Quotulatiousness

November 30, 2023

Canadian government declares victory over Google, then lays down its arms and marches into captivity

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Trudeau government has won a glorious, historic victory over the evil capitalistic powers of Google in the war of Bill C-18. Let all patriotic Canadians raise their hands to cheer our victorious politicians before they have to admit out loud that they fucked up real good:

Heritage Minister Pascale St. Onge has surrendered to Google and Canadian media have avoided what would have been a catastrophic exclusion from the web giant’s search engine.

In the short term, this is very good news. The bureaucrats at Heritage must have performed many administrative contortions to find the words needed in the Online News Act‘s final regulations to satisfy Google, a beast which isn’t easily soothed. In doing so, they have managed to avoid what Google was threatening — to de-index news links from its search engine and other platforms in Canada. Given that Meta had already dropped the carriage of news on Facebook and Instagram in response to the same legislation, Google’s departure would have constituted a kill shot to the industry.

Instead, the news business will get $100 million in Google cash. For this, all its members will now fight like so many pigeons swarming an errant crust of bread.

The agreement will also allow the government, while surrounded by an industry whose reputation and economics have been devastated by this policy debacle, to attempt to declare victory. Signs of that are already evident.

That’s the good news.

The bad news is that while 100 million bucks is nothing to sneeze at, in the grand scheme of things it is a drop in the bucket for an industry in need of at least a billion dollars if it is to recover any sense of stability. Indeed, when News Media Canada first began begging the government to go after Google and Meta for cash, some involved were selling the idea that sort of loot was possible.

This did not turn out to be so.

Instead of the $100,000 per journo cashapalooza that was once hoped for, the final tally will be more like $6,666.00 per ink-stained wretch.

That figure is based on two assumptions. The first is that the government has agreed to satisfy Google’s desire to pay a single sum to a single defined industry “collective” that would then divide the loot on a per-FTE (full-time employee) basis to everyone granted membership in the industry’s bargaining group. Google had made it clear it had no interest in conducting multiple negotiations and exposing itself to endless and costly arbitrations. So, as we have a deal and Google held all the cards, it’s fair to assume it got what it wanted — a single collective with a single agreement and a single cheque.

Why Wilders’ PPV appealed to Dutch voters and why the establishment is utterly horrified

Filed under: Europe, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Free Press, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Evelyn Markus explain why Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom took so many seats in the Dutch elections:

Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV).
Photo by Wouter Engler via Wikimedia Commons.

It was in 2004, the same year that Theo van Gogh was brutally murdered, that Geert Wilders saw his opening.

Though Wilders had been in Dutch politics for a long time, that year Wilders left the VVD — the center-right party where he served alongside Ayaan — and branched out on his own with a new party, the Party for Freedom. The key issue that led to his break was that Wilders refused to countenance the possibility of EU membership for Turkey (which the VVD was willing to accept as long as certain conditions were met).

Almost immediately, Wilders became the most controversial man in Dutch politics. He urged the banning of the Quran and a halt to the construction of new mosques. He railed against what he described as the “Islamization of the Netherlands”. When he asked a crowd in 2014 whether they wanted “more or fewer” Moroccans, the crowd chanted “fewer”, and Wilders replied that this was something that would be arranged. Prosecutors argued this constituted an illegal collective insult, and the Dutch High Court ultimately ruled that Wilders was guilty, but without sentencing him to a penalty.

It was easy to be scandalized by Wilders. The press and the political class certainly were. Some publicly supported Wilders’ prosecution in the “fewer Moroccans” case.

We disagreed — and still do — with Wilders’ calls for blanket bans on additional asylum seekers, with the notion of banning the Quran (let alone any book), and with his consistent failure to draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism.

But we understand how and why his message resonated with the public.

While elites over the past two decades have told the public to ignore their lying eyes, Wilders continued to emphasize the hot-button subjects that resonated with the public: the struggling economy, the importance of borders, the risks of devolving too much power to Brussels, the threat of Islamism, and the challenge of mass migration.

While elites told the public that opposing migration was xenophobic, ordinary people noticed structural changes in their country and felt they — the public — had not been adequately consulted. In the 1960s, 60,000 Muslims lived in the Netherlands; today there are around 1.2 million, thanks to massive chain migration, asylum, and a high birth rate. (Fewer than 50,000 Jews remain in the country.)

While political elites told the public to be tolerant of Islam, in keeping with a long-standing tradition of religious tolerance, ordinary people saw that Islamists were increasingly well-entrenched in the country, a point even made by Dutch intelligence officials. Although Wilders’ rhetoric can be uninhibited and extreme, he articulates a general and perfectly legitimate feeling among voters who know that Islamism is a threat to their way of life and want to oppose it. (Wilders has been the subject of sustained Islamist threats and has had to live his life within a tight security bubble because of them.)

