World War Two
Published 27 Jul 2024China, Britain, and the US issue a Declaration demanding Japan’s unconditional surrender, and promising complete destruction if this does not happen and happen soon. The plan is to for the Americans to use their atomic bombs on Japan if she does not comply, but by the end of the week the Japanese have not replied. They still have hopes for the Soviets to mediate some sort sort of peace. What they don’t have is a navy, as its final destruction comes this week.
00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:32 The Potsdam Conference
04:41 Japanese Hopes
05:56 The Potsdam Declaration
10:53 The Initial Reaction
14:48 The End Of The Japanese Navy
15:05 The War On Land
19:10 Summary
19:30 Conclusion
(more…)
July 28, 2024
Allies Issue Potsdam Declaration – WW2 – Week 309 – July 27, 1945
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J.D. Vance is an ideological extremist who has pushed an idea also supported by … Canadian deputy PM Chrystia Freeland
There’s much viewing-with-alarm and pearl-clutching going on over some of J.D. Vance’s more outré notions floated before he became Trump’s running mate:
U.S. Senator J.D. Vance speaking with attendees at The People’s Convention at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan, 16 June, 2024.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
One of the amusing features of this week’s U.S. election turbulence has been sudden media scrutiny of Ohio Republican Senator J.D. Vance, a former author and pundit newly named as Donald Trump’s running mate. Readers will know I’m a sadistic student of electoral reform crusades, and in 2021 Vance advocated for one of the myriad of utopian ideas that has never quite reached prime time: parents should be given extra votes that they can exercise on behalf of their minor children.
[…]
Critics of Vance are screaming about the sacred principle of “one person, one vote” — but of course the centrists and liberals who have toyed with the same idea support it precisely because children are persons who deserve political representation. (They would be represented second-hand by their parents until the age of majority, but us adults are all represented that way in democratic decision-making now, right?) Earlier this week Reason magazine published a short excerpt from a pro-Demeny paper by two American law professors with strong conservative, originalist credentials: there isn’t all that much daylight between their arguments and Corak’s.
Are the arguments actually any good? Some of them seem circumstantial or even aesthetic. We’re in a transitory era of gerontocracy because of a baby boom that happened eighty years ago, and nobody under 70, whatever their ideology, likes this universal predicament much. But on the grounds of revealed preference, the lack of actual real-world Demeny experiments is a big problem.
If we want the proxy votes to go to custodial parents who are involved with a real child and conscious of its particular interests, you’re suddenly talking about integrating election systems with family law. I.e., an unfathomable technical nightmare. But assigning control of the extra child votes automatically to biological parents, including deadbeats and those who have surrendered children to adoptees or foster families, seems like a non-starter. (And would also be an unfathomable technical nightmare.)
You can say that the democratic principle is more important than the mere design details of a child-voting system, and this is the kind of thing election reformers say all the time — but would you book a seat on an airplane that was built on aerodynamic principles with no attention to detail?
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How America RUINED the world’s screws! (Robertson vs. Phillips)
Stumpy Nubs
Published Apr 17, 2024
QotD: The environment
The environment, as such, is not a sentient creature. It has no will, no wants, no goals, no triumphs, no regrets, no hopes, and no fears. The environment’s value lies solely in the value attached to it by us human beings (including, of course, the value that we attach to the welfare of non-human creatures).
I here do not express a normative judgment; I express a positive assessment – namely, any value that any human attaches to, or perceives in, the natural environment is necessarily the product of his or her own mind and judgment. (I understand that many of my Christian friends might conclude that my positive statement is in error.)
The beauty that Smith enjoys when looking at a mountain range and the comfort that Jones feels knowing that she and her family live on land that is fertile are human experiences. An alien from another planet – a creature evolved under very different conditions from humans – who finds itself suddenly transported to any place on earth, including any place that we humans commonly regard as comfortable and gorgeous, would almost certainly regard earth’s atmosphere as hellish and find the view, if that alien could see it all, as hideous.
