Quotulatiousness

December 12, 2023

On Machiavelli

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

Rob Henderson dips into the works of Niccolo Macchiavelli, not so you don’t have to, but perhaps in hopes you’ll do so as well:

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

This is an overview of Niccolò Machiavelli — his backstory, his personal views, a summary of Machiavellian thought, and an explanation for why his ideas have been so despised throughout history.

Throughout his books, Machiavelli seems to take delight in demonstrating — much to his reader’s discomfort — the distance between our lofty intentions and the actual consequences of our deeds.

Writing in the sixteenth century, Machiavelli anticipated Nietzsche’s conception of master and slave morality by some three hundred years.

In Ch. 15 of The Prince he wrote:

    Since it is my intent to write something useful to whoever understands it, it has appeared to me more fitting to go directly to the effectual truth of things than to the imagination of it … many have imagined republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in truth … he who lets go of what is done for what should be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation.

This passage is often viewed as the essence of Machiavellianism. He had no intentions of disguising unpleasant realities. He wanted to describe the world as it is, and not as people wish it to be.

[…]

Machiavelli rejected the dominant utopian ideas of his day, including Platonic or Augustinian cities of God and the concept of Christian universalism (or its modern variant of Humanism).

Machiavelli warns rulers to be on guard against those who do not see men as they are, and see them through spectacles colored by their hopes and wishes, their loves and hatreds, in terms of an idealized image that they want men to be, and not as they are.

Some pieces of advice Machiavelli offers to rulers:

  • Employ brutality or kindness, as the case requires. Brutality is usually more effective, but kindness, in some situations, bears more fruit
  • It’s better to be feared than loved. Love is fickle, but fear is predictable. The worst is to be hated. Hatred will lead your subjects to destroy you
  • It’s a good idea to keep your people in a state of poverty and always prepared for war. This helps to reduce both ambition and boredom — two qualities that can undermine obedience
  • Fierce competition in a society is desirable, for it generates energy and ambition
  • Religion must be promoted regardless of how truthful it is, because it supplies social solidarity
  • When you confer benefits to the people, make sure to do so yourself. But let minions do the dirty work of inflicting punishments because then they, not you, will be blamed, and you can then gain the people’s favor by cutting off your minions’ heads
  • Men prefer vengeance and security to liberty
  • If you have to commit a crime, don’t advertise it beforehand. Otherwise your enemies may destroy you before you destroy them
  • Punishment should be delivered in a swift and brutal manner, while rewards should be dispersed in small amounts over time
  • Be wary of powerful advisors and servants — victorious generals should be purged after they have served their purpose, otherwise they may attempt to usurp you
  • You can be violent and use your power to command obedience, but if you break your own laws you will undermine societal stability
  • Men should either be caressed or annihilated; appeasement and neutralism always lead to ruin. Your adversaries can recover from minor injuries and setbacks to seek revenge. But if you crush them totally, you neutralize any threat.
  • Rulers must live in the constant expectation of war
  • Success inspires more devotion than friendliness and affability
  • Men will lie to you unless you compel them to be truthful by creating circumstances in which deception will not pay

This list could continue but I’ll stop here.

Canadian politics – if you don’t like something, call it some kind of “genocide”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper on the political mis-use of the technical term “genocide”, to the point that it’s almost become routine to describe something you oppose as a “genocide”:

Victims of genocide
Photo by Cantetik2 via Wikimedia Commons.

In recent weeks, it’s become popular among Canada’s activist groups and even mainstream politicians to accuse Israel of “genocide”. In a since-deleted Thursday evening social media post, for one, NDP MP Don Davies accused Israel of “cultural genocide” against Palestinians. The United Church of Canada has also begun using the g-word in its official literature.

The charge doesn’t hold up on any material grounds. Unlike most genocided people, the Palestinian population has been soaring dramatically ever since the 1960s — all while retaining their traditional language and religion. Israel’s prosecution of its current conflict against Hamas, meanwhile, has featured any number of factors that are markedly out-of-step with an attempted genocide, including detailed evacuation orders and a rate of civilian casualties markedly lower than the global average.

But the charge doesn’t need to make sense, because it turns out Canada has been abusing the term “genocide” for quite some time. Coined amidst the Second World War by Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, “genocide” refers to the intentional destruction of an entire demographic of people.

