Quotulatiousness

September 27, 2022

Is Kayla Lemieux the leading edge of LGBT tolerance or a “dude gaming the system”?

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Back on September 16, I posted a link to the then-breaking story of the teacher in Halton whose prosthetic breasts had poked into news headlines everywhere: “This is either the teacher of the year (come on, you know that’s inevitable because reasons) or someone doing an epic physical and psychological parody of our culture right now.” It’s nearly two weeks later, and we’re still not really clear on which of those two possibilities is closest to the truth. At PJ Media, Athena Thorne is making a case for the epic prank case:

There is the most titillating rumor being bandied about the interwebs right now. And while it may or may not be true, it’s certainly food for thought. It concerns “Kayla Lemieux”, the infamous trans-woman shop teacher at Oakville Trafalgar High School (OTHS) in Ontario, Canada.

An anonymous poster on an online forum recently made a claim about Lemieux’s shop class back when “Kayla” was still Mr. Kerry Luc Lemieux. The post reads:

    This dude is gaming the system. An anon here yesterday was in this dude’s class. This teacher was almost fired for ‘toxic masculinity’ last year, as well as not embracing woke culture. He’d drop redpills to his class, such as how silly gender neutral bathrooms are. The school board hates him.

    He’s now upping the ante to exploit the very clown world the school and society itself created. His long game is most likely to get fired, and then sue for discrimination. There is no other explanation… No better way to troll clown world than to become an over-the-top caricature of a woman.

File this allegation under “Huge if True” (lol). Imagine for a moment that the anonymous person is telling the truth. If that is the case, then this teacher is the greatest hero the sane world has fronted yet.

If Lemieux is indeed pranking the school board, then he is a genius. When images of the trans-busty high school shop teacher began spreading like wildfire online, the outrage was swift and formidable. OTHS and the Halton District School Board (HDSB) went on the defensive — and it quickly became evident that they had painted themselves into a corner with their mindless commitment to “inclusion”.

“We are aware of discussion on social media and in the media regarding Oakville Trafalgar High School. We would like to take this opportunity to reiterate to our community that we are committed to establishing and maintaining a safe, caring, inclusive, equitable and welcoming learning and working environment for all students and staff”, said OTHS in an email sent to parents and obtained by feminist news site Reduxx.

The War That Made Germany Prussian – Austro-Prussian War 1866

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

Real Time History
Published 23 Sep 2022

After settling the Schleswig-Holstein question in 1864, Austria and Prussia are uneasy allies. Both are the biggest players in the German confederation. In Bismarck’s dream of a united Germany, he sees Prussia as the only leader and wants to force the so called “small German solution” without Austria. And so, in 1866 a war between Austria and Prussia (plus other German states like Bavaria, Baden, Württemberg, Saxony, Hanover) breaks out to settle this question once and for all.
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Sarah Hoyt on how Americans are mis-understanding the TV show Bridgerton

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

I don’t watch TV, so I haven’t seen the show myself, but apparently a lot of Blacks in the US are taking away the multi-racial casting of a parallel-universe TV show set in the Regency period as being a true representation of British history:

Anyway, all this came to a head with my watching the Bridgerton series. As other people know, it bothers the living daylights out of me to cast well-known historical figures as another race. Not because there can’t be decent actors of another race, but because I know there is a percentage of the population who takes fictional movies and shows as revealing “the truth”.

My mom, who is better educated (alas) than most American high school graduates is one of those. She will adapt her vision of the past according to some crazy movie she just watched. (The number of arguments I’ve had.)

For those who haven’t watched Bridgerton (bog standard regency romances, with gorgeous, if not period-accurate clothing) they cast a certain number of noblemen as black or indian or other “races” and the English Queen in Bridgerton is black.

The buried history in the mini-series (suggested and Heinleined in) is that black and white people coexisted in England side by side, until the king married a black Queen, and then suddenly mixed marriages were allowed.

This is obviously a fantastic parallel world history. Yes, there were black people in England in the regency. I’m sorry to tell you there were very few and 99% of them were slaves or servants brought by people who had lived in Africa.