Reasonable people can and do disagree over the extent to which the state should act to protect the environment. But no reasonable person believes that any such state action should, or can possibly be, judged by standards other than human ones. Again, such judgments are inescapably made by humans.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2019-09-06.
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July 27, 2024
Cancelling Orwell (again)
In The Daily Sceptic, Paul Sutton recounts a recent discussion with some Oxford graduate students where the topic of George Orwell came up:
The students maintained that the important thing is quality of writing but, paradoxically, this can only be judged by a strict contemporary “evaluation” of any Right-wing or outdated views. Inevitably, this contextualisation then reveals that said writers are “problematic” and “not as good as XYZ” – usually some figure who fits their sensibilities, and coincidentally one who’s almost always female – or at least better suited to the diversity required by these commissars.
So far, so well known and wearily familiar. The absolute impossibility of literature under such a mindset – one enthusiastically endorsed by graduate students who professed to live for literature – is utterly depressing. We’re in effect dealing with its cancellation.
I made a perfunctory effort in observing their complete inconsistency, but things got more interesting when Orwell was discussed. Of course, Orwell famously wrote against their stand, not least in his brilliant defence of Kipling’s literary merit and his refusal to allow orthodoxy to dictate his aesthetic preferences, in “Benefit of Clergy“.
Unfortunately, Orwell’s stint in the Burmese Imperial Police made him a despicable figure to the students, little better than a Waffen SS or Gestapo officer. True, he’d belatedly retrieved himself by his “eventual writing” in the 1940s, but he’d spent many years performing the dirty work of the British Empire. His famous essay, “A Hanging“, showed him enthusiastically hands on at it.
I’d honestly never heard such a narrow and limited view, and was intrigued. As a preposterous misrepresentation, it needs little rebuttal. “A Hanging” is indeed a brilliantly disturbing account of an Indian murderer being hanged, a man who’d have been executed at that time in any country. The essay explores the deep unease Orwell felt about his role, so it’s a lie to claim it shows him uncritically doing his job, let alone revelling in his exertion of British authority.
Such an interpretation shows a shocking lack of understanding. As does the idea that Orwell only recanted any pro-Imperial views in the 1940s; his underrated Burmese Days was published in 1934 and he wrote extensively about his disgust for the job he did in the late 20s and 1930s. Of course, he didn’t only feel disgust, nor would he pretend that the British brought only misery and were unique as imperial exploiters.
What I’m most interested in is how an alternative Orwell was then offered up, a writer who’d accepted the British Empire was “problematic” yet offered a nice comforting view of how nice and comforting life can be – if you agree with the progressives, that is.Step forward Jan Morris and his trilogy Pax Britannica. Now, I haven’t read this non-fictional account of the British Empire but from background knowledge, it’s not in any way a replacement for Orwell or even remotely comparable. It’s an exhaustive historical work, not a personal creative one. But this trilogy was extolled by the students as what Orwell should have done when discussing empire. There was the implication that Orwell could now be – somewhat thankfully – ignored.
Bizarrely, the Englishman then introduced Joyce, first saying that the man was a lifelong sponger who’d have probably fleeced him, but as a writer was the very model of a pan-European, liberal and open to all cultures. Again, the grubby contradictions and sheer banality of such a perspective are eye-popping – from a DPhil student in perhaps the country’s finest university.
And I’ve a nagging feeling that Jan Morris – a famous case of gender realignment (he “transitioned” to female in 1972) – was picked for the “acceptable author” reasons. That’s the problem with “author context” vetting – as with “diversity hires”. Much as I’ve enjoyed Morris’s travel writing, especially Oxford, it’s staggering for this author to be proposed as some alternative to Orwell! Not only in terms of obvious lesser importance, but they’re not remotely comparable in terms of genre or aims. How could any serious reader – let alone one at a leading university – talk such gibberish?
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More Kamalamentum
At Spiked, Fraser Myers examines what he calls “Kamala’s Ministry of Truth”:
“Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
.
Did I just fall out of a coconut tree? How else to explain the dizziness so many of us are feeling at the speed of Kamala Harris’s coronation – and at the contortions now being performed to present her as the saviour of the beleaguered Democrats, if not of American democracy itself.
