But he says they are dead ends when it comes to statecraft.

Machiavelli wrote:

    Any man who under all conditions insists on making it his business to be good, will surely be destroyed among so many who are not good. Hence a prince … must acquire the power to be not good, and understand when to use it and when not to use it, in accord with necessity.

To create a strong state, one cannot hold delusions about human nature:

    Everything that occurs in the world, in every epoch, has something that corresponds to it in the ancient times. The reason is that these things were done by men, who have and have always had the same passions.

Rob Henderson, “The Machiavellian Maze”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2023-12-09.

March 11, 2024

QotD: The profound asshole-ishness of the “best of the best”

Filed under: Health, Quotations, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ever met a pro athlete? How about a fighter pilot, or a trauma surgeon? I’ve met a fair amount of all of them, and unless they’re on their very best behavior they all tend to come off as raging assholes. And they get worse the higher up the success ladder they go — the pro athletes I’ve met were mostly in the minors, and though they were big-league assholes they were nothing compared to the few genuine “you see them every night on Sports Center” guys I met. Same way with fighter pilots — I never met an astronaut, but I had buddies at NASA back in the days who met lots, and they told me that even other fighter jocks consider astronauts to be world-class assholes …

The truth is, they’re not — or, at least, they’re no more so than the rest of the population. It’s just that they have jobs where total, utter, profoundly narcissistic self-confidence is a must. It’s what keeps them alive, in the pilots’ case at least, and it’s what keeps you alive if, God forbid, you should ever need the trauma surgeon. Same way with the sportsballers. I can say with 100% metaphysical certainty that there are better basketball players than Michael Jordan, better hitters than Mike Trout, better passers than Tom Brady, out there. There are undoubtedly lots of them, if by “better” you mean “possessed of more raw physical talent at the neuronal level”. What those guys don’t have, but Jordan, Brady, Trout et al do have, is the mental wherewithal to handle failure.

Everyone knows of someone like Billy Beane, the Moneyball guy. So good at football that he was recruited to replace John Elway (!!) at Stanford, but who chose to play baseball instead … and became one of the all-time busts. He had all the talent in the world, but his head wasn’t on straight. Not to put too fine a point on it, he doubted himself. He got to Double A (or wherever) and faced a pitcher who mystified him. Which made him think “Maybe I’m not as good as I think I am?” … and from that moment, he was toast as a professional athlete. Contrast this to the case of Mike Piazza, the consensus greatest offensive catcher of all time. A 27th round draftee, only picked up as a favor to a family friend, etc. Beane was a “better” athlete, but Piazza had a better head. Striking out didn’t make him doubt himself; it made him angry, and that’s why Piazza’s in the Hall of Fame and Beane is a legendary bust.

The problem though, for us normal folks, is that the affect in all cases is pretty much the same … and it’s really hard to turn off, which is why so many pro athletes (fighter jocks, surgeons, etc.) who are actually nice guys come off as assholes. It’s hard to turn off … but as it turns out, it’s pretty easy to turn ON, and that’s in effect what Game teaches.

Severian, “Mental Middlemen II: Sex and the City and Self-Confidence”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.

March 10, 2024

QotD: Sustainability

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I would argue that financial stability has everything to do with environmental sustainability (though I will admit that this comparison is a bit hard since environmentalists seem to bend over backwards to NOT define “sustainability” very precisely). In fact, I think that sustainability is baked right into the heart of capitalism.

The reason for this comes back to the magic of prices. Of all the amazing, wondrous things we celebrate in the world, prices may be the most overlooked. Just think of it: with no governing structure or top down ruling board, a single number encapsulates everything most everyone in the world knows about a particular product: both its utility and relative scarcity, both now and as anticipated in the future. It is a consensus derived voluntarily between millions of people who never meet with each other and likely never communicate with each other.

It is amazing to me that people who talk so much about their concern for scarcity tend to be the same folks who ignore prices and even eschew markets and capitalism. But in prices we have a number that gives us a single metric telling us the world’s consensus on the current and future scarcity of any commodity.

We do know that prices can miss some things. Perhaps most relevant today, they can fail to include the cost of emissions (ground, water, air) associated with that commodities extraction, refining and processing, and use. But compared to the effort of trying to create some alternate structure for managing product scarcity, this is a relatively simple problem to fix (simple technically, but not necessarily politically). Estimates of these pollution costs can be added as a tax (e.g. a carbon tax on fossil fuels to take into account climate effects of CO2 emissions) and prices will continue to work their magic but with these new factors added.

Warren Meyer, “Sustainability Is Baked Right Into the Heart of Capitalism”, Coyote Blog, 2019-10-10.