While the most notable genocides involve systematized mass-murder, it’s not a requirement. As per the official definition struck in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, genocide can also include attempts to erase a people via birth control or indirect methods such as famine. It’s on these grounds that Canada has officially accused China of genocide regarding its Uyghur minority. Although Beijing is not mass-murdering the Uyghurs, they are rounding them up into “re-education” camps and mandating forced sterilization with the explicit intention of destroying the Uyghur way of life.

But among Western academic and activist circles, “genocide” has now been stretched to apply to almost anything, from emissions policy to the ethnic ratios in prisons. Below, a not-at-all comprehensive list of just how much of Canadian life has been accused of being genocidal.

Rolling a Reliant Robin | Top Gear | BBC

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

Top Gear
Published 26 Nov 2010

Jeremy takes the extreme sport of Reliant Robin rolling to the streets of Barnsley, aided by a string of celebrities who just happen to be on hand to help keep the fabled three-wheeler upright.
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QotD: “Natural hierarchies” don’t work in distributed systems

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

This, I think, is a function of something like the Dunbar Number. There IS a “natural hierarchy”, but it only works in person – that is, in a group where everyone interacts face to face. Any given group of humans will naturally sort itself, and again, yeah yeah, I’m not a biologist, but I’ve been to a few bars in my time. If you doubt it, just head down to your local dive and pilot a barstool for a few hours, you’ll see enough basic primate behavior to give Jane Goodall a stiffie.

Politics, being a distributed system, doesn’t work like that. Neither does the corporate world, which is why both invariably end up dominated by sociopathic, sexually deviant shitweasels. Whereas the social interaction in a bar, in a pickup basketball game, in a church group, whatever, naturally bends towards a baboon troop, “social” interaction in a distributed power structure bends towards whoever has the time, energy, and sheer Wille zur Macht, as our friend above would put it, to dominate it.

Example: Even at the height of his power, when he really could have liquidated everyone in the room with a wave of his hand, Joe Stalin didn’t win arguments with his nomenklatura by threatening to have them all shot. Rather, he outworked them. Even when he exercised the most raw power any one human being is capable of wielding, Stalin’s work ethic was legendary – he spent a minimum of fifteen hours a day at his desk, every day, 365 days a year. He simply ground down all lesser men with the sheer force of his leather ass and cast-iron bladder … and compared to Stalin, when it came to paperwork, all men were lesser men.

That’s a cast of mind, reinforced by the habits of a lifetime. Stalin was also a dominant personality by the end, of course, but he certainly didn’t start that way – he was cringingly servile to Lenin, for instance, and even once to Trotsky, which is probably the main reason Trotsky had to die when you come right down to it.

Hitler was the same way, in his own special, bizarre way. While no one would ever accuse Hitler of an overactive work ethic when it comes to government – those who study these things still can’t get their heads around it, the fact that for long, critical periods the Third Reich basically didn’t have a government – but he could wear you down with the best of them when it came to party speeches, organizing, propaganda. No one worked harder at that stuff than Corporal Hitler … and no one knuckled under to authority faster, which is why he remained Corporal Hitler despite four years on the Western Front.

Combine them, and you get the Big Man On Campus thoroughly dominated by the deviant sociopathic shitweasels. The BMOC dominates every personal interaction; therefore, he thinks it’s the rules which get him where he is. Society is set up, he thinks, to produce people such as himself. And since that society is also set up such that the deviant sociopathic shitweasels (we should probably acronymize that; hereafter, DSS) do the boring shit like student government, when the DSS pass some bizarre law the BMOC just rolls with it …

Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.

December 11, 2023

Roman glossary

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I continue to post QotD entries drawn from Bret Devereaux’s fascinating historical blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (with Dr. Devereaux’s kind permission, I hasten to add), the number of specialized terms from the Roman Republic and Empire also expands. As some of these terms pop up in my shorter excerpts without immediate context, I think that a glossary for Rome is called for (similar to the Spartan glossary, as there’s a lot more Roman content coming up, it being Dr. Devereaux’s area of academic specialization) to help explain the terms that I think may need expansion in these excerpts from his longer posts. As usual, most of the information is drawn directly from ACOUP (often from more than one original post) and where I’ve felt the need to interpolate any additional information it will be enclosed in square brackets. Errors and misinterpretations of his original work are purely mine.

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This man built his office inside a lift

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

Tom Scott
Published 28 Aug 2023

The Baťa Skyscraper, in Zlín, Czechia, is a landmark of architecture. And the office of Jan Antonín Baťa … is an elevator.