Within 48 hours of Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential race on Sunday, Vice-President Harris had clinched enough delegates, donors and Democratic power-brokers to ensure her an unchallenged, uncontested path to becoming the Democratic nominee to face Donald Trump this autumn. The last dominos to fall, Barack and Michelle Obama, today offered a full-throated endorsement of Harris, claiming she has the “vision, the character, and the strength that this critical moment demands”.
Since Harris emerged as the frontrunner, the Democrats’ media cheerleaders appear to have been gripped by a nasty bout of Kamalamania. “Kamala Harris will be the 47th President of the United States. Democracy will survive”, declared one Hollywood celeb. She brings the “political power of joy” and “effervescent vibes” to US politics, according to a New York Times columnist. CNN reporters have been gushing over her choice of hoodie and sneakers. As Jenny Holland wrote on spiked earlier this week, the media are eager to present Harris as “Martin Luther King, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, all rolled into one”.
We need to remember who we’re talking about here. The newly anointed Democratic nominee was someone few believed could win the presidency, only a few weeks ago. Indeed, this is widely understood to be behind the Obamas’ hesitancy to back her – and Biden’s own reluctance to hand over the baton to his veep.
It’s not hard to see why. Harris is a politician who exudes negative charisma. She speaks like a cross between a Calfornian self-help guru – her favoured aphorism is “What can be, unburdened by what has been” – and a primary-school teacher who enjoys a few too many glasses of wine at lunchtime. She laughs and cackles at inopportune moments, often to herself. At times, her speech is as incoherent as the mentally frail Joe Biden’s. Who could forget her nonsensical remarks last year at a White House function in which she asked: “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” Good luck translating that into English for swing voters in Pennsylvania.
We know that Harris is unpopular with the public, because she has been tested before. Her campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2020 had to be suspended two months before the first primary vote in order to avoid total humiliation at the ballot box. Nationally, Harris was polling at just three per cent. Even in her home state of California, she could only muster eight per cent. Yet now she is about to become the Democratic contender for the White House, with zero input from the public or the party grassroots.
At Founding Questions, Severian responds to a few questions from readers about the Kamala Harris candidacy and what it might indicate about what is happening behind the scenes among the Democratic movers and shakers:
My read is that 2024 is going to be Fortified to hell and back — that’s a certainty — but the extent of the Fortification, and probably its eventual outcome, is tied to the Robber Barons. I agree with William Briggs or whoever it is who suggests a “Thermidorian faction” (I prefer “competent fraction”) of Juggs within the Apparat who are trying desperately to slam on the brakes. IF they can do it — and I’m honestly not sure they can, not at this late date — it’ll be because the Robber Barons put the resources behind it.
I get a sense that there are more than a few Robber Barons making their peace with the BOM. There are, of course, a lot more Robber Barons who hate him and will never reconcile themselves to him … but that doesn’t mean they want Kamala Harris as President. As I wrote in the comments yesterday, if they’d wanted Harris as President, she’d be President by now. Pretty much all the Uniparty’s current problems go away if Biden resigns the Presidency, and if they can force him to drop his reelection bid, they can certainly force his resignation — he’s out in five months no matter what, so why not pass the reins to Harris? She’d be in a far, far stronger position going into 2024 as the incumbent.
No, really. I know that sounds badly wrong to people in contact with Reality, but look at it from the dumbass perspective. The Media has been telling us for four years that the Biden Administration is the greatest ever. Despite your lying eyes, there’s no inflation, no border crisis, no crime problem, and so forth. Harris is going to try to take credit for that on the campaign trail, of course, but it rings a weensy bit hollow coming from a Vice-President. From Madam President xzyrzelf, though? Different story. At least, that’s how the dumbfucks out there in Normie-land would see it, and those are the stupid bastards who will be voting in the fall.
As Vice-President, she gets no credit for the Biden Administration’s accomplishments (I know, I know, stop laughing) … but she gets tarred with all their failures, plus her fuckups as “border czar” (that’s gonna be fun), plus her role in the very obvious and ongoing coverup of Dementia Joe’s galloping dementia.