While elites told the public that giving more power to the EU was an unqualified good, ordinary people took a more nuanced view. When we left the Netherlands in the early 2000s, the Dutch were solidly pro-EU. Today, although most Dutch voters do not wish to leave the EU, there are growing concerns that, especially when it comes to migration and borders, too much authority has been ceded to supranational institutions.

Over the years, we have heard more and more friends express private sympathy with Geert Wilders. And it should be noted that during the most recent campaign, he toned down some of his more extreme rhetoric. Previously, his party called for a “Ministry of Re-migration and De-Islamization”. That is no longer the case. Similarly, the phrase “Islam is not a religion, but a totalitarian ideology”, which was previously part of the election manifesto, was scrapped. This time around, Wilders emphasized his commitment to working within the Dutch coalition system, which he conceded would require him to make compromises in order to be able to govern.

The recent aggressive and occasionally violent pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the Dutch streets — as elsewhere — may have been the final blow that led to last week’s landslide. It’s worth noting that Wilders’ voters do not fit a crude stereotype — he won the most votes of any party among voters between the ages of 18 and 35.

The challenge facing Javier Milei

Filed under: Americas, Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Craig Pirrong outlines just how much work Argentinian President-Elect Javier Milei will have to accomplish to begin to bring Argentina’s government in line with his electoral mandate:

When I wrote Milei is not a leftist, let’s say that rather understates the matter. Milei loathes leftists and leftism, and repeatedly refers to them on television and in public appearances in scatalogical terms, calling them “leftards”. He despises collectivism, and asserts bluntly that leftists are out to destroy you. His mission is to destroy them first.

As someone so vehemently hostile to the left and well outside conventional political categories, Milei’s victory has triggered a mass moral panic, especially in the media. The New York Times coverage was (unintentionally) hilarious: “Some voters were turned off by his past outbursts and extreme comments over years of work as a television pundit and personality.” Well, obviously a lot more weren’t, but I guess one has to take solace where one can, eh, NYT?

Milei’s agenda is indeed a radical one, especially for a statist basket case like Argentina. To combat the country’s massive (140 per cent annualised) inflation, Milei says he will dollarise the economy and eliminate (“burn down”) the central bank. He also wants to reduce radically the role of the state in Argentina’s economy. He says he wants to “chainsaw” the government – and emphasises the point by campaigning with an actual chainsaw.

His election on this programme sparked a rally in Argentine financial markets, with government debt rising modestly and stock prices rallying smartly.

Will Milei be able to deliver? Some early commentary has doubted his ability to govern based on the fact that his party’s representation in the legislature is well below a majority. That may be an issue, but not the major obstacle to Milei’s ability to transform Argentina into what it was at the dawn of the 21st century: an advanced, rapidly growing economy and a relatively free society.

The real obstacle is one that is faced by anti-statists everywhere – the bureaucracy. (I do not say “civil service” because that phrase is at best aspirational and more realistically a patent falsehood. Akin to the Holy Roman Empire that was neither holy nor Roman, the “civil service” is neither civil nor a service.)

Argentina’s bloated state is its own clientele with its own interests, mainly self-preservation and an expansion of its powers. Moreover, it has created a whole host of patronage clients in business and labour. Milei’s agenda is anathema to this nexus of public and private interests. They will make war to the knife to subvert it.

Even a president with an electoral mandate faces formidable obstacles to implementing his agenda. The most important obstacle is what economists call an “agency problem”. The bureaucrats are agents of the chief executive, but it can be nigh unto impossible to get these agents to implement the executive’s directives if they don’t want to. Their incentives are not aligned with the executive, and are often antithetical. As a result, they resist and often act at cross purposes with the executive.

The modern chief executive’s power to force his bureaucratic agents to toe the line is severely circumscribed. At best, the executive can make appointments at the upper levels of the bureaucracy (such as the heads of ministries or departments), but the career bureaucrats who can make or break the executive’s policy are beyond his reach, and not subject to any punishment if they subvert the executive’s agenda.

Men and Morale: Canadian Army Training in the Second World War

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

WW2TV
Published 1 Feb 2023

Men and Morale: Canadian Army Training in the Second World War
Part of Canadian Week on WW2TV With Megan Hamilton

The Canadian Army of the Second World War spent more time preparing and training their citizen soldiers then they did in sustained action. This chiefly took place across Canada and in the United Kingdom. Adequate training functioned as a cradle for collective action, morale, empowerment, self-confidence, and, ultimately, success in battle. Yet, due to a number of factors, a sufficient standard of training was not always achieved by all.

