This is therefore, in its over-reach, ideology masquerading as neutral scholarship. Take a simple claim: no aspect of our society is unaffected by the legacy of slavery. Sure. Absolutely. Of course. But, when you consider this statement a little more, you realize this is either banal or meaningless. The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before us. You could say the same thing about the English common law, for example, or the use of the English language: no aspect of American life is untouched by it. You could say that about the Enlightenment. Or the climate. You could say that America’s unique existence as a frontier country bordered by lawlessness is felt even today in every mass shooting. You could cite the death of countless millions of Native Americans — by violence and disease — as something that defines all of us in America today. And in a way it does. But that would be to engage in a liberal inquiry into our past, teasing out the nuances, and the balance of various forces throughout history, weighing each against each other along with the thoughts and actions of remarkable individuals — in the manner of, say, the excellent new history of the U.S., These Truths by Jill Lepore.
But the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one. Arguing that the “true founding” was the arrival of African slaves on the continent, period, is a bitter rebuke to the actual founders and Lincoln. America is not a messy, evolving, multicultural, religiously infused, Enlightenment-based, racist, liberating, wealth-generating kaleidoscope of a society. It’s white supremacy, which started in 1619, and that’s the key to understand all of it. America’s only virtue, in this telling, belongs to those who have attempted and still attempt to end this malign manifestation of white supremacy.
I don’t believe most African-Americans believe this, outside the elites. They’re much less doctrinaire than elite white leftists on a whole range of subjects. I don’t buy it either — alongside, I suspect, most immigrants, including most immigrants of color. Who would ever want to immigrate to such a vile and oppressive place? But it is extremely telling that this is not merely aired in the paper of record (as it should be), but that it is aggressively presented as objective reality. That’s propaganda, directed, as we now know, from the very top — and now being marched through the entire educational system to achieve a specific end. To present a truth as the truth is, in fact, a deception. And it is hard to trust a paper engaged in trying to deceive its readers in order for its radical reporters and weak editors to transform the world.
Andrew Sullivan, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism”, New York, 2019-09-13.
February 5, 2024
QotD: The history of slavery in America
February 3, 2024
The climate alarmists long ago gave up honest scientific reporting
Tom Knighton says he used to fully buy in to the climate alarmist message, but eventually realized the fix had been in for years, especially when it came to the predictive ability of all the climate change models … as in, their total lack of predictive ability:
When Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth came out, I watched it. I was terrified by the world being described, and since I was still pretty liberal and sort of an environmentalist, I took it all to heart.
Over time, as my personal politics shifted, I still had concerns regarding climate change. After all, it is what it is, right?
Until I came to look deeper into the issue and the one thing that shattered my belief in the whole concept: The fact that not a single climate model has ever panned out as predicted despite pretty much none of the draconian measures we’re told we need in order to avert disaster ever coming to fruition.
Science is supposed to be predictive. If it can’t predict something in its models, then scientists need to back up and figure out what the problem is. Instead, they seemingly just keep doubling down.
[…]
Let’s be clear here, the idea of taking measurements in heat islands is freshman year stuff. There’s absolutely no way they’re unaware the effect that’s having on their readings, even as most of their instruments are subject to heat bias.
In other words, I can’t accept this is a good faith error.
No, I believe this to be malicious.
Climatology isn’t exactly a field of science that would ever be considered sexy. Before all the climate alarmism, research grants were likely few and far between. People weren’t overly worried about the climate because it simply ways.
Then scientists started screaming that we were all doomed. The end is nigh, they told us, screaming at the top of their lung and acting just shy of wearing a sandwich board in Times Square.
With that came money and prestige.
Suddenly, climatologist could get recognition and write bestselling books. They could get grants from everyone and their brother to fund their research. The thing is, they had to keep up the charade. People had to believe that we were going to die if we didn’t do something.
Maybe they actually want the draconian measures they suggest, measures that pretty much amount to going back to living in mud huts, but with solar- and wind-created electricity so we won’t need to burn wood to survive.
Or something.
February 2, 2024
“Who funds you?”
Tim Worstall considers George Monbiot (lovingly known as “The Moonbat” to early bloggers) and his demand that others make their sources of income transparent to show whether their opinions are being “bought” by shady interested parties:
George Monbiot has his positive attributes. His change of mind on nuclear power in the face of the evidence from Fukushima — that no one at all died from three reactors going pop, while 15k and more did from the tsunami and therefore he became in favour of nuclear — is an example. OK, that’s rather hitting someone over the head with a cluebat but it’s also true that Caroline Lucas didn’t manage to note that same point. So, there is that. Even if “more aware of reality that Caroline Lucas” is a low bar to have to clear.
George can also rather dig himself into holes. As he is here with his insistence about funding of varied think tanks and so on.
And, OK, let’s go look at George’s registry of interests […]
OK, that’s the sword that George declares he’s going to live by. Fair play and all that.
Except, except. Last year was pretty good, book royalties flowing in and more power to that typing. The core earning is The Guardian, royalties on top. Not unusual for a writer to be honest. Gain a core contract that produces an ongoing and assured income, spend time floating books or other work out there to see what happens to income. Freelancing is certainly a great deal more fun if you already know where the monthly nut is going to come from with such a core contract.
But, but.
Book royalties, umm, Penguin? Used to be part owned by Pearson, also at the time owners of the Financial Times. So that’s a connection into the shadowy world of international capitalists. It’s now Bertelsman, so foreign international capitalists to boot. Macmillan? They admitted to bribery in Sudan over a school books contract. So a link to international thieving capitalists too. HarperCollins? That’s Murdoch, no more need be said, right?
But, but, a reasonable response would be that this is all far removed from the level George works at. That would be a fair enough response too.
