John: … I think my favorite big picture thing about the Roberts book [Napoleon the Great] is the way it cuts through two centuries of Anglophone ignorance and really shows you why the continent flung itself at this man’s feet. The pop culture image of Napoleon as this little bumbling dictator is so clearly a deliberate mystification by the perfidious British who felt inadequate in the shadow of this guy they (barely) beat.
Remember, the real Napoleon was so impressive he literally caused a crisis in 19th century philosophy! Everybody had carefully worked out their little theories, later exemplified by Tolstoy, about how human agency doesn’t matter in history and everything is just the operation of vast impersonal forces like the grinding of tectonic plates, and then boom this guy shows up and the debate springs to life again. You know it’s real when two guys as different as Nietzsche and Dostoevsky are both grappling with what we can learn from somebody’s existence. And I think Raskolnikov’s unhealthy Napoleon fanboyism was supposed to be a bit of a satire of some very real intellectual currents among the European and Russian intelligentsia.
So what do you think? Does Napoleon vindicate the great man theory of history? I’m still working out my own answer to this, which I briefly allude to in my review of Zhuchkovsky’s book. Basically, I think we can transcend the traditional dichotomy by constructing a political/military analogue of the Schumpeter/Kirzner theory of entrepreneurship. Vast, impersonal forces (such as technological progress or structural economic changes) can create opportunities — in fact they’re pretty much the only thing that can, because the force required to reconfigure society is usually far beyond what any person or group can manage.
But once the opportunity is there, it takes a lot less raw power to act on it, assuming you can recognize it. Imagine a process of continental drift that slowly, slowly raises a mountain-sized boulder out of the ground, and every year it’s inching closer to this precipice, until finally it teeters on the edge. A human being could never have done that, it would be far too heavy, but once it’s up there, there might be a narrow window, a few precious moments, when a solid shove by somebody sufficiently perceptive and motivated can direct and harness this unimaginable force.
So the question is: what made Europe so ripe for Disruption (TM) at that moment? Obviously the French Revolution, and there were some pretty important changes in the nature of warfare too. What else?
Jane: Well, you know what I’m going to say: it’s the Enlightenment, stupid.
I was going to compare Napoleon to, say, Odoacer, but I don’t think the analogy actually holds. The Goths were conquerors from outside; their approach, their whole worldview, was very different from the Romans’.1 But Napoleon is extremely inside. The people he comes from are not actually all that different from the ancien régime — they’re feuding hill clans, but they’re aristocratic feuding hill clans — and yet he’s so thoroughly a creature of Enlightenment modernity that even when he’s engaging in the time-honored feuding hill clan pastime of resisting integration by the metropole he’s doing it by writing pamphlets. He might be a Corsican nationalist but he’s been intellectually colonized by France. Or, more accurately, by the elements of French culture that are in the process of undermining and overthrowing it.
I think you’re right about political entrepreneurship. (So here we see the Psmiths wimp out and answer the great man/impersonal force dichotomy “yes”.) It’s perhaps more neatly summed up by that famous Napoleon quip: “I saw the crown of France lying on the ground, so I picked it up with my sword”. Which: based. But also, if we’re going to continue his metaphor, he didn’t knock the crown onto the ground. Everything was already irredeemably broken before he got there. And this, I think, distinguishes him from the Germanic conquerors, who found something teetering and gave it a final push. Caesar, similarly, came up in the old order but dealt it its death blow.
But back to the Enlightenment: the crown is on the ground because the culture that held it up has fallen apart, and it’s fallen apart because gestating in its innards was an entirely different culture that’s finally burst its skin like a parasitic wasp and emerged into the light of day. A lazy reading of history sees Napoleon with a crown giving people titles and building palaces and goes “ooh, look, he’s just like the ancien régime“, but this is dumb. Napoleon is obsessed with modernizing and streamlining. He wants to wipe away the accumulated cruft of a thousand years of European history and build something smarter and cleaner and more rational. He’s just better at organization and psychology than the revolutionaries were. The French Revolution (and the total failure of the Directory) created the material conditions, but the entire intellectual milieu that made the French Revolution possible also made it possible for people to look at Napoleon and go “whoa, nice”.
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Napoleon the Great, by Andrew Roberts”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-21.
1. There’s some very interesting stuff on this, and about later efforts from both cultures to bridge the gap, in Bryan Ward-Perkins’ The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization.