There were limits to the Canadian Army’s ability to control the morale of its men as it created a vast organization from scratch. Training camp experiences varied, influenced by factors such as food, weather, comfort, group cohesion, leadership, skill level, discipline, social activities, and interactions with local civilians. In fact, it required a constant negotiation between camp leadership and the rank and file. Drawing from her research on both the Canadian and wider Commonwealth armies, Megan’s presentation will explain why soldiers’ morale in training was a difficult, yet vital, balancing act.

Originally from Vernon, British Columbia, Megan Hamilton is a social and military historian of the 20th century. She has an Honours Bachelor of Arts degree from Wilfrid Laurier University and a Master of Arts degree from the University of Waterloo. Her federally-funded master’s research focused on the Canadian experience of the Second World War, specifically the Vernon Military Camp. Megan’s work has been published by a number of platforms and in 2022 she won the Tri-University History Program’s top essay prize for master’s students.

She is currently located in London, England, where she has begun a fully-funded PhD at King’s College London and the Imperial War Museum, supervised by Dr. Jonathan Fennell. Her dissertation is a study of Second World War army training across the Commonwealth.
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QotD: “Information velocity” in the English Civil War

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

Information velocity had increased exponentially by the 1630s, such that the English Civil War was, in a fundamental way, a propaganda war, an intellectual war.

Some of the battles of the Wars of the Roses were bigger than some of the Civil War’s battles – an estimated 50,000 men fought at Towton, in 1461 – but the Civil War was inconceivably harder and nastier than the Wars of the Roses, because the Civil War was an ideological war. The Wars of the Roses could’ve ended, at least theoretically, at any time – get the king and five dukes in a room, hammer out a compromise, and simply order everyone in each lord’s affinity to lay down his weapons. The Civil War could only end when everyone, in every army, was persuaded to lay down his arms.

Thus the winners had to negotiate with the people, directly. The Putney Debates didn’t involve everyone in the realm, but they were representative, truly representative, of everyone who mattered. Though no one explicitly made an appeal to competence alone, it was – and is, and must be – fundamental to representative government. Guys like Gerrard Winstanley had some interesting ideas, but they were fundamentally impractical, and Winstanley was not popularly viewed as a competent leader. Oliver Cromwell, on the other hand, was competence personified – the Protectorate became Cromwell’s military dictatorship largely because the People, as literally represented by the New Model Army, wanted it so … and, thanks to much faster information velocity, could make their wishes known.

Severian, “Inertia and Incompetence”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-25.

November 29, 2023

Alfred the Great

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ed West‘s new book is about the only English king to be known as “the Great”:

There are no portraits of King Alfred from his time period, so representations like this 1905 stained glass window in Bristol Cathedral are all we have to visually represent him.
Photo by Charles Eamer Kempe via Wikimedia Commons.

History was once the story of heroes, and there is no greater figure in England’s history than the man who saved, and helped create, the nation itself. As I’ve written before, Alfred the Great is more than just a historical figure to me. I have an almost Victorian reverence for his memory.

Alfred is the subject of my short book Saxons versus Vikings, which was published in the US in 2017 as the first part of a young adult history of medieval England. The UK edition is published today, available on Amazon or through the publishers. (use the code SV20 on the publisher’s site, valid until 30 November, which gives 20% off). It’s very much a beginner’s introduction, aimed at conveying the message that history is just one long black comedy.

The book charts the story of Alfred and his equally impressive grandson Athelstan, who went on to unify England in 927. In the centuries that followed Athelstan may have been considered the greater king, something we can sort of guess at by the fact that Ethelred the Unready named his first son Athelstan, and only his eighth Alfred, and royal naming patterns tend to reflect the prestige of previous monarchs.

Yet while Athelstan’s star faded in the medieval period, Alfred’s rose, and so by the fifteenth century the feeble-minded Henry VI was trying to have him made a saint. This didn’t happen, but Alfred is today the only English king to be styled “the Great”, and it was a word attached to him from quite an early stage. Even in the twelfth century the gossipy chronicler Matthew Paris is using the epithet, and says it’s in common use.

However, much of what is recorded of him only became known in Tudor times, partly by accident. Henry VIII’s break from Rome was to have a huge influence on our understanding of history, chiefly because so many of England’s records were stored in monasteries.

Before the development of universities, these had been the main intellectual centres in Christendom, indeed from where universities would grow. Now, along with relics, huge amounts of them would be lost, destroyed, sold … or preserved.

It was lucky that Matthew Parker, the sixteenth-century Archbishop of Canterbury with a keen interest in history, had a particularly keen interest in Alfred. It was Parker who published Asser’s Life of Alfred in 1574, having found the manuscript after the dissolution of the monasteries, a book that found itself in the Ashburnham collection amassed by Sir Robert Cotton in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Sadly, the original Life was burned in a famous fire at Ashburnham House in Westminster on October 23, 1731. Boys from nearby Westminster School had gone into the blaze alongside the owner and his son to rescue manuscripts, but much was lost, among them the only surviving manuscript of the Life of Alfred, as well as that of Beowulf. In fact the majority of recorded Anglo-Saxon history had gone up in smoke in minutes.