There was no “black nobility” and no system of apartheid.

HOWEVER as we found out, American people absolutely believe this nonsense. They believe Queen Charlotte (mostly German, honestly) was “black” based on a very bad portrait and rumors of a Moorish ancestress. (Note this rumor was almost certainly political slander. Also that Moor at that time in the peninsula depending on whether in the South or the North might mean slim, small and tan, but did not mean AFRICAN.) Weirdly the best debunking I found was from Quora.

HOWEVER I also found endless pages of well-educated black-Americans celebrating Queen Charlotte for “Black history month”.

Let me also point out that both the Queen and her husband (Yes, mad King George) were ardent abolitionists and that did she have any legitimate hint of African blood ALL the opposition would have fixated on this, and the caricatures would have been next level. However this never happened. Queen Charlotte was and looked German, even if a portrait can imply “stereotypical” African features … As long as you remember that those features exist in a lot of other races, and that a lot of them are also Neanderthal.

Sure, if you go with the one drop theory, Queen Charlotte was black. So is everyone else. EVERYONE else, even those whose 23andme swears they’re pure Scandinavian. Because sometime in the last two thousand years all of us got an African ancestor, somewhere, on one of the many, many lines that fed into our family. (Note genealogy is also a lie to some extent, since it’s impossible to follow every single female (if you’re tracking the male. Vice versa otherwise) line that dropped into your family, and everyone who fed into every other of those lines.)

The problem is that it was the rats in the head of the American black producers of the series that led them to create this entire parallel universe which they THINK IS TRUE on the basis of “well the queen was black”. WITHOUT LOOKING.

And now those rats are reproducing everywhere, but most notably in black American heads, who now believe that “Well, the king married a black queen, so it must be true that the Americans rebelled to keep enslaving the black people”.

This is all not just arrant nonsense, but poisonous bullshit, and has no contact whatsoever with reality.

What can we do about it?

Correct it, ruthlessly, whenever we come across it. And keep pointing out that a queen who was blond and blue eyed was not in fact “black” unless everyone is. And that reading racial tea leaves is a pseudo-science, like phrenology.

I would very much appreciate if we could put this behind us so may family doesn’t keep getting asked “what is your racial background” by complete strangers. (And not just census takers, whom I like to answer with “human”.)

Look, in the end, the darkest African and the lightest Scandinavian have more in common with each other than not. To pretend otherwise is arrant nonsense.

Yes, our far-distant ancestors developed racism as a necessary survival tool (along with the uncanny valley discomfort) because you could fall into the hands of another hominin band and become “food”. (The chimps are less discriminating and will also eat babies of their own band.)

We are now past that, and I would like it not to return. Yes, there are physical characteristics that go with certain character traits, but it’s harder to track than you think, and they’re often things that have nothing to do with race, let alone racial stereotypes.

We all have one drop of slaves and enslaved, or saints, sinners, murderers, murder victims, kings and peasants, ascetics and whores. And we all have all the inclinations of all of mankind in varying degrees.
It’s what you make of it and with it that determines whether you can wear “human” as a crown, or in fact get cast out of the human race for shoving in line.

It’s time to stop with the nonsense.

Arex Delta Gen2: How Gun Designs Iterate and Improve

Filed under: Europe, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 May 2022

In firearms, as in really all technology, the market iterates and improves concepts over time. A novel new system — like the polymer-framed, striker-fired semiauto pistol — will never be perfect on its first introduction. Over time, as users and manufacturers gain more insight into the details of using and building the system, changes are made to improve it. At the same time, the cost of production comes down (especially after applicable patents have expired).

The Arex Delta Gen2 pistol is a really good example of this, I think. While offering no fundamental innovation, it is markedly better in all sorts of ways than similar pistols that preceded it. It has great handling, safe disassembly, near-universal optics compatibility, slim lines, light weight, and a good trigger. And it does this for a remarkably low price.