June 16, 2024
QotD: Napoleon Bonaparte – the great man?
June 15, 2024
In Germany, it can be dangerous to “participat[e] in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembl[e] one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources”
German government control over what people can say online seems like something Justin Trudeau would love to have (and, in fact, is working toward) here in Canada:
Almost two years ago, on 26 July 2022, a German Twitter user known only as MicLiberal posted a thread that culminated in his criminal trial this week. His is but the latest in a long line of such prosecutions – the tactic our rulers increasingly favour to intimidate and harass those who use their freedom of expression in inconvenient ways.
MicLiberal committed his alleged offence as Germany was still awakening from months of hypervaccination insanity. Science authorities and politicians had spent the winter decrying the “tyranny of the unvaccinated“, demanding that “we have to take care of the unvaccinated, and … make vaccination compulsory“, firing people who protested institutional vaccine mandates on social media and denouncing the unvaccinated for ongoing virus restrictions and Covid deaths. Our neighbour, Austria, even went so far as to impose a specific lockdown on those who refused the Covid vaccines. Culturally and politically, those were the darkest months I have ever lived through; they changed my life forever and I will never forget them.
MicLiberal’s thread aimed only to memorialise some of the crazy things the vaccinators had said. It opened with this tweet:
We were complicit!
We marginalised, defamed, discredited, insulted and cancelled people. On behalf of science!
By popular demand, this brief thread with statements that should not be forgotten:
There ensued nothing but a series of citations, most of them wholly typical samples of vintage 2021/22 vaccinator rhetoric, much of it not even that remarkable. For example, MicLiberal included this statement from Andreas Berholz, deputy editor-in-chief of the widely read blog Der Volksverpetzer:
Fact-check: The unvaccinated remain the main drivers of the pandemic.
[…]
You might be wondering what crime MicLiberal can possibly have committed by drawing attention to these already-public statements. The most honest answer is that his thread achieved millions of views in a matter of days, and at a very awkward moment – precisely when everyone was beginning to regret all the illiberal and wildly intemperate things they had said in the depths of the virus craze. He had embarrassed some very vain and powerful people with their own incredibly stupid words, and today many are of the opinion that that ought to be a crime in and of itself.
Alas, things have not yet deteriorated that far. Thus the police and prosecutors were left to scour our dense thicket of laws for a more plausible offence. They decided that their best chance lay with a novel provision of the German Criminal Code (Paragraph 126a). This provision makes it a crime to “disseminate the personal data of another person in a matter that is … intended to expose this person … to the risk of a criminal offence directed against them“. On 28 July, two days after MicLiberal posted his 25 tweets, Cologne police filed a criminal complaint against him, and afterwards the Cologne prosecutor’s office brought charges, arguing that MicLiberal had suggested that the people he cited were “perpetrators” and therefore associated them with “fascism”. The district court declined to approve the charges, but the prosecutors appealed to the regional court, where the judges saw things differently. They believed that a prosecution was warranted because of the “heated social debate” surrounding Covid measures, and because MicLiberal’s audience was composed of “homogeneous” like-minded people, who (in the summary of the Berliner Zeitung) “could either form groups or encourage individual members to commit acts of violence”. MicLiberal had furthermore assembled his citations from a website that the judges deemed guilty of an “anti-government orientation”.
We must take a moment to ponder this truly amazing argumentation, which would seem to criminalise such things as participating in the wrong discussions before the wrong kind of people and assembling one’s (wholly accurate) data from the wrong sources. In each of these cases, of course, it is the prosecutors and the judges eager to apply Paragraph 126a to their political opponents who get to decide what is “wrong”.
The good news in all of this is that the court acquitted him of these creative charges, but the prosecution has given notice that they intend to appeal.
W.H.O. the hell do they think they are?
Christopher Snowden on what he calls a “new low” for the World Health Organization (WHO) in a report issued earlier this week that sounds like Karl Marx was one of the writers:
The WHO European Region published a new report today, written mostly by British ‘public health’ academics. It is quite revealing. For example …
This requires, at a minimum, that governments recognize that the primary interest of all major corporations is profit and, hence, regardless of the product they sell, their interests do not align with either public health or the broader public interest. Any policy that could impact their sales and profits is therefore a threat, and they should play no role in the development of that policy. Similarly, governments must also recognize the now overwhelming evidence (see also chapters 4, 6 and 7) that HHIs [“health-harming industries”] engage in the same political and scientific practices as tobacco companies and that voluntary or multistakeholder partnership approaches do not work where conflicts of interest exist. Instead, they must regulate other HHIs [“health-harming industries”], their products and practices, as they do tobacco.
