Quotulatiousness

November 27, 2022

“The uncomfortable truth is that autocrats and architects share complimentary motivations”

Filed under: Architecture, Middle East — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In UnHerd, Wessie du Toit sets the Saudi Arabian “Neom” development in its true and unsavoury proper context:

There may be no philosopher kings, but there are sci-fi princes. The dreams of Mohammed bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia and chairman of the Neom board, make the techno-futurism of Silicon Valley look down to earth. Bin Salman is especially fond of the cyber-punk genre of science fiction, which involves gritty hi-tech dystopias. He has enlisted a number of prominent Hollywood visual specialists for the Neom project, including Olivier Pron of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy franchise. A team of consultants was asked to develop science-fiction aesthetics for a tourist resort, resulting in “37 options, arranged alphabetically from ‘Alien Invasion’ to ‘Utopia'”. One proposal for a luxury seaside destination, which featured a glowing beach of crushed marble, was deemed insufficiently imaginative.

Such spectacular indulgence must be causing envy among the high-flying architects and creative consultants not yet invited to join the project — if there are any left. But it also makes the moral dimension difficult to ignore: how should we judge those jumping on board bin Salman’s gravy train? Saudi Arabia — in case anyone has forgotten in the years since the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered at its consulate in Istanbul — is a brutal authoritarian state.

In recent weeks, this has prompted some soul-searching in the architecture community, with several stinging rebukes aimed at Neom. Writing in Dezeen, the urbanist Adam Greenfield asks firms such as Morphosis, the California-based architects designing The Line, to consider “whether the satisfaction of working on this project, and the compensation that attends the work, will ever compensate you for your participation in an ecological and moral atrocity”. Ouch. Greenfield’s intervention came a week after Rowan Moore asked in The Observer: “When will whatever gain that might arise from the creation of extraordinary buildings cease to outweigh the atrocities that go with them?”

[…]

The uncomfortable truth is that autocrats and architects share complimentary motivations. The former use architecture to glorify their regimes, both domestically and internationally, whereas the latter are attracted to the creative freedom that only unconstrained state power can provide. In democratic societies, there is always tension between the grand visions of architects and the numerous interest groups that have a say in the final result. Why compromise with planning restrictions and irate neighbours when there is a dictator who, as Greenfield puts it, “offers you a fat purse for sharing the contents of your beautiful mind with the world?”

This is not just speculation. As Koolhaas himself stated: “What attracts me about China is that there is still a state. There is something that can take initiative on a scale and of a nature that almost nobody that we know of today could even afford or contemplate.”

But really this relationship between architect and state is a triangle, with financial interests making up the third pole. Despite the oft-repeated line that business loves the stability offered by the rule of law, when it comes to building things, the money-men are as fond of the autocrat’s empty canvas as the architects are. When he first pitched the Neom project to investors in 2017, bin Salman told them: “Imagine if you are the governor of New York without having any public demands. How much would you be able to create for the companies and the private sector?”

This points us to the deeper significance of the Gulf States and China as centres of high-profile architecture. These were crucial regions for post-Nineties global capitalism: the good illiberal states. Celebrity architects brought to these places the same spectacular style of building that was appearing in Europe and North America; each landmark “iconic” and distinct but, in their shared scale and audacity, also placeless and generic. Such buildings essentially provided a seal of legitimacy for the economic and financial networks of globalisation. Can this regime’s values really be so different to ours, an investor might say, when they have a museum by Jean Nouvel, or an arts centre by Norman Foster? British architects build football stadiums and skyscrapers in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, while those governments own football stadiums and skyscrapers in Britain, such as The Shard and Newcastle’s St James’s Park.