But note the thing here. By agreeing that there’s some level of connection which is too ephemeral to matter we are agreeing that this thing called the corporate veil exists. We can indeed don the tin foil hats and connect near anything we want. Pretty much all Europeans are 16th cousins for example. So I — and George — am/are responsible for WWI because we’re both related to the Kaiser, Emperor and Tsar all at the same time. It’s our family wot dun it, see? Within economic connections that concept, that there’s this thing ‘ere which is responsible not the further connections away from that, is called that corporate veil. I shop at Sainsbury’s sometimes. The Labour Minister husband of a Sainsbury’s heiress employed two butlers (before dumping her for his boyfriend if memory serves). It’s possible to claim that I therefore fund dual butlership but it’s not a claim that all that many are going to regard as valid.
But The Guardian, that core contract. The newspaper seems to have returned to profit recently but there was a decade or so there where it was losing tens of millions a year — and more in some 12 month periods. Those losses were covered by the profits from Autotrader more than anything else. So, George was funded by the facilitation of climate destruction through the trade in internal combustion engined cars.
If, you know, we wanted to put it that way.
January 31, 2024
The LA Times recently laid off a bunch of “activists masquerading as reporters”
Tom Knighton illustrates one of the reasons so many legacy news organizations are being forced to cut back on staff in hopes of staying afloat:
Last week, the LA Times announced a massive layoff of journalists. They were just one of several places that kicked the activists masquerading as reporters to the curb.
This, of course, was met with consternation by the journalistic field as a whole.
Everyone seemed ready to warn of doom and gloom, telling us how important they are to society and that we need them.
Yet absolutely none of them seemed remotely interested in actually examining why the field is shrinking so horrifically.
Sure, the current landscape is very different due to technological advancements. For example, there’s places like Substack where I can reach out to readers directly instead of needing to filter things through a newspaper’s editorial voice.
But journalists also did this to themselves.
[…]
Because journalism’s “inherently political” tribe uses their politics to decide which stories are worth reporting. Journalists, if we can even really call them that anymore, aren’t simply sharing truth. They’re amplifying some stories and smothering others.
How often do we see stories claiming so-and-so is a white supremacist because he favors welfare reform or a tougher stance on illegal immigration? How many publications amplified the nonsense about Border Patrol agents “lassoing” illegal immigrants because of a picture they didn’t understand?
Journalism doesn’t represent the American people. It represents the Democratic Party.
In 1971, Republicans accounted for just over a quarter of all journalists. In 2022, they were 3.4 percent.
Original can be found here – https://www.theamericanjournalist.org/
Now, in 1971, those independents were probably divided between left-leaning and right-leaning to some degree or another, though the survey didn’t capture that.
In 2022, I suspect many who called themselves independent did so because they thought the Democrats were too right-leaning for their tastes.
What’s more, despite the lack of ideological diversity, that same source found that only 21.8 percent see that as needing to change.
What’s more, starting in 2016, news publications really stopped even trying to pretend they were unbiased. A form of blatantly activist journalism became common, with virtually every news agency in the nation showing at least some signs of it.
January 30, 2024
York University’s CUPE local apparently cribs their homework from the Völkischer Beobachter
York University’s contract and part-time instructors are represented by CUPE local 3903, who’ve distributed an eye-openingly anti-semitic document with the (implied) order to interrupt normal tutorials and replace the content with Palestinian propaganda:
Detail from an official “toolkit” distributed to York University contract and part-time faculty which claims that their employer is complicit in “genocide” by the mere tolerance of Jewish groups on campus.
Photo by A Toolkit on Teaching Palestine
A new toolkit circulated to York University teaching assistants instructs them to denounce Israel at every available opportunity, even when it has no apparent relevance to the subject being studied.
“Let us collectively divert this week’s tutorials to teaching on Palestinian liberation,” reads the 15-page document circulated by CUPE 3903, the union representing York’s contract and part-time faculty.
The document adds that tutorials should be diverted to condemnations of the “Zionist Israeli state” regardless of the course that the TA is supposed to be discussing.
“It is a medical issue. An arts issue. A feminist issue. A society issue. A political issue. A cultural issue. A geography issue. An engineering issue. An architecture issue,” it reads.
The document is filled with claims denouncing Israel as a genocidal “colonial project”. Canada is treated much the same, and is referred to alternately as the “Canadian settler state” or “Turtle Island”.
The mere presence of Jewish groups on campus is also referred to as evidence of York University’s “complicity” in genocide.
The document denounces the existence of sanctioned “Zionist cultural institutions”, making explicit reference to Hillel, the world’s go-to Jewish campus organization. York is also called an accessory to genocide because of its research links with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The pamphlet even provides a script for TAs to read as they inform students that the tutorial will be cancelled in favour of becoming a “teach-in … for liberation.”
“Today, I open up our classroom to bring our attention on Gaza, to speak up and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement, and contribute in ending Canada’s and York’s complicity with genocide and the settler-colonial occupation of Palestinian land and life,” reads one introductory line.
January 29, 2024
Peter Hitchens isn’t onboard with the march to yet another war
Writing in the Daily Mail, Peter Hitchens decries the apparent drift by western politicians into yet another war:
Are we the baddies? What if the Ukraine war is just as stupid and wrong as the Iraq war, but the state propaganda has been more successful and hardly anybody has realised … yet?
Many people to this day still think the damaging and morally dubious Western attacks on Serbia and Libya were justified. Many still think the gory attempt to destroy Syria was a good thing. It took ages for opinion to swing on the Vietnam war, back in the 1960s. And, as one who opposed the Iraq war, I remember only too well just how many (who now think they were against it all the time) were fooled into backing Sir Anthony Blair and George W. Bush.
The issue is more pressing as generals and admirals warn we must live in a militarised society and prepare for what they think is an inevitable war against Russia. They could get their way. If you go on backing this policy, you could be condemning yourself, your children or grandchildren to a world of war, privation and perhaps conscription into some sort of military service.
[…]
This is what I have never been able to work out. We have a Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, who has perfected the art of shouting loudly while carrying a very small stick – thunderous, belligerent declarations while our Armed Forces melt away thanks to neglect and badly targeted spending. Perhaps, if the long-feared Russian invasion of Western Europe takes place, we can fend it off by dispatching our troops on the pestilential e-scooters and e-bikes which are this former Transport Secretary’s major contribution to the nation.