That’s just one paragraph, but there’s a lot it in.
Firstly, they are clearly not just opposed to “health-harming industries” but to private industry and the free market in general.
Secondly, they want to exclude all industries from the policy-making process, as already happens with the tobacco industry.
Thirdly, they want to regulate all “health-harming industries” in the same way as they regulate tobacco. These industries include alcohol, food and fossil fuels, but the report also mentions pharmaceuticals, infant formula, gambling, firearms, healthcare (!) and sugary drinks. As the quote above makes clear, they think that all private industry damages health in some way.
This is all there in black and white and there is much more of the same in the report. This is not scaremongering or the slippery slope fallacy. It is in an official WHO document.
When people show you who they are, believe them.
I have written about this for The Critic …
If this sounds to you like Bolshie talk, you might be onto something. It is further confirmation that the modern “public health” movement is an arm of the hard left presented as an arm of medicine. It would be tempting to tell the authors to stay in their lane, but anti-capitalist nanny statism is their lane. For over a decade, such academics, mostly from Britain and Australia, have been pumping out studies about the “commercial determinants of health” and the “corporate political activity” of “unhealthy commodity industries”. The new WHO report is a sort of greatest hits collection. Last year they published a whole series of articles in the Lancet in which they claimed that there is “growing evidence that neoliberalism has been damaging to health” and called for “a normative shift away from harmful consumptogenic systems”.
Half-baked Marxist rhetoric has been rife in the social sciences for decades, but these people have a vaguely coherent point to make and are pursuing a serious, if terrifying, agenda. Since they do not believe in human agency, they assume that people only make “unhealthy choices”, such as eating processed ham, because the system that controls them has been rigged by big corporations. They say in today’s report that “consumers do not have capacity (time or resources) to make the ‘right’ choice”. Fortunately, public health academics know what the right choice is and could impose it on a grateful population if it were not for the pesky free market. Hence their rage against capitalism, which extends to suspicion of intellectual property, international trade, share buybacks, impact assessments (because they allow businesses to engage with policy-makers) and even the EU single market.
Further to what I say in the article, I’d add that it is to the UK’s shame that so many of the authors of this report are British. They include quackademics that I have been making fun of for years, such as Anna Gilmore, Mark Petticrew and May van Schalkwyk. Between them, they constitute a small clique of talentless, fanatics and/or grifting social scientists who have constructed a world of unreality for themselves by publishing endless low quality journal articles which they and their colleagues then reference and self-reference. It is profoundly depressing that they are now dangling the corpse of the WHO — which was once a great institution — on pieces of string.
The Ford Foundation and the far left
N.S. Lyons looks at the vast amount of money the “philanthropic” Ford Foundation donates to organizations pushing far left agendas:
It’s November 2023, and, following the October 7 attacks by Hamas terrorists that killed some 1,400 Israelis and at least 31 Americans, thousands of demonstrators march through New York City, calling for the destruction of the Jewish state. Chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” echo through the streets, along with “there is only one solution: intifada revolution”. Among the crowd is the infamous Palestinian American activist Linda Sarsour, who warns through a megaphone that a cabal of wily Jews has conspired to place “their little posters” (of kidnapped Israeli civilians) across the city, seeking to entice people to rip them down. While many onlookers might look like “ordinary people”, she says, the Jews have “their little people all around the city”, surveilling others. Sarsour is there to deliver such rhetoric in part because she’s been paid to be there: her nonprofit, MPower Change, has received $300,000 in grant funding from the Ford Foundation “to build grassroots Muslim power”.
It’s May 2023, and protesters have stormed the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., to demand that lawmakers not accept spending cuts during negotiations to lift the debt ceiling. Many are so disruptive that the police arrest them and drag them out. These are activists of the Center for Popular Democracy, an extreme left-wing organization that has collected $35.2 million from the Ford Foundation since 2012. Four months later, they will be imitated by 150 youth activists from the “climate revolution” group the Sunrise Movement, 18 of whom will be arrested after occupying the Speaker of the House’s office. The Sunrise Movement also receives Ford Foundation money—$650,000 for “training and organizing”.