The Costliest Day in US Marine History – WW2 – 222 – November 26, 1943

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

World War Two
Published 26 Nov 2022

The Americans attack the Gilbert Islands this week, and though they successfully take Tarawa and Makin Atolls, it is VERY costly in lives, and show that the Japanese are not going to be defeated easily. They also have a naval battle in the Solomons. Fighting continues in the Soviet Union and Italy, and an Allied conference takes place in Cairo, a prelude for a major one in Teheran next week.
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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

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

In Quillette, Robin Ashenden discusses the life experiences of Aleksandr Slozhenitsyn that informed the novel that made him famous:

The book was published less than 10 years after the death of Joseph Stalin, the dictator who had frozen his country in fear for nearly three decades and subjected his people to widespread deportation, imprisonment, and death. His successor Nikita Khrushchev — a man who, by his own admission, came to the job “elbow deep in blood” — had set out on a redemptive mission to liberalise the country. The Gulags had been opened and a swathe of prisoners freed; Khrushchev had denounced his predecessor publicly as a tyrant and a criminal and, at the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961, a full programme of de-Stalinisation had been announced. As for the Arts, previously neutered by the Kremlin’s policy of “Socialist Realism” — in which the values of Communism had to be resoundingly affirmed — they too were changing. Now, a new openness and a new realism was called for by Khrushchev’s supporters: books must tell the truth, even the uncomfortable truth about Communist reality … up to a point. That this point advanced or retreated as Khrushchev’s power ebbed and flowed was something no writer or publisher could afford to miss.

Solzhenitsyn’s book told the story of a single day in the 10-year prison-camp sentence of a Gulag inmate (or zek) named Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. Following decades of silence about Stalin’s prison-camp system and the innocent citizens languishing within it, the book’s appearance seemed to make the ground shake and fissure beneath people’s feet. “My face was smothered in tears,” one woman wrote to the author after she read it. “I didn’t wipe them away or feel ashamed because all this, packed into a small number of pages … was mine, intimately mine, mine for every day of the fifteen years I spent in the camps.” Another compared his book to an “atomic bomb”. For such a slender volume — about 180 pages — the seismic wave it created was a freak event.

As was the story of its publication. By the time it came out, there was virtually no trauma its author — a 44-year-old married maths teacher working in the provincial city of Ryazan — had not survived. After a youth spent in Rostov during the High Terror of Stalin’s 1930s, Solzhenitsyn had gone on to serve eagerly in the Red Army at the East Prussian front, before disaster struck in 1945. Arrested for some ill-considered words about Stalin in a letter to a friend, he was handed an eight-year Gulag sentence. In 1953, he was sent into Central Asian exile, only to be diagnosed with cancer and given three weeks to live. After a miraculous recovery, he vowed to dedicate this “second life” to a higher purpose. His writing, honed in the camps, now took on the ruthless character of a holy mission. In this, he was fortified by the Russian Orthodox faith he’d rediscovered during his sentence, and which had replaced his once-beloved, now abandoned Marxism.

Solzhenitsyn had, since his youth, wanted to make his mark as a Russian writer. In the Gulag, he’d written cantos of poetry in his head, memorized with the help of matchsticks and rosary beads to hide it from the authorities. During his Uzbekistan exile, he’d follow a full day’s work with hours of secret nocturnal writing about the darker realities of Soviet life, burying his tightly rolled manuscripts in a champagne bottle in the garden. Later, reunited with the wife he’d married before the war, he warned her to expect no more than an hour of his company a day — “I must not swerve from my purpose.” No friendships — especially close ones — were allowed to develop with his fellow Ryazan teachers, lest they take up valuable writing time, discover his perilous obsession, or blow his cover. Subterfuge became second nature: “The pig that keeps its head down grubs up the tastiest root.” Yet throughout it all, he was sceptical that his work would ever be available to the general public: “Publication in my lifetime I must put out of my mind.”

After the 22nd Party Congress, however, Solzhenitsyn recognised that the circumstances were at last propitious, if all too fleeting. “I read and reread those speeches,” he wrote later, “and the walls of my secret world swayed like curtains in the theatre … had it arrived, then, the long-awaited moment of terrible joy, the moment when my head must break water?” It seemed that it had. He got out one of his eccentric-looking manuscripts — double-sided, typed without margins, and showing all the signs of its concealment — and sent it to the literary journal of his choice. That publication was the widely read, epoch-making Novy Mir (“New World”), a magazine whose progressive staff hoped to drag society away from Stalinism. They had kept up a steady backwards-forwards dance with the Khrushchev regime throughout the 1950s, invigorated by the thought that each new issue might be their last.