Thanks to the museum staff for fact-checking and translation!
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QotD: The Palace of Westminster

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

Work outwards from this change and you will begin to have some idea of how much Britain has altered. The bits you don’t or can’t see are as unsettlingly different as those tattoos. Look up instead at the Houses of Parliament, all pinnacles, leaded windows, Gothic courtyards and cloisters, which look to the uninitiated as if they are a medieval survival. In fact they were completed in 1860, and are newer than the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The only genuinely ancient part — not used for any governing purpose — is the astonishing chilly space of Westminster Hall, faintly redolent of the horrible show trial of King Charles I, still an awkward moment in the national family album. But those who chose the faintly unhinged design wanted to make a point about the sort of country Britain then was, and they were very successful. Gothic meant monarchy, Christianity, and conservatism. Classical meant republican, pagan, and revolutionary, and mid-Victorian Britain was thoroughly wary of such things, so Gothic was chosen and the Roman Catholic genius Augustus Welby Pugin let loose upon the design. Wherever you are in the building, it is hard to escape the feeling of being either in a church, or in a country house just next to a church. The very chimes of the bell tower were based upon part of Handel’s great air from The Messiah: “I know that my Redeemer liveth”.

I worked for some years in this odd place. It is by law a Royal Palace, so nobody was ever officially allowed to die on the premises, in case the death had to be inquired into by some fearsome, forgotten tribunal, perhaps a branch of Star Chamber. Those who appeared to have deceased were deemed to be still alive and hurried to a nearby hospital where life could be pronounced extinct and an ordinary inquest held. We were also exempt from the alcohol laws that used in those days to keep most bars shut for a lot of the time, and if the drinks were not free they were certainly amazingly cheap.

In my years of wandering its corridors and lobbies, of hanging about for late-night votes and dozing in committee rooms, I came to loathe British politics and to mistrust the special regiment of journalists (far too close to their sources) who write about it. I had hoped for a kingdom of the mind and found a squalid pantry in which greasy, unprincipled deals were made by people who were no better than they ought to be.

But I came to love the building. Once you had got past the police sentinels, who knew who everyone was, you could go everywhere, even the thrilling ministerial corridor behind the Speaker’s chair, from which Prime Ministers emerged to face what was then the genuine ordeal of Parliamentary questions, twice a week. There was a rifle range beneath the House of Lords, set up during World War I to make sure honorable members of both Houses would be able to shoot Germans accurately if they ever met any. There was a room where they did nothing but prepare vast quantities of cut flowers, and which perfumed the flagstone corridor in which it lay. There was a convivial staff bar (known to few) where the beer was the best in the building and politicians in trouble would hide from their colleagues. The Lords had a whole half of the Palace, with lovely murals illustrating noble moments of our history, and the Chief Whip’s cosy, panelled office where reporters would be summoned once a week for dangerous gossip and perilously large glasses of whisky or very dry sherry, generously refilled. And high up in the roof, looking down over the murky Thames, was the room where the government briefed us, in meetings whose existence we were sworn never to reveal. Now they are pretty much public, so the real briefings must happen somewhere else, I suppose.

Peter Hitchens, “An Empty Parliament”, First Things, 2017-10-03.

December 10, 2023

“The peasants are revolting!”

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

Chris Bray says we’re back to aristocracy:

What do Americans think of vitriolic language directed at government?

Remember that Superior Court Judge William Fahey has just tentatively ruled, in a First Amendment lawsuit over the decision by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health to forbid public comments on its social media posts, that the county has not engaged in viewpoint discrimination, because the public is yucky:

Comments were closed to the public because many were “extreme” and vitriolic; therefore, no First Amendment violation has occurred. Government cannot discriminate against your viewpoint if your viewpoint is extreme, or if it’s expressed too strongly; the First Amendment only protects inoffensive expression.

The lowest-hanging fruit for the counterargument is all in New York Times Company v. Sullivan, in which a quite liberal Supreme Court repeatedly and very clearly spelled out the American standard for the criticism of government. Justice Arthur Goldberg, in a concurring opinion: “In my view, the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution afford to the citizen and to the press an absolute, unconditional privilege to criticize official conduct despite the harm which may flow from excesses and abuses”.

This is how the Supreme Court showed up in 1964 to start thinking about a case involving the limits of speech about public officials; as Justice William Brennan, Jr. wrote in the majority opinion, “we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

Compare that conclusion to the argument that government has not engaged in viewpoint discrimination, because it banned comments only in the context of being addressed with vitriol. We didn’t say we didn’t didn’t like their viewpoint; we just said that their opinions were too extreme.