It’s April 2023, and, a world away, the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), a think tank set up and directed by the Chinese state, is hosting a conference in Beijing to discuss how to “promote the formation of an internationally accepted ESG system with Chinese characteristics”, including through China’s globe-spanning influence and infrastructure plan, the Belt and Road Initiative. But this effort by America’s top geopolitical adversary isn’t too far afield for the Ford Foundation to fund; it has given CDRF $600,000 to help realize its ambitions.
These examples from just the last year — collected via a semi-random tour of the Ford Foundation’s vast Grants Database — represent a tiny fraction of the nearly $1 billion that the foundation gives away yearly, on average. Almost a century old and sitting on a mountainous $16.4 billion endowment in 2022, the foundation is a “philanthropic” giant — one of the five largest in the U.S. If it were a for-profit firm, its market capitalization would rank it among the Fortune 500. Instead, “guided by a vision of social justice”, as its mission statement puts it, the Ford Foundation’s enormous flood of untaxed money flows annually to an immense ecosystem of overwhelmingly left-wing — and often outright revolutionary — causes.
Yet the foundation’s activities remain largely below the public’s radar, the extent of its malign history mostly unknown. This should change. America today faces a multitude of escalating sociopolitical crises that are rapidly tearing apart the body politic: a rapacious strain of tribal identity politics; spreading legal, cultural, and moral chaos; lawlessness in the streets; and the entrenchment of an oligarchic managerial elite, increasingly willing to cast aside any remaining shred of democratic or national sovereignty in its pursuit of top-down global “progress”. Behind every one of these fractures, one finds the ongoing work of the Ford Foundation.
In 2020, following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, a “racial reckoning” swept the United States, kindling fiery riots across the nation, abrupt moves by municipalities to defund police departments, and the near-wholesale capitulation of public institutions — from universities to government agencies to major corporations — to a culturally revolutionary ideology of identitarian grievance and racial separatism. To some, this came as a shock. To the Ford Foundation, it marked the fulfillment of decades of effort.
The foundation has long seen itself as uniquely dedicated to progress and social justice, its stated mission from as early as the 1950s being the “general purpose of advancing human welfare” and to “eradicate the causes of suffering” worldwide. But after current president Darren Walker took the helm in 2013, it began more fully to embrace a public identity as a “social justice foundation” and reoriented its mission to “disrupt the drivers of inequality” in every sphere of life and across the globe.
Dado by Hand
Lost Art Press
Published Mar 6, 2024Megan Fitz demonstrates her dado cutting process by hand for a Dutch tool chest. Will the shelf fit?
QotD: Is there more craziness these days or is it just the volume turned up to 11?
Contrast this to the Current Year, where, much like breakfast food, what seems to be a bewildering variety of lunacy can be boiled down to just a few basic types. “Wokeness” is a madlib with just two variables: ____ is either racist or sexist, pick one. (I suppose you can combine them, but you’ll notice that doesn’t happen nearly as often as you’d predict, because the blacks hate the gays and the feminists hate everyone, so going full retard ends up getting you in a lot of trouble with your coreligionists).
Severian, “Mail Bag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-11.
June 14, 2024
Britain’s anti-gay hate crime epidemic
Andrew Doyle suggests you take the recent reports of burgeoning hate crime in Britain with a fair bit of salt, because the hate crime statistics are far from trustworthy:
When things like this can be reported as “hate crimes”, and the definition depends on the reporter’s assumption of hateful intent, you’re going to see a lot more “hate crimes”.
We all know by now that the Metro is an activist publication masquerading as a newspaper. And so we ought to approach with some caution its article this week claiming that the UK has seen a surge in hate crime against gay people. There’s even a handy rainbow-coloured map which pinpoints the most homophobic locations in the country. Thankfully St Ives isn’t on the list, so I won’t have to cancel my holiday.
What are we to make of the article’s claim that there has been a 462% increase in homophobic hate crime and a 1,426% increase in transphobic hate crime since 2012? The source for these remarkable figures is the House of Commons Hate Crime Statistics report. If true, it would seem to confirm activists’ claims that we are living in an anti-LGBTQIA+ hellhole.