A copy of Beowulf had also been made, although the poem only became widely known in the nineteenth century after being translated into modern English. The fire also destroyed the oldest copy of the Burghal Hidage, a unique document listing towns of Saxon England and provisions for defence made during the reign of Alfred’s son Edward the Elder. An eighth-century illuminated gospel book from Northumbria was also lost.

So it is lucky that Parker had had The Life of Alfred printed, even if he had made alterations in his copy that to historians are infuriating because they cannot be sure if they are authentic. He probably added the story about the cakes, for instance, although this had come from a different Anglo-Saxon source.

We also know that Archbishop Parker was a bit confused, or possibly just lying; he claimed Alfred had founded his old university, Oxford, which was clearly untrue, and he was probably trying to make his alma mater sound grander than Cambridge. Oxford graduates down the years have been known to do this on one or two occasions.

Grover Cleveland – more “republican” than any Republican alive today

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Not having studied American history in school, I don’t know a lot about most American presidents, especially those of the 19th century whose names aren’t Jefferson, Jackson, or Lincoln. One of the presidents I only knew about because his name turned up in a lot of original Trivial Pursuit questions was Grover Cleveland, the only man (so far) who has ever been elected to non-consecutive terms:

Grover Cleveland (1837-1908), President of the United States, 1885-89 and 1893-97.
Photo from the National Archives and Records Administration (NAID 518139) via Wikimedia Commons.

Cleveland won the White House in 1884 on a platform of restraining federal spending and corruption. Running for re-election in 1888, he won the popular vote but lost to Republican Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College. A major reason he came out of retirement to run again in 1892 was the reckless spending of the Harrison administration. He beat Harrison that year and became the only man ever elected to non-consecutive terms (1885-89 and 1893-97).

I call to the reader’s attention an article ex-President Cleveland wrote three years after the end of his second term, in June 1901. Titled “The Waste of Public Money”, it was one of half a dozen he penned for The Saturday Evening Post. In this one, he referred to “a malign condition which threatens us,” an “evil” that he saw as “calamitous and destructive to our national character and integrity”.

In 1901, the federal government spent half a billion dollars over the whole year, roughly equivalent in real terms to around $12 billion today. Washington spends that much now in about half a day. Lest you think the feds were misers in 1901, ponder what Cleveland had to say in his article that year:

    Probably no one will have the hardihood to deny that the cost of our Government is excessive and wasteful, and that for this condition the heedless neglect and indifference of our people are in some degree responsible … If the aggregate mass of our people are at all blameworthy on account of the present advanced stage of public prodigality, it is largely because they overlooked and tolerated its small beginnings, when at all times they should have been vigilant and uncompromising. A self-ruling people … should constantly remember that nothing multiplies itself more abundantly than national extravagance, and that neither an individual nor a popular government can easily correct or check habits of waste.

The former president did not for a moment believe that only the politicians were to blame for excessive spending. He boldly asserted that many Americans embraced it. They were effectively bought and paid for, guilty of “accepting the bribes of selfish and personal advantage which public waste and extravagance offer”.

Cleveland was often warned by advisers to moderate his stances to avoid controversy. Biographer H. Paul Jeffers quotes him as responding once to such advice by asking, “What is the use of being elected or re-elected unless you stand for something?” When he vetoed a bill to relieve drought-stricken farmers with federal money, he made it plain that “though the people support the government, the government should not support the people”. He saw his job as upholding the Constitution and keeping the federal government in its proper place, not weakening “the bonds of common brotherhood” by robbing Peter to pay Paul.

This was a man who said what he meant and meant what he said, come Hell or high water. He spoke with a clarity of principle that makes a nation great, and the absence of which makes a great nation fail. He understood that no society in history that allowed itself to be bribed by its politicians ever survived such legal larceny.

In the final paragraphs of his June 1901 Saturday Evening Post article, Cleveland admonished his fellow Americans. With these words, he urged them to muster the character to resist being bribed with their own money:

    The lessons of extravagance and paternalism must be unlearned; economy and frugality must be reinstated; and the people must exact from their representatives a watchful care for the general welfare and a stern resistance to the demands of selfish interests, if our Government is to be an enduring and beneficent protection to a patriotic and virtuous people.

Many Americans today would undoubtedly dismiss Cleveland’s warnings as “quaint” and “old-fashioned”. They want the government to give them stuff and they don’t think much about who will pay for it. They think even less about how it corrupts the national character.