I am looking forward to really putting one through the wringer at Slovenian Brutality this June!
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QotD: The Poor Law Reform Act of 1834

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Royal Commission on the Operation of the Poor Laws, set up in 1832, was chaired by Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London. It numbered several other prominent churchmen among its members. The deliberations of this body led to the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834. This charming statute was based on the idea that the provision of poor relief must be made so torturous and degrading that only those suffering from extreme starvation and indigence would accept it. The sole form of assistance was to be within the context of workhouses, which were to be made as miserable and hellish as any prison. Any family unfortunate enough to have no choice but to fall back on the workhouse would be split up, as mixed-sex institutions would “undermine the good administration” of the workhouses, as the authorities euphemistically put it.

One of the law’s architects, Edwin Chadwick — a man who made Mr Gradgrind [Wiki] look like one of the Cheeryble brothers [Wiki] — infamously commented that it was vital that the inmates of workhouses should be given the coarsest food possible. William Cobbett, a leading opponent of the bill, gleefully seized on this, nicknaming the Whigs, who pushed the legislation hardest, the “Coarser Food Party”. The idea of all this — rooted in the principles of utilitarianism, political economy and Malthusianism — was, as future Archbishop of Canterbury John Bird Sumner put it, to encourage the labouring poor to do everything they could to avoid the “intemperance and want of prudent foresight” that creates poverty, the “punishment which the moral government of God inflicts in this world upon thoughtlessness and guilty extravagance”.

In the 1830s, these ideas were at the very vanguard of progressive thinking. They were promoted by the metropolitan liberal elite of the age, men such as James Mill, Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo, the forward-thinking “Philosophic Radicals” who spewed out reforming and “improving” ideas through their famous organ The Westminster Review. Other contributors included happy-go-lucky eugenicist pioneer and social Darwinist Herbert Spencer, as well as Harriet Martineau, the sort of woman who would cheerfully have put her “enlightened benevolence” into practice by personally taste-testing workhouse food to ensure it was sufficiently coarse.

These ideas were gleefully leapt upon by a large swathe of the Church leadership, who endorsed the grim dogmas of political economy with an alacrity that would only surprise anyone unfamiliar with the long history of our episcopacy’s lamb-like submission to secular liberal orthodoxies. As E.R. Norman pointed out many decades ago, the Church of England’s leaders have, again and again since at least the eighteenth century, “readily adopted the progressive idealism common to liberal opinion within the intelligentsia, of which they were a part”. They have “always managed to reinterpret their sources in ways which have somehow made their version of Christianity correspond to the values of their class and generation”, a process intimately connected to the fact that bishops are nearly always tied (by personal links, economic interests and a desire to conform) to their secular peers who set the broader cultural and political agenda.

Capel Lofft, “The closing of the Episcopal mind”, The Critic, 2022-06-21.

September 26, 2022

Canada, a confessed “ongoing” genocidal state, has no moral grounds to criticize China, Russia, or Iran

Filed under: Cancon, History, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Quillette, Jonathan Kay expresses his frustration as Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s performative moral posturing and virtue signalling for his globalist comrades comes back to bite him in the ass … again:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

… [Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi] also threw in an attack on Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples, declaring that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school.”

The issue of supposed unmarked Indigenous child graves dominated the Canadian media in the latter half of 2021. But as I reported in Quillette several months ago, no “mass graves” were ever found. In fact, even the Indigenous groups that initially reported ground-penetrating radar (GPR) survey results consistent with the possible presence of unmarked burial sites weren’t talking about “mass graves”. Rather, the invented mass-graves claim was popularized by a badly botched New York Times May 28th, 2021, story written by reporter Ian Austen. (For a definitive debunking, see Terry Glavin’s account in Canada’s National Post).

In the 16 months that have passed since the unmarked-graves story broke in late May 2021, not a single body has been found, nor any human remains. And so even the less sensational allegation that 215 individual unmarked child graves lie buried under the grounds of a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, now seems doubtful. Nor have bodies or human remains been recovered at any of the other former residential-school properties where GPR surveys were conducted.