Certainly these vehicles are terrifying to those not riding them. They have nearly killed me more than once. And, piled up in heaps, they make formidable obstacles, as the people of London are finding.
What Mr Shapps does not seem to grasp is that Britain became great by staying out of continental conflicts, and letting others do the fighting. Even in the battle against Bonaparte, we paid our European allies to do most of the hard work.
Our greatness ceased when bombastic moralising took over, in 1914. We flung ourselves, supposedly nobly, into a Russo-German war. Within two years we were bankrupt, and bereft of the flower of our young manhood.
People still refuse to believe me when I say accurately that Britain has not paid off its huge 1914-18 war debts (now worth about £40 billion) to the USA. But I promise you it is true.
Four years of terrible loss left the Russo-German problem unsolved and we had to do it all again in 1939. After that we were even more bankrupt, and in 1946 had to ration bread, like some desperate People’s Republic. But for many years afterwards we were largely governed by grown-ups who had fought in actual wars and been wounded, and had seen death very near them, or endured bombing and a war economy. And so we largely stayed out of major foreign trouble.
January 22, 2024
QotD: Mao’s theory of “protracted war” as adapted to Vietnamese conditions by Võ Nguyên Giáp
Giáp was facing a different set of challenges in Vietnam facing either France or the United States which required the framework of protracted war to be modified. First, it must have been immediately apparent that it would never be possible for a Vietnamese-based army to match the conventional military capability of its enemies, pound-for-pound. Mao could imagine that at some point the Red Army would be able to win an all-out, head-on-head fight with the Nationalists, but the gap between French and American capabilities and Vietnamese Communist capabilities was so much wider.
At the same time, trading space for time wasn’t going to be much of an option either. China, of course, is a very large country, with many regions that are both vast, difficult to move in, and sparsely populated. It was thus possible for Mao to have his bases in places where Nationalist armies literally could not reach. That was never going to be possible in Vietnam, a country in which almost the entire landmass is within 200 miles of the coast (most of it is far, far less than that) and which is about 4% the size of China.
So the theory is going to have to be adjusted, but the basic groundwork – protract the war, focus on will rather than firepower, grind your enemy down slowly and proceed in phases – remains.
I’m going to need to simplify here, but Giáp makes several key alterations to Mao’s model of protracted war. First, even more than Mao, the political element in the struggle was emphasized as part of the strategy, raised to equality as a concern with the military side and fused with the military operation; together they were termed dau tranh, roughly “the struggle”. Those political activities were divided into three main components. Action among one’s own people consisted of propaganda and motivation designed to reinforce the will of the populace that supported the effort and to gain recruits. Then, action among the enemy people – here meaning Vietnamese who were under the control of the French colonial government or South Vietnam and not yet recruited into the struggle – a mix of propaganda and violent action to gain converts and create dissension. Finally, action against the enemy military, which consisted of what we might define as terroristic violence used as message-sending to negatively impact enemy morale and to encourage Vietnamese who supported the opposition to stop doing so for their own safety.
Part of the reason the political element of this strategy was so important was that Giáp knew that casualty ratios, especially among guerrilla forces – on which, as we’ll see, Giáp would have to rely more heavily – would be very unfavorable. Thus effective recruitment and strong support among the populace was essential not merely to conceal guerrilla forces but also to replace the expected severe losses that came with fighting at such a dramatic disadvantage in industrial firepower.
That concern in turn shaped force-structure. Giáp theorized an essentially three-tier system of force structure. At the bottom were the “popular troops”, essentially politically agitated peasants. Lightly armed, minimally trained but with a lot of local knowledge about enemy dispositions, who exactly supports the enemy and the local terrain, these troops could both accomplish a lot of the political objectives and provide information as well as functioning as local guerrillas in their own villages. Casualties among popular troops were expected to be high as they were likely to “absorb” reprisals from the enemy for guerrilla actions. Experienced veterans of these popular troops could then be recruited up into the “regional troops”, trained men who could now be deployed away from their home villages as full-time guerrillas, and in larger groups. While popular troops were expected to take heavy casualties, regional troops were carefully husbanded for important operations or used to organize new units of popular troops. Collectively these two groups are what are often known in the United States as the Viet Cong, though historians tend to prefer their own name for themselves, the National Liberation Front (Mặt trận Dân tộc Giải phóng miền Nam Việt Nam, “National Liberation Front for South Vietnam”) or NLF. Finally, once the French were forced to leave and Giáp had a territorial base he could operate from in North Vietnam, there were conventional forces, the regular army – the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) – which would build up and wait for that third-phase transition to conventional warfare.
The greater focus on the structure of courses operating in enemy territory reflected Giáp’s adjustment of how the first phase of the protracted war would be fought. Since he had no mountain bases to fall back to, the first phase relied much more on political operations in territory controlled by the enemy and guerrilla operations, once again using the local supportive population as the cover to allow guerrillas and political agitators (generally the same folks, cadres drawn from the regional troops to organize more popular troops) to move undetected. Guerrilla operations would compel the less-casualty-tolerant enemy to concentrate their forces out of a desire for force preservation, creating the second phase strategic stalemate and also clearing territory in which larger mobile forces could be brought together to engage in mobile warfare, eventually culminating in a shift in the third phase to conventional warfare using the regional and regular troops.
Finally, unlike Mao, who could envision (and achieve) a situation where he pushed the Nationalists out of the territories they used to recruit and supply their armies, the Vietnamese Communists had no hope (or desire) to directly attack France or the United States. Indeed, doing so would have been wildly counter-productive as it likely would have fortified French or American will to continue the conflict.
