Alas, as my fictional namesake said somewhere, time has a habit of turning all our lies into truths. It turns out Karl Marx was right after all. Who, I ask you, is more cartoonishly evil, more like the caricature capitalist of paranoid Communist fantasies, than Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? Tim Cook? Jack Dorsey? Sundar Pichai?
We’re actually living, comrades, in the class-warfare world Marx preached in the 1840s. Everything Marx said about the factory owners of the First Industrial Revolution, that seemed so luridly absurd that even other Socialists criticized him for it, is true of the tech fascists of the Biden-Harris Revolution. Solzhenitsyn cites Russian writers from the late nineteenth century noting that Marxian socialism would end up as nothing more than dialectically-constructed feudalism, and lo, here we are. America in 2021 looks almost exactly like the USSR looked upon Lenin’s death …
… that was 1924, gang, and in case you’ve forgotten, what happened next was a vicious intra-Party civil war, in which Stalin crushed his enemies. AOC makes a pretty unlikely Trotsky, but it’s no less ludicrous than the thought of Nancy Pelosi as Koba … but that’s just the thing, isn’t it? We’ve been noting here for years that the modern Left is dedicated to being the Hollow Men in all things. They’re Revolutionaries without a Revolution — they go on and on (and on and on and on) about fighting the power and sticking it to the Man, even though they, themselves, have been the Man since at least 1974. They’re moralizers without morality — you’ll be scolded for not being as perverse as humanly possible. And, of course, their politics is a cult of personality without the personality — not even Orwell or Kafka could’ve come up with the Party installing an obvious dementia patient as its figurehead, not even if you’d dropped LSD in their tea.
As always — and yes, even in the depths of Stalin’s terror — the real rulers are the nomenklatura, the apparatchiki. Not even Koba the Dread can be everywhere. Being Hollow Men, our Postmodern Leftist masters have decided to dispense with the whole Kremlin thing. Who needs the NKVD, the gulag, the dreaded Lubyanka? The Junior Volunteer Thought Police “fact checking” everything on social media will do it for free, and much more efficiently, at which point their fellow travelers in the banking system will simply cut the badthinkers off. The only reason the gulag persisted after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” was that the Soviets, those fools, wanted to exploit their natural resources themselves, to build things themselves; labor camps were thus integral to the Soviet economy. Our masters don’t care about that, and their masters, the Chinese, certainly don’t. Much more efficient, and psychologically effective, to let the unperson simply starve in the middle of the town square, pour encourager les autres.
But hey, at least we’ll have some fun figuring out who the new Trotsky is. Again, my money’s on AOC — she’s so stupid that she’s bound to do something irrecoverably dumb sooner or later, after which she gets the digital icepick. That’ll be a hoot. Enjoy what parts of the spectacle you can, comrades – if you’re a student of human folly, you’re going to love the next few decades, because Marx was right about that too, the bastard — second time as farce.
Severian, “Marx Was Right After All (on ongoing series”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-12.
September 5, 2023
September 4, 2023
The temptations of envy
Rob Henderson discusses the phenomenon of envy in the modern world:
A couple of sample items in the social comparison scale are “I often compare myself with others with respect to what I have accomplished in life” and “I often compare how I am doing socially (social skills, popularity) with other people.”
Social comparison, by definition, is relative. Here is a question often used in these kinds of scales.
Suppose you are presented with two options:
A. You get 2 weeks of vacation; your coworkers get 1 week
B. You get 4 weeks of vacation; your coworkers get 8 weeks
A sensible, rational, objective person should choose B. One week of vacation versus 4 weeks is a no-brainer. But a surprisingly high number of people will choose A over B.
Consider the reality of working in an environment in which you know everyone gets twice as much vacation time as you. It’s unfair. And as we’ve discussed before, our preoccupation with the idea of fairness is in part rooted in concerns about status.
So what are some of the traits associated with social comparison orientation?
Unsurprisingly, social comparison orientation is associated with the Dark Triad personality traits (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism), fear of failure, interest in exhibiting status, FoMo (Fear of Missing Out), utilitarian moral preferences, malicious envy, and benign envy. We’ll discuss the difference between these two forms of envy later.
The utilitarian finding is interesting. When you present trolley problems to people high on social comparison orientation, they are more likely to report that they would flip the switch to kill one person or push the fat man off the bridge in order to save five people. They seem to favor cold calculations for decision-making, which may be why they tend to score highly on psychopathy.
Narcissism is unsurprising. People who compare themselves with others are more likely to be preoccupied with their social image and want others to admire them and think highly of them.
This is of course related to fear of failure. Failure means that you come off looking comparatively worse than others. Social comparers are interested in status displays, that’s not a surprise given the link with narcissism.
In fact, some researchers have found that narcissistically-oriented people often report intense reactions to the perception of others’ envy. They experience a hidden sadistic satisfaction in causing a sense of inferiority and painful feelings in others.
Social comparers report greater levels of Fear of Missing Out, because if they are left out or excluded, this reflects poorly on them. Most people want to be a part of the excitement, but social comparers have an especially intense desire to be among those who are seen.
And this brings us to envy.
What is envy? Plainly, it is the emotional consequence of upward social comparison. Envy is an emotion that regulates the navigation of status hierarchies.
It is a painful emotion. People might say they will occasionally feel pride, or greed, or lust, but seldom do people confess to feelings of envy. To confess to envy is to acknowledge that you believe someone else has more status than you. Few people are eager to intentionally lower themselves in this way.
