World War Two
Published 14 Dec 2021It’s late 1942 and the German Army is close to ruin. The Ostheer alone has suffered more than a million casualties in its fight against the Red Army. If the Wehrmacht cannot find a way to return to its former strength or reap decisive strategic benefits in the near future, it will ultimately face destruction in a war of attrition.
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December 15, 2021
Is the Wehrmacht Defeated in 1942? – WW2 Special
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Christopher Hitchens, ten years gone
In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith laments our loss of the “last cool columnist”:
Christopher Hitchens speaking at The Amaz!ng Meeting held at the Riviera Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada on 20 January 2007.
Photo detail by ensceptico via Wikimedia Commons.
The ten year anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens (15 December) brings to mind two questions. Firstly, has it really been ten years since Christopher Hitchens died? Secondly, has it only been ten years since Christopher Hitchens died? The vivid nature of his prose and rhetoric makes him feel like our contemporary. His obsessions, though, — like atheistic evangelism and Middle Eastern nation building — feel as dated as a Roman artifact.
Columnists have a short cultural lifespan. Once, millions of Britons read Bernard Levin every week. Now? I doubt that most young writers have even heard of him. Classic books are reprinted. Newspapers gather dust. Hitchens’s name does not have all the weight it had ten years ago but it has stayed alive, because the Internet archives essays and appearances and because of the esteem that he is held in by his peers.
Janan Ganesh, writing for the Financial Times, believes that Hitchens would have thrived if he had lived to comment on 2021. “He was made for our time, not his own,” Ganesh writes, “The great vacancy in today’s public life is for an equal scourge of the censorious left and the feral right … Hitchens would have been in his element.”
This is bunkum. Hitchens would have been hopelessly out of sorts in the 2020s. How, for example, would he have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic? It is as implausible to imagine that a man with such a lust for life would have endorsed long-term restrictions as it is to imagine that a man with such cheerful faith in the scientific establishment would have had time for COVID sceptics and vaccine hesitancy. Anybody hoping that Hitchens would have carved out some kind of nuanced middle ground, meanwhile, must have forgotten who we are dealing with. No, the plain truth is that the high moralism and rhetorical fury of “the Hitch” were perfectly suited to the heydays of the War on Terror and cable TV.
Liberal commentators like Ganesh miss Hitchens not so much because of his opinions as because he was cool. Ross Douthat mentions Mark Lilla, Anne Applebaum and Andrew Sullivan as other liberals who criticise the left and the right. But while I respect Lilla and Applebaum’s accomplishments and enjoy Sullivan’s writing, how many people do you think have fantasised about having a few drinks with them — or, indeed, with any other political commentator not named “Hitchens”?
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Why Real Wasabi Is So Expensive | So Expensive
Business Insider
Published 19 Jan 2019The green paste you’ve been eating with your sushi isn’t really wasabi. If you check the ingredients on the packet, you might see a mixture of sweetener, horseradish and perhaps a small percentage of the real thing. Real wasabi is hard to come across and it can cost $250 per kilo. So what actually is wasabi, and why is it so expensive?
For more from The Wasabi Company, go to: https://www.thewasabicompany.co.uk/
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#Wasabi #Expensive #BusinessInsider
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QotD: Suppressing intellectual heresy
Middlebury students acted to prevent Charles Murray from speaking on the relatively benign subject of the travails of the white working class because he had previously written work that some have categorized as racist. That label meant that they need not grapple with the substance of his earlier book, but it also meant that as a known heretic his subsequent work was likewise tainted.
The young people at Middlebury who shouted down Charles Murray and assaulted a faculty member who had tried to engage him in civil debate were, in effect, suppressing the ideas of a heretic. After all, a heretic’s ideas are too dangerous to be heard.
Dangerous ideas are, of course, interesting ideas, especially to young people. When we fail to address dangerous ideas in our courses, we add to their mystique. When activists shout down or assault heretical speakers they send two messages. The first and intended message is a display of righteous disapproval. The other, unintended message, is that there is something so menacing about the idea being expressed that it cannot simply be laughed off or even argued with, rather it cannot be allowed to be spoken.
Consider how that looks to someone who is starting to question the premises of the liberal orthodoxy on race, gender, diversity and so on. Why, our alt-right curious person might wonder, are there some ideas that are so laughably false that one need not even mount a counter argument (a flat earth or the financial benefits of college athletics), some ideas that are considered contentious but still open to debate (supply-side economics), and some ideas that are so outré that they can only be met with back turning, shouting, or by punches to the face?
Might it be, our waverer must wonder, that these people don’t want me to hear this idea because they don’t have a good answer to it?
Erik Gilbert, “Liberal Orthodoxy and the New Heresy”, Quillette, 2019-02-04.
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