Make her President, and all that shit goes away. For her first official act, she appoints someone, anyone, as the new “border czar”, and tells that persyn to fall on xzheyr sword. Or, better yet, just never mention the border again. Tell the Media to blast nothing but Historic First Female President!! shit from now until Fortification Day. They will be happy to comply, and it’ll drive most of the bad news off the front page.
This is such a no-brainer that there are only two possible explanations for why they haven’t done it: Either they’re even more terrifyingly stupid than they seem, and so it never occurred to them; or it did occur to them, but Kamala Harris is such a repulsive retard that they can’t risk it — despite it all, Chomo Joe and his galloping dementia are still, somehow, the safer bet.
My guess is that, as Pickle Rick posited the other day, they all give her a pro-forma endorsement, then quietly pull the funding plug. They all pretty much have to endorse her at this point, if for no other reason than the Spiteful Mutants are already going to go apeshit in Chicago; an actual primary fight might burn the city to the ground.
But who knows? These are Juggs. Plus, as I’ve written, this is their moment — every grievance group in AINO will be going for it, as the Uniparty in general, and Harris in particular, will have to promise them the earth and stars to keep them onside. Consider that she has to get both the Bagels and their shekels, and the Pali-bros, in order to make the whole thing go. That would test the political skill of a Metternich, to say nothing of a woman who literally slept her way to the top. She can’t blow ’em all, so she’s going to have to deliver the goods in some other way.
It’ll be a hoot, that’s for sure. Keeping an eye on the funding is probably the best indicator we have.
And in an answer to a different reader:
Welcome to Late Soviet America. Expect a lot more of this, as obvious, ham-handed repression is SOP for flailing, collapsing regimes. We’ve entered the Andropov / Chernenko phase of the festivities, when the phrase “decrepit old man” refers to both the “leader” and his nation. And yeah, I realize that makes Kamala Harris the fake and gay Gorbachev, but that’s actually pretty close — Gorby, too, destroyed what was left of his country because he really believed in all that “openness” and “democracy” bullshit they taught him at the Higher Party Academies. Harris is a far worse moonbat race-baiter than even Bathhouse Barry ever dreamed of being; we’ll get the whole Gorby-Yeltsin-we’re fucked decade in about six weeks once she’s Fortified into office.
And on the power politics uncertainties for both America’s allies and adversaries when it’s not clear exactly who is in charge in Washington DC, the temptation to press a temporary advantage may become overwhelming:
Had Brandon resigned, it wouldn’t be ideal for the Juggs — Harris is still largely holding the bag for Chomo’s failures — but it’d be a hell of a lot better than this, because at least there is someone nominally in charge. Putin or Xi or whoever can pick up the phone and demand to speak to President Harris, and at the very least, he can be assured that President Harris will remember their discussion a few hours later. She might decide to do some incredibly stupid shit, of course — in fact that’s almost guaranteed — but at least Xi, Putin, whoever will know that it’s a bad decision …
… and not just some random drooling lunacy by a guy who thinks it’s 1971 and he’s sticking it to Corn Pop. If anything, the problem just got worse, because they’ve all but openly admitted what everybody already knew: We’re under the Do Long Bridge. There ain’t no fuckin’ CO. But now, instead of just ignoring Harris as per usual when decisions have to be made by … well, by whomever, now they pretty much have to loop her stupid ass in, even though she has no official power to make anything happen. They’ve added yet another layer of retarded dysfunction to an already FUBAR process.
And at The Free Press, Suzy Weiss explains a few Kamalamemes that her campaign has decided to “lean into” (note that the rest is behind a paywall):
→ Kamala is brat, Biden is boots, please God send the asteroid today: I’ve learned the hard way — and by that I mean my parents once asked me what “WAP” meant — that certain things should never be explained with words. It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just that it embarrasses everyone.