Envy is an unpleasant feeling, as many of your emotions are. But negative emotions are evolutionarily adaptive. Envy alerts you when you might be falling too low on the status ladder. It is a kind of status leveling mechanism.
Here’s how some psychologists have described it:
At its core, envy is born out of the perceived danger to lose respect and social influence in the eyes of others … envy’s function may be to foster the motivations to re-gain status or harm the superior position of others.
What does envy look like? Here’s a still from season 1 of the superb television series Mad Men.
Here, two advertising executives, Peter Campbell and Paul Kinsey, are reacting to their colleague Ken Cosgrove, who has just told them one of his stories was published in a prestigious magazine. Ken’s colleagues are smiling and congratulating him, but you can observe a bit of surprise, a bit of skepticism, and an attempt to show Ken that they are happy for him but also surprised that he had this talent for writing. It’s a way of being cordial while also communicating that Ken shouldn’t get too full of himself. This kind of contorted smile might be a uniquely American expression, because Americans are culturally conditioned to suppress envy and be happy for one another’s success. This is a good cultural practice, in my view.
There’s a term used in New Zealand and Australia called “Tall Poppy Syndrome”. The idea is that tall poppies, or people who rise too far up beyond others, get cut down because the smaller poppies are envious. Bids for status can incur envy in other people. If you try to achieve something, others might attack you or resent you or cut you down in some way. Some of you may be familiar with the crabs in the bucket metaphor, and this is similar to that idea of crabs at the bottom of the bucket pulling down the crabs higher in the bucket. People are often intuitively aware of this, which is why people conceal their desire for wealth or status or power.
Our own little Cyberpunk Dystopia
Kulak suggests we get comfortable with the tropes of Cyberpunk Dystopias, since we’re already living in one:
One need not spend long in radical or dissident Right discourse to encounter talk of Psy-ops and demoralization campaigns.
Some of this traces back to Yuri Besmenov’s work on subversion, some to speculation about “Operation Mockingbird” type media manipulation schemes, and some to simply obvious symbolic work being done for seeming for no reason except to horrify, offend, “blackpill”, and create a sense of helplessness amongst regime enemies.
One can point to the massive sentences for Jan 6th protestors, the recent charges of Trump (outside any norm or existing political theory or constitutional theory), or most ridiculous: Dystopia Porn news stories.
I recently heard a story repeated by a commentator of a news story of a trans-woman working with doctors to be amongst the first to receive a womb transplant which would allow a biological male to gestate a baby, this person was excited, completing the South Park plotline (seriously 2005 s09e01 “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina” look it up), stating that they were excited that they might be the first trans-woman to get an abortion.
Why would the medical establishment play along and at least pretend to enable this obviously malicious and self-destructive wish? Why would the media bother to report such a crazy person’s putrid desire?? This religious commentator could only describe it as “satanic”, and speculated that it was a psy-op meant to break decent people’s will …
Setting aside the question of intention, and whether it wasn’t “just” medical professionals salivating at a paying guinea pig, and the media looking for clicks that aligned with their propaganda …
Why would it demoralize!?
Abortions happen by the hundreds of thousands annually, and the nightmare of the trans-medical process is visited on thousands of souls more sympathetic than this South Parkian weirdo every year … outside of the immediate outrage, such a bizarre one-off intersection of the two is basically of no broader political import … indeed if one is of the social conservative set one has seen rather major political victories on both fronts, with the overturning of Roe vs. Wade and the end of adolescent gender treatment across wide sections of Europe.
And yet for this one-off story of someone saying they would like to do something evil and stupid … you got outrage and horror and many an invocation of “It’s so over”.
What are the point of Psy-ops? What is the goal of demoralization?
Well as a perfidious leaf I am uniquely positioned to tell you, indeed, indeed one might say my country only exists because of the greatest psy-op in human history …
No not anything to do with Trudeau sr. or the liberal government’s corruption and bribery to keep Quebec from leaving …
The founding Canadian Psy-op occurred in 1812 … carried out by the greatest psychological warfare operative in human history, and Canadian national hero:
General Sir Isaac Brock
According to former President Jefferson, the conquest of Canada was to be “just a matter of marching” … indeed it should have been, the woefully outnumbered British Regulars and under-trained Canadian Militia should have been in no position to hold Upper Canada (now Ontario) and by rights should have lost what is now English Canada to American expansion … The defence of Canada depended on keeping America’s superior numbers on the far side of the St Lawrence/Great Lakes waterway bound up and unable to deploy in force for such an invasion …
… a seemingly hopeless task since they already had a beachhead for such an invasion at Fort Detroit (site of the current, well former, major city).
So Brock went on the attack, marching on Detroit with vastly inferior numbers to even the garrison.
His 1300 men of three different nationalities (British, Canadian, and Native) attacked 2500 unified defenders across the massive Detroit River, in a prepared defensive position.
It should have been suicide … he didn’t lose a single man.
Brock dressed his militia in excess redcoat uniforms of British regulars to make it appear as if he had more professionally trained soldiers … then throughout his maneuvers created the illusion that he had vastly more men than his opponent, marching his men in circles to create the illusion from the walls of the fort that he had thousands more than reality.
He then wrote to his opposite general William Hull begging him to surrender, stating that he did not believe he could control his 3000 Indian allies (in reality just 600) and prevent scalping and war crimes once battle broke out.