Yet that didn’t prevent Prime Minister Justin Trudeau from lowering flags on Canadian public buildings for more than five months, nor from speaking publicly as if bodies were already being dug up. And aside from the National Post, not a single major Canadian media outlet has admitted its role in feeding the unmarked-graves social panic that exploded last year, and which often included lurid speculation that the supposed grave sites not only contained the remains of Indigenous children, but that these children had been murdered through methods worthy of a horror-movie plot.

Given this, what can Canadian public figures say to Raisi now that he’s throwing spurious moral equivalences into our faces? Nothing. In making the false claim that “bodies of hundreds of children were discovered in mass graves in a [former residential] school”, the man is merely reading our own officially sourced misinformation back to us.

This isn’t the first time that Trudeau has managed to maneuver Canada into this kind of mortifying position vis-à-vis the world’s tyrants. Last year, when Canadian lawmakers voted to denounce China’s treatment of Uighurs in western Xinjiang as a form of genocide, Trudeau and his Cabinet abstained. The suspected reasons for that move were complex. But they included the fact that Canada was, by its own description, morally compromised on the genocide file: Back in 2019, Trudeau had explicitly acceded to the (absurd) claim that Canada, too, was guilty of “genocide” — this one against Indigenous women. Indeed, according to the official report that precipitated Trudeau’s mea culpa, this supposed Canadian genocide remains ongoing.

Did D-Day win WW2? – a WW2 expert discussion

Filed under: Britain, Europe, France, Germany, History, Media, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 25 Sep 2022

WW2 historians Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, and Paul Woodadge moderated by Ryan Socash discuss the meaning and significance of D-Day from historical, current, and future perspectives. Recorded on the road while shooting in Normandy for TimeGhost’s 24-hour documentary on the events of June 6, 1944.
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“We’ve credentialed people for membership in a series of high-cultural-status groups on the basis of their ability to chant slogans and perform rituals; they are coreless”

Filed under: Business, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Chris Bray on Vivek Ramaswamy’s book Woke, Inc.:

Vivek Ramaswamy was trying to close a deal, so he went to do some relationship building over dinner at an investor’s house. As dinner ended, the investor’s son came downstairs to greet the visitors, and he turned out to be a high school senior who was applying to Harvard. By the most remarkable coincidence, Vivek Ramaswamy is a Harvard grad, so the kid asked for some advice on getting in. Stand out, the Harvard grad told the Harvard applicant. Have something that makes you different than all the other applicants. Oh, the kid said, yeah — I got that. It turns out the seventeen year-old son of a venture capitalist had started a non-profit to fight against global sex slavery, which did indeed impress the admissions office and did indeed get him into Harvard. When Ramaswamy ran into the kid again, a few years later, he was shopping for Wall Street internships — and had moved on from the whole sex slavery thing, which had by then served its purpose.

Ramaswamy’s book Woke, Inc., a title published last year that seems to be gaining new momentum now as its author takes on corporate ESG posturing, accurately promises to take readers “inside corporate America’s social justice scam”, though I don’t love everything he offers as a solution. He clearly is reporting from inside: He’s a Harvard grad, a Yale Law grad, a former hedge fund employee, and a former pharmaceutical CEO. (Those credentials make you trust his argument, right?)

The thing the kid did, dummying up a quick thing to fight global sex slavery to get it into his admissions package, is a version of a maneuver that Ramaswamy finds all over the woke corporate world. The highly woke consumer products company Unilever is passionate about taking deep notice of intersectionality and serving women of color, and it partners with UN Women, “a nonprofit branch of the UN dedicated to advancing gender equality and empowering women”. Also, dozens of women who work on a Unilever tea plantation in Kenya were gang-raped in front of their families, an event that was coupled with a dozen or so murders, and Unilever declined to provide them with substantial support or assistance: “Unilever said the attacks on its plantation were unexpected and therefore that it should not be held liable”.