That’s how I feel about the whole Kamala-is-brat thing. Brat is a good album about partying and getting older and having anxiety that was released earlier this summer by Charli XCX. But it’s since been adopted by too-online and very young people as a personality, and by Kamala Harris’s campaign as a mode to relate to those very young people. Her campaign is leaning into the whole green look of the album to try and win over Gen Z, and generally recasting her many viral moments—”You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” “I love Venn diagrams” “What can be, unburdened by what has been” — as calling cards. It’s like when Hillary went on Broad City, only this time more cringe.
And now we have Jake Tapper and Greg Gutfeld grappling with the “essence” and the “aesthetic” and overall vibe of brat girl summer. We used to be a serious country. We used to make things.
Here’s the thing about Kamla: she is hilarious and campy, but unintentionally so. Any goodwill that her goofy dances or weird turns of phrase garner should be considered bonus points, not game play. Was there ever any doubt that Fire Island would go blue? We’ve been debating whether Kamala’s meme campaign is a good move for her prospects in the Free Press Slack, and here I’ll borrow from my older and wiser colleague Peter Savodnik: “There is nothing more pathetic than an older person who cares what a younger person thinks is cool”.
→ Boomer behavior: While Kamala’s campaign is being run by a 24-year-old twink with an Adderall prescription, J.D. Vance’s speechwriter seems to be a drunk boomer who just got kicked out of a 7-Eleven. Vance, appearing this week at a rally in Middletown, Ohio, riffed, “Democrats say that it is racist to believe … well, they say it’s racist to do anything. I had a Diet Mountain Dew yesterday and one today, and I’m sure they’re going to call that racist too.” Crickets. Horror. Major “Thanks, Obama” energy. There was also a bit on fried bologna sandwiches and a lot of “lemme tell you another story”. The guy is 39 but sounds older than Biden.
Fresher, 35-to-60-year-old blood is exactly what we’ve been begging for. Let the boomers boom, let the Zoomers zoom. Kamala and J.D.: act your age.
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Dining on the Orient Express
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Apr 16, 2024Côtelettes d’Agneau à la Minute
Simple, delicious fried lamb cutlets with a lemon-butter sauce with swirls of Duchess PotatoesCity/Region: France
Time Period: 1903The food and dining cars of the Orient Express were a big part of the luxurious experience that drew in passengers. The chefs, who were brought in from top French institutions, prepared meals on moving train cars, sometimes themed to which countries the train was passing through.
These lamb cutlets are simple, tender, and delicious. The lemon-butter sauce has only two ingredients, and pairs perfectly with Duchess Potatoes for a wonderful meal (or more accurately, single course) aboard the Orient Express.
Côtelettes d’Agneau à la Minute
Cut the cutlets very thin, season them and shallow fry in very hot clarified butter. Arrange them in a circle on a dish, sprinkle with a little lemon juice and the cooking butter after adding a pinch of chopped parsley, Serve immediately.
— Le Guide Culinaire by Auguste Escoffier, 1903
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QotD: The academic “grinder”
Looking back on it, homeboy was more than a little “on the spectrum”, as the kids say nowadays, but he wasn’t a grinder. Nor do long hours, in themselves, make a grinder — med students, for instance, work in the neighborhood of 60-75 hours a week, but though there are lots of grinders in medical school, not all med students are grinders. Long hours in the lab just go with the territory.
Indeed, actually working hard is almost an exclusion criterion for grinder-ness. Grinders ostentatiously spend many, many hours hitting the books, but it’s almost literally hitting the books. They “work” the Latin way — lots of activity, almost no accomplishment. Put a big honking stack of the largest, mustiest tomes you can find in front of you in your study carrel. Pick one up, flip through it, take one note, then rotate it to the bottom of the stack. Do this for hours on end, always making sure that your stack is flush with the wall, so that everyone in the room can see how many books you have, and how diligently you’re “taking notes”. That’s a grinder.
And cheat your ass off, it goes without saying. In my day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and “the Internet” was a way for Defense Department nerds to exchange missile schematics with one another, the preferred method was with a graphing calculator. Your dishwasher has more hard disk space than those things, but the mere presence of memory capacity made it ideal for cheating, providing you could come up with some elaborate shorthand to cram all the material in … and providing, of course, you could use it. My friends, you have never seen true comedy until you’ve seen some sweaty Chinese kid begging the teacher to be allowed to use his graphing calculator in Engrish class. Quick, what’s the cosine of MacBeth?
