Quotulatiousness

July 26, 2022

What’s worse than having a nepotistic elite running the country? Having an incompetent nepotistic elite running the country

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kurt Schlichter isn’t a fan of the kakistocratic “elite” running most of the western world at the moment:

The things we took for granted decades ago are uncertain, and there’s always an excuse — inevitably one that blames us. Like the new take on air conditioners, which is that they are an extravagance we should learn to live without. What the hell? Why?

And don’t get me started on the bizarre insistence of the resetters that we all need to give up beef and start eating bugs. I have a better idea. How about we eat ribeyes and burgers like Americans instead of crickets and locust like Third World famine victims?

A proper ruling class would see the problems and move to solve them, because the proper relationship between the ruling class and the rest of us is that the ruling class provides prosperity and security and the rest of us let them skim some cream off the top. If they were doing a decent job, their riches and luxuries would not bother us much; but when they have failed yet still expect full pay and benefits anyway, that grates. It is unsustainable.

So why doesn’t the ruling class try to get America moving again instead of telling us that we should settle for less and less? For one thing, because our ruling class is not competent. Joe Biden is, in a way, the perfect president for the resetters — stupid and getting seniler, corrupt, yet absolutely sure of his own genius despite literally no basis for that self-regard. Look, the solutions are there. Want to fix crime? Do what Giuliani did in New York City in the nineties. Want energy independence? Do what Trump did in 2016. Want the economy roaring? Do what Reagan and Trump did. These tactics are not secrets, yet they seem to be too hard for our elite to pull off. Our reset revolt will be to embrace someone who can.

Of course, the incompetence issue assumes that our elite wants to succeed in doing what elites should do. Does it really? Does it really want us prosperous, secure and free? Oh, the elite wants to succeed for itself, and it sure has. The elite is richer than ever. And it intends to stay that way even after you are reset to “Peasant” mode. The elite won’t be taking public transportation among the hobos like you. They will be safe behind armed guards while you are disarmed and victimized — defend yourself at your peril! And they will keep eating steak tartar while you slurp up beetle paste. Yum yum, proles!

The ruling caste has no intention of you living like a civilized citizen. No, you are their sacrifice, to Gaia, the angry weather goddess or whatever other pagan idol that empty void inside them worships. Your pain is the point. Remember, bullies love the raw exercise of power. Making you miserable is a manifestation of their urge to dominate and crush. That’s the genesis of those seemingly insane moves around the world like Sri Lanka giving up fertilizer or agricultural powerhouse Holland evicting farmers. But these moves — including the destruction of our own energy industry — only seem insane if you refuse to accept their ultimate goal. They want to hurt you. Your pain is a feature, not a bug — which will be your next meal if they get their way.

Barbarian Europe: Part 4 – The Ostrogoths in Italy

Filed under: Europe, History, Italy — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published 10 May 2021

In 400 AD, the Roman Empire covered roughly the same area as it had in 100 AD. By 500 AD, all the Western Provinces of the Empire had been overrun by barbarians. Between April and July 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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Is Trudeau channelling Caligula? – “Let them hate me as long as they fear me”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Spencer Fernando, writing for the National Citizens Coalition:

When trying to ascertain where the Trudeau Liberals are trying to take the country, it’s important to look at the foundations of Justin Trudeau’s worldview.

Clearly, he was heavily influenced by his father, someone who continuously expanded the power of the state.

Justin Trudeau’s father was well known as a Communist-sympathizer, being a big fan of both Fidel Castro and Communist China.

Note, the version of the CCP that existed in Pierre Trudeau’s era was even more brutal than the CCP as it exists today. At the time, it was not far removed from the time of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, a government-imposed “reshaping of society” that led to roughly 45 million deaths.

To look at that, and still be a fan of the Chinese Communist Party, is to show a deep ideological commitment to authoritarian socialism and a deep aversion to human freedom.

The apple clearly didn’t fall far from the tree, as Justin Trudeau praised China’s “basic dictatorship” (AKA the centralized power structure that enables horrific crimes).

Trudeau also sought to move Canada closer to China’s orbit, only giving up on that when public opinion – and a subtle revolt among some backbench Liberals – rendered it politically unfeasible.

We can see how the authoritarian socialism that Trudeau praised in China (and let’s not forget his fawning eulogy for Fidel Castro), lines up with the fear and contempt he and the Liberals have for many Canadians.