The Biggest Lie of WWII? The Myth of the Norden Bombsight

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Flight Dojo
Published 16 Jun 2022

I think most of us, at some point, have had someone say to us “You know, we went to the moon with less computing power than your iPhone” or something to that effect. What you may not know, though, is that less than a century ago, a 2000-piece mechanical computer that lacked a single transistor or chip was the most closely guarded military secret of the Allied war effort. Or, at least, the second most.

Before being overshadowed by the Manhattan Project, the U.S. Navy spent billions helping Carl Norden develop a mechanical computer with one job and one job only: to determine the point at which a level-flying bomber would need to drop its bombs to achieve “pinpoint accuracy” on an intended target.

When it was completed, Mr. Norden famously claimed that the sight was so accurate that it was capable of putting a bomb inside a pickle barrel. And if it could, then war would be revolutionized, or so the powers-at-be thought. The idea was simple: fly your bombers above the enemy’s air defenses, above the reach of their flak batteries, faster than their fighters could fly, and drop your bombs, with pinpoint accuracy, on crucial industrial sites, robbing the enemy of their ability to manufacture the equipment they need to wage a war in the first place.

The only problem was that everything about the Norden Bombsight turned out to be a myth. Not just the obviously mythical bits, like the fact that the crosshairs in the site itself were actually webs from a Black Widow, or that, instead, the reticle was made from the strands of hair of a young Midwestern girl, but everything, the accuracy, the secrecy, and even the fact that it was the only bombsight used in the war.

So how can this be? Until two weeks ago, I believed that the Norden Bombsight was an ingenious piece of equipment that more than any other singular device, changed the tides of WWII in favor of the allies. So why do we still believe in the Norden Bombsight?

Because, as it turns out, myths are useful, not just to the Army Air Corps, the Carl Norden Company, and Hollywood, but to us, the public. As it turns out, they can help us swallow hard truths about the war we’d prefer to avoid.
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QotD: Gambling is not a “public health” issue

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government, Health, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

By any conventional definition, gambling is not a public-health issue. It is not an infectious disease. It is not an environmental hazard. And its association with poor health is tenuous and indirect. Losing a lot of money might be bad for your health in some way. But if that is the argument, you might as well redefine compulsive shopping or stock trading as public-health issues, too.

Nevertheless, the public-health lobby is keen to take over this area of policy and PHE ended its days with the following conclusion: “The evidence suggests that harmful gambling should be considered a public-health issue because it is associated with harms to individuals, their families, close associates and wider society.”

By this definition, anything that can cause harm to individuals and / or other people is a public-health issue. This would make every health problem and most social problems public-health issues. It spreads the net across such a vast expanse of human behaviour that it renders the term “public health” totally meaningless. Still, this is very much in keeping with the mission creep of a sector that claims everything from poverty and war to housing and climate change can be public-health issues.

It can be argued that almost everything has an effect on health, but what is the point of making everything a public-health issue? What expertise do people with a masters in public health have that makes them better at solving complex social and economic problems than anyone else? And as we saw during the pandemic, when the public-health lobby spreads itself too thinly, it becomes incapable of doing its day job. The World Health Organisation and Public Health England, for instance, were both far more interested in pushing for nanny-state interventions than in preparing for pandemics.

But if we see the modern public-health movement for what it really is – a paternalistic, bourgeois crusade for moral reform – it becomes obvious why gambling is in the crosshairs. A classic target of puritans, gambling will fit in well alongside the other supposed public-health “epidemics” of our age: gluttony, sloth, smoking and the demon drink. It wouldn’t surprise me if usury and lust were its next targets.

Christopher Snowdon, “No, gambling is not a “public health” issue”, Spiked, 2022-08-25.

November 26, 2022

Indigo vastly prefers selling pillows, candles, and tchotchkes of all kinds rather than – ugh! – books

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte explains why it’s becoming harder and harder to find actual books in Canada’s biggest bookstore chain … because they no longer want to be a bookstore chain:

“Indigo Books and Music” by Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine is licensed under CC0 1.0

We need to talk about Indigo. As you know, it’s Canada’s biggest bookstore chain, with 88 superstores and 85 small-format stores. It sells well over half the books that are bought in stores in Canada, with Walmart, Costco, and independent bookstores accounting for most of the rest.

One problem with Indigo is that it’s failing. The other problem is that it’s abandoning bookselling. Yes, that sounds like a Woody Allen joke, but it’s not funny from a publishing perspective. We depend on Indigo.