That limitation would, however, demand substantial flexibility in how the Vietnamese Communists moved through the three phases of protracted war. This was not something realized ahead of time, but something learned through painful lessons. Leadership in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV = North Vietnam) was a lot more split than among Mao’s post-Long-March Chinese Communist Party; another important figure, Lê Duẩn, who became general secretary in 1960, advocated for a strategy of “general offensive” paired with a “general uprising” – essentially jumping straight to the third phase. The effort to implement that strategy in 1964 nearly overran the South, with ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam – the army of South Vietnam) being defeated by PAVN and NLF forces at the Battles of Bình Giã and Đồng Xoài (Dec. 1964 and June 1965, respectively), but this served to bring the United States more fully into the war – a tactical and operational victory that produced a massive strategic setback.
Lê Duẩn did it again in 1968 with the Tet Offensive, attempting a general uprising which, in an operational sense, mostly served to reveal NLF and PAVN formations, exposing them to US and ARVN firepower and thus to severe casualties, though politically and thus strategically the offensive ended up being a success because it undermined American will to continue the fight. American leaders had told the American public that the DRV and the NLF were largely defeated, broken forces – the sudden show of strength exposed those statements as lies, degrading support at home. Nevertheless, in the immediate term, the Tet Offensive’s failure on the ground nearly destroyed the NLF and forced the DRV to back down the phase-ladder to recover. Lê Duẩn actually did it again in 1972 with the Eastern Offensive when American ground troops were effectively gone, exposing his forces to American airpower and getting smashed up for his troubles.
It is difficult to see Lê Duẩn’s strategic impatience as much more than a series of blunders – but crucially Giáp’s framework allowed for recovery from these sorts of defeats. In each case, the NLF and PAVN forces were compelled to do something Mao’s model hadn’t really envisaged, which was to transition back down the phase system, dropping back to phase II or even phase I in response to failed transitions to phase III. By moving more flexibly between the phases (while retaining a focus on the conditions of eventual strategic victory), the DRV could recover from such blunders. I think Wayne Lee actually puts it quite well that whereas Mao’s plan relied on “many small victories” adding up to a large victory (without the quick decision of a single large victory), Giáp’s more flexible framework could survive many small defeats on the road to an eventual strategic victory when the will of the enemy to continue the conflict was exhausted.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How the Weak Can Win – A Primer on Protracted War”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-03.
January 13, 2024
It’s not lying lying
Paul Homewood on how Brits are propagandized through slanted reporting on the weather (which has always been a topic of interest in the British Isles):
Storm Gerrit arrived the day after Boxing Day, accompanied by the usual headlines: “85mph gales barrelled down on Britain”, screamed the Daily Mail.
As usual the public were being deliberately deceived. The 85mph claim was based on one site in North East Scotland, at the top of a 400ft cliff overlooking the North Sea, marked in red below.
Inverbervie, Kincardineshire
A few miles away at sea level average wind speeds never got above 30mph. The Met Office never reports any of this, preferring to publish its favourite sites on clifftops or halfway up mountains.
It was the same story a week later, when another system of low pressure came along to be given yet another silly name, “Henk”.
“94mph winds pummel the UK”, shrieked the Mirror. This time the wind speeds were measured on the Met Office’s go-to weather station, the Needles, off the Isle of Wight. As this column has discussed before, the Needles sit at the end of a long, narrow peninsula, and the station is on top of a 260ft cliff. Winds there are routinely 30mph higher than even exposed sites nearby, such as St Catherine’s Point. Meanwhile average winds inland were typically around 30mph.
It rained as well last week! During the two days of Storm Henk, about an inch fell in parts of southern and central England. There is nothing at all unusual about this amount; it is the sort of thing which happens every year. Because the ground was already saturated, following wet weather last month, there was inevitably some flooding. But, for the most part, this was little more than flooded fields, overflowing river banks and localised flooding. Again, normal scenes in England. And as Patrick Benham-Crosswell pointed out in TCW this week, many houses built on flood plains were once again flooded. There was certainly none of the major river flooding which has hit the country many times in the past.
According to the Environment Agency, about 2,000 properties were flooded, a tragedy for everybody involved. But in overall terms, this is a tiny number. For instance, 55,000 were flooded in 2007.
Inevitably, the media jumped to blame it all on climate change. According to ITV: “Henk is the eighth named storm to have hit the country this winter and the pattern is likely to continue due to the effects of climate change. ‘This is climate change and the impacts we are seeing,’ the Environment Agency’s Tom Paget added. ‘We are seeing these increasingly wet and blustery winters. We are seeing storm upon storm which is exacerbating the issues’.”
Claims like this explain why the Met Office decided to start giving every low-pressure system a silly name back in 2015. But as it admitted in its State of the UK Climate last year, storms used to be much stronger:
The most recent two decades have seen fewer occurrences of max gust speeds above these thresholds [40, 50, 60 kts] than during the previous decades, particularly comparing the period before and after 2000.
This earlier period [before 2000] also included among the most severe storms experienced in the UK in the observational records including the “Burns Day Storm” of 25 January 1990, the “Boxing Day Storm” of 26 December 1998 and the “Great Storm” of 16 October 1987. Storm Eunice in 2022 was the most severe storm to affect England and Wales since February 2014, but even so, these storms of the 1980s and 1990s were very much more severe.
Nor is there any evidence that December or the autumn last year were unusually wet.
We look like getting a few weeks of cold, dry weather from now on – so expect drought warnings soon!
January 12, 2024
“… normal people no longer trust experts to any great degree”
Theophilus Chilton explains why the imprimatur of “the experts” is a rapidly diminishing value:
One explanation for the rise of midwittery and academic mediocrity in America directly connects to the “everybody should go to college” mantra that has become a common platitude. During the period of America’s rise to world superpower, going to college was reserved for a small minority of higher IQ Americans who attended under a relatively meritocratic regime. The quality of these graduates, however, was quite high and these were the “White men with slide rules” who built Hoover Dam, put a man on the moon, and could keep Boeing passenger jets from losing their doors halfway through a flight. As the bar has been lowered and the ranks of Gender and Queer Studies programs have been filled, the quality of college students has declined precipitously. One recent study shows that the average IQ of college students has dropped to the point where it is basically on par with the average for the general population as a whole.