March 9, 2024

QotD: Reading for snobs

Filed under: Books, Humour, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

I would like, for the sake of hipness, to be able to claim that I am reading some obscure French novelist of the inter-war period, in the original French. Unfortunately, the only thing I can read in the original French is no-smoking signs, and I hate most French novels written after 1890. Instead, I’m reaquainting myself with the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Dorothy Parker, the patron saints of light verse. When I was in college, I thought I wanted to be Dorothy Parker, until I realised that no matter how hard I tried I was never going to be talented, Jewish, or short, and that dying alone only sounds romantic so long as you continue to believe yourself to be immortal.

Megan McArdle, writing as “Jane Galt”, Asymmetrical Information, 2004-12.

March 8, 2024

QotD: The original greasy pole of the cursus honorum

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Last week we discussed the overall structure of the “career path” for a Roman politician and the first few offices along that path. This week we’re going to look at the upper-steps of that career path, the offices of praetor and consul and the particular set of powers they possess, called imperium, along with the pro-magistrate forms of these positions. Now I should note at the outset that we have skipped one office on our way through, the tribunes of the plebs; we’ll get to that office next week to discuss its oddities and unusual powers.

The praetorship and the consulship are the highest Roman offices (the censorship being more of a “victory lap”) and the two offices that wield direct military and judicial authority. These are also the offices where competition in the cursus honorum starts to get fierce, as the eight quaestors must compete for just six praetorships and those six praetors can expect to compete for just two – always two – consulships. It is worth keeping in mind as we go through this that on the one hand these offices are largely confined to a small Roman elite, the nobiles, composed of families (both patrician and plebeian) that have been successful in politics over generations, but at the same time it is the popular assemblies which choose “winners” and “losers” from among the nobiles by deciding who gets to proceed to the next round of the political elimination context, and who is forever going to sit in the Senate as a former quaestor and nothing more.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Part IIIb: Imperium”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-08-18.

Update: I forgot to add the glossary links. Fixed now.

March 7, 2024

QotD: Helmuth von Moltke’s Kabinettskriege of 1870

[The Franco-Prussian War] is generally considered the magnum opus of the titanic Prussian commander, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke. Exercising deft operational control and an uncanny sense of intuition, Moltke orchestrated an aggressive opening campaign which sent Prusso-German armies streaming like a mass of tentacles into France, trapping the primary French field army in the fortress of Metz in the opening weeks of the war and besieging it. When the French Emperor, Napoleon III, marched out with a relief army (comprising the rest of France’s battle-worthy formations), Moltke hunted that army down as well, encircling it at Sedan and taking the entire force (and the emperor) into captivity.

From an operational perspective, this sequence of events was (and is) considered a masterclass, and a major reason why Moltke has become revered as one of history’s truly great talents (he is on this writer’s Mount Rushmore alongside Hannibal, Napoleon, and Manstein). The Prussians had executed their platonic ideal of warfare — the encirclement of the main enemy body — not once, but twice in a matter of weeks. In the conventional narrative, these great encirclements became the archetype of the German kesselschlacht, or encirclement battle, which became the ultimate goal of all operations. In a certain sense, the German military establishment spent the next half-century dreaming of ways to replicate its victory at Sedan.

This story is true, to a certain extent. My objective here is not to “bust myths” about blitzkrieg or any such trite thing. However, not everyone in the German military establishment looked at the Franco-Prussian War as an ideal. Many were terrified by what happened after Sedan.

By all rights, Moltke’s masterpiece at Sedan should have ended the war. The French had lost both of their trained field armies and their head of state, and ought to have given in to Prussia’s demand (namely, the annexation of the Alsace-Lorraine region).

Instead, Napoleon III’s government was overthrown and a National Government was declared in Paris, which promptly declared what amounted to a total war. The new government abandoned Paris, declared a Levee en Masse — a callback to the wars of the French Revolution in which all men aged 21 to 40 were to be called to arms. Regional governments ordered the destruction of bridges, roads, railways, and telegraphs to deny their use to the Prussians.

Instead of bringing France to its knees, the Prussians found a rapidly mobilizing nation which was determined to fight to the death. The mobilization prowess of the emergency French government was astonishing: by February, 1871, they had raised and armed more than 900,000 men.

Fortunately for the Prussians, this never became a genuine military emergency. The newly raised French units suffered from poor equipment and poor training (particularly because most of France’s trained officers had been captured in the opening campaign). The new mass French armies had poor combat effectiveness, and Moltke managed to coordinate the capture of Paris alongside a campaign which saw Prussian forces marching all over France to run down and destroy the elements of the new French Army.

Big Serge, “The End of Cabinet War”, Big Serge Thought, 2023-11-30.

March 6, 2024

QotD: Mansa Musa’s disastrous foreign aid to Cairo

Mansa Musa’s good intentions may be the first case in history of failed foreign aid. Known as the “Lord of the Wangara Mines”, Mansa Musa I ruled the Empire of Mali between 1312 and 1337. Trade in gold, salt, copper, and ivory made Mansa Musa the richest man in world history.