But here’s the important thing about New York Times Company v. Sullivan: it’s a history lesson. The majority opinion quotes James Madison and John Stuart Mill, and examines debates over public speech in the early republic. Looking at the national past and its political sources, they saw only the idea that government officials may properly be addressed with whatever degree of firmness citizens choose to apply. American politics were never polite, and were never thought to be. The tumult of a democratic republic, Tocqueville wrote, “begins in the lowest ranks of the people”, storming the seats of government to shout their disapproval:

“… if he happens by chance to become heated”. That wasn’t pathology or exception; a French observer touring America thought that heated denunciations of government were signs of … a weekday. A scholar of early American politics has written colorfully about the way national officials limited the aggressiveness of attacks on their character: they shot each other, or threatened to.

Can the Americans Stop the Kamikazes? – WW2 – Week 276 – December 9, 1944

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

World War Two
Published 9 Dec 2023

This is a very busy week of the war. In the west, the Americans manage to reach the Roer River in force, but haven’t taken any of its dams; in Italy, the Allies liberate Ravenna; the Soviet advance in Hungary continues, and the Soviets even set up a new Hungarian government; martial law is declared in Greece; the Japanese make a corridor to Indochina; the fighting on Leyte continues, and the kamikaze menace becomes ever more worrisome.

00:00 INTRO
01:10 British intelligence failure
01:55 Allies reach the Roer River
05:35 Problems with Devers’ 6th Army Group
07:41 Allies liberate Ravenna
08:50 Soviet advances in Hungary
12:10 Soviets set up a new Hungarian government
13:47 A deadly demonstration and martial law in Greece
18:33 Japanese establish a corridor to Indochina
19:59 Leyte and kamikaze attacks
23:45 CONCLUSION
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The history of the steam engine … but interactive

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

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes is pleased to announce the release of a new ongoing project to illustrate the steam engine in an interactive format:

I’m excited to announce something I’ve been quietly working on for a few months now behind the scenes. Some of you may be familiar with the explorable interactive articles of Bartosz Ciechanowski. They are so clearly written and so cleverly explorable, that they give an intuitive grasp of how many very complicated technologies work. My favourite is his article on mechanical watches. Be warned: if you’ve not seen these before, you’re about to lose a good few hours.

But his article on watches — which came out just as I was doing some research on the development of watches, and which proved an invaluable reference work — got me thinking about how great it would be to have something similar not just for how current technologies function, but to show how they changed over time. Wouldn’t it be great, I dreamed, to have a similarly intuitive way to explore and appreciate the process of improvement. And to correct lots of misapprehensions about the development of various technologies along the way.

As it turned out, my fellow inventions history fanatic Jason Crawford, who runs the non-profit The Roots of Progress, had been thinking along the same lines. (Drumroll starts softly.) So with the help of the Matt Brown we’ve been able to realise what is hopefully just the first small step of our vision. (Drumroll intensifies.) Based on my recent work re-writing the standard pre-history of the steam engine (drumroll crescendoes), allow me to present:

(Cue trumpets!)

The interactive, animated, **Origins of the Steam Engine**

Alongside contemporary illustrations of the many devices, you can play around with the animated models, dragging them to see them from different angles. It introduces what are so far the only interactive and animated models yet made of a great many devices — from Philo of Byzantium’s 3rd Century BC experiments, to Salomon de Caus’s 1610s solar-activated and self-replenishing fountains and musical instruments, and the 1606 steam engine of the Spanish engineer Jerónimo de Ayanz y Beaumont:

It also contains the first depictions of the 1630s and 40s devices of Kaspar Kalthoff and William Petty. These are the experiments I discovered about a year ago, which I hope will now be given a place in the canon of the history of the steam engine. (You can read my discussion of the evidence I’d stumbled across about them here.)

Engines of War: How Wars Were Won and Lost on the Railways

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Military, Railways, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

WW2TV
Published 15 Jun 2023

Engines of War: How Wars Were Won and Lost on the Railways With Christian Wolmar

Before the nineteenth century, armies had to rely on slow and unreliable methods of transportation to move soldiers and equipment during times of conflict. But with the birth of the railroad in the early 1830s, the way wars were fought would change forever. In this show renowned expert Christian Wolmar tells the story of that transformation with a focus on railways in WWII and especially the Normandy campaign.