Unilever provides money to UN Women, Ramaswamy concludes, and UN Women provides Unilever with “moral cover for the Kenyan massacre”. Woke Unilever is a façade for, you know, Unilever. It’s a strategy, one example of many, and Ramaswamy argues that the “arranged marriage” between wokeness and corporate capitalism was born out of Occupy Wall Street: Here’s a check, now let’s stop talking about TARP and start talking about white privilege.

You should read Woke, Inc., so I won’t go on summarizing. But without going deeper into Ramaswamy’s argument, which reflects a series of increasingly familiar observations about social class and the function of wokeness, the point is the inauthenticity and shallowness of corporate social justice posturing, all of which is meant to protect the core of the project — to provide cover for business practices that might otherwise be criticized. It’s a show, a performative and manipulative posture. You could easily make comparable arguments about wokeness and power in academia, media, or government.

Now, to take all of this and pivot to an argument that will satisfy absolutely no one, if the social justice façade is a façade — shallow, performative, calculatedly purpose-serving — then there’s a good chance the branch managers of the globalist project will drop it when it slides out of fashion. The kid who, wanting a career on Wall Street, did the sex slavery nonprofit thing just long enough to get into Harvard: That kid is a middle manager now, and he’ll recite slogans about white privilege or not, as Current Thing demands, as long as the checks still cash. We’ve credentialed people for membership in a series of high-cultural-status groups on the basis of their ability to chant slogans and perform rituals; they are coreless.

Dovetailing – The Coping Saw Method | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 25 May 2022

The quickest simplest of all dovetailing methods, bar none.

Whether you need a quick fix to replace a kitchen drawer or a fine element to a precious furniture piece you are making, this dovetail is quick to make and needs no special equipment beyond a chisel, a mallet, a sharp knife, and a square.

That’s nine minutes to a twin dovetailed corner and a mere 36 minutes for a box or a drawer.
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QotD: “Comrades of proven worth”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Politics, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This would be funny if it wasn’t quite such a jarring reminder of how the Soviets used to manage matters. The revolutionary vanguard were not held to the same standards as everyone else because, you know, they were the revolutionary vanguard, leaders of the people. They thus got all the nice apartments in central Moscow as they had to be close to the Ministries where they directed the peasants. They didn’t have to share the apartment because they needed to rest after their labours. And surely those working for the workers should be well rewarded?

So too they didn’t have to line up for the scraps of whatever rotting junk the ration stores had. The KGB, for example, had its own commissary just around the back of Lubyanka – I know, I’ve shopped in it. And higher ranks simply never needed to go shopping at all, the nomenklatura had the government delivery service. Ocado for commies but only really important commies.

This all came under the rubric of comrades of proven worth…

Tim Worstall, “Emma Thompson Is A Comrade Of Proven Worth To Extinction Rebellion”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-04-19.

September 25, 2022

Red Army Reaches the Dnieper – WW2 – 213 – September 24, 1943

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

World War Two
Published 24 Sep 2022

Benito Mussolini proclaims a new fascist republic in Italy, but this time it is a full puppet state to Germany. There is scattered fighting around Italy and the Dodecanese — including a massacre of Italian POWs, but the big Allied advances this week are the Australians in New Guinea and the Soviets retaking their own territory. They take ground, in fact, from near Smolensk all the way south to the Sea of Azov.
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The five-paragraph essay straitjacket

Filed under: Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Aeon, David Labaree discusses the good intent and terrible results of forcing students to rigidly follow the “five paragraph” model of essay writing:

Schools and colleges in the United States are adept at teaching students how to write by the numbers. The idea is to make writing easy by eliminating the messy part – making meaning – and focusing effort on reproducing a formal structure. As a result, the act of writing turns from moulding a lump of clay into a unique form to filling a set of jars that are already fired. Not only are the jars unyielding to the touch, but even their number and order are fixed. There are five of them, which, according to the recipe, need to be filled in precise order. Don’t stir. Repeat.