Another area where this comes into play is with the replication crisis in science. For those who haven’t heard, the results from an increasingly large number of scientific studies, including many that have been used to have a direct impact on our lives, cannot be reproduced by other workers in the relevant fields. Obviously, this is a problem because being able to replicate other scientists’ results is sort of central to that whole scientific method thing. If you can’t do this, then your results really aren’t any more “scientific” than your Aunt Gertie’s internet searches.
As with other areas of increasing sociotechnical incompetency, some of this is diversity-driven. But not wholly so, by any means. Indeed, I’d say that most of it is due to the simple fact that bad science will always be unable to be consistently replicated. Much of this is because of bad experimental design and other technical matters like that. The rest is due to bad experimental design, etc., caused by overarching ideological drivers that operate on flawed assumptions that create bad experimentation and which lead to things like cherry-picking data to give results that the scientists (or, more often, those funding them) want to publish. After all, “science” carries a lot of moral and intellectual authority in the modern world, and that authority is what is really being purchased.
It’s no secret that Big Science is agenda-driven and definitely reflects Regime priorities. So whenever you see “New study shows the genetic origins of homosexuality” or “Latest data indicates trooning your kid improves their health by 768%,” that’s what is going on. REAL science is not on display. And don’t even get started on global warming, with its preselected, computer-generated “data” sets that have little reflection on actual, observable natural phenomena.
“Butbutbutbut this is all peer-reviewed!! 97% of scientists agree!!” The latter assertion is usually dubious, at best. The former, on the other hand, is irrelevant. Peer-reviewing has stopped being a useful measure for weeding out spurious theories and results and is now merely a way to put a Regime stamp of approval on desired result. But that’s okay because the “we love science” crowd flat out ignores data that contradict their presuppositions anywise, meaning they go from doing science to doing ideology (e.g. rejecting human biodiversity, etc.). This sort of thing was what drove the idiotic responses to COVID-19 a few years ago, and is what is still inducing midwits to gum up the works with outdated “science” that they’re not smart enough to move past.
If you want a succinct definition of “scientism,” it might be this – A belief system in which science is accorded intellectual abilities far beyond what the scientific method is capable of by people whose intellectual abilities are far below being able to understand what the scientific method even is.
December 2, 2023
QotD: Western media and Putin’s war
Regarding [Vladimir Putin’s] Magical Mystery War, I’m going with the stoyak that the casualty counts peddled by the [western media] is part of a very very old playbook which various Western observers have peddled since 1905-that of Russian stupidity and indifference to casualties. Russia loses a war? They’re stupid gopniks who flung their soldiers into meat grinders until they rebelled (1905 or 1917). Russia wins a war? They’re stupid gopniks who flung their soldiers into meat grinders until they won (1945, 2023). Note that you can effortlessly pivot your propaganda when it becomes obvious in hindsight the outcome of the war. This becomes very important when [Putin] negotiates his 18th century kabiniettskreig ending to the war, since nobody in the West, especially AINO, understands how a cabinet war is fought, much less ends. They will claim that they foiled Putin’s plan for conquering all Ukraine (which he never has wanted) by killing hundreds of thousands of poor, oppressed, stupid, vodka-fueled gopniks used as cannon fodder who simply overwhelmed the valiant forces of good by sheer numbers. Not by superior strategy or tactics, or weapons, but the good ol’ Russian sledgehammer. Just like Hitler’s excuse in 1945, when Ivan was knock knock knockin’ on his bunker door. His generals who survived carried that piece of gospel West when the US Army started studying how to fight the Reds and asked the Germans how they did it. Their answer was happily embraced by the next generation of Very Clever Boys in the 1960s and carried forward to today’s Fistagon — Wunderwaffen.
Pickle Rick, commenting on “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2023-12-01.
Rick agreed to me posting this quote as long as I included this colourized photo of Marshal of the Soviet Union Georgy Zhukov (“because it’s gangsta as FUCK”)
November 27, 2023
Elagabalus, the first queer or trans Roman emperor?
I guess it was inevitable that the urge to “queer” the museum or “queer” history would eventually dig up Elagabalus as an icon, as his brief reign certainly drew a lot of slander in the years that followed his death (similar to what historians wrote about Caligula or Nero … once they were safely dead):
Bust of Elagabalus in the Palazzo Nuovo – Capitoline Museums – Rome.
Photo by José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro / CC BY-SA 4.0.
It’s not such a stretch as it may sound. As well as throwing wild parties, Elagabalus was also said to have openly flouted contemporary gender roles. The emperor is said to have also dressed as a female sex worker, “married” a male slave and acted as his “wife”, asked to be referred to as “lady” rather than “lord” and even, according to one account, begged to have a surgical vagina made by a physician.
The stories led Keith Hoskins, executive member for arts at North Herts council, to say in a statement: “Elagabalus most definitely preferred the she pronoun, and as such this is something we reflect when discussing her in contemporary times … It is only polite and respectful. We know that Elagabalus identified as a woman and was explicit about which pronouns to use, which shows that pronouns are not a new thing.”
But do we know that? Thanks to a growing awareness of more complex ideas of gender in history, and a desire to reject historical prejudices, Elagabalus has been reclaimed in recent decades as a genderqueer icon.
However, many historians disagree that the evidence is as unambiguous as the museum says. Mary Beard, formerly professor of classics at Cambridge University, directed followers on X to her latest book, titled Emperor of Rome, which opens with a lengthy discussion of the “tall stories” told about Elagabalus.
The accounts of sexual unconventionality (and extravagant cruelty) largely originate with hostile historians who wanted to win the favour of Elegabalus’s successor, Severus Alexander, and so portrayed the emperor in the worst light possible, she says. “How seriously should we treat them? Not very is the usual answer,” Beard writes, calling the stories “untruths and flagrant exaggerations”.
The Romans may not have shared current understandings of trans identity, but several of the contested accounts about Elagabalus feel remarkably modern, points out Zachary Herz, assistant professor of classics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who has written about how we should approach the story of Elagabalus in the context of queer theory.