Hull wrote back asking for three days to arrange the surrender, Brock gave him three hours.
Once surrendered, Hull’s men spat on him seeing the inferior force they had just turned their guns over to.
At a court martial General Hull was sentenced to be shot, however, President Madison commuted his sentence to mere dismissal from the service … beginning a 200+ year-long tradition of US military retreat and lack of accountability.
In 1945 Canadian forces would repeat this obscene tactic at the battle of Zwolle, when soldier Leo Major single-handedly tricked ~1500 German soldiers into believing they were surrounded by superior forces and retreating.
“… the ‘Teachers should tell parents’ people outnumber the ‘Teachers must not tell parents’ folks by something like four-to-one”
In the free-to-cheapskates segment of The Line‘s weekly round-up post, they discuss the suddenly “brave” Conservative provincial premiers jumping onto a hot culture war topic on the side of the vast majority of Canadians:
New Brunswick now has Policy 713, that requires teachers or school officials to notify parents and obtain consent if a child younger than 16 wishes to change his or her name or pronouns. Saskatchewan has announced a similar proposal; Ontario is considering one, too.
The Line looks upon these proposals with extreme skepticism. To be frank, we wish the provinces weren’t doing this. We think it’s strategically misguided: every moment a Conservative spends defending “parental rights” is a moment in which they are not talking about highly salient economic issues that affect far more people. Further, we don’t trust their motives. Either they’ve decided to pick this fight because they thought parental consent was going to be a winner for them, or they simply felt pushed into it by the more excitable elements of their respective bases. (We assign a probability assessment of absolute zero to the notion that the leaders might be doing this out of moral conviction.)
So yeah, it’s cynical and exploitive policy, but gosh, is it ever popular policy, too. Polling shows it’s like 80-per-cent approval popular.
Because of course it is.
Again, we stress that we don’t support the imposition of sweeping legislation. Absent evidence of abuse or mismanagement, we think parental notification of social transition should be handled on a case-by-case basis. In the midst of a moral panic on trans issues, we’d prefer to keep politicians as far away from this third rail as possible, with long pointy sticks and cages if necessary.
However, we also recognize that cynicism cuts both ways. We have also borne witness this week to some hysterical rhetoric from those who seem to seriously believe that schools should be forbidden from sharing this information, if the minor in question so chooses.
These people are in the minority, as we suggested above. The polling shows that the “Teachers should tell parents” people outnumber the “Teachers must not tell parents” folks by something like four-to-one. This is the kind of lopsided result you almost never see on contentious policy issues — the numbers are what we would expect if we asked Canadians “Is ice cream tasty?” or “Do you enjoy cuddling a puppy?” And of course this is so. Parents are, generally speaking, not going to have a whole lot of time for the suggestion that children will be better off if the state, at any level, adopts a policy of withholding information from them.
We don’t support what the conservative premiers are doing, because we think they’re doing it for cynical reasons, but we would absolutely oppose any policy that goes in the opposite direction. And the majority of the country — a massive supermajority — is onside with us on this one.
There are no easy answers here, because we do not dismiss the concerns raised by the minority. We absolutely agree and accept that there are going to be families and parents that may react badly, even dangerously, to their child changing their name or pronoun. But the answer isn’t to involve teachers and schools in a coverup; it’s to have policies in place that give any child that may fear for their safety all the help they need, including, if necessary, intervention. To this end, we would note that teachers are mandatory reporters — they must report a variety of issues (or concerns) because society has learned through tragedy and horror what happens when parents and other guardians are excluded from knowing details of their child’s life. If teachers have reasonable grounds to suspect abuse, mental health issues and more, they are legally required to inform authorities and families. Limiting their ability to inform parents would cut against this necessary and overdue progress. Further, we have already passed laws banning “conversion therapy.”
Your Line editors support the right of trans people to live lives of legal equality, safety and dignity, and we honestly believe that most Canadians would agree with us on that. We also note that the rising tide of trans activism has raised complicated concerns that exist at the edges of reasonable accommodation, and must necessarily raise thorny concerns about how we manage competing rights between disadvantaged people. Can minors consent to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones? Is it fair to allow trans women who enjoy the permanent physical advantages bestowed by male puberty into female athletics? When should trans men be permitted in women’s prisons and shelters, if ever? These questions demand a thoughtful and nuanced response. They don’t disappear the moment someone screams “trans women are women!” and threatens to kill that bigoted TERF J.K. Rowling. They aren’t resolved by hysterics and warnings of suicide.
By staking out maximalist positions on the most difficult topics, and granting no ground for concession and compromise, trans-rights activists have polarized their own cause. Shouting down critics worked for a while, but the pendulum is now rapidly swinging back to the plumb line. Labelling every concerned parent a transphobe is tired and played out. It’s failing as a strategy of persuasion. Which brings us to the current moment; the place of four-to-one support for cynical policies proposed by conservative premiers. Keep it up, and we suspect it’ll be nine-to-one in short order.
Backlashes are rarely measured, sane, or logical, and we fear this one is already teasing out some very dark and long-repressed demons, even among people who once counted themselves allies of LGBTQ people and causes. We are seeing this backlash in a rise in hate crimes, growing counter-protests, and in a decline in support for LGBTQ people generally. And, yes, we are seeing it in in heavy-handed and misguided legislation both here and in the U.S. We aren’t arguing that any of this is justifiable; rather, we are merely noting that it has long been inevitable and predictable. We were warned.