The truth is not so melodramatic. The supposed escalation of hate crimes in the UK can be accounted for by the way in which they are now recorded. Police actively trawl for complaints, inviting citizens to report offensive comments or any action – criminal or otherwise – that the “victim” perceives to have been motivated by prejudice. No evidence of “hate” is required for it to be recorded as such, other than the assumption of the complainant. With such methodology in place, it is inevitable that the statistics will rise.
And perhaps that’s the whole point. The police in the UK are just one of the many major institutions that has been captured by intersectional ideology. Police are regularly seen dancing at Pride parades, driving rainbow-coloured cars, and harassing gender-critical women for wrongthink. In February 2021 in Merseyside – a county that tops the Metro‘s list of homophobic hate spots – police were photographed next to a digital advertisement which read “Being offensive is an offence”. This belief-system can only be sustained by the narrative of widespread hate, and so we should not be surprised to see that police practice has been modified to ensure this outcome.
In fact, the College of Policing had made it clear that a fall in hate crime statistics would not be acceptable. Its operational guidance says that “targets that see success as reducing hate crime are not appropriate”. And by the Home Office’s own admission, “increases in police-recorded hate crime in recent years have been driven by improvements in crime recording and a better identification of what constitutes a hate crime”. In other words, there is no hate crime epidemic at all. It’s simply that the definitions have expanded.
Rather than rely on the Home Office statistics, we would be better turning to a source that hasn’t been corrupted by ideology. The Crime Survey for England and Wales hasn’t adopted the new police methods of recording, and shows that hate crime has been consistently dropping. Between 2008 and 2020, the number of hate crimes fell by 38%, and all the while records of hate crime kept by the police kept on rising. The disparity between the reality and the narrative couldn’t be more stark.
When propaganda wins over historical facts, Ontario public schools edition
To someone of my generation (late boomer/early GenX), the history of the Residential School system was taught, at least superficially, in middle school. Along with the early settlement of what is now Canada by the French and later the English (with a very brief nod to the Vikings, of course), we got a cursory introduction to the relationships among the European settlers and explorers and the various First Nations groups they encountered. It wasn’t in great depth — what is taught in great depth in middle school? — but we got a rough outline. In my case, details about the Residential School system came more from a “young adult” novel about a young First Nations student running away from his school and trying to find his way back to his home and family. My best friend in school had First Nations ancestry, so I felt a strong desire to understand the book and the system and culture portrayed in it.
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
If, in the early 1970s, the Ontario school system taught at least a bit about the history of the First Nations peoples, how is it possible that they stopped doing so and my son’s generation were utterly blindsided by the sensationalist treatment of the students at a particular Residential School in British Columbia? And as a result, were far more credulous and willing to believe the worst that the “anticolonialist” propagandists could come up with.
“Igor Stravinsky” is a teacher in the Ontario school system who writes under a pseudonym for fairly obvious reasons, as he’s not a believer in the modern narrative about the history of First Nations children in the Residential School system:
This will be my last instalment of this series. I have attempted to shed light on the poor quality of information students are receiving in Ontario schools with regard to Indigenous history and current issues. It is important to note that this is being done intentionally. It is to the advantage of the leaders of the Indigenous Grievance Industry to characterise Canada and the pre-Canadian colonies of this land as genocidal oppressors, and our politicians have exploited this situation for crass political gain. This was perhaps epitomised by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s photo op of himself holding a teddy bear in the proximity of a soil disturbance in a field at the site of a former residential school in Cowessess First Nation, Saskatchewan on Tuesday, July 6, 2021:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holding a teddy bear in Cowessess First Nation, Saskatchewan.
July 6, 2021.Are there actually human remains there? If so, of whom? Is this evidence of any kind of foul play? These are questions he was not about to bother to ask. Why would he, when such a golden opportunity to score political points presented itself?
We now know all this murdered Indigenous children stuff was a big hoax but don’t hold your breath waiting for Trudeau to issue an apology for staining the international reputation of Canada and triggering a knee-jerk vote by our Parliament declaring Canada a genocidal state and adopting the The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (more on that below). Undoing all this damage will be a herculean task.
Just as students are fed simplistic, misleading, and false information about the past with regard to Indigenous people (the focus being the Indian Residential Schools) they are being presented with the point of view that human rights violations against the Indigenous people are ongoing, and are the reason for the poor quality of life in which such a disproportionate number of Indigenous people find themselves.