And speaking of begging, that’s the final diagnostic criterion. Have you polished so many apples, your fingers are permanently stained red? Are you so far up the guidance counselor’s ass that you’re banging your skull on her uvula? Have you kissed so much butt, you’ve got a mouth like a lamprey? Would you cheerfully murder your best friend’s dog if it would get you an extra 0.02 on your GPA? Then you, my friend, are a grinder.
Severian, “The Grinder Mindset [expanded]”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-22.
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July 26, 2024
Getting meta on “cancelling the cancellers”
Nearly a week ago, I posted an excerpt from John Carter’s essay at Postcards From Barsoom called “Right Wing Cancel Squads“. As sometimes happens, this particular essay caught the attention of a lot of folks online and triggered much discussion pro and con. John did his best to summarize and respond here, and (as I post links to Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten now and again), I thought John’s response to Scott’s criticism was worth highlighting:
Somehow, Scott Alexander took interest in my essay, and addressed it at length. I’m not deeply familiar with Alexander, aside from a vague awareness that he’s a big deal in the rationalist community, to say nothing of being a much bigger deal than I am, and that he’s dealt with lying journalists and hysterical wokoids enough himself to have a healthy distaste for them. Alexander is characteristically calm and thorough, starting with a selection of screenshotted posts on Notes from various writers and commenters who take the pro-fight-the-enemy side, before presenting an extensive set of excerpts from my own essay.
Scott sidesteps the ethical question, to focus instead on the practical considerations, on the grounds of which he comes down (as expected, given his ideological niche) on the don’t-cancel side. He enumerates a series of objections, which can be approximately summarized as1:
1) cancellation will not, in fact, teach anyone anything – after all, just look at how eager the right is to cancel;
2) this has been going on forever, e.g. the Red Scare, so one more whirl ‘bout the merry-go-round isn’t likely to stop the wheel a turnin’;
3) If you act like the woke, you are the woke;
4) Most cancellations have been of liberals, by liberals, so if the right starts doing this it is likely to turn on itself;
5) cancellation destroys competence, because avoiding cancellation takes on a higher salience to people than doing their damn jobs;
6) embracing cancel culture has ruined the left’s name, which is why it is struggling despite holding all of the institutional power;
7) going mad with power before you actually have power is probably stupid;
And finally
8) there are better options.
The better options Alexander describes are mostly at the policy and tech level, such as better moderation tools that take the personal politics of platform moderators out of the equation, or dismantling those aspects of the regulatory state, such as the sillier and more self-contradictory elements of Civil Rights law, which nourish cancel culture in the first place. Alexander’s policy proposals are all great, and I completely agree that the most effective long-term solution is to tear the legal basis of cancel culture up by the roots, set those roots on fire, and salt the earth in which they were planted.
Regarding power, and the simple fact that the right does not have it in any formal sense, Charles Haywood and Bennett’s Phylactery made the same very cogent point. I don’t think any sane person could disagree.
I’m not convinced by some of Alexander’s other points. For instance, the right is an extremely contentious place, with the modal rightist being pretty low in agreeableness, which probably makes it hard for circular firing squads to be terribly effective. That isn’t to say that rightists don’t have strong beliefs – there are fanatics all over the place – but those beliefs are so contradictory between the various factions that the ideology of the right is infamously difficult to describe. Just look at the perennial holy war between Christians and pagans/Nietzscheans/vitalists.
As to the Red Scare, it’s probably worth pointing out that McCarthy was actually right: there really were communists trying to infiltrate the Western social order; tragically for us, the communists succeeded, which is a large part of the reason why we are where we are now.
As to the unpopularity of the left, I do not think this is only because of their po-faced censoriousness, although there is no question that that contributes. It probably also has something to do with their vicious racial and sexual hatred, their contemptuous hostility towards Western civilization, and their propensity to emotionally abuse children to the point that those children demand that they be allowed to mutilate their genitalia, amongst a great number of other horrors.