The company’s finances have been ugly for some time. It lost $37 million in 2019, $185 million in 2020, and $57 million in 2021. Things looked somewhat better in 2022 with a $3 million profit, but the first two quarters of 2023 are now in the books (it has a March 28 year end) and Indigo has already dropped $41.3 million.

[…]

Indigo hasn’t come right out and said we’re through with books. It can’t, given that Heather [Reisman] has spent the last twenty-five years building herself up as the queen of reading in Canada. Also, the Indigo brand is still associated with books in most people’s minds and that won’t change overnight no matter how many cheeseboards it stocks. So Heather talks about a gradual, natural transition: “We built a wonderful connection with our customers in the book business. Then, organically, certain products became less relevant and others were opportunities.”

To be clear, books are irrelevant; general merchandise is the opportunity. Heather recently appointed as CEO a guy named Peter Ruis who has no experience in books. He comes from fashion retail, most recently the Anthropologie chain, which sells clothing, shoes, accessories, home furnishings, furniture, and beauty products. Anthropologie was hot in 2008, and it seems to be where Indigo wants to go today.

Fair enough. You own a company, you can take it in any direction you want, so long as your shareholders will follow. I don’t blame Heather for having second thoughts about the book business. (I have them every week. It’s a tough business.) But where does that leave readers, writers, agents, publishers, and everyone else who remains committed to books?

You’ll recall that Indigo and Chapters, between them, decimated the independent bookselling sector in Canada in the nineties. They are the principal reason Canada has so few independent bookstores today. You could probably fit the combined stock of all our independents into a handful of Heather’s stores.

The federal government let Heather’s Indigo buy Larry Stevenson’s Chapters in 2001, which gave her a ridiculously large share of the market. That shouldn’t have happened.

At the same time, with the help of some lobbying by Heather, the federal government made it clear that the US chains, Borders and Barnes & Noble, weren’t welcome up here. The argument was that bookselling was a crucial part of our cultural sector and needed to be protected from foreign domination by the Canadian government.

In that spirit, Indigo also asked the federal government to prevent Amazon from opening warehouses in Canada. That request was denied in 2010, which is about when Indigo began its transition out of books.

One can see how Heather might feel betrayed by the federal government. Instead of protecting bookselling, it swung the door wide open for Amazon. You said I wouldn’t have to compete!

Why so Deadly? – Battle of Okinawa 1945

Filed under: History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Real Time History
Published 25 Nov 2022

The American invasion of Okinawa was the last big island operation on the Pacific Front. It took the US Marines and Army troops several months to defeat the last Japanese resistance on the island in one of the costliest American victories of the 2nd World War — but in the end not even Japanese Kamikaze attacks and using the civilian population could avert the outcome.
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Britain’s experiment with mass immigration since 2014

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West considers the legacy media’s quick dismissal of conservative concerns about rising immigration from poorer European countries in 2014 with the reality only eight years later:

“Xenophobia” by malias is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

It was a sort of mini-publicity stunt by Vaz, but all for a good cause: a response to fear mongering by the Right-wing press who warned that we’d be “flooded” by Romanians, and predictions by MigrationWatch that’d we have 50,000 new arrivals a year from the A2 countries (as Romania and Bulgaria were called).

Twitter that day was full of journalists and other public intellectuals laughing about how we were going to be “swamped”. Why would Romanians, after all, want to come here, to this miserable rainy island?

“We’ve seen no evidence of people who have rushed out and bought tickets in order to arrive because it’s the 1st of January,” Vaz concluded.

Various publications, with the ill-founded confidence so often found in the journalist trade, soon declared that the Romanian influx was a conservative fantasy.

“Eastern European invasion comes to nothing”, the Independent declared on the day, just a tad prematurely you might say.

A Guardian commentator suggested the year before that the number of Romanians and Bulgarians arriving might actually fall following accession, and that “all the ‘invasion’ predictions … have more in common with astrology than demography.”
[…]

As it turned out, in the year to September 2015, 206,000 Romanians and Bulgarians took out a National Insurance number, meaning they were registering to work here. By late 2017, there were 413,000 Romanian and Bulgarians living in Britain, suggesting 90,000 had arrived each year since January 2014, while just 6,200 Britons had made the opposite journey.