Asserting that Elagabalus requested female pronouns is an “astonishingly close translation” of a story written by the third-century historian Cassius Dio, says Herz. “Elagabalus is literally saying, ‘Don’t call me this word that ends in the masculine ending, call me this word that ends in the feminine’. So it’s unbelievably close to correcting someone’s pronouns.”
The problem, as he sees it, is that “I just don’t think it really happened”. “The quote-unquote biographies” written under Elagabalus’s successor are “hit pieces”, he says. “I would be inclined to read [them] as basically fictional.”
Martijn Icks, a lecturer in classics at the university of Amsterdam and author of a book about Elagabalus’s life and posthumous reputation, agrees that the stories about the emperor should be taken with “a large pinch of salt”. The same “effeminacy narrative” that has made Elagabalus a queer icon “was meant to character assassinate the Emperor, to show that he was completely unsuitable to occupy this position”, he says, adding that other so-called “bad emperors” including Nero and Caligula were described in very similar terms.
Racial prejudice also played a part, says Icks: before coming to Rome to rule it, Elagabalus was a priest in an obscure cult in Syria that venerated a black stone meteorite – a culture that would have been deeply strange to the Romans.
“And the stereotype that Romans had of Syrians … is that they were very effeminate and not real men like the Romans were.”
November 20, 2023
The Fact-Checkers found the phrase “kill switch” isn’t in the bill, “proving” it false
Jon Miltimore has yet another example of “fact-checkers” carrying water for politicians to obscure actual facts when they’re politically inconvenient:
In November 2021, former US Representative from Georgia Bob Barr wrote a little-noticed political column claiming that buried inside President Joe Biden’s $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure legislation was a dangerous provision that would go into effect in five years.
“Marketed to Congress as a benign tool to help prevent drunk driving, the measure will mandate that automobile manufacturers build into every car what amounts to a ‘vehicle kill switch'”, wrote Barr, who was the Libertarian Party’s nominee for president in 2008.
Like most Americans, I had never heard of this alleged “kill switch” until a few days ago when Representative Thomas Massie, a libertarian-leaning Republican, proposed to strip the mandate’s funding.
“The right to travel is fundamental, but the government has mandated a kill-switch in new vehicles sold after 2026,” said Massie. “The kill-switch will monitor driver performance and disable cars based on the information gathered.”
Nineteen Republicans joined all but one Democrat in opposing Massie’s amendment, which failed.
True or False?
The claim that the feds would mandate that every new motor vehicle include technology that could disable the vehicle seemed ludicrous. So I started Googling.
To my relief, I saw several fact-checkers at legacy institutions had determined the “kill switch” mandate was not true.
“Our rating: False,” said USA Today.
“ASSESSMENT: False,” said the Associated Press.
“We rate it Mostly False,” concluded PolitiFact.
(Snopes, a reliably left-leaning fact check group, was a little less conclusive, saying the claim was a “mixture” of true and false.)
Unfortunately, my relief evaporated once I looked at the bill itself.
Sec. 24220 of the law explicitly states: “[T]o ensure the prevention of alcohol-impaired driving fatalities, advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology must be standard equipment in all new passenger motor vehicles.”
The legislation then goes on to define the technology as a computer system that can “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle” and can “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected” (emphasis added).
How the system will make this determination is unclear, as is the government’s potential role in apprehending suspected drunk drivers (more on that later).
But the law’s language could not be more clear: New motor vehicles must have a computer system to “monitor” drivers, and the system must be able to prevent vehicle operation if it detects impairment.
November 12, 2023
“When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean”
Andrew Sullivan on how our “elites” now live in a world that the renowned Oxford academic Charles Lutwidge Dodgson1 predicted in his writings a century and a half ago:
“Israeli flag, Tel Aviv, Star of David” by Tim Pearce, Los Gatos is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
The word “genocide” may be the one rendered most meaningless in our discourse. It has some steep competition, of course. “White supremacy” now means asking someone to show up on time. “Trauma” means being referred to with the wrong pronoun. And “genocide” can, among other things, mean debating experimental sex reassignment procedures for children. (Go look up #transgenocide on Twitter and weep.)
But the supporters of Hamas and of the Palestinians have seized the g-word with particular zeal. And who can blame them? There’s a real, adolescent frisson in accusing the victims of the worst genocide in modern history of being genocidal themselves. “Israel, we charge you with genocide” is a common chant in many of the pro-Palestinian protests. “Genocide Joe” has been trending on Twitter. Eight hundred artists signed an open letter calling the Israeli counteract in Gaza “a genocide”. Yale professor Zareena Grewal channeled much of the “decolonizing” left: “Israeli [sic] is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle”.
It’s not just the activists. Congresswoman Tlaib has accused Biden of “funding Netanyahu’s genocide”, and said “We are literally watching people commit genocide” — referring to the blast next to a Gaza hospital caused by a Hamas rocket. Congresswoman Omar retweeted a photo of dead kids with the caption “CHILD GENOCIDE IN PALESTINE” — but the photo was from a 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria. A State Department official tweeted that Biden is “complicit in genocide”. A UN official just quit his post, adding:
In just 4 weeks, Israel with US backing has cut off food, water, power & then brutally exterminated more than 10,000 imprisoned civilian men, women & children in Gaza, destroyed their homes, churches, mosques, schools & hospitals because they are Palestinians. Name it? #Genocide.
The devastation in Gaza is horrifying to watch, worse than horrifying. Anyone who isn’t deeply troubled by the mass death has lost humanity. But the UN official, and all those echoing him, are full of it. The basic definition of “genocide” provided by the State Department is “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”
The key, defining thing here is the aim. Horrifying massacres may or may not be genocidal, depending on the intention. The Hiroshima bomb, for example, was devastating, but it was aimed at ending the war, not obliterating the Japanese people as a race. And if Israel were interested in the “genocide” of Palestinian Arabs, it has had the means to accomplish it for a very long time. And yet, for some reason, the Arab population of Israel and the occupied territories has exploded since 1948, and the Arabs in Israel proper have voting rights, and a key presence in the Knesset.