One of the only real questions we have is how self-styled progressive parties and leaders are going to navigate trans issues when the population is very much not on their side. We talk a lot about how the conservatives are beholden to the most vocal minorities within their parties; but we fear that the progressives suffer the same fundamental problem.
We’d like to think that the Liberals and the NDP will handle trans issues maturely, responsibly and well. But we know better. They’ll go all in, setting everyone up for a very nasty confrontation that we think they’ll lose, and badly. Brace yourselves, friends.
Ask Ian: Donating Gun Collections to Museums … or Not
Forgotten Weapons
Published 24 May 2023Lots of people put together significant gun collections over a lifetime, and want to see those collections preserved after they pass. This often manifests as looking for a museum that will keep a collection intact and display it — which is unfortunately a nearly impossible goal.
First, it is very rare to find a museum whose mission matches the collection focus of a specific private collection. Firearms cover a vast amount of history even firearms-specific museums are usually fairly narrow in scope.
Second, museums already have all their display space filled. Promising to display a new collection means taking down something they already deemed worthy of display — and promising not to take it down in turn if something more suitable comes along.
Third, even if a museum has space and shares the theme of a collection, they will almost certainly already have examples of many of the items in the collection. If a museum is not allowed to break up and sell off parts of a collection, it simply ensures that many of the items will remain perpetually locked away in a reserve archive.
I would propose that we really need to rethink the idea that museums have a duty to keep everything they acquire. We know that virtually all museums have much more in storage than on display, and forcing duplicate items or pieces unrelated to the museum’s focus to remain in museum property simply ensures that those pieces are kept away from the collecting community. It is the collecting community that does most of the research and publication on firearms history, and this practice undoubtedly hinders research and scholarship. That is not to say we should close museums; certainly not! Museums are extremely valuable for preserving artifacts and making them available to some degree to the public, but they are only one part of the historical community.
If you are a collector who really wants your collection to be displayed in full in a museum, you really only have one option: bequeath the museum enough money to build and maintain a new wing specifically for your collection.
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QotD: Historical rice farming versus wheat or barley farming
At the same time, the irrigation demands for effective production of wet-rice requires a lot of labor to build and maintain. Fields need to be flooded and drained; in some cases (particularly pre-modern terrace farming) this may involve moving the water manually, in buckets, from lower fields to higher ones. Irrigation canals connecting paddies can make this job somewhat easier, as can bucket-lifts, but that still demands moving quite a lot of water. In any irrigation system, the bunds need to be maintained and the water level carefully controlled, with also involves potentially quite a lot of labor.
The consequence of all of this is that while the rice farming household seems to be roughly the same size as the wheat-farming household (that is, an extended family unit of variable size, but typically around 8 or so members), the farm is much smaller, with common household farm sizes, even in the modern period, clustering around 1 hectare (2.47 acres) in comparison to the standard household wheat farms clustered around 4-6 acres (which, you may note with the yield figures above, lands us right back at around the same subsistence standard).
Moreover, rice cultivation is less soil dependent (but more water dependent) because wet-rice farming both encourages nitrogen fixation in the soil (maintaining the fertility of it generally without expensive manure use) and because rice farming leads naturally to a process known as pozdolisation, slowly converting the underlying soil over a few years to a set of characteristics which are more favorable for more rice cultivation. So whereas with wheat cultivation, where you often have clumps of marginal land (soil that is too wet, too dry, too rocky, too acidic, too uneven, too heavily forested, and so on), rice cultivation tends to be able to make use of almost any land where there is sufficient water (although terracing may be needed to level out the land). The reliance on the rice itself to “terraform” its own fields does mean that new rice fields tended to under-produce for the first few years.
The result of this, so far as I can tell, is that in well-watered areas, like much of South China, the human landscape that is created by pre-modern rice cultivation is both more dense and more uniform in its density; large zones of very dense rice cultivation rather than pockets of villages separated by sparsely inhabited forests or pasture. Indeed, pasture in particular seems in most cases almost entirely pushed out by rice cultivation. That has very significant implications for warfare and I have to admit that in reading about rice farming for this post, I had one of those “oh!” moments of sudden understanding – in this case, how armies in pre-modern China could be so large and achieve such massive local concentrations. But as we’ve discussed, the size of an army is mainly constrained by logistics and the key factor here is the ability to forage food locally, which is in turn a product of local population density. If you effectively double (or more!) the population density, the maximum size of a local army also dramatically increases (and at the same time, a society which is even more concentrated around rivers is also likelier to allow for riverine logistics, which further improves the logistical situation for mass armies).
But it also goes to the difficulty many Chinese states experienced in maintaining large and effective cavalry arms without becoming reliant on Steppe peoples for horses. Unlike Europe or the Near East, where there are spots of good horse country here and there, often less suited to intensive wheat cultivation, most horse-pasturage in the rice-farming zone could have – and was – turned over to far more productive rice cultivation. Indeed, rice cultivation seems to have been so productive and suitable to a sufficient range of lands that it could push out a lot of other kinds of land-use, somewhat flattening the “ideal city” model that assumed wheat and barley cultivation.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice!”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-09-04.
September 3, 2023
Online dating apps
The modern dating scene is evidently catastrophic for the majority of men:
After all, dating apps digitally castrate 85 percent of men.