By mid-2018, there were more than 400,000 Romanians in Britain, making them one of the largest national minorities in England. The real figure is hard to tell, because the British state has lost the capacity or will to count the number of foreign residents, and it may be higher.

[…]

The scale of immigration in the 2000s and 2010s led to the rise of Ukip, the referendum and the political chaos that followed; what follows now we can’t yet say, but no one has seemed to have learned the lesson: that in the 21s century, because of easier travel, smartphones, smuggling networks and establishment communities in the West, the sheer scale of potential migration is astronomical. Yet people often have a very 20th or even 19th century understanding of how much people are able and willing to move, which makes them vastly underestimate the potential numbers arriving.

The Turkish Cypriots of north London are a case in point, the example Paul Collier used in Exodus to show the huge extent of potential migration between countries with different levels of wealth. 

Because of colonial links, North Cyprus had free movement with Britain and so provided a test case: as a result, there are now more Turkish Cypriots in Britain than in Cyprus. In fact, not only did the majority of Turkish Cypriots move, but back in their homeland they become outnumbered by arrivals from a third, even poorer country, mainland Turkey, who are permitted to settle there.

In a theoretical world of open borders, Britons would be outnumbered very quickly; infrastructure would start to buckle under the strain, and governments would find it difficult to increase the necessary number of houses, schools, hospitals and other services for this expanded population, because society would now lack the social capital and cohesion to make the personal sacrifices. People would begin to lose faith in the police, a difficult role in such a transient and diverse society, and politics would become increasingly unstable and aligned along ethnic lines.

The Volcanic: Smith & Wesson’s First Pistol

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 18 Aug 2017

The deep beginnings of the Volcanic go back to Walter Hunt’s Volitional Repeater, which became the Jennings repeating rifle, which then became the Smith-Jennings repeating rifle when Horace Smith was brought in to improve it. Smith was able to make it more commercially viable than the Jennings had been, but he recognized that the system needed significant changes to really become successful. He had met a fellow gun designer who had similar ideas, by the name of Daniel Wesson, and the two would spend a couple years developing and refining the system. In 1854 they thought it was ready for production, and formed the Smith & Wesson Company.

Included in the original company was a man named Courtland Palmer, who owned the patent rights to the Jennings system. Smith & Wesson’s system would probably have been deemed an infringement of Palmer’s patents, and by bringing him into the company they avoided legal trouble. The fact that he was a relatively wealthy financier of the new company certainly didn’t hurt!

The pistol that S&W started producing was a manually repeating one with a tubular magazine under the barrel holding either 6 or 10 rounds. It was available in the .41 caliber Navy model (note: not actually adopted by the Navy) and the .31 caliber pocket version. In this first iteration, both used iron frames, which were all engraved lightly. The prices were pretty steep, and the guns suffered from some reliability problems and a fundamental problem of underpowered ammunition (the .41 caliber had a muzzle velocity of just 260 fps / 79 m/s). However, they did offer a much greater level of rapid repeating firepower than the muzzle loading revolvers of the period, and gained some loyal fans. In total, just 1700 of the guns were produced before the company went bankrupt, about a year after forming.

To recover from that setback, they reformed the company into the new Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, and sold stock in the new company to generate a new supply of capital. This allowed them to get back into production, and the Volcanic company would make another 3000 pistols, all .41 caliber Navy types, before also running out of money 19 months later in 1856.

At this point, Smith and Wesson decide to move in another direction, and one of the main creditors of the Volcanic company was able to acquire all of its assets and put the guns into production a third time. The name of this creditor? None other than Oliver Winchester. Winchester puts a new infusion of his own money into the company under the name New Haven Arms Company. This company produces another 3300 guns, both large and small frame by 1861. The New Haven company comes very near to bankruptcy itself before finally changing the design to create the Henry repeating rifle. The Henry’s rimfire ammunition finally solved the reliability and power problems of the Volcanic, and became the starting point for Winchester to become one of the predominant American arms making companies.
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QotD: The search for “authenticity”

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The search for authenticity is not only futile but actively harmful, both psychologically and socially, for in general, authenticity is thought to require behavior without the restraints of normal civilized conduct, amongst which are the capacity and willingness on occasion to be hypocritical and insincere. Of course, the precise amount of hypocrisy and insincerity that one should indulge in is always a matter of judgment, but authenticity is brutish if it means saying and doing whatever one wants whenever one wants it.