Finally, as to Alexander’s first point, that cancellation does not teach anyone anything. Au contraire. Look around at how society has changed in just the last decade. Sure, if you’re an autistic rationalist, a contrarian ideologue, or a Bohemian free spirit, cancel culture has only made you hate the left more. But this is a fairly small fraction of the population. What about the normies? In a remarkably short period of time, they went from opposing gay marriage, to supporting it. Why? Because examples were made of a few people who opposed it, and the rest got into line. Most people are basically NPCs: they don’t follow a praxis emerging from carefully thought out philosophical systems, but simply go along with whatever they perceive the prevailing morality to be. They are not rational, nor are they principled. They simply respond to incentives, which is to say, to rewards and to punishments. Put a few heads on pikes to demarcate new social boundaries, and the normies will in general respect them.2
There are limits to the ability to enact social change via incentive structure manipulation, because if the social boundaries you establish don’t map to the eternal verities of human nature, the resulting social order will generate a lot of friction and consequently destabilize … as our society observably is. However, the social boundaries the right intends to enforce do, in fact, map to human nature. The left has been figuratively beheading the people who object to the surgical genital mutilation and chemical sterilization of children; the right intends to metaphorically behead the people who have been advocating and carrying out that child abuse in the first place. There’s a profound moral asymmetry there, but I think there’s also a practical asymmetry, because the right isn’t demanding that everyone publicly agree sadomasochistic psychosis is healthy.
1. I skipped one in the middle because it looked redundant.
2. [NR] Sarah Hoyt is one of the folks most likely to describe herself as being on Team Heads-On-Pikes, and I suspect she has a non-trivial following who share in that inclination.
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Vance, the harbinger
In City Journal, Christopher Rufo explains why Trump selected a VP candidate that goes against the “usual” ticket balance criteria for a presidential team:
U.S. Senator J.D. Vance speaking with attendees at The People’s Convention at Huntington Place in Detroit, Michigan, 16 June, 2024.
Detail of a photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
The Vance selection is not a gambit to secure a particular demographic or region — white men are Trump’s base; Ohio is a safe red state — but an effort to cultivate an emerging counter-elite that could make the second Trump administration substantially more effective than the first.
This story is built into J. D. Vance’s biographical arc. He was the all-American kid who rose from humble beginnings to make his way in the world: the Marines; Yale Law; venture capital; a best-selling book. He learned the language of the prestige institutions, cultivated powerful patrons, and quickly climbed the ladder in academia, finance, and business. He had made it.
Then, his story takes a turn. Having entered the ranks of America’s elite, Vance became disillusioned and disenchanted with it, correctly identifying it as a force of hypocrisy and corruption. He defected — first, by parting ways with the respectable conservatism of the Beltway, and then by embracing Donald Trump.
Some have criticized this as a cynical move, but my sense is that it is the opposite. A cynic would have continued to build an elite résumé; Vance sacrificed his respectability within a certain stratum, assumed considerable risk by moving toward Trump, and, in my view, was genuinely convinced that the establishment, both Left and Right, had exhausted itself and had to be opposed.
Now, not only has Vance been selected as a vice-presidential nominee; more significantly, he has charted the path for an emerging new conservative counter-elite.
The political balance is beginning to shift. A significant cohort of power brokers in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street have publicly moved toward Trump in this election cycle. Some of the names are familiar: Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Bill Ackman. But hundreds of other influential figures are assembling behind the scenes to support Trump’s campaign. Even some of Trump’s former adversaries, such as Mark Zuckerberg, have expressed cautious admiration for the former president.
Vance can now position himself at the center of this counter-elite. He has been in the boardrooms, made the pitches, and built the relationships. He speaks their language. They can do business together.
This could represent a sea-change. During the first Trump administration, especially following the death of George Floyd, institutional elites could neither express admiration for nor devote public support to Trump without paying a significant political price. Now the market has shifted, with a dissident elite moving along a similar path as Vance.