Christian Wolmar is a British journalist, author, railway historian and Labour Party politician. He is known for his commentary on transport, especially as a pundit on Britain’s railway industry, and was named Transport Journalist of the Year in the National Transport Awards in 2007.
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QotD: Roman citizenship

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

As with other ancient self-governing citizen bodies, the populus Romanus (the Roman people – an idea that was defined by citizenship) restricted political participation to adult citizen males (actual office holding was further restricted to adult citizen males with military experience, Plb. 6.19.1-3). And we should note at the outset that citizenship was stratified both by legal status and also by wealth; the Roman Republic openly and actively counted the votes of the wealthy more heavily than those of the poor, for instance. So let us avoid the misimpression that Rome was an egalitarian society; it was not.

The most common way to become a Roman citizen was by birth, though the Roman law on this question is more complex and centers on the Roman legal concept of conubium – the right to marry and produce legally recognized heirs under Roman law. Conubium wasn’t a right held by an individual, but a status between two individuals (though Roman citizens could always marry other Roman citizens). In the event that a marriage was lawfully contracted, the children followed the legal status of their father; if no lawfully contracted marriage existed, the child followed the status of their mother (with some quirks; Ulpian, Reg. 5.2; Gaius, Inst. 1.56-7 – on the quirks and applicability in the Republic and conubium in general, see S.T. Roselaar, “The Concept of Conubium in the Roman Republic” in New Frontiers: Law and Society in the Roman World, ed. P.J. du Plessis (2013)).

Consequently the children of a Roman citizen male in a legal marriage would be Roman citizens and the children of a Roman citizen female out of wedlock would (in most cases; again, there are some quirks) be Roman citizens. Since the most common way for the parentage of a child to be certain is for the child to be born in a legal marriage and the vast majority of legal marriages are going to involve a citizen male husband, the practical result of that system is something very close to, but not quite exactly the same as, a “one parent” rule (in contrast to Athens’ two-parent rule). Notably, the bastard children of Roman women inherited their mother’s citizenship (though in some cases, it would be necessarily, legally, to conceal the status of the father for this to happen, see Roselaar, op. cit., and also B. Rawson, “Spruii and the Roman View of Illegitimacy” in Antichthon 23 (1989)), where in Athens, such a child would have been born a nothos and thus a metic – resident non-citizen foreigner.

The Romans might extend the right of conubium with Roman citizens to friendly non-citizen populations; Roselaar (op. cit.) argues this wasn’t a blanket right, but rather made on a community-by-community basis, but on a fairly large scale – e.g. extended to all of the Campanians in 188 B.C. Importantly, Roman colonial settlements in Italy seem to pretty much have always had this right, making it possible for those families to marry back into the citizen body, even in cases where setting up their own community had caused them to lose all or part of their Roman citizenship (in exchange for citizenship in the new community).

The other long-standing way to become a Roman citizen was to be enslaved by one and then freed. An enslaved person held by a Roman citizen who was then freed (or manumitted) became a libertus (or liberta), by custom immediately the client of their former owner (this would be made into law during the empire) and by law a Roman citizen, although their status as a freed person barred them from public office. Since they were Roman citizens (albeit with some legal disability), their children – assuming a validly contracted marriage – would be full free-born Roman citizens, with no legal disability. And, since freedmen and freedwomen were citizens, they also could contract valid marriages with other Roman citizens, including freeborn ones […]. While most enslaved people in the Roman world had little to no hope of ever being manumitted (enslaved workers, for instance, on large estates far from their owners), Roman economic and social customs functionally required a significant number of freed persons and so a meaningful number of new Roman citizens were always being minted in the background this way. Rome’s apparent liberality with admission into citizenship seems to have been a real curiosity to the Greek world.

These processes thus churned in the background, minting new Romans on the edges of the populus Romanus who subsequently became full members of the Roman community and thus shared fully in the Roman legal identity.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.

December 9, 2023

The coming Micro-Macro culture war … and who’s going to win it

Filed under: Business, Economics, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia outlines the dismal state of the “macro” culture — television, movies, newspapers, book publishing and all the big corporations that control them — with the dynamism of the “micro” culture:

In the beginning, all culture was microculture.

You knew what was happening in your tribe or village. But your knowledge of the wider world was limited.

So you had your own songs and your own stories. You had your own rituals and traditions. You even had your own language.

But all these familiar things disappeared when you went off into the world. That was dangerous, however. That’s why only heroes, in traditional stories, go on journeys.

You learn on the journey. But you might not survive.

But all that changed long before I was born.

In my childhood, everything was controlled by a monoculture. There were only three national TV networks, but they were pretty much the same.