Yugoslav M57: Tito’s Tokarev

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 7 Aug 2023

Yugoslavia purchased both 1895 Nagant revolvers and TT33 Tokarev from the Soviet Union after World War Two, but this was only a holdover until domestic pistol production could begin. While Yugoslavia was formally communist, Tito was not a puppet of Moscow, and Yugoslavia did their own development to reverse-engineer the Tokarev pistol. In the process, they made a number of improvements to the design, resulting in the M57. Serial production began in 1963 and lasted until 1982, with about 270,000 made in total. It was the standard sidearm for the Yugoslav People’s Army and Yugoslav police forces until 1988.

The changes made from the standard Soviet pattern Tokarev include:
– Longer grip and 9-round magazine capacity
– Captive recoil spring
– Improved front sight
– Stronger firing pin with improved retention system
– Magazine disconnect safety
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QotD: The children of the revolution

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

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up. What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn’t be a revolution or a riot. It’d be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning, and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn’t try to bite the sheep next to them.

Terry Pratchett, Night Watch, 2002.

November 28, 2023

Pierre Trudeau and Canada’s choice to become an international featherweight in the 1970s

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

In The Line, Jen Gerson endures a foreign policy speech from Mélanie Joly that takes her on a weird journey through some of Canada’s earlier foreign policy headscratchers … usually leading back to Justin Trudeau’s late father:

A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.

If I saw a statue of P.E.T. on the roof of a foreign affairs building that looked like it were competing for a 10th place spot in the Eurovision tourney, I don’t know how I’d feel: embarrassed, touched, certainly too polite to say anything honest. I probably wouldn’t be so struck with awe by the sight that I’d be keen to shoehorn the anecdote into a major policy speech in front of the Economic Club.

And yet.

Joly’s speech was striking in that it could be divided into two distinct parts: The first half was a cogent and clear-eyed examination of the state of play of the world, one that acknowledged a fundamental shift in the assumptions that underpin the global order. Nothing one couldn’t glean from the Economist, but grounded nonetheless. The global order is shifting, the stakes have increased, and the world is going to be marked by growing unpredictability.

“Now more than ever, soft and hard power are important,” Joly noted, correctly, ignoring the fact that Canada increasingly has neither, and doesn’t seem to be doing much about that.

And this brings us to the second half of the speech, which was an attempt to spell out the way Canada will navigate this shift, by situating itself as both a Western ally and an honest broker: we are to defend our national interests and our values, while also engaging with entities and countries whose values and interests radically diverge from our own. “We cannot afford to close ourselves off from those with whom we do not agree,” Joly said. “I am a door opener, not a door closer.”

This was clearly intended to be analogous to the elder Trudeau’s historic policy of seeking cooperation with non-aligned countries — countries that declined to join either the Communist or the Western blocs throughout the Cold War.

[…]

If our closest allies treat us like ginger step-children as a result of our own obliviousness and uselessness, our platitude-spewing ruling class is going to seek closer relationships in darker places: in economic ties with China, and in finding international prestige via small and middling regional powers or blocs whose values and interests are, by necessity or choice, far more malleable than our own.

These cute turns of phrase are a matter of domestic salesmanship only. “Pragmatic diplomacy” is a thick lacquer on darker arts.

Which brings us back to Macedonia, again. Or North Macedonia, if you’re a stickler.

Before it declared independence in 1991, Macedonia was a republic within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During much of Trudeau Sr.’s time, Yugoslavia was led by Josip Tito, a Communist revolutionary who broke with Stalin and spearheaded a movement of non-aligned countries, along with the leaders of India, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia. Tito was one of several despotic and authoritarian leaders with whom Trudeau Sr. sought to ingratiate himself to navigate the global order.

P.E.T.’s most ardent supporters maintain a benevolent amnesia about just how radical Trudeau Sr. was relative not only to modern standards, but to world leaders at the time.

During the 1968 election, Trudeau promised to undertake a sweeping review of Canada’s foreign affairs, including taking “a hard look” at NATO, and addressing China’s exclusion from the international community.

In 1969, America elected Richard Nixon a bombastic, controversial, and corrupt president who forced Canada examine the depth of its special relationship with its southern neighbour. At the time, this was termed “Nixon shock.” And it could only have furthered Trudeau Sr.’s skepticism of American hegemony.

It was in this environment of extraordinary uncertainty, and shifting global assumptions and alliances, that Trudeau Sr. called for a new approach to Canadian foreign policy. He wanted a Canada that saw itself as a Pacific power, more aligned to Asia (and China). Trudeau also wanted stronger relationships with Western Europe and Latin America, to serve as countervailing forces to American influence.