As a practicing Muslim, Mansa Musa decided to visit Mecca in 1324. It is estimated that his caravan was composed of 8,000 soldiers and courtiers — others estimate a total of 60,000 — 12,000 slaves with 48,000 pounds of gold and 100 camels with 300 pounds of gold each. For greater spectacle, another 500 servants preceded the caravan, and each carried a gold staff weighing between 6 and 10.5 pounds. When totaling the estimates, he carried from side to side of the African continent approximately 38 tons of the golden metal, the equivalent today of the gold reserves in Malaysia’s central bank — more than countries like Peru, Hungary or Qatar have in their vaults.

On his way, the Mansa of Mali stayed for three months in Cairo. Every day he gave gold bars to the poor, scholars, and local officials. Mansa’s emissaries toured the bazaars paying at a premium with gold. The Arab historian Al-Makrizi (1364-1442) relates that Mansa Musa’s gifts “astonished the eye by their beauty and splendor”. But the joy was short-lived. So much was the flow of golden metal that flooded the streets of Cairo that the value of the local gold dinar fell by 20 percent and it took the city about 12 years to recover from the inflationary pressure that such a devaluation caused.

Orestes R Betancourt Ponce de León, “5 Historic Examples of Foreign Aid Efforts Gone Wrong”, FEE Stories, 2021-06-06.

March 5, 2024

QotD: Begging the question

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… I hate, hate — with a burning passion — the modern use of the phrase “begs the question”. That’s NOT what it means, damn it!! “Begs the question” is a translation of the Latin petitio principii, which is a time-hallowed description of one of the most common of mankind’s logical fallacies — an “argument” that assumes the conclusion in the premises. Please don’t ever use “begs the question” in the modern sense — the fact that we don’t know what it actually means is one of the reason it’s so depressingly common today.

Severian, “Mental Middlemen II: Sex and the City and Self-Confidence”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-05-06.

March 4, 2024

QotD: The “ABC” movement in wine

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Back in the 1990s when I first got into wine, there was a movement against the growing homogenisation of the world’s wine called ABC: “anything but chardonnay” which handily also stood for “anything but cabernet”. This was at a time when growers from Piedmont to Penedès were planting chardonnay (or cabernet sauvignon for reds) instead of local grape varieties.

There was a worry that in the future all wine would taste the same while the more obscure varieties would disappear. As an ABC enthusiast, I thought it far better and more interesting to drink riesling, or fiano or albariño or esgana cão (a Madeiran grape that means “dog strangler” in Portuguese because of its ferociously high acidity).

Jancis Robinson was also not a chardonnay fan. Recently I’ve been watching her Wine Course made in the 1990s on YouTube. It still holds up well, and the budget by modern standards is mind-blowing; one moment she’s in Burgundy, the next she’s in Australia.

Can we have another series like this again soon please? Each episode is devoted to a grape and in the chardonnay one Jancis (she’s one of the few famous people who it is acceptable to refer to by just her first name, like Britney or Boris) can barely contain her contempt for many wines made from the variety describing them as “sugar water”. She’s also not keen on the world’s second favourite variety, sauvignon blanc, either.

I was with Jancis. In fact, I was with Jancis on most things which points to a possible explanation for my chardonnay conversion. When I started out, I hadn’t developed my own tastes and so I was buying wine that I thought sounded sophisticated — such as Mosel riesling.

But as I’ve got older, I’m now buying bottles purely because I like them. Furthermore, I cook and entertain a lot more than I did when I was in my twenties and chardonnay, especially white Burgundy, goes with pretty much anything. If you don’t know what to order when eating out then a bottle of Mâcon-Villages will cover all your bases (the red equivalent if you’re interested is a bottle of Beaujolais).

But also your average chardonnay has got a lot better since the ’90s, or perhaps I should say that it leans more towards my tastes. I’ve been watching a lot of old episodes of Frasier recently and the chardonnay they drink is nearly orange. This style which is still very popular in the US is based on very ripe, some might say overripe, grapes which are then treated to a pre-fermentation maceration to get colour and body out of the skins.

Following fermentation with a yeast which accentuates tropical fruit flavours, the wine would be perked up with some tartaric acid and then either aged in new oak casks or more likely for cheaper wines have oak chips added.

The finished product would be thick and syrupy with a deep golden colour. Not very chic but a revelation in 1980s Britain when everyday white wine meant Blue Nun or Black Tower. They’re what Oz Clarke called “bottled sunshine” in his colourful slots with Jilly Goolden on BBC2’s Food and Drink programme. Like those loud waistcoats everyone thought were so witty worn with a morning suit or dinner jacket, they were great fun then but a bit embarrassing now.

Henry Jeffreys, “Chard: an apology”, The Critic, 2023-11-14.

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