The claim of generational trauma
On Apr. 27, 2010, speaking as chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and for the people of Canada, Sinclair told the Ninth Session of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues: “For roughly seven generations nearly every Indigenous child in Canada was sent to a residential school. They were taken from their families, tribes and communities, and forced to live in those institutions of assimilation.”
This lie is promoted in the schools. It is the foundation of the generational trauma claim but in fact, during the IRS era, perhaps 30% of Status Indians (you can cut that figure in half if you include all people who identify as Indigenous) ever attended, and for an average of 4.5 years.
Even if it were true that most Indigenous people who attended the IRS suffered trauma, there is no evidence or logical reason to believe that trauma could be transferred down the generations. If generational trauma is a thing, why have the descendants of the victims of the holocaust been doing so well?
If there is generational trauma, the culprit is alcohol. Alcohol abuse has been a major problem in Indigenous communities since first contact but rarely comes up these days, certainly not in schools. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS), which occurs when a mother consumes alcohol during pregnancy, is also a major problem and the children born with it suffer from mental and emotional challenges throughout their lives. It impacts their social life, education and work. Girls who suffer from the condition all too often end up drinking during pregnancy themselves and the cycle continues.
Chef John’s Cream of Mushroom Soup – Pure Liquid Moon-Soaked Earth
Food Wishes
Published Dec 30, 2009[NR: I kid you not, this is the best cream of mushroom soup I’ve ever tasted. And I made it!]
I can’t believe I haven’t posted a video recipe for cream of mushroom soup! It’s such a classic cool weather staple, and quite simple to make – as long as you have a few hours to spare. The secret to this deep rich potage is a long slow caramelization, the key to unlocking the mushroom’s magic. Oh, and by the way, I mean that literally. Mushrooms are by far the most mysterious and magical things we eat.
Scientists still don’t really understand how and why they grow like they do. While every other food you eat gets its energy from the sun, Agaricus bisporus, the common button mushroom, does not. Some believe mushrooms are powered by the moon, which I find fascinating to contemplate.
This is a very minimalist formula, and meant to transform the browned bits of fungus into pure earthy essence of mushroom. You can use whatever exotic mushrooms you can get a hold of, but it works quite well with the ubiquitous white button mushroom. Enjoy!
(more…)
QotD: European “megacorporations” in the east
And the structure of these massive trading companies mirrors some of the elements of a megacorp. While both companies were, in theory, shipping companies, in practice they were massive vertically integrated conglomerates. Conquering the production areas (particularly India for the EIC and Java for the VOC), they essentially controlled the production chain from start to finish. That complete vertical integration meant that the companies also had to supply employees and colonial subjects, which in turn meant controlling trade and production in everything from food and clothes to weapons. Both companies had their own armies and fleets (the EIC boasted more than 25,000 company soldiers at its height, the VOC more than 10,000) and controlled and administered territory.
In short, they were the colonial Dutch and British governments for many millions of colonial subjects. For the people living in territory dominated by these companies, they really would have resembled the megacorps of speculative fiction, operating with effectively impunity and using their vast profits to field armies and navies capable of defeating local states and compelling them to follow the interests of the company (which remained profit-oriented).
(I feel the need to stop and note that “company rule” in India and even more so in the Dutch East Indies was brutally exploitative, living up to – and in many cases quite surpassing – the normal dystopian billing of science fiction megacorporations. At the same time, it seems equally worth noting that the shift to direct colonial rule by the state was not always much better.)
So in one sense, the speculative fiction megacorp has already existed, but in the other, the limits of these historical entities are informative too. First, it seems relevant that none of these companies were creatures of the markets, rather, they were created by state action – they were chartered companies, state monopolies, or both. These massive imperial trading companies (of which the EIC and VOC were the most successful, but not the only ones) were all created by their respective governments, armed with substantial privileges and typically given exclusive rights to certain trade – they were state-sanctioned monopolies (echoes of this also in the Japanese Zaibatsu state-sanctioned vertical monopolies; note that the Roman publicani [tax-farming “companies” of the middle and late Republic] were also state-sanctioned monopolies) whose monopolies were backed by state power to the point that their states (that is, Britain, the Dutch Republic, France and so on) would and did go to war to protect the trading rights of their monopoly trading companies.