So let’s explore the form and function of this model of writing, considering both the functions it serves and the damage it does. I trace its roots to a series of formalisms that dominate US education at all levels. The foundation is the five-paragraph essay, a form that is chillingly familiar to anyone who has attended high school in the US. In college, the model expands into the five-section research paper. Then in graduate school comes the five-chapter doctoral dissertation. Same jars, same order. By the time the doctoral student becomes a professor, the pattern is set. The Rule of Five is thoroughly fixed in muscle memory, and the scholar is on track to produce a string of journal articles that follow from it. Then it’s time to pass the model on to the next generation. The cycle continues.

Edward M White is one participant in the cycle who decided to fight back. It was the summer of 2007, and he was on the plane home from an ordeal that would have crushed a man with a less robust constitution. An English professor, he had been grading hundreds of five-paragraph essays drawn from the 280,000 that had been submitted that June as part of the Advanced Placement Test in English language and composition. In revenge, he wrote his own five-paragraph essay about the five-paragraph essay, whose fourth paragraph reads:

    The last reason to write this way is the most important. Once you have it down, you can use it for practically anything. Does God exist? Well you can say yes and give three reasons, or no and give three different reasons. It doesn’t really matter. You’re sure to get a good grade whatever you pick to put into the formula. And that’s the real reason for education, to get those good grades without thinking too much and using up too much time.

White’s essay – “My Five-Paragraph-Theme Theme” – became an instant classic. True to the form, he lays out the whole story in his opening paragraph:

    Since the beginning of time, some college teachers have mocked the five-paragraph theme. But I intend to show that they have been mistaken. There are three reasons why I always write five-paragraph themes. First, it gives me an organisational scheme: an introduction (like this one) setting out three subtopics, three paragraphs for my three subtopics, and a concluding paragraph reminding you what I have said, in case you weren’t paying attention. Second, it focuses my topic, so I don’t just go on and on when I don’t have anything much to say. Three and only three subtopics force me to think in a limited way. And third, it lets me write pretty much the same essay on anything at all. So I do pretty well on essay tests. A lot of teachers actually like the five-paragraph theme as much as I do.

Note the classic elements of the model. The focus on form: content is optional. The comfortingly repetitive structure: here’s what I’m going to say, here I am saying it, and here’s what I just said. The utility for everyone involved: expectations are so clear and so low that every writer can meet them, which means that both teachers and students can succeed without breaking a sweat – a win-win situation if ever there was one. The only thing missing is meaning.

For students who need a little more structure in dealing with the middle three paragraphs that make up what instructors call the “body” of the essay, some helpful tips are available – all couched in the same generic form that could be applicable to anything. According to one online document by a high-school English teacher:

    The first paragraph of the body should contain the strongest argument, most significant example, cleverest illustration, or an obvious beginning point. The first sentence of this paragraph should include the “reverse hook” which ties in with the transitional hook at the end of the introductory paragraph. The topic for this paragraph should be in the first or second sentence. This topic should relate to the thesis statement in the introductory paragraph. The last sentence in this paragraph should include a transitional hook to tie into the second paragraph of the body.

You probably won’t be surprised that the second paragraph “should contain the second strongest argument, second most significant example, second cleverest illustration, or obvious follow-up to the first paragraph …” And that the third paragraph “should contain the third strongest argument …” Well, you get the picture.

200 Medals Won in an Hour – The Raid on Zeebrugge, 1918

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historigraph
Published 11 May 2022
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QotD: Sparta’s military reputation as “the best warriors in all of Greece”

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

… the Spartans seemed to have leaned into Herodotus’ image of them as the best warriors in all of Greece and the eternal opponents of all kinds of tyranny. Spartan “messaging” in the war against Athens portrayed Athens itself as a “tyrant city” ruling over the rest of Greece (which was, to be fair, pretty accurate at the time). Likewise, the image of military excellence the Spartans put forward is picked up and represented clearly in the writings of Xenophon, Plato, Aristophanes and Thucydides (though he is, at least, more skeptical that the Spartans are supermen) and in turn picked up and magnified by later writers (Diodorus, Plutarch, etc) who rely on them. Other states sought out Spartan military advisors, famously Syracuse (advised by the mothax Gylippus) and Carthage (by Xanthippus, a Spartan mercenary).