Shakespeare knew that authenticity, in this sense, is for most people impossible and in all cases undesirable. The first few lines of Sonnet 138 should be enough to prove it:

    When my love swears that she is made of truth,
    I do believe her, though I know she lies,
    That she may think me some untutored youth,
    Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
    Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
    Although she knows my days are past the best,
    Simply I credit her false speaking tongue:
    On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.

Should Shakespeare abandon his love because he knows she is inauthentic in what she says? Of course not:

    Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust …

Away, then, with your self-esteem, your true self and your authenticity, and all the bogus desiderata of modern psychology.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Lose Yourself”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-11-10.

November 25, 2022

“… no Canadian should trust any government enough to settle for a ‘trust me’ on matters this serious”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Gurney at TVO Today on the likely outcome of the Public Order Emergency Commission’s deliberations after testimony ends on Friday with whatever Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is planning to say:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

We can’t simply outsource decision-making to federal agencies, particularly intelligence services! The federal cabinet has the right to disagree with CSIS’s conclusions, especially as it may consider a broader range of information. That’s why we elect leaders. That’s democracy.

But a democracy is supposed to empower the people. We are citizens, not subjects. And there is something very worrisome in Vigneault’s comments. He noted that he had information that informed his decisions — information that cannot be publicly disclosed. This apparently includes legal opinions that the federal government has not disclosed (citing attorney-client privilege) and also, reportedly, classified information.

Attorney-client privilege is important. So is secrecy on matters of national security. Both of these things are essential for a society to function. But, in this case, they are corrosive to democracy and public faith in the federal government.

The Trudeau government’s case for invoking the Emergencies Act isn’t a slam dunk. It’s not bulletproof. I’ve been swayed by some of its arguments and some of the testimony and documents that have been produced. But it hasn’t sealed the deal. And if its final argument hinges on legal advice and classified information, that’s … awful. That’s just a terrible situation. That would amount, in effect, to Trudeau saying, “We can’t tell you why we did this incredibly rare and controversial thing, but trust us.”

No.

That’s it. Just no.

I don’t trust this government. That’s partially, I grant, a criticism of this particular government, which I am not a fan of. It is often high-handed, arrogant, and incompetent, and I do not trust it won’t try to duck criticism by hiding dirty laundry behind privilege and secrecy. Its conduct over the past seven years in office simply has not earned it any benefit of the doubt.

But there’s a deeper truth here: no Canadian should trust any government enough to settle for a “trust me” on matters this serious. That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work. Bluntly, if that’s how your democracy is working, it isn’t working or a democracy.

The Secret Radio in Auschwitz – War Against Humanity 088

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 24 Nov 2022

In Auschwitz the inmates gathering evidence of Nazi crimes score two successes, while the RAF score a direct hit on Goebbels as they set Berlin aflame. In the Pacific the accidental sinking of the SS Suez Maru triggers a Japanese war crime.
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Our old, comfortable geopolitical certainties are becoming less comfortable and less certain

Filed under: China, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney discusses a few of the things he heard at the recent Halifax International Security Forum:

First, though, I wanted to explore that grim feeling that swept over me as Forum president Peter Van Praagh stepped up to the lectern and opened the formal proceedings with a review of the geopolitical situation, and how we got here. 

From his prepared remarks (slightly trimmed):

    Last year … we marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11. It was not an auspicious anniversary. Just months earlier, the United States and its allies withdrew their troops from Afghanistan and discarded the hopes and dreams of so many Afghans … [it] was a low point for Afghanistan and indeed, for all of us. … It was the culmination of 20 years of good intentions. And bad results:

    The decisions made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, North Korea going nuclear, Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the Great Recession, Iran, the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war, the surge of refugees — more than at any time in human history, the successful rise of populist politics, the higher than necessary death toll from coronavirus, Hong Kong losing its freedoms, January 6 and its wake, climate-change disasters, and our withdrawal from Afghanistan …

    It was a tragic end to a 20-year tragic era.