On Bumble, sixty percent of women say they’re looking for a six-foot-tall or taller man. Just 30 percent will drop their requirements one inch lower. Just 15 percent of women would consider a man just one inch shorter than the average 5’9 man. Shorter than that? Your chances fall with each descending inch. Understandably, 80 percent of men lie about their height. Why? Dating apps are merciless, Latin American economies. Most women on dating apps like Tinder and Bumble seek the top 20 percent of men, leaving the rest to compete for a small portion of the dating pool. Reader, I’m not bearing a tall grudge from a short height, I’m six-foot-two.
When I was younger, we used to meet people in person. This antiquated exercise was meritocracy in action.
For the genetically ungifted, that is, the ordinary 80 percent of men, this was the great leveller.
No matter how short or aesthetically unblessed, meeting in person gave all a fair hearing. As the great Christopher Hitchens once wrote, there’s a good reason why men employ humour and why women tend to value a man’s mastery of humour.
Dating apps are anti-merit. Essentially, they provoke a biological feudalism that determines your prospects before you escape the womb.
The 5’9 guy with good humour, high intelligence, seasoned wit, and good manners? Nope.
Social media mutates the ideal into the ordinary. Every man is six-foot-plus. Every woman resembles a Reality TV star: big lips, ballooning bum, bouncing boobs.
In this strange, digital landscape, some porn-addled men use dick pics as a greeting. Three-quarters of women have endured such “greetings”.
Dating apps are a primitive world in which some men say “hello” by showing you their rather ugly organs.
Offline, leery weirdoes masturbating vigorously (Is there any other way?) on the night Tube often end up in jail or in the newspaper. Endearingly, the Daily Telegraph still calls this “performing a sexual act” as if on a stage before a ticket-waving audience and a shrivel of critics.
Reader, I’m no reactionary prude — I’m spiritually French — the only people on earth a majority of whom think adultery is an invigorating hobby rather than a grave sin.
The business of life works better without a screen and an algorithm.
Unsurprisingly, presenting oneself as a product on the “dating marketplace” degrades self-esteem, afflicts mental health, and corrodes our sense of reality. I’m no philosopher, but maybe our burgeoning mental health crisis has something to do with our living as if products on a shelf to be thumbed over by complete strangers.
As Rob Henderson reported last year, the world of dating apps is a hellscape for everyone but the tiny minority of men who get a “swipe right” from vast numbers of women:
Some findings on dating apps:
- 18 to 25 percent of Tinder users are in a committed relationship.
- Women aged 23 to 27 are twice as likely to swipe right (“liked”) on a man with a master’s degree compared with a bachelor’s degree.
- Men swipe right (“liked”) on 62 percent of the women’s profiles they see; women swipe right (“liked”) on only 4.5 percent of the men’s profiles they see.
- Half of men who use dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app. All women who used dating apps while in a committed relationship reported having sex with another person they met on a dating app.
- 30 percent of men who use Tinder are married.
- In terms of attractiveness, the bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
The War is Five Years Old – WW2 – Week 262 – September 2, 1944
World War Two
Published 2 Sep 2023Five years of war and no real end in sight, though the Allies sure seem to have the upper hand at the moment. Romania is coming under the Soviet thumb and Red Army troops are at Bulgaria’s borders, the Allies enter Belgium and also take ports in the south of France. A Slovak National Uprising begins against the Germans, and the Warsaw Uprising against them continues, but in China it is plans for defense being made against the advancing Japanese.
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“This is the world of the Spring and Autumn Annals, and the Zuozhuan“
Another anonymous book review at Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten considers the Zuozhuan, a commentary and elaboration of the more bare-bones historical record of the Spring and Autumn Annals:
The first page of the Li Yuanyang edition of Zuo zhuan (16th century).
Wikimedia Commons.
To tell the story of the fall of a realm, it’s best to start with its rise.
More than three thousand years ago, the Shang dynasty ruled the Chinese heartland. They raised a sprawling capital out of the yellow plains, and cast magnificent ritual vessels from bronze. One of the criteria of civilization is writing, and they had the first Chinese writing, incising questions on turtle shells and ox scapulae, applying a heated rod, and reading the response of the spirits in the pattern of cracks. “This year will Shang receive good harvest?” “Is the sick stomach due to ancestral harm?” “Offer three hundred Qiang prisoners to [the deceased] Father Ding?” The kings of Shang maintained a hegemony over their neighbors through military prowess, and sacrificed war captives from their campaigns totaling in the tens of thousands for the favor of their ancestors.
But the Shang faced growing threat from the Zhou, a once-subordinate people from west beyond the mountains. Inspired by a rare conjunction of the planets in 1059 BC, the Zhou declared that there was such a thing as the Mandate of Heaven, a divine right to rule—and while the Shang had once held it, their misrule and immorality had forced the Mandate to pass to the Zhou. Thirteen years later, the Zhou and their allies defeated the Shang in battle, seized their capital, drove their king to suicide, and supplanted them as overlords of the Central Plains.
If the Shang were goth jocks, the Zhou were prep nerds. In grave goods, food-serving vessels replaced wine vessels. Mass human sacrifice disappeared, while bureaucracy expanded. The Shang lacked the state power to administer their surrounding subject peoples so much as intimidate them into line; the Zhou, galvanized by a rebellion not long after the conquest, put serious thought into consolidating their control. While the king remained in the west to rule over the original Zhou lands, he sent relatives and allies east into the conquered territories to establish colonies at strategically important locations, anchoring Zhou rule in a sprawling network of hereditary regional lords bound together by blood, marriage, custom, and ancestor worship of the Heaven-blessed founding Zhou kings.
