Quotulatiousness

August 21, 2022

The pandemic lockdowns heralded the “worldwide end of the Nuremburg code”

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

At Samizdata, Perry de Havilland considers how British culture has been impacted by many of the worst notions coming out of American culture in the last few years:

… support for Brexit, by no means confined to the lumpenproletariat of Guardian reader’s imagination, might not indicate what purveyors of the high status opinion fondly imagine. The conflation of Brexit with the “Trump phenomenon” was always overblown, given the deep social and structural differences between UK and USA. Yes, we are influenced by America, but we are not the same in oh so many ways.

But western civilisation, not just Britain, is undeniably going through a very strange phase. The insane and demonstrably pointless covid lockdowns seem to have had a pressure cooker effect, with every -ism being dialled up several notches. The mainstreaming of transsexuality, a largely harmless hobby until a lunatic fringe grabbed hold of it, indicates the world is not running in well-oiled grooves. An inability to define “what is a woman?”, by sages and politicians who nevertheless expect to be treated as serious people, would have seemed implausible just a few years ago.

But the covid lockdowns, that is the “biggie”: an egregious abridgement of liberty & common sense that placed the global economy into repeated bouts of cardiac arrest. The worldwide end of the Nuremburg code.

The lockdowns were an even more polarising issue that Brexit or Trump or indeed anything else. Why? Because there was no opt-out, you could not just go to work, or visit granny, no ability to ignore the whole thing and just head down the pub or retire for a macha latte in some café. The effects of that will be enduring. That was the issue that taught a lot of people to fear what other people believe to be true, and people always hate what they fear.

Now just wait to see what happens when the green lunacy that stopped investment in reliable power supply and new reservoirs means we start running out of power and water. I suspect that will be what makes the cork finally blow off.

Sicily Liberated; Italy in the Firing Line – WW2 – 208 – August 20, 1943

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Italy, Japan, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 20 Aug 2022

The British and Americans race for Messina to complete the conquest of Sicily — who will reach it first? On New Guinea, the Allies destroy a substantial Japanese air force; there are several major Allied air raids over Europe, the fighting in the USSR around Kharkov is brutal and costly for both sides, and a secret Allied leadership conference in Quebec begins to determine the course of the war. Busy week.
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David McCullough, RIP

Filed under: Books, History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte remembers the late David McCullough:

David McCullough speaking at Emory University, 25 April, 2007.
Photo by Brett Weinstein via Wikimedia Commons.

David McCullough died August 7 at the age of 89. He won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman, National Book Awards for The Path Between the Seas, about the building of the Panama Canal, and Mornings on Horseback, a biography of young Theodore Roosevelt, as well as two Francis Parkman prizes (The Path, Truman) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also enjoyed a prominent career as a broadcaster and several of his books were transformed into important television events, most notably HBO’s John Adams.

I read him closely over the years. Studied him, even. After finishing his major biographies — books that can’t fail to impress for their prodigious research and literary grace — I went back to his early work to trace how long it took him to develop into a master of narrative historical writing. I started at the beginning, The Johnstown Flood (1968), and was stunned to find that he was all there from page one. He had total command of his material and his story at the outset.

I wouldn’t call him a favorite writer. McCullough tended to play safe. He had a somewhat rosy view of American history: “I want to bring to life the best that can be found in the story of why we are the way we are and how we got to where we are.” He was so busy bringing the best to life that he seldom challenged his readers with the worst: truly repellant individuals or unredeemed national failure.

His subjects tended to be public-spirited men of noble character and hard-earned wisdom. He felt comfortable in their company. “It’s like picking a roommate,” he once said, explaining why he dropped the idea of a biography of Pablo Picasso. “After all, you’re going to be with that person every day, maybe for years, and why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don’t like?”

When the abhorrent forced its way into his stories, he tended to rationalize it. His formulation that Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, was a lesser evil necessary to prevent a greater evil (heavy American troop losses) may have got it exactly backward.

His paeans to American greatness even wore on American audiences in his later years. Reviews of The Pioneers, his 2019 account of the Euro-American settlement of the Ohio River valley, accused him of “romanticizing white settlement and downplaying the pain inflicted on Native Americans.”

I raise these issues not to speak ill of the dead but to say that McCullough is worth reading, and reading again, even if, like me, you’re part of the minority who can find him hard to take at times. (The majority love him: I’m not sure any historian has sold more books.)

I had the pleasure of meeting David McCullough in Toronto at an intimate lunch arranged by his publisher, Simon & Schuster. I interviewed him later for Macleans. He was a complete gentleman and an enjoyable companion, notwithstanding his many twice- and thrice-told stories (an occupational hazard for touring writers).

I was able to draw him out on various aspects of non-fiction craft, which he spoke well on. What follows are some of my favorite quotes from the interview along with several other things McCullough said about writing and one comment by another author, the great Candace Millard, about his work.

History Summarized: The Acropolis

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, Greece, History, Humour — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 29 Apr 2022

They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is …
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QotD: The “social responsibility” of the corporate executive

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

In a free-enterprise, private-property system, a corporate executive is an employee of the owners of the business. He has direct responsibility to his employers. That responsibility is to conduct the business in accordance with their desires, which generally will be to make as much money as possible while conforming to their basic rules of the society, both those embodied in law and those embodied in ethical custom. Of course, in some cases his employers may have a different objective. A group of persons might establish a corporation for an eleemosynary purpose — for example, a hospital or a school. The manager of such a corporation will not have money profit as his objectives but the rendering of certain services.

In either case, the key point is that, in his capacity as a corporate executive, the manager is the agent of the individuals who own the corporation or establish the eleemosynary institution, and his primary responsibility is to them.

Needless to say, this does not mean that it is easy to judge how well he is performing his task. But at least the criterion of performance is straight-forward, and the persons among whom a voluntary contractual arrangement exists are clearly defined.

Of course, the corporate executive is also a person in his own right. As a person, he may have many other responsibilities that he recognizes or assumes voluntarily — to his family, his conscience, his feelings of charity, his church, his clubs, his city, his country. He may feel impelled by these responsibilities to devote part of his income to causes he regards as worthy, to refuse to work for particular corporations, even to leave his job, for example, to join his country’s armed forces. If we wish, we may refer to some of these responsibilities as “social responsibilities.” But in these respects he is acting as a principal, not an agent; he is spending his own money or time or energy, not the money of his employers or the time or energy he has contracted to devote to their purposes. If these are “social responsibilities,” they are the social responsibilities of individuals, not business. What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a “social responsibility” in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers. For example, that he is to refrain from increasing the price of the product in order to contribute to the social objective of preventing inflation, even though a price increase would be in the best interests of the corporation. Or that he is to make expenditures on reducing pollution beyond the amount that is in the best interests of the corporation or that is required by law in order to contribute to the social objective of improving the environment. Or that, at the expense of corporate profits, he is to hire “hardcore” unemployed instead of better qualified available workmen to contribute to the social objective of reducing poverty.

In each of these cases, the corporate executive would be spending someone else’s money for a general social interest. Insofar as his actions in accord with his “social responsibility” reduce returns to stockholders, he is spending their money. Insofar as his actions raise the price to customers, he is spending the customers’ money. Insofar as his actions lower the wages of some employees, he is spending their money.

Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, New York Times, 1970-09-13.

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