That’s a pretty depressing list. Right?

As a student of history, I always strive to avoid too much recency bias. Most of the things you hear described as “unprecedented” aren’t anything remotely close to that. The general public has a memory of a few years — maybe a generation. We definitely do face some novel challenges today, but we are still better off than most generations in human history, and it’s not even close. 

Still. Van Praagh offered a bleak if concise catalogue of tragedy and struggle. And there are some notable absences. The Iraq War, for instance, is probably worth noting as a specific event, not just part of the Sept. 11th fallout. Perhaps the Libyan intervention as well. Some of China’s more aggressive actions, especially at home, also come to mind.

But as I mulled over that terse version of early-21st-century history, something else jumped out at me: most of those threats were things that happened far away and to other people.

I mentioned recency bias above, so it’s only fair to note a different bias: “far away” and “other people” depends on the vantage point, doesn’t it? Every event listed above was a direct and local tragedy for the people caught in the middle of it, who don’t have the luxury of viewing these events at a comfortable remove, the way the West generally has.

The pandemic, of course, did not spare the West. Nor did the Great Recession, the toll of a changing climate and the populist upheavals roiling the democracies. Those are local problems for us all.

The military challenges, though, are getting more and more local, aren’t they? North Korea seemed far away once; today it’s using the Pacific Ocean’s vital sealanes for target practice and providing some of the munitions being used against civilians in Europe. Libya, Syria and the other migration crises posed real societal and political challenges for Europe, but nothing like what the continent has been bracing for in the event of either crippling energy shortages or an outright escalation into a military conflict, potentially nuclear conflict, with Russia. China’s growing ambitions and willingness to use force pose direct challenges to the West and its prosperity; American financier Ken Griffin recently made the headlines when he observed that if Chinese military action were to cut off or disrupt American access to Taiwanese semiconductor chips, the immediate impact on the U.S. economy would be between five and 10 per cent of GDP. That would be a Great Depression-sized bodyblow, and it could happen almost instantly and without much warning.

Pondering Van Praagh’s list later on, it occurred to me that the more remote threats to core Western security and economic interests were also more remote in time. The closer Van Praagh’s summation of crises came to the present, the more immediate and near to us they became. 

Canada’s all-purpose VTOL transport that could have changed everything; the Canadair CL-84 Dynavert

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Polyus Studios
Published 14 Jul 2018

The program that developed the CL-84 lasted for almost 20 years and produced one of the most successful VTOL aircraft ever, as far as performance. Canadair produced four Dynavert’s over those 20 years and two of them crashed. In fact one crashed twice. The story of the great CL-84 is one of perseverance and missed potential.
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QotD: Cults, conspiracy theories, progressives, and “the death wish”

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The more refined the man — crusty old badthinkers like E.B. Tylor and Lucien Levy-Bruhl would say “civilized”, and of course you shouldn’t look those names up, much less read their works, they are very very bad — the greater his sense of time … and the greater his death wish. In fact, at some point in the “civilization” process, Whitey gets so “over-civilized” that he reverts to what is effectively bicamerality (if Jaynes does it for you) or to the primitive sense of the endless now …

… but alas, he does NOT lose his neuroses, his death wish. That becomes all-consuming.

When the very smart boys in the sociology departments first started studying cults, they assumed — being very smart boys — that cult members would all be dumb, mal-educated yokels. After all, those are the only kind who believe in Magic Sky Fairies, no? But because the urge to suppress or falsify research findings that don’t fit their pre-chosen Narrative hadn’t entirely permeated the academy yet, they actually published their “counterintuitive” findings — the average cult member is smarter, and much better educated, than the hoi polloi.

Which should’ve been obvious by the fact that cults as a general rule don’t bother trying to recruit in slums, or out in the sticks, but DO focus almost their entire recruiting effort near college campuses. They could’ve skipped the fieldwork entirely, and just looked around at the very obvious cult of “Leftism” that they and all their colleagues were already in, but self-awareness has never been a thing on the Left, and that goes triple for the egghead set.