“This was a document from a parallel universe with familiar-sounding people and places, but a totally bizarre worldview and culture”

Filed under: Books — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the latest addition to Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, John Psmith reviews The Man Who Rode the Thunder, by William H. Rankin:

Like many little boys, I loved learning lists of things. One day it was clouds. How could I not love them? The names were fluffy and Latinate, delicate little words like “cumulus” and “cirrus” that sounded like they might float away on a puff of wind. But there was also a structure to the words, intimations and hints of taxonomy. Was the relationship of an altocumulus to an altostratus the same as that of a cirrocumulus to a cirrostratus? I wasn’t sure, but it seemed likely! So here I had not just a heap of words, but something more like a map to making sense of a new part of the world.

So I learned the names of all the clouds, but I quickly got bored of most of them. Only one of them held my attention, but it made up for the rest by becoming an obsession. Yes, it was the mighty cumulonimbus, the towering, violent monster that heralds the approach of a thunderstorm. By then I had already met plenty of them — one of my earliest memories is of huddling with my mother in the room of our house that was farthest from any exterior walls, while lightning struck again and again and again, the echoes of the previous thunderclap still reverberating off the landscape when the next one began. What, I wondered, would it be like to be inside one?

There’s one man who knows. His name is Colonel William H. Rankin, and he fell through a thunderstorm and lived to tell the tale. After his ordeal Rankin published a memoir that was a bestseller in the early ’60s, but is out of print today. If you click the Amazon link at the top of this page, you will see that secondhand copies of the paperback edition go for about $150. If that’s too steep for you, I’m told that Good Samaritans communists have uploaded high-quality scans of the book to various nefarious and America-hating websites, but this is a patriotic Substack and we would never condone that sort of behavior. Be warned!

I sought out and read Rankin’s memoir for the part where he falls through a cloud, so I was planning on skimming and/or skipping the hundred or so pages where he narrates his life and career up to that point. When I actually cracked open the pdf legally-purchased paperback, though, I found that I couldn’t. Somehow an artifact from an alien world had fallen into my hands. This was a document from a parallel universe with familiar-sounding people and places, but a totally bizarre worldview and culture.

They say you should read books to broaden yourself, to learn about foreign peoples and about cultures not your own. I was unprepared for late 1950s America being as foreign as it turned out to be. There’s a whole genre comprised of parodying the supposed mid-century American combo of sunny faith in scientific progress, squeaky-clean public morality, and blithe indifference to the horrors of industrial warfare. In my own reading and watching, I had only ever encountered the parodies, never the genuine article, until I read this book. Rankin’s memoir exudes gee-whiz enthusiasm from every pore. He is patriotic without a trace of irony, giddy as a schoolboy about advances in jet propulsion, and then uses a totally unchanged tone of giddiness and enthusiasm to describe melting hundreds of Korean peasants with napalm.

Reading this stuff fills me with the same feeling of vertigo that I get reading about Bronze Age Greek warriors — here is a human being just like me, but inhabiting a cultural, spiritual, and memetic universe so different from mine. Are we the same species? If we were to meet each other would we even be able to communicate? Or perhaps every age has had people like him and people like me, and all that’s changed is that the dominant mode of social interaction shifted from favoring one of us to the other. After all, I know people today who are incapable of irony or reflection. For instance, TSA agents. Was 1950s America an entire society of TSA agents? And if so, what am I to make of the fact that in so many ways it seems to have been more functional than America today?

Geert Wilders

Filed under: Europe, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark Steyn on the suddenly fascinating-to-American-media Dutch politician Geert Wilders, with whom he has had a long association:

Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV).
Photo by Wouter Engler via Wikimedia Commons.

Times are bad, and the respectable chaps are explicit about their eagerness to make them more so — more mass immigration, more green bollocks, more “digital identity”, more “variants” and more “public health”, more mutilation and sterilisation of your middle-schoolers …

This last week I’ve received a bazillion queries demanding to know what I make of Geert Wilders. It’s true that a lot of commentary on his victory is close to witless: in America, he is apparently “the Dutch Trump” — because they’re both, er, blond. As David Reaboi pointed out on Twitter, Wilders has been a thorn in the side of the Dutch state since the days when “Trump was donating to Democrats”. In 2005, when The Donald was still sufficiently “respectable” that Hillary Clinton attended his wedding, Wilders had already been expelled from his party for objecting to Turkish membership of the European Union.

So he’s been at this a long time – and yours truly goes back a long way with him. He did me the great honour of inviting me to write the introduction to his book, Marked for Death, which is a cracking read — not just my bit, but his parts too: Geert writes way better in English than most anglo politicians do. (We have a few copies at the SteynOnline bookstore, and I’ll even sign it for you: the perfect Christmas gift for the “far right” members of your family.)