For generations, the system worked, ensuring military successes at the borders and stability in the interior. The first reigns of the dynasty became a golden age in the cultural imagination for thousands of years. But by the dynasty’s second century, barbarian incursions were putting the state on the defensive, and surviving records hint at waning control over the regional lords and power struggles at court. 771 BC marked a breaking point, when barbarians allied with disgruntled nobles to overrun the royal domain and kill King You of Zhou.
Legend has it that the king was bewitched by his new consort, a melancholy beauty born from a virgin impregnated by the touch of a black salamander. Desperate to make her laugh, the king pranked his lords by lighting the beacon fires intended to summon them in case of invasion. When she delighted at the sight, he kept playing the same trick until the lords got sick of him and stopped coming, which doomed him when the barbarians actually invaded.
But the historical reality seems to be the usual sordid political struggle around a new consort — and heir — threatening the power of the old one. The original queen’s powerful father allied with barbarians to root out the upstart, only to get maybe more than he bargained for. Sure, he put his grandkid on the throne in the end, but the royal house had been devastated. It would never regain the ancestral lands it had lost to the barbarians, the direct holdings that filled its treasury and provided for its armies. The king retreated east into the Central Plains, playing ground of lords that were now more powerful than him. While the royal line remained symbolically important, as holder of the Mandate of Heaven from which all the states derived their legitimacy, the loss of central authority in every other sense would unleash centuries of intensifying interstate warfare and upheaval.
This is the world of the Spring and Autumn Annals, and the Zuozhuan.
The Spring
“Spring and Autumn Annals” is a bit of a redundant translation, since “spring and autumn” was just an old way of saying “year”, and thus, “annals”. And technically, there were multiple Spring and Autumn Annals — every state kept, in addition to court and administrative documents, its own laconic record of each year’s wars, diplomacy, natural phenomena, major rites, and notable deaths. But the state of Lu’s is special, because Confucius was from Lu. He’s said to have personally edited and compiled the extant version of its 242-year-long Spring and Autumn, loading each character with weighty yet subtle moral deliberation. This ensured it a place in the Confucian canon, and its survival where every other state’s annals have been lost to time. The era that it covers is named the Spring and Autumn period after the text, not the other way around.
Taken on its own, though, the Annals is little more than a list of dry facts. For example, the first year reads:
The first year, spring, the royal first month.
In the third month, our lord and Zhu Yifu swore a covenant at Mie.
In summer, in the fifth month, the Liege of Zheng overcame Duan at Yan.
In autumn, in the seventh month, the Heaven-appointed king sent his steward Xuan to us to present the funeral equipment for Lord Hui and Zhong Zi.
In the ninth month, we swore a covenant with a Song leader at Su.
In winter, in the twelfth month, the Zhai Liege came.
Gongzi Yishi died.
Who is Zhu Yifu? Who’s Duan? What’s all this about “overcoming”? Where does the moral deliberation come in? This canon badly needs meta, and the most notable of the ancient commentaries written for the Spring and Autumn Annals is the Zuozhuan. Ten times as long as the text it’s for, the Zuozhuan is the flesh on the Annals‘ bare bones, one of the foundational works of ancient Chinese literature and history-writing in its own right.
While tradition attributes the text’s authorship to Zuo Qiuming, a contemporary of Confucius, most modern historians date its compilation to the century after. In its extant form, it’s presented interleaved with the Annals, so that after the Annals’ account of each year, with entries such as …
In summer, in the sixth month, on the yiyou day (26), Gongzi Guisheng of Zheng assassinated his ruler, Yi.
… you have the Zuozhuan’s account of the year, mostly composed of elaborations upon the above entries, such as:
The leaders of Chu presented a large turtle to Lord Ling of Zheng. Gongzi Song and Gongzi Guisheng were about to have an audience with the lord. Gongzi Song’s index finger moved involuntarily. He showed it to Gongzi Guisheng and said, “On other days when my finger did this, I always without fail got to taste something extraordinary.” As they entered, the cook was about to take the turtle apart. They looked at each other and smiled. The lord asked why, and Gongzi Guisheng told him. When the lord had the high officers partake of the turtle, he called Gongzi Song forward but did not give him any. Furious, Gongzi Song dipped his finger into the cauldron, tasted the turtle, and left. The lord was so enraged that he wanted to kill Gongzi Song. Gongzi Song plotted with Gongzi Guisheng to act first. Gongzi Guisheng said, “Even with an aging domestic animal, one is reluctant to kill it. How much more so then with the ruler?” Gongzi Song turned things around and slandered Gongzi Guisheng. Gongzi Guisheng became fearful and complied with him. In the summer, they assassinated Lord Ling.
The text says, “Gongzi Guisheng of Zheng assassinated his ruler, Yi”: this is because he fell short in weighing the odds. The noble man said, “To be benevolent without martial valor is to achieve nothing.” In all cases when a ruler is assassinated, naming the ruler [with his personal name rather than his title] means that he violated the way of rulership; naming the subject means that the blame lies with him.
There’s a few too many mythological creatures and just-so stories for the Zuozhuan to be taken entirely at face value, but it’s clear that its creator(s) had access to diverse now-lost records for the era portrayed. For example, some of the events show a two-month dating discrepancy — one of the states used a different calendar, and most likely the creator(s) overlooked the difference when borrowing from sources from that state. While the overall level of historical rigor versus 4th century BC authorial invention remains under heated debate, the Zuozhuan is undeniably the most comprehensive written source on its era that we have.