The other thing that becomes immediately obvious in the academic study of cults is that the phrase “suicide cult” is redundant. They’re all suicide cults. Lots of them do us the great favor of admitting it, one way or the other, but THE cult belief is in the imminent immanentizing of the eschaton. The world’s gonna end, and they’re going to be the Big Guy’s right-hand persyns in the new dispensation. The Big Guy could be God, Jesus, the saucer people, Cthulhu, Satan, the Proletariat, whatever — they have a bewildering variety of mythologies, but the underlying belief is exactly the same, every time, and there’s only that ONE belief:

    The world is gonna end in their lifetimes, and they themselves are helping to make it happen sooner.

Thus to pscircle back to [the] question: “has there been a historical situation where there is a generalised cult mentality which is attached and detached to a serial cult sequence (coof, ukraine, trump, etc).”

The way I’m interpreting this (please correct me if I’m wrong) is that the Juggalo Cult, unlike all the other known cults throughout history, seems to be able to change its mythology on a dime. We’re all familiar with Festinger, yeah? If not, go read When Prophecy Fails at the nearest opportunity — it’s short, and surprisingly readable for academic sociology. The UFO cult Festinger studied predicted the end of the world. When it didn’t happen, lots of members left the cult … but lots didn’t, and in fact they doubled down — it was only their constant vigilance, they said, that kept the saucer people from destroying the earth as originally planned.

(This is where the phrase “cognitive dissonance” comes from, by the way. Festinger coined it).

Note that the UFO cultists didn’t suddenly flip mythologies as a way to deal with their cogdis — oh, we were wrong, it wasn’t the saucer people, it was the Illuminati. And that seems to apply to any “disconfirmation” of any cult belief. Everything that happens, or doesn’t happen, gets folded in. In the same way, there’s only ever one Devil. See e.g. every conspiracy theory on the Internet, ever. When ___ happens, the guys who think the Freemasons control the world blame the Freemasons, the guys who think it’s the saucer people blame it on the saucer people, etc., same as it ever was.

But if the Freemasons step up and take credit for it, the guys who think it’s the saucer people don’t shrug and say ooops. Rather, they build it in — ok, ok, yeah, technically it was the Freemasons, but we all know who really controls the Freemasons! (It’s the saucer people and the RAND Corporation, in conjunction with the reverse vampires. We’re through the looking glass here, people).

In a sense, of course, the Juggalo Cult does do that — Whitey is always the Devil (do a find-and-replace, swapping in “White supremacy” for “capitalism”, and you could republish the entire Collected Works of V.I. Lenin, verbatim, as your dissertation and no one would be the wiser). But the Juggalos also seem to be unique in that the Apocalypse changes on a dime, too. Festinger’s cult all agreed that the saucer people were still going to destroy the world; they just hadn’t gotten around to it yet, because reasons.

The Juggalo Cult, by contrast, lurches from apocalypse to apocalypse. Global Cooling! Global Warming! Global Climate Change! Reagan! Boooosh! Drumpf! Covid! Ukraine! The Supreme Court! THE CURRENT THING!!!!

This, I think, is the reversion to bicamerality — the “digital clock effect” […] The Juggalo Cultists are still oppressed by their two-millennia-old sense of the passage of linear time — it’s baked into their DNA at this point — but they’ve been acculturated to the Endless Now of social media. There is no past on Twitter, nor any future — there’s just retweets and upvotes and replies, and what’s at the top of the news feed is all that is or could ever be, world without end amen.

They’re trapped in an endless loop — everything they do immanentizes the eschaton, because immanentizing the eschaton is simply a matter of tweeting it. And yet, the eschaton never comes. The tweet is merely replaced by another tweet, which is the only thing in the universe. It’s like what some old “paranormal researchers” said ghosts are — little loops of “film”, endlessly replaying the same thing forever. Time passes — the haunted house is bought and sold, remodeled, added to, stripped to the bricks and rebuilt, bought and sold again — but the ghost is still there, endlessly replaying the same scene, because it’s just static, just energy discharge from some kind of psychic dry-cell battery.

The difference being, of course, that these ghosts can actually pull the nuclear trigger … and they won’t even know they’re doing it, in the same way that the ghosts don’t realize they’re scaring the “occupants” of the “haunted house”, because there ARE no occupants, no house. It’s just the flickering, endlessly repeating NOW.

Severian, “The Ghosts”, Founding Questions, 2022-05-17.

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