Now, let’s also note this essential point:

The Liberals continuously target the same individuals that authoritarian socialists and communists have targeted:

    Rural Conservatives.

    Private Enterprise.

    Religious Groups.

    Freethinkers.

    Individualists.

    Private Farmers.

    Rural Gun Owners.

    Independent Press Outlets.

Historically, those are all groups that the far-left has targeted when given the opportunity.

We only need to look at how the Liberal approach to Covid was modelled after the approach taken by Communist China, and how both the Liberals and the CCP have been largely unwilling to move on.

While the Liberals are more constrained than the CCP by the fact that Canada maintains some freedoms, do we have any doubt that they would be far more severe if they could get away with it?

Remember, the moment he feared losing the 2021 election, Justin Trudeau used very divisive and disturbing rhetoric (especially disturbing when seen in a historical context), and purposely sought to direct hatred and blame towards those who resisted draconian state orders.

Since then, the Trudeau Liberals – even in the face of criticism by a few courageous Liberal MPs who were quickly “put back in their place” – have almost gleefully abused their power, purposely creating an “Us vs Them” narrative designed to pit Canadians against each other.

At the same time, they’ve continued their efforts to gain control over social media, silence dissenting views, and turn the establishment media into an extension of the state propaganda apparatus.

This is all being done because they fear those who have the intelligence and strength of character to see through their agenda.

They fear you, and have contempt for you.

Flying Failures – Christmas Bullet (The Worst Plane Ever Built)

Filed under: Business, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 25 Dec 2020

Merry Christmas everyone! 😀

To coincide with this most special of holidays, in this episode of Flying Failures we will be examining the dubious history of the Christmas Bullet, a divisive little plane that could either be seen as the brainchild of a man whose ambition outweighed his abilities, or perhaps one of the greatest cons in aviation history, a con that left two planes destroyed, two test pilots dead, and the US taxpayer several million dollars out of pocket.
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QotD: The nothoi class of Sparta

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

We are not told that spartiates men rape helot women, but it takes wilful ignorance to deny that this happened. First of all, this is a society which sends armed men at night into the unarmed and defenseless countryside (Hdt. 4.146.2; Plut. Lyc. 28.2; Plato, Laws 633). These young men were almost certainly under the normal age of marriage and even if they weren’t, their sexual access to their actual spouse was restricted. Moreover (as we’ll see in a moment) there were clearly no rules against the sexual exploitation of helot women, just like there were no laws of any kind against the murder of helot men. To believe that these young men – under no direction, constrained by no military law, facing no social censure – did not engage in sexual violence requires disbelieving functionally the entire body of evidence about sexual violence in combat zones from all of human history. Anthropologically speaking, we can be absolutely sure this happened and we can be quite confident (and ought to be more than quite horrified) that it happened frequently.

But we don’t need to guess or rely on comparative evidence, because this rape was happening frequently enough that it produced an identifiable social class. The one secure passage we have to this effect is from Xenophon, who notes that the Spartan army marching to war included a group he calls the nothoi – the bastards (Xen. Hell. 5.3.9). The phrase typically means – and here clearly means – boys born to slave mothers. There is a strong reason to believe that these are the same as the mothakes or mothones which begin appearing with greater frequently in our sources. Several of these mothakes end up being fairly significant figures, most notably Lysander (note Plut. Lys. 2.1-4, where Plutarch politely sidesteps the question of why Lysander was raised in poverty and seemed unusually subservient and also the question of who his mother was).

We’ll get to the Spartan free-non-citizen-underclasses next week when we talk more about the Spartan manpower shortage, but for now, I just want to underline and bold something very clearly here: there was so much spartiate rape of helot women in Sparta that it created a significant, legally distinct underclass. And, just so we’re clear: yes, I am classifying all of that contact as rape, because sexual consent does not exist in master-slave relationships where one human being has the literal power of life and death over the other human being and her entire family. We may suppose that some helot women, trapped in this horrific and inhuman circumstance, may have sought out these relationships – but that does not change the dynamics of violence and compulsion permeating the entire system.

To recap quickly: poor peasant life in ancient Greece was already hard for anyone. Women in farming households had difficult, but extremely important jobs for maintaining themselves, their families and their society. To these difficulties, the Spartan state added unnecessary, callous and brutal conditions of poverty, malnutrition, violence, murder and rape.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.

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