And importantly, it’s enjoyable.
You can think of the Zuozhuan as the Gene Wolfe of ancient historical works. It’s not an easy read, especially in translation, where names that are visibly distinct in the original (e.g. 季, 急, 姬, etc.) all get unhelpfully collapsed into one transliteration (Ji). The work drops you into a whirl of nouns and events, some of them one-off asides, others part of long-running narrative threads that might only surface again decades of entries later. While a casual readthrough still offers plenty of rewards, putting together all the subtext, references, and connections between entries is an endeavor that’s occupied readers for millennia. Your unreliable narrator remains enigmatic on most of the events he presents, leaving interpretation as an exercise for the reader; when he does speak, either directly or in the voice of the “noble man”, he can raise more questions than he answers. For one, the rule about the naming of an assassinated ruler largely holds in the Annals, but seems to have some notable exceptions.
But if you’re willing to plunge in, the work offers an experience unlike anything else.
The Saalburg: A Roman Fort on the German Frontier
Scenic Routes to the Past
Published 23 May 2023A brief tour of the principal buildings in the Saalburg, Germany’s most completely reconstructed Roman fort.
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QotD: The obesity epidemic – a possible explanation
When I was growing up as a white supremacist, embedded in a neighborhood of white privilege, before all our communities were broken by forced immigration and vulture capitalism, we all, despite our relative wealth, ate the dullest food you can imagine. Simple, basic, and not a lot of it: fish sticks, hamburgers, a hunk of roast beef or lamb once in a while, canned vegetables, ice cream once a week, no pop, like ever. Mac and cheese. Spaghetti and meatballs. Roast chicken. That’s it. No Japanese, Chinese, French, Italian, fusion, Korean, Mexican. Out for dinner once a month. Maybe. Abstemious.
Add to this, the entire culture was Stoic. Suck it up buttercup was pretty much the solution to everything. Life was not fair. Your duty was to make it more fair. That’s was it. That is the entire ethic of white supremacy. You didn’t eat a lot because that was not good for a) you or b) your tribe on whom your survival was based. It meant you were cheating, taking more of scarce common resources. That was not OK. This wasn’t stated or even conscious, but it was hard-wired.
My ever so privileged tribe left the Levant around 30,000 years ago, hived off to the Mongol Steppes, then migrated north to Scandinavia, thence to northern Scotland, and then to Ireland. Pretty much starved all the way. For 30,000 years. Constant famines. Dying by the side of the trail, absorbed into the peat moss. Etc. Like that. Around 500 BC they moved to the Midlands and bred out those who were lactose intolerant. To this day I can live on milk and cheese and meat. Wild greens. Salt. Bread. Their diet.
Then, after 1500 years of breeding and starving in the Midlands, a strike of lightning: the Industrial Revolution leading inevitably to industrial food and abundance. For 300 years afterwards there wasn’t famine for us, but there was pioneering and starving to the point of having to eat squirrel and tree bark, wars and rationing. Then, for the first time, EVER, the massive cohort of boomers got into the job market, started to make money, fall in love, date and party, food got spectacular.
And everyone got fat. Genes taught to horde any excess bloomed into layers and layers of fat around every torso and butt. This is not a moral issue. This is genetic. For every “race” or ethnic grouping.
That’s it. The end. Period. Every one of us has this history embedded in our genetic structure, one way or another. It is a bitch. It means a constant war against your appetite and genetic history which is shrieking EAT EAT! It’s only the left that makes it into a crime. We are hardwired to see fat as dangerous to collective survival, and deep down, we know it’s just not healthy. Near everyone is fat and everyone worries about it.
My white privileged clan developed stoicism as the primary survival tool because it worked. For 30,000 years, it made it possible to survive anything. Today, white culture or rather, the dominant culture filled with people of every race and color still uses stoicism to succeed in every profession or activity. There is no escaping it. Indulge the weakest part of you and you are doomed to failure.
It’s only the left that has made emotional blackmail the determinant survival tool.
Elizabeth Nickson, “The Woke Marxist Agenda to Destabilize Kids’ Health”, Welcome to Absurdistan, 2023-06-01.
September 2, 2023
Trial Run for D-Day – Allied Invasion of Sicily 1943
Real Time History
Published 1 Sept 2023After defeating the Axis in North Africa, the stage was set for the first Allied landing in Europe. The target was Sicily and in summer 1943 Allied generals Patton and Montgomery set their sights on the island off the Italian peninsula.
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The 4% non-solution
Michael Geist updates us on the Canadian government’s latest blunder in the Online News Act saga:
The government is releasing its draft regulations for Bill C-18 today and the chances that both Google and Meta will stop linking to news in Canada just increased significantly. In fact, with the government setting an astonishing floor of 4% of revenues for linking to news, the global implications could run into the billions for Google alone. No country in the world has come close to setting this standard and the question the Internet companies will face is whether they are comfortable with the global liability that would see many other countries making similar demands. The implications are therefore pretty clear: there is little likelihood that Meta will restore news links in Canada and Google is more likely to follow the same path as the Canadian government establishes what amounts to 4% link tax from Bill C-18 on top of a 3% digital services tax and millions in Bill C-11 payments.