This is not to exonerate Israel entirely. I’ve had strong words for the Netanyahu governments over the years. And Israeli politicians, on the far right, have used foul rhetoric and deemed the Palestinians subhuman in some respects. Bibi swiftly suspended a rogue minister for saying a nuke could be dropped on Gaza. There are anti-Arab maniacs among the West Bank settlers and in Bibi’s cabinet. But a policy of Arab genocide? Please.
The only people actively and proudly engaged in genocide are Hamas. The marchers on the streets this weekend will not be opposing genocide; they will be defending its perpetrators. It’s right there in the Hamas founding charter:
[All of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank is] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. … The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.
This is not mere rhetoric. On October 7, we saw what genocide is in practice. Hamas didn’t kill civilians as a tragic consequence of attacks on military targets. Its torture and murder of Jewish civilians was its core mission. And if Hamas had the capacity, they would gladly enact a second Holocaust, and they have proudly said so, with even more sadism than the Nazis. They would kill every Jew they could.
1. Lewis Carroll, “an English author, poet, mathematician and photographer. His most notable works are Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass (1871). He was noted for his facility with word play, logic, and fantasy. His poems ‘Jabberwocky’ (1871) and ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ (1876) are classified in the genre of literary nonsense.” (Wiki)
November 5, 2023
Hugo Chávez
The most recent entry in the Dictator Book Club at Astral Codex Ten looks at former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez:
Former Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.
Photo by Roberto stuckert Filho/PR via Wikimedia Commons.
All dictators get their start by discovering some loophole in the democratic process. Xi realized that control of corruption investigations let him imprison anyone he wanted. Erdogan realized that EU accession talks provided the perfect cover to retool Turkish institutions in his own image.
Hugo Chavez realized that there’s no technical limit on how often you can invoke the emergency broadcast system. You can do it every day! The “emergency” can be that you had a cool new thought about the true meaning of socialism. Or that you’re opening a new hospital and it makes a good photo op. Or that opposition media is saying something mean about you, and you’d like to prevent anyone from watching that particular channel (which is conveniently bound by law to air emergency broadcasts whenever they occur).
This might not be the only reason or even the main reason Hugo Chavez ended up as dictator. But it’s a very representative reason. If Putin is basically a spook and Modi is basically an ascetic, Hugo Chavez was basically a showman. He could keep everyone’s attention on him all the time (the emergency broadcast system didn’t hurt). And once their attention was on him, he could delight them, enrage them, or at least keep them engaged. And he never stopped. Hugo Chavez was the marathon runner of dictators.
He was on television almost every day for hours at a time, invariably live, with no script or teleprompter, mulling, musing, deciding, ordering. His word was de facto law, and he specialised in unpredictable announcements: nationalisations, referenda, troop mobilizations, cabinet shuffles. You watched not just for news value. The man was a consummate performer. He would sing, dance, rap; ride a horse, a tank, a bicycle; aim a rifle, cradle a child, scowl, blow kisses; act the fool, the statesman, the patriarch. There was a freewheeling, improvised air to it all. Suspense came from not knowing what would happen.
There would be no warning. Soap operas, films, and baseball games would dissolve and be replaced by the familiar face seated behind a desk or maybe the wheel of a tractor … it could [last] minutes or hours. Sometimes Chavez wouldn’t be talking, merely attending a ceremony … One time Chavez decided to personally operate a machine on the Caracas-to-Charallave rail tunnel. A television and radio announcer improvised commentary for the first few minutes, but gradually ran out of things to say as the president continued drilling, drilling, drilling. Radio listeners, blind to Chavez pounding away, were baffled and then alarmed by the mechanical roar monopolizing the airwaves. Some thought it signaled a coup.
In 2012, while he was dying of cancer, Chavez gave “a state of the nation address lasting nine and a half hours. A record. No break, no pause.” Put a TV camera in front of him, and the man was a machine.
If he had been an ordinary celebrity, he would be remembered as a legend. But he went too far. He became his TV show. He optimized national policy for ratings. The book goes into detail on one broadcast in particular, where he was filmed walking down Venezuela’s central square, talking to friends. He remarked on how the square needed more monuments to glorious heroes. But where could he put them? The camera shifted to a mall selling luxury goods. A lightbulb went on over the dictator’s head: they could expropriate the property of the rich capitalist elites who owned the mall, and build the monument there. Make it so! Had this been planned, or was it really a momentary whim? Nobody knew.
Then he would move on to some other topic. An ordinary citizen would call in and describe a problem. Chavez would be outraged, and immediately declare a law which solved that problem in the most extreme possible way. Was this staged? Was it a law he had been considering anyway? Again, hard to tell.
Sometimes everyone in government would ignore his decisions to see if he forgot about them. Sometimes he did. Other times he didn’t, and would demand they be implemented immediately. Nobody ever had a followup plan. They expropriated the mall, but Chavez’s train of thought had already moved on, and nobody had budgeted for the glorious monuments he had promised. The mall sat empty; it became a dilapidated eyesore. Laws declared on the spur of the moment to sound maximally sympathetic to one person’s specific problem do not, when combined into a legal system, form a great basis for governing a country.
But Chavez TV was also a game show. The contestants were government ministers. The prize was not getting fired. Offenses included speaking out against Chavez:
Chavez clashed with and fired all his ministers at one time or another but forgave and reinstated his favorites. Nine finance ministers fell in succession … it was palace custom not to give reasons for axing. Chavez, or his private secretary, would phone the marked one to say thank you but your services are no longer required. Good-bye. The victim was left guessing. Did someone whisper to the comandante? Who? Richard Canan, a young, rising commerce minister, was fired after telling an internal party meeting that the government was not building enough houses. Ramon Carrizales was fired as vice president after privately complaining about Cuban influence. Whatever the cause, once the axe fell, expulsion was immediate. The shock was disorienting. Ministers who used to bark commands and barge through doors seemed to physically shrink after being ousted … they haunted former colleagues at their homes, seeking advice and solace, petitioning for a way back to the palace. “Amigo, can you have a word with the chief?” One minister, one of Chavez’s favorites, laughed when he recounted this pitiful lobbying. “They know it as well as I do. In [this government] there are no amigos.”