    When I went to the office, back then, we had all watched the same thing on TV the night before. We had all seen the same movie the previous weekend. We had all heard the same song on the radio while driving to work.

The TV shows were so similar that they sometimes moved from CBS to NBC, and you never noticed a change. The newscasters also looked pretty much the same and always talked the same — with that flat Midwestern accent that broadcasters always adopted in the US.

The same monoculture controlled every other creative idiom. Six major studios dominated the film business. And just as Hollywood controlled movies, New York set the rules in publishing. Everything from Broadway musicals to comic books was similarly concentrated and centralized.

The newspaper business was still local, but most cities had 2 or 3 daily newspapers — and much of the coverage they offered was interchangeable. Radio was a little more freewheeling, but eventually deregulation allowed huge corporations to acquire and standardize what happened over the airwaves. [NR: I suspect the “freewheeling” went away once the government started imposing regulations, and the corporate consolidation was enabled when they “deregulated” the radio licensing regime several decades later.]

When I went to work in an office, back then, we had all watched the same thing on TV the night before. We had all seen the same movie the previous weekend. We had all heard the same song on the radio while driving to work.

And that’s why smart people back then paid attention to the counterculture.

The counterculture might be crazy or foolish or even boring. But it was still your only chance to break out of the monolithic macroculture.

Many of the art films I saw at the indie cinema were awful. But I still kept coming back — because I needed the fresh air these oddball movies provided. For the same reason, I read the alt weekly newspapers and kept tabs on alt music.

In fact, whenever I saw the word alt, I paid attention.

That doesn’t mean that I hated the major TV networks, or the large daily newspaper, or 20th Century Fox. But I craved access to creative and investigative work that hadn’t been approved by people in suits working for large organizations.

The Internet should have changed all this. And it did — but not much. Even now the collapse in the monoculture is still in its early stages.

But that’s about to change.

If you don’t pay close attention, the media landscape seems pretty much the same now as it did in the 1990s. The movie business is still controlled in Hollywood. The publishing business is still controlled in New York. The radio stations are still controlled by a few large companies. And instead of three national TV networks plus PBS, we have four dominant streaming platforms — who control almost 70% of the market.

So we still live in a macro culture. But it feels increasingly claustrophobic. Or even worse, it feels dead.

Meanwhile, a handful of Silicon Valley platforms (Google, Facebook, etc.) have become more powerful than the New York Times or Hollywood studios or even Netflix. It’s not even close — the market capitalization of Google’s parent Alphabet is now almost ten times larger than Disney’s.

But here’s the key point — these huge tech companies rely on the microculture for their dominance.

Where is Facebook without users contributing photos, text and video? Where is Google’s YouTube without individual creators?

In terms of economic growth or audience capture, the microculture has already won the war. But it doesn’t feel that way.

Why not?

First and foremost, Silicon Valley is a reluctant home for the microculture. To some extent Alphabet and Facebook are even going to war with microculture creators — they try to make money with them even while they punish them.

  • So Mark Zuckerberg needs creators, but won’t even let them put a live link on Instagram and limits their visibility on Facebook and Threads.
  • Alphabet needs creators to keep YouTube thriving, but gives better search engine visibility to total garbage that pays for placement.
  • Twitter also claims it wants to support independent journalists — but if you’re truly independent from Elon Musk, your links are brutally punished by the algorithm.

This tension won’t go away, and next year it will get worse. The microculture will increasingly find itself at war with the same platforms they rely on today.

And legacy media and non-profits are even more hostile to emerging media. Go see who wins Pulitzer Prizes, and count how many journalists on alternative platforms get honored.

I’ll save you the trouble. They don’t.

All those (officially unexplained) “excess” mortalities

Filed under: Australia, Europe, Health — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Mark Steyn discusses European and Antipodean statistical reports that echo what Maxime Bernier was talking about the other day on the as-yet officially unexplained huge rise in “excess mortality” since the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

We are now three years into the administration of the Covid vaccines, and we have many startling statistical anomalies, including the most basic one of all: a huge mound of extra corpses. Per the EU’s official statistics agency:

    Among the eighteen EU Member States that recorded excess deaths, the highest rates were in Cyprus (13.9%), Finland (13.4%), the Netherlands (12.7%) and Ireland (12.5%).

Those percentages are sufficiently high that in the Netherlands, formerly one of the healthiest nations on earth, they’re reducing life expectancy. The ongoing excess deaths are at odds with the normal post-pandemic pattern, such as the Spanish Flu a century ago. The intro to this new scientific paper sets out what’s meant to be happening:

    Our approach takes into account age and gender, but also under-mortality that you would expect after a period of excess mortality.