The estimated revenues from Bill C-18 or the Online News Act have always been the subject of some debate. The Parliamentary Budget Officer set the number at $329 million, using a metric of 30% of news costs for all news outlets in Canada. Under that approach, over 75% of the revenues would go to broadcasters such as Bell, Rogers, and the CBC. The Canadian Heritage estimates were considerably lower, with officials telling a House of Commons committee last December that they expected about $150 million in revenue:
I won’t speak to the PBO report which is the source of the numbers that you cited. That was not a department-led initiative. The internal modelling that we did when we tabled the bill and mentioned in our technical briefings was more around $150 million impact. That was based again in terms of how this played out in Australia and making some assumptions about how it might play out here. With respect to the PBO report, any questions about that particular number would have to be directed towards them.
By the time the bill reached the Senate several months after that, the number had grown to $215 million.
With the release of the draft regulations, the government has established a formula with an even bigger estimate. The creation of a formula is presumably designed to provide some cost certainty to the companies and represents a change in approach in Bill C-18, given that the government had previously said it would not get involved private sector deals but it is now setting a minimum value of the agreements. Officials told the media this morning that it believes Google’s contribution would be $172 million and Meta’s would be $62 million, for a total of $234 million. However, that may understate the revenues by focusing on search revenues alone. If based on total revenues, with a 4% minimum floor, the requirement would exceed C$300 million for Google. Either way, the number is more than 50% higher than the $150 million estimate the department gave the Heritage committee just eight months ago.
The draft regulations will also provide some additional clarity on several issues. The standard for a digital news intermediary has been fleshed out to include $1 billion in global revenues and 20 million Canadian users. As for the process, those companies subject to the rules are required to conduct a 60 day open call for negotiations. To meet a fairness standard, the resulting deals must be within 20% of the average and cover a wide range of news outlets. Contributions can include non-monetary items but it seems unlikely the resulting deals would grant links significant value. The CRTC would then pass judgment on the deals and determine whether the companies are exempt from a final offer arbitration process. The timing on this includes a 30 day consultation process on the regulations, before they are finalized prior to the December deadline. But with the CRTC not having established a bargaining framework before 2025, the liability issues start arising well before any deals are concluded or approved.
QotD: Ancient DNA
The wonderful thing about ancient DNA is it gives us an extreme case of this. Basically, the first serious attempt at creating a scientific field of archaeology was done by 19th century Germans, and they looked around and dug some stuff up and concluded that the prehistoric world looked like the world of Conan the Barbarian: lots of “population replacement”, which is a euphemism for genocide and/or systematic slavery and mass rape. This 19th century German theory then became popular with some 20th century Germans who … uh … made the whole thing fall out of fashion by trying to put it into practice.
After those 20th century Germans were squashed, any ideas they were even tangentially associated with them became very unfashionable, and so there was a scientific revolution in archaeology! I’m sure this was just crazy timing, and actually everybody rationally sat down and reexamined the evidence and came to the conclusion that the disgraced theory was wrong (lol, lmao). Whatever the case, the new view was that the prehistoric world was incredibly peaceful, and everybody was peacefully trading with one another, and this thing where sometimes in a geological stratum one kind of house totally disappears and is replaced by a different kind of house is just that everybody decided at once that the other kind of house was cooler. The high-water mark of this revisionist paradigm even had people saying that the Vikings were mostly peaceful traders who sailed around respecting the non-aggression principle.
And then people started sequencing ancient DNA and … it turns out the bad old 19th century Germans were correct about pretty much everything. The genetic record is one of whole peoples frequently disappearing or, even more commonly, all of the men disappearing and other men carrying off the dead men’s female relatives. There are some exceptions to this, but by and large the old theory wins.
I used to have a Bulgarian coworker, and I asked him one day how things were going in Bulgaria. He replied in that morose Slavic way with a long, sad disquisition about how the Bulgarian race was in its twilight, their land was being colonized by others, their sons and daughters flying off to strange lands and mixing their blood with that of alien peoples. I felt awkward at this point, and stammered something about that being very sad, at which point he came alive and declared: “it is not sad, it is not special, it is the Way Of The World”. He then launched into a lecture about how the Bulgarians weren’t even native to their land, but had been bribed into moving there by the Byzantines who used them as a blunt instrument to exterminate some other unruly tribes that were causing them trouble. “History is all the same,” he concluded, “we invaded and took their land, and now others invade us and take our land, it is the Way Of The World.”
Even a cursory study of history shows that my Bulgarian friend was correct about the Way Of The World. There’s a kind of guilty white liberal who believes that European colonization and enslavement of others is some unique historical horror, a view that has now graduated into official state ideology in America. But that belief is just a weird sort of inverted narcissism. I guess pretending white people are uniquely bad at least makes them feel special, but white people are not special. Mass migration, colonization, population replacement, genocide, and slavery are the Way Of The World, and ancient DNA teaches us that it’s been the Way Of The World far longer than writing or agriculture have existed. It wasn’t civilization that corrupted us, there are no noble savages, “history is all the same”, an infinite history of blood.
Land acknowledgments always struck me as especially funny and stupid: like you really think those people were the first ones there? What about acknowledging the people that they stole it from? Sure enough one of the coolest parts of Reich’s book is his recounting the discovery that there were probably unrelated peoples in the Americas before the ancestors of the American Indians arrived here, and that a tiny remnant of them might even remain deep in Amazonia. So: what does it actually mean to be “indigenous”? Is anybody anywhere actually “indigenous”?
Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.