Second, these megacorporations, far from being in a position to usurp the states that formed them (as fictional megacorporations often do), turn out to be extremely vulnerable to those states. The EIC was effectively nationalized by an act of parliament in 1858 (after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 discredited company rule in the eyes of the British government) and disbanded in 1874. The VOC was likewise nationalized by its parent government in 1796 and then dissolved in 1799. No effort was made by either company to resist being disbanded with any sort of force; it would have been a pointless gesture in any case. While the resources of the EIC were vast, the military capabilities of the British Empire were far greater. Moreover, the companies simply didn’t have the legitimacy to operate absent their state backing.
This is of course also true for the not-quite-megacorporations, like the great trusts of America’s gilded age (Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, etc.), or the Japanese zaibatsu or even modern super-sized corporate entities. Of the 10 largest companies in the world, four are straight up state-owned enterprises. Even for the private modern massive company, by and large when they try to fight their “home” state, they lose, or at least are badly damaged without seriously inconveniencing the far greater power of the state (just ask AT&T or Microsoft).
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-01.
June 13, 2024
Fun new family game – Who’s the Parliamentary Traitor?
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper presents the rulebook for an exciting new family game literally “ripped from the headlines” – Who’s the Parliamentary Traitor?
“To simulate what it’s like to go to work in a national parliament secretly housing foreign agents, the National Post presents a tongue-in-cheek instruction manual to play this group game: Who’s the Parliamentary Traitor?
Photo by Brice Hall”
WHAT YOU NEED TO PLAY:
- One large writing surface, such as a chalkboard, whiteboard or flip chart (THE ORDER PAPER)
- 20-70 note cards
- A timer
SETTING UP PLAY:
Gather at least five of your closest friends and have them sit in a line facing the ORDER PAPER. They will be divided into two categories: The WITTING AGENTS and the CREDULOUS NAIFS.To choose who among them will be the WITTING AGENTS, prepare a stack of IDENTITY CARDS equal to the number of players. On every fifth card, mark the symbol for the Chinese yuan (¥). In the case of five players, mark a single card, for 10 players, mark two, etc.
Shuffle the IDENTITY CARDS and distribute them among the players. Anyone receiving a “¥” is now a WITTING AGENT.
Set aside another stack of note cards to serve as MANDATE LETTERS. The text for each card is below. Shuffle the MANDATE LETTERS and place them face down.
RULES OF THE GAME:
Each round begins with a CANADA IS NOT BROKEN phase in which all players close their eyes, put their thumbs in their ears and bury their face for two minutes (the elapsed time to be marked with a timer). During this phase, the WITTING AGENTS open their eyes, stride over to the ORDER PAPER and write down a piece of binding public policy that damages Canada to the advantage of a hostile government (suggestions below).Once this act of treachery is done, the WITTING AGENTS return to their seats will pretend to wake up alongside them as if nothing happened.
Now begins the CONCERNED FOLLOW-UP phase. First, players must pull a MANDATE LETTER card that will determine conditions of discussion. Now, the parliamentarians must decide who among them is the foreign cat’s paw who has defaced their ORDER PAPER with disloyal policy. Uncomfortable questions are asked, accusations are made, and at the end of the round the players vote on who among them will be ejected as a traitor.
Only after the accused traitor is exiled will they show their IDENTITY CARD, revealing whether the accusations have been true, or whether they have been unjustly maligned.
Ejected players are then exiled to THE SENATE, a separated area of chairs where they are served port, ginger ale and black liquorice. They continue to participate in the CANADA IS NOT BROKEN and the CONCERNED FOLLOW-UP phases, but they no longer have a vote.
Build a Traditional Tool Tote for Father’s Day
Rex Krueger
Published Jun 12, 2024This Father’s Day, go for a project that stays in the family.
Free Plans! https://www.rexkrueger.com/store/p/fr…
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Debunking the “miraculous” Marshall Plan
If you’ve read anything about the state of Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, you’ll undoubtedly have heard of the way the Marshall Plan did wonders to get (western) Germany and the other battle-devastated nations back on their feet economically. At FEE, Christian Monson suggest that you’ve been provided with a very rosy scenario that doesn’t actually accord with the facts:
Konrad Adenauer in conversation with Ludwig Erhard.
KAS-ACDP/Peter Bouserath, CC-BY-SA 3.0 DE via Wikimedia Commons.
Unfortunately, the ubiquity of the myth that the Marshall Plan rebuilt Germany is proof that state-controlled education favors propaganda over economic literacy. Despite the fact that most modern historians don’t give the Marshall Plan much credit at all for rebuilding Germany and attribute to it less than 5 percent of Germany’s national income during its implementation, standard history textbooks still place it at the forefront of the discussion about post-war reconstruction.