But here’s the most relevant aspect of how Wilders was ahead of the game. I try not to let my own twelve years in the dank septic tank of Washington pseudo-justice get to me, but, as you know, for me the only salient point about this US election season is that the multitudes of prosecutors and judges of the American state are willing to torture the plain meaning of the nation’s laws in order to get Trump convicted of … something, anything, as long as it gets him banged up in gaol for the rest of his days.

This is the central fact of our increasingly post-democratic age: the criminalisation of political opposition. If you’re in European-style multi-party systems, they’ll deny you bank accounts and seize your kids’ iPads, and if necessary find twenty coppers to jump you in the street. But, if you’re in America’s bloody awful frozen two-party system, the leader of Party A will unleash the resources of the world’s most lavishly funded Deep State on the leader of Party B and persuade anyone around him to cop a plea on crimes they didn’t commit — mainly because those crimes don’t actually exist.

In that sense, rather than Geert being the Dutch Trump, Trump is the American Geert. Until Biden came along, no other settled western democracy had been as zealous as the Netherlands in prosecuting opposition politicians for their policy platforms.

Light Tank Mk IV | Tank Chats #173 | The Tank Museum

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

The Tank Museum
Published 18 Aug 2023

Weighing in at five tons, machine gun armed and with a two-man crew, the Tank, Light, Mk IV was one of a series produced for the British Army by Vickers before World War II, seeing service on the NW Frontier of India. Recently restored, the Mk IV is the oldest running tank in our collection.
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QotD: The tactical problem of attacking WW1 trenches

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The trench stalemate is the result of a fairly complicated interaction of weapons which created a novel tactical problem. The key technologies are machine guns, barbed wire and artillery (though as we’ll see, artillery almost ought to be listed here multiple times: the problems are artillery, machine guns, trenches, artillery, barbed wire, artillery, and artillery), but their interaction is not quite straight-forward. The best way to understand the problem is to walk through an idealized, “platonic form” of an attack over no man’s land and the problems it presents.

[…]

So, the first problem: artillery. Neither side starts the war in trenches. Rather the war starts with large armies, consisting mostly of infantry with rifles, backed up by smaller amounts of cavalry for scouting duties (who typically fight dismounted because this is 1914, not 1814) and substantial amounts of artillery, mostly smaller caliber direct-fire1 guns, maneuvering in the open, trying to do fancy things like flanking and enveloping attacks to win by movement rather than by brute attrition (though it is worth noting that this war of maneuver is also the period of the highest casualties on a per-day basis). The tremendous lethality of those weapons – both rifles that are accurate for hundreds of yards, machine guns that can deny entire areas of the battlefield to infantry and the artillery, which is utterly murderous against any infantry it can see and by far the most lethal part of the equation – all of that demands trenches. Trenches shield the infantry from all of that firepower. So you end up with parallel trenches, typically a few hundred yards apart as the armies settle in to defenses and maneuver breaks down (because the armies are large enough to occupy the entire front from the Alps to the Sea).

The new problem this creates, from the perspective of the defender, is how to defend these trenches. If enemies actually get close to them, they are very vulnerable because the soldier at the top of the trench has a huge advantage against enemies in the trench: he can fire down more easily, can throw grenades down very easily and also has an enormous mechanical advantage if the fight comes to bayonets and trench-knives, which it might. If you end up fighting at the lip of your trench against massed enemy infantry, you have almost certainly already lost. The defensive solution here, of course, are those machine guns which can deploy enough fire to prohibit enemies moving over no man’s land: put a bunch of those in strong-points in your trench line and you can prevent enemy infantry from reaching you.

Now the attacker has the problem: how to prevent the machine guns from making approach impossible. The popular conception here is that WWI generals didn’t “figure out” machine guns for a long time; that’s not quite true. By the end of 1914, most everyone seems to have recognized that attacking into machine guns without some way of shutting them down was futile. But generals who had done their studies already had the ready solution: the way to beat infantry defenses was with artillery and had been for centuries. Light, smaller, direct-fire guns wouldn’t work2 but heavy, indirect-fire howitzers could! Now landing a shell directly in a trench was hard and trenches were already being zig-zagged to prevent shell fragments flying down the whole line anyway, so actually annihilating the defenses wasn’t quite in the cards (though heavy shells designed to penetrate the ground with large high-explosive payloads could heave a hundred meters of trench along with all of their inhabitants up into the air at a stretch with predictably fatal results). But anyone fool enough to be standing out during a barrage would be killed, so your artillery could force enemy gunners to hide in deep dugouts designed to resist artillery. Machine gunners hiding in deep dugouts can’t fire their machine guns at your approaching infantry.

And now we have the “race to the parapet”. The attacker opens with a barrage, which has two purposes: silence enemy artillery (which could utterly ruin the attack if it isn’t knocked out) and second to disable the machine guns: knock out some directly, force the crews of the rest to flee underground. But attacking infantry can’t occupy a position its own artillery is shelling, so there is some gap between when the shells stop and when the attack arrives. In that gap, the defender is going to rush to set up their machine guns while the attacker rushes to get to the lip of the trench:first one to get into position is going to inflict a terrible slaughter on the other.