“Under-mortality” occurs because, if the Spanish Flu killed you prematurely in 1920, you weren’t around to die when you otherwise would have done in 1924. Hence, excess mortality is followed by under-mortality. So:

    If this under-mortality does not seem to be happening, it is actually hidden excess mortality.

That’s an important point. What Eurostat identifies as an excess mortality rate in Ireland of 12.5 per cent is, as a practical matter, actually higher – because it should be measured against not the pre-Covid baseline but the under-mortality one would have expected four years on. So persistent excess mortality is deeply weird, and, unlike those killed by the virus (where the median age of death by Covid is above most developed nations’ life expectancy), the extra deaths, as we have discussed on The Mark Steyn Show, are skewed towards the young and middle-aged:

    We note that excess mortality in the Netherlands remains consistently high during 2020-2022 and has shifted from high to low age and towards men.

In other words, it’s not a general trend of excess deaths, but something more particular. Which, in a normal environment, would suggest something particular is causing it. Aside from excess deaths in “low age”, we also have excess deaths at no age – the babies who aren’t being born. The western world’s jabbed and re-jabbed citizenry has seen a catastrophic slump in newborns. Scandinavia:

    The whole region reported sharp declines in fertility rates in 2022. Finland had the lowest fertility rate of all Nordic countries, 1.32 children. This is also the lowest Finnish rate since 1776 when monitoring of fertility rates first started.

Incidentally, that Finnish rate – of 1.3 children per woman – is what demographers call “lowest-low fertility”, from which no society has ever recovered.

Fortunately for officialdom, there was enough Covid circulating in Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, etc that the ever higher mountain of corpses can be shrugged off as most likely “Long Covid” or maybe, if necessary, “Extra-Long Covid”. In the Antipodes, they can’t get away with that. Australia and New Zealand enacted some of the most draconian public-health measures on the planet, and in effect quarantined their entire nations. As a result, pre-Omicron they had all but negligible accounts of Covid. But they obediently submitted themselves to the mass vaccination regime. And, whaddaya know, they too have extraordinary rates of excess death.

Clare Craig, a favourite guest of The Mark Steyn Show, has published a detailed analysis of the post-vaccination years Down Under. It makes for sober reading.

In 2021, for example, they had officially 1,224 deaths from Covid.

But also in 2021 – the first full year of the vaccines – they had 876 excess deaths from ischaemic heart disease alone. Plus another 583 excess deaths from other cardiac diseases.

Death by ischaemic heart disease had been in decline in Australia in the pre-vaccine years, but, having shot up in 2021, it went up even further in 2022. (Same trend with strokes.) So, having shut down the country for those 1,224 Covid deaths, you would think the public health bureaucracy might show a smidgeonette of interest in those 1,359 excess cardiac deaths.

But apparently not.

Now, across the Tasman Sea, we have a Kiwi whistleblower, Barry Young, who has released an avalanche of data with some quite disturbing takeaways that I referenced on Wednesday’s Clubland Q&A. I was careful to qualify my remarks with a lot of “ifs”, but our friend Norman Fenton, Professor of Risk Information Management at Queen Mary University, has taken a look and The Conservative Woman has published his findings. I see that on the Internet the kneejerk reaction was that Mr Young had simply leaked a lot of vaccination stuff from the old folks’ homes where the Covid centenarians would have died anyway. So it’s a biased sample.

In reality, it does not appear to be a “sample” at all:

    [Steve Kirsch] says that there are widespread misunderstandings about the data and it is not biased. For a start he says that the dataset is the complete set of ‘pay-per-dose’ vaccination records and therefore there is no biased sampling at all. He says:

    “The people within the group is representative of the total population. There are 2.2 million people in the group, and there are 4 million records. Each of those records is a Vaccination Record.”

2.2 million is over forty per cent of the population of New Zealand. That’s some “sample”. Nevertheless, Professor Fenton is being scrupulously cautious:

    Even accounting for inevitable “survivor bias” (the more jabs a person gets, the quicker they are likely to die after their last jab) there was some evidence of increased risk the more doses a person gets. Moreover, given Steve’s comments about the datatset being the complete set of “pay-per-dose” vaccination records, this conclusion seems robust even if there were a biased proportion of vaccinee deaths in the dataset. Also (as per my above quote in Steve’s presentation) I felt that the data provided further support for the hypothesis that the vaccine was increasing the mortality rate in the older population (something which we had already concluded based on the most recent ONS data).