… or taking any independent action:
[A minister] was not supposed to suggest an initiative, solve a problem, announce good news, theorise about the revolution, or express an original opinion. These were tasks for the comandante. His fickleness encouraged ministers to defer implementation until they were certain of his wishes. In any case they spent so much time on stages applauding — it was unwise to skip protocol events — that there was little opportunity for initiative. Thus the oil minister Rafael Ramirez would lurk, barely visible, while the comandante signed a lucrative deal with Chevron […]
But upon command, the stone would transform into a whirling dervish … the comandante‘s impulsiveness demanded instant, urgent responses. He would become consumed by a theme. Rice! Increase rice production! The order would ricochet through [the government]. The agriculture, planning, transport, commerce, finance, and infrastructure ministers would work around the clock devising a scheme or credits, loans, cooperatives, mills and trucks to have it ready, at least on paper, for the comandante to unveil on his Sunday show. Thus was born the Mixed Company for Socialist Rice. Then, the next week, chicken! Cheaper chicken! The same ministers would forget about rice while they rushed to squeeze farmers, truckers, and supermarkets so that the comandante could say, on his next show, that chicken was cheaper.
… or, worst of all, not enjoying Chavez’s TV shows enough:
[Ministers had to] arrange their features into appropriate expressions when on camera or in the comandante‘s sight line. This was tricky when the comandante did something foolish or bizarre because the required response could contradict instinct … Missing a cue could be fatal. During a show the comandante‘s laser-beam gaze swung from face to face, spotlighting expressions, seeking telltale tics. Immediately after a broadcast, Chavez reviewed the footage, casting a professional eye over the staging, lighting, camera angles — and audience reaction.
The comandante‘s occasional lapses into ridiculous were inevitable. He spoke up to nine hours at a time live on television, without a script … Being capricious and clownish also sustained interest in the show and underlined his authority. No other government figure, after all, dared show humour in public. But on occasion this dissolved into absurdity. Who tells a king he is being a fool?
Ministers faced another test of the mask in September 2007, when the comandante announced clocks would go back half an hour. The aim was to let children and workers wake up in daylight, he said. “I don’t care if they call me crazy, the new time will go ahead, let them call me whatever they want. I’m not to blame. I received a recommendation and said I liked the idea.” Chavez wanted it implemented within a week — causing needless chaos — and bungled the explanation, saying clocks should go forward rather than back. If ministers realized the mistake, they said nothing, only smiled and clapped […]
On rare occasions the correct response was not obvious, sowing panic. In a speech to mark World Water Day in 2011, the comandante said capitalism may have killed life on Mars. “I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet.” Some in the audience tittered, assuming it was a joke, then froze when they saw neighbors turned to stone. To these audience veterans it was unclear if it was a joke, so they adopted poker faces, pending clarification. It never came; the comandante moved on to other topics.
How did a once-great nation reach this point? I read Rory Carroll’s Comandante to find out.
October 29, 2023
QotD: Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will
Ah, if only it weren’t for that awkward patch …
In the 1930s, Fräulein Riefenstahl put her formidable film-making talents to the cause of the Third Reich, and, after attending the Reichsparteitag des Willens in 1934, produced one of the most remarkable films ever made: Triumph Of The Will.
Go back to that scuba-diving disembarkation scene in Ray Müller’s The Wonderful Horrible Life Of Leni Riefenstahl. In theory, it could all be a setup, and the participants chewed over how best to do it beforehand and did fifteen takes: anyone who’s worked in documentaries knows how phony the whole business is. But the point is it seems careless — as if it happened, and the camera happened to be there to record it.
There’s no sense of that in any frame of Triumph Of The Will. Granted that audiences were a lot less media savvy in 1934, and granted that a people dumb enough to fall for National Socialism will fall for anything, it’s still hard to believe that even in its day anyone accepted what remained Fräulein Riefenstahl’s official explanation to the end — that this was just a “documentary record” of the 1934 annual party convention. Early on, we see the Führer‘s motorcade driving through Nuremberg, with what seems like the entire citizenry jammed on to the streets to greet him. Riefenstahl’s camera shoots Hitler (if you’ll forgive the expression) from directly behind him, a sequence which for some reason always reminds me of Gore Vidal’s boast that only very famous people such as himself know what the back of their heads look like. There’s a fabulous moment when the great man — Adolf, not Gore — is responding to the Hitler salutes offered up by the crowds with his campy little elbow-bend and wrist-flip and, as his Mercedes moves forward, the sun catches his fingers and fills the palm, first bathing it in glory and then making it appear as if the Führer‘s hand is the very source of the sunlight itself. Did the director just get lucky? Did the sun just happen to hit? Seconds later, we cut to a long shot of Hitler in the Mercedes continuing down the street. There’s no camera in the car, although the scene we’ve just witnessed could only have been filmed by someone in the back seat. Another minute goes by, and we’re back to the close-up of the Führer‘s neck.
Did she stop the car, get out and film the long shot, and then get back in? Did Leni get Adolf to do re-takes? Or maybe she made the entire population of Nuremberg re-take the scene; maybe they staged the procession twice. If Hitler was unusually agreeable about taking direction, it was because this was never a filmed record of an event so much as an event created for the film. Whatever Triumph Of The Will is, it’s not a documentary. Its language is that of feature films — not Warner Brothers gangster movies or John Ford westerns, but rather the supersized genres, the epics and musicals where huge columns of the great unwieldy messy mass of humanity get tidied and organized — and, if that isn’t the essence of totalitarianism, what is? Riefenstahl has the same superb command of the crowd as Busby Berkeley, the same flair for human geometry (though Berkeley would have drawn the line at giving the gentlemen of the chorus as swishy a parade step as Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard do).
Mark Steyn, “Triumph of the Will”, SteynOnline, 2019-09-07.