Now the defender begins to look for ways to slant the race to his advantage. One option is better dugouts and indeed there is fairly rapid development in sophistication here, with artillery-resistant shelters dug many meters underground, often reinforced with lots of concrete. Artillery which could have torn apart the long-prepared expensive fortresses of a few decades earlier struggle to actually kill all of the infantry in such positions (though they can bury them alive and men hiding in a dugout are, of course, not at the parapet ready to fire). The other option was to slow the enemy advance and here came barbed wire. One misconception to clear up here: the barbed wire here is not like you would see on a fence (like an animal pen, or as an anti-climb device at the top of a chain link fence), it is not a single wire or a set of parallel wires. Rather it is set out in giant coils, like massive hay-bales of barbed wire, or else strung in large numbers of interwoven strands held up with wooden or metal posts. And there isn’t merely one line of it, but multiple lines deep. If the attacker goes in with no preparation, the result will be sadly predictable even without machine guns: troops will get stuck at the wire (or worse yet, on the wire) and then get shot to pieces. But even if troops have wire-cutters, cutting the wire and clearing passages through it will still slow them down … and this is a race.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part I: The Trench Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-17.

    1. Direct fire here means the guns fire on a low trajectory; you are more or less pointing them where you want the shell to go and shooting straight at it, as you might with a traditional firearm.

    2. The problem with direct-fire artillery here is that you cannot effectively hide it in a trench (because it’s direct fire) and you can’t keep it well concealed, so in the event of an attack, the enemy is likely to begin by using their artillery to disable your artillery. The limitations of direct-fire guns hit the French particularly hard once the trench stalemate set in, because it reduced the usefulness of their very effective 75mm field gun (the famed “French 75” after which the modern cocktail is named [Forgotten Weapons did a video covering both]). That didn’t make direct-fire guns useless, but it put a lot more importance on much heavier indirect-fire artillery.

November 27, 2023

“A law for which no enforcement mechanism exists is not a law. It is a LARP or a declaration of feeling”

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

Kulak takes on politics and violence:

“Death and Life constrasted … or, an Essay on Man” by Robert Dighton, 1784.
British Museum number 1935,0522.3.55.

The power of any law comes from the fact that armed men stand ready to commit an escalating series of violence against those who do not comply. And even the lightest touch, subtlest “Nudge” laws gain their power via subtly manipulating the circumstances in which violence by state is already applied. (When you fill out the tax form you must fill out or be dragged to prison, this new law will let you fill in a box to receive $200 back if you have a dog … whom the IRS would shoot before taking you to prison if you had not surrendered the money to them in the first place)

To say someone has political power whether a voter, an activist, or a politician … is to say they can effect political outcomes such that they can make violence more or less likely to be exercised against someone.

If your political activism and activity is not connected to any mechanism to commit violence, whether through the states agents, or through an illegal organization … you are not a political actor. You are a “citizen”, “voter”, “activist”, “politician” in the same way the madman at the asylum is “Napoleon”, you may play-act with the symbols of power … but you do not interact with it.

All Political Discussion Terminates in Violence

All discussions of politics is inevitably, and CAN ONLY BE, a conspiracy to commit violence, whether legally through the state, illegally through some form of direct action or “terrorism”, or Stochastically through some impact on the culture or wider discussion which will make the prior two more likely or effect their nature.

If your supposedly political speaking’s have no connection to state or non-state “policy” Ie. Violence … then they are not political. You are engaged in fantasy at best, grovelling at worst.

This is why so many in the safety brigade and regime are not incorrect when they call the political speech of their opponents “Dangerous” or a form of “violence” all political speech is necessarily, by the nature of being political, directed to altering the atmosphere, calculus, mechanisms, and willing committal of state and non-state violence.

.

None of this should be shocking

Clausewitz observed “War is politics by other means”

Vladimir Lenin observed the inverse: “Politics is warfare by other means”

In both they merely restated Hobbes: The state of nature is a state of war and peace is merely an artifice mutually consented to by all sides under a sovereign … which can be unilaterally terminated at will by any party, and rationally must be terminated in any one of a thousand circumstances.

That Rights and Liberties are “Given by God” is a euphemism for the violence and threat implicit in the claims of free men.

The founders saying their rights were “endowed by God”, was no different than Carolus Rex declaring he was “Chosen by Heaven” … It was a euphemism and a flex that their violence and dominance of fate had left them masters of their domain, and that they’d meet any challenge with as much violence as a crusader or Inquisitor would visit upon a heretic challenger.

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