Consider this section from McDougal Littell’s World History (p. 968), the textbook I was given in high school:
This assistance program, called the Marshall Plan, would provide food, machinery, and other materials to rebuild Western Europe. As Congress debated the $12.5 billion program in 1948, the Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia. Congress immediately voted approval. The plan was a spectacular success.
Of course, the textbook makes no mention of the actual cause of the Wirtschaftwunder: sound economic policy. That’s because, for the state, the Marshall Plan makes great statist mythology.
Not only is it frequently brought up to justify the United States getting involved in foreign conflicts, but it simply gives support for central planning. Just look at the economic miracle the government was able to create with easy credit, they say.
And of course, admitting that the billions of dollars pumped into Germany after WWII accomplished next to nothing, especially when compared to something as simple as sound money, would be tantamount to admitting that the government spends most of its time making itself needed when it isn’t and thereby doing little besides getting in the way.
The Inconvenient Truth of Currency Reform
You are unlikely to find the real cause of the Wirtschaftwunder mentioned in any high school history textbook, but here is what it was. In 1948, the economist and future Chancellor of West Germany Ludwig Erhard was chosen by the occupational Bizonal Economic Council as their Director of Economics. He went on to liberalize the West German economy with a number of good policies, the most important being currency reform.
The currency in Germany immediately after WWII was still the Reichsmark, and both the Nazis and then the occupying Soviet authorities had increased the amount in circulation significantly. As a result, by 1948 the Reichsmark was so worthless that people had turned to using cigarettes and coffee as money.
To give people a true store of value so that they could calculate economic costs accurately, assess risk and invest in the future, Erhard created the Deutsche Mark, West Germany’s new currency. Like ripping off a bandaid, he decreased the money supply by 93 percent overnight.
It’s also worth noting that while Erhard, following his school of Ordoliberalism, did form a central bank, it was at least designed independent from the government and followed a hard-money policy (preserving a stable amount of money) through the length of the Wirtschaftswunder. In fact, the original Bank Deutsche Länder was rather limited in scope until it was reorganized as the considerably more centralized Bundesbank in 1957, incidentally when Germany’s economic miracle began to lose steam.
Other notable liberal policies instituted by Erhard included removing all price controls and lowering taxes from the Nazis’ absurd 85 percent to 18 percent. The American occupational authorities opposed these reforms, but Erhard went through with them anyway. This liberalization had an immediate effect. The black market disappeared almost overnight, and in one year, industrial output almost doubled.
Perhaps most poignantly, unemployment dropped from more than 10 percent to around 1 percent by the end of the 1950s. Normally the government tries to justify currency manipulation as a means to eliminate unemployment, but the Wirtschaftwunder is evidence that sound money does the job far better.
The Best Allied Tank Of WW2
WW2 Pod: We Have Ways of Making You Talk
Published Mar 7, 2024Comedian Al Murray and historian James Holland look at a picture of a Cromwell tank jumping over a ramp in 1944. Was this the best Allied tank of WW2?
QotD: Gun safety is for always
The entire point of Rule One is that when you are handling a firearm, you need to be mindful. You need to be constantly aware of the fact that what you have in your hand is not a banana or a can of soup but an object that can, under the right circumstances, discharge a projectile with lethal consequences.
Chuck Haggard says that one shouldn’t have separate habits of handling for “loaded” and “unloaded” guns because when one is tired or distracted, one can inadvertently default to the wrong one. (“How do you dry-fire, Tam?” As though I’m expecting a loud noise at any moment. And I sure don’t have that gun pointed at anything I’m not prepared to pay for if I’m wrong about the gun’s status.)
[…]
What you see there with the chief in the video and with the guy in the picture above is bad gun-handling habits at work. This is why, whether I’m handling an actual firearm or a SIRT or a blue gun or an airsoft or whatever, I am very conscious of where the muzzle is pointing and do not point or wave it around casually. I want the default, habitual behavior for when there is a gun-shaped object in my hand to be caution and awareness. I always want the action of aiming a gun at something to be a conscious and deliberate choice.
And I don’t ever want to have to utter the words “Oh my God, I’m sorry! I thought it was unloaded!”
Tamara Keel, “Safety Is For Always”, View From The Porch, 2016-06-06.