That reputation could be a real military advantage. Greek hoplite armies arranged themselves right-to-left according to the status of each polis‘ army (poleis almost always fight in alliances). Since Sparta was always the leader of its alliance, the Spartan king and his force always took the right – opposite the weakest part of the enemy army. You may easily imagine the men facing the Spartans – they know the Spartan reputation for skill (and do not have the advantage of me telling them it is mostly hogwash) and by virtue of where they are standing know that they do not have the same reputation. Frequently, such match-ups resulted in the other side running away before the Spartans even got into spear’s reach (e.g. Thuc 5.72.4).

There’s a story in Xenophon, embedded in the larger Battle of Lechaeum, which I think illustrates the point well. Early on, the Argives (the men of Argos, always the enemy of Sparta) meet and rout a group of Sicyonians (who are allies of Sparta). A passing Spartan cavalry company under a Pasimachus sees this and rushes in; getting off their horses, they grab the Sicyon shields (marked with the city’s sigma) and advance against the Argives. But whereas later in the battle the arrival of the Spartans will trigger panic and retreat, here the Argives do not know they are fighting Spartans (because of the shields) – and so they advance with confidence; Pausimachus with his small force is crushed. As he attacks Pausimachus declared (according to Xenophon), “By the two gods, Argives, these Sigmas will deceive you” (Xen. Hell. 4.4.10; the “two gods” or “twin gods” here are Castor and Pollux).

I rather think that Pausimachus was deceived by the lambda his own shield may have carried (there is debate about if Spartan shields always had the lambda device, I tend to think they did not). Pausimachus expected to surprise the Argives with his Spartan skill. Instead, he found out – fatally – that the magic was never in the Spartan, it was in the image of Sparta that lived in the mind of his opponent.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.

September 24, 2022

The end of crisis culture – “[Y]ou can’t go on having a culture of crisis if people stop showing up for it”

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

Chris Bray on the inevitable endgame of “all crisis, all the time” culture:

The journalist John Tierney has described the Crisis Crisis, “the incessant state of alarm fomented by journalists and politicians”. What we’re experiencing now is the Crisis Crisis crisis, the emerging crisis caused by the Crisis Crisis. Over and over again, interventions in some invented or overhyped form of the crisis, undertaken in the hysterical spirit of the Crisis Crisis, cause a form of the Crisis Crisis crisis, which eventually results in a course correction that may or may not be fully apparent for a while. Skip right over the next paragraph if you don’t need to see examples again.

The Sri Lankan government intervenes in climate change by instantly ending the use of commercial fertilizers in agriculture, which causes a dangerous decline in the production of food. The German government intervenes in climate change by declaring a commitment to 100% clean energy, which causes dangerous instability in the availability of actual energy (“committing national suicide“), with some help from the Nord Stream shut-off valve, which nobody ever could have seen coming. The Dutch government intervenes in climate change by declaring an intention to limit agricultural production, which doesn’t cause anything yet, because Dutch farmers won’t stand for it, but final outcome TBD.

All over the world, things that work stop working because of excessive and unwarranted interventions led by people who cry crisis and throw sand in functioning gears. Dutch agriculture was just fine; then the government decided to help end the crisis. The interventions — the interveners, the people who get in the way — are harming us, when their harm could be prevented by literal nothing, by the simple choice to not perform the interventions. What we need is for the interveners to go play Risk in their basement or something, and forget their important duty to help.

The entertainment industry has had its own intervention, famously described on Substack, in woke-facing talent purges and narrative shifts and insulting “It’s Ghostbusters … but with WOMEN!” reboots. And now some hint about the endgame of the one big cycle of fraud comes from woke Hollywood — which has pounded audiences with The Message for years, resulting in a catastrophic loss of audience. The result is starting to look like this:

The social justice intervention in Hollywood storytelling is harming Hollywood; the intervention in that industry is causing the decline of the industry. At some point, people stop eating shit.

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