It’s interesting that such questions never come up at Britain’s official “Covid inquiry” which is increasingly risible in its palpable determination to find that the only mistake that was made was not to lock down harder and faster.

The other takeaway mentioned by Professor Fenton is the fatality rate of individual batches. Take a look at this handy graph:

I suppose it would be possible to argue that all 711 jabs of Batch #1 were administered to residents of the Shady Acres Retirement Home for Centenarians with Stage Four Ebola. But it’s difficult to make the same case with Batch #62 which went into the arms of 18,173 New Zealanders and killed 831 of them. Which, all by itself, is two hundred times the country’s official death toll from the vaccines. Which is to say, according to His Majesty’s Government in Wellington, precisely four Kiwis are dead of the vax.

Venezuela’s renewed imperialism

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Like many of us, Colby Cosh is trying to figure out what’s going on in Venezuela these days, as the government “won” a plebiscite to push its long-standing claim for a huge chunk of next-door neighbour Guyana’s territory:

Map showing the two disputed land areas of Guyana. The red region is disputed with Venezuela (Guayana Esequiba) and the yellow region is disputed with Suriname (Tigri or New River Triangle)
Map by SurinameCentral via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve been plunging into the weeds — as some of my readers perhaps are — trying to figure out why Venezuela is trying to take over three-quarters of the land area of neighbouring Guyana. I mean, yes, duh, the simple answer is “oil”. The relevant part of Guyana — the sparsely populated, heavily Indigenous Essequibo region west of the river of the same name — has been claimed by Venezuela with varying degrees of vigour and indignation since it became independent from Spain. In the last decade or so, it has come to light there is abundant oil beneath the continental shelf belonging to the Essequibo area.

It might, in fact, be enough oil to make Guyana the world’s largest crude producer in a manner of months. Such an event would almost certainly create an unbearable crisis for the radical-left Venezuelan government, which has fouled up its own oil industry, obliterated its currency and created the single largest refugee crisis in the recorded history of the Americas. And so, the North Korea of the Western Hemisphere is suddenly behaving in an awfully warlike — one might say imperialistic — manner towards a tiny neighbour. Which is, in turn, why the United States is rattling the sabre in Guyana’s defence.

The basic situation in the Essequibo region in the centuries after Columbus was that the territory de jure belonged to Spain but was often really in the hands of Dutch mariners and colonists. There was a long cycle of Dutch incursion and Spanish retaliation. Venezuela inherited and pursued the Spanish claims upon independence — originally as part of the Republic of Gran Colombia (1811) and then as a sovereign state unto itself (1830). Britain gained the Dutch territory in the Napoleonic Wars and incorporated Essequibo into the unified colony of British Guiana in 1831.

The two countries recognized that they had a big disagreement over where the Venezuela-British Guiana border might actually lie. But Venezuela wasn’t in a position to pick a fight with the British Empire, and British public opinion couldn’t be convinced to care very much about the problem. The two countries kicked the can down the road and mutually agreed not to colonize the area.

Fast-forward a bit: in the 1870s, gold was discovered in the disputed zone, waaay over toward the Venezuelan side, and in the 19th century, gold meant a gold rush. British and American privateers started turning up with shovels and pickaxes in the interior, sovereignty be damned. Venezuela eventually began to lobby the U.S. executive branch for redress, reminding American politicians of their precious Monroe Doctrine (which was technically incompatible with the existence of a “British Guiana”). Britain, coming under uncomfortable diplomatic pressure, agreed to submit the border question to neutral arbitration.

And here we come to the heart of the quarrel. The U.S. and Britain set up an arbitration panel of the classic 19th-century kind — the same kind of panel, in fact, that fixed up much of the U.S.-Canada border during the same period. This panel had two American Supreme Court justices representing Venezuelan interests; two equally high-ranking British judges; and a neutral fifth man borrowed from the Russian Empire — the Estonian international-law scholar Friedrich Martens (1845-1909). Throughout the 19th century, Russia had often been used in this way by western powers as an honest broker, and arbitration was seen as a universal means of peaceful dispute resolution — the great hope of the world’s future.

And yet, like what seems to be every border dispute in South America since the Spanish skedaddled, an agreement doesn’t seem to last more than the lifetime of one of the governments that negotiated it and some of them aren’t even that durable. Ed Nash has a video summarizing the economic and military state of affairs that helps explain why this dispute is potentially of global concern.

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