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Latest Liberal ad totally DESTROYS Pierre Poilievre and the Conservatives
If you’re new here, you may not recognize my headline as being sarcastic. Here’s Chris Selley‘s attempt to figure out what the Liberal brain trust is up to with their latest anti-Tory ad:
“The CEO of Elections Canada has indicated his opposition to it, and let me just say I’m at peace with that.”
These words, spoken by Pierre Poilievre a decade ago, are part of an absolutely bizarre 46-second video the Liberal Party of Canada released in recent days trying to convince us — a very novel approach — that the Conservative leader is too wacky and full of dangerous ideas to vote for.
Read that sentence again. It’s supposed to be a scare quote. Are you scared? Or, more likely, do you not know what the hell he’s talking about? Removed from its context it’s not just uncontroversial; it barely even exists. It’s like someone negotiating the return date on their dry cleaning, or asking for no mayonnaise on their Whopper.
There’s another quote like that in the same 46-second video: “We’re Conservatives, so we don’t believe in that”.
Believe in what? No idea. Keynesian economics? The curse of the Oak Island treasure? Could be anything.
The notion that communications is the Liberals’ “problem” is as laughable as ever, but good grief are they ever terrible at communicating.
Usually politicians take other politicians’ quotes out of context to make them look bad. Here the Liberals have done … I really have no idea what. It’s like they’re so hopelessly ensconced in their echo chamber that they can’t tell which echoes have even escaped the chamber into the real world … if the real world even still exists.
Those intimately familiar with Poilievre’s parliamentary record (which is what, maybe 90 people in the world?) might surmise, correctly, that in the first instance he was talking in his role as minister of state for democratic reform in the Harper government about Bill C-23. That was the 2014 legislation that, most controversially, toughened voter-ID requirements: Your voter-information card, delivered by mail, would no longer be sufficient proof of your identity to cast your ballot. You wouldn’t be able to “vouch” for another voter.
This was unnecessary, I felt at the time, and I might still, though the prospect of electoral fraud doesn’t make Liberal eyes roll quite as theatrically as it used to. But it seems clear the serious foreign interference in play is considerably smarter and more insidious than just sending some people to vote without proof of citizenship (which few of us offer up to vote as it stands).
Anyway, Poilievre was telling a Senate committee, on April 8, 2014, that he understood then chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand disagreed with the bill, and that he disagreed with Mayrand, and that he was “at peace with it.”
I do hope you were sitting down for that bombshell.
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The ABC Of Hand Tools (1945) – Tool Care & Handling
PeriscopeFilm
Published Apr 16, 2024The ABC of Hand Tools (1945) is a Walt Disney Co. produced training and educational film for General Motors (GM) about proper use of hand tools. The film, which is in Technicolor, is fully animated and opens with a caveman character “Primitive Pete” seen inventing the first hand tool: an early model hammer made from stone with a stick handle. The film then goes on to elegantly show different types of basic hand tools such as the hammer, screwdriver, wrench, and pliers and show their proper uses, design elements and proper care.
Opening credits and title page, General Motors (GM) logo (0:07). Animation of various hand tools on blue background: wrench, hammer, saw, screwdriver (0:28). Various human innovations built using hand tools stretch out from globe: Golden Gate Bridge, radio towers, train (0:35). Stone Age: cartoon character caveman “Primitive Pete” uses earliest form of hand tool, stone tied to stick “Stone Age hammer” (0:58 – 2:12). Various modern day hand tools derived from Primitive Pete’s invention and shots of Primitive Pete misusing these tools: Ball-Peen Hammer design and proper uses of peen vs. face (2:24). Brass or copper hammer, raw-hide face hammer, plastic tip hammer, claw hammer (3:38). Details of design, uses of claw hammer (how to tighten hammer head, how to insert or remove nail using hammer head and claw) and Primitive Pete demonstrating how NOT to use the hammer (3:56 – 5:32). Ordinary screwdriver: Primitive Pete struggles to open window using screwdriver, however, he fails and only ends up ruining the tool (5:35). More information on the screwdriver which is made up of three principal parts: handle, shank, blade (6:00). Various size screws screwed into wood plank, demo on how to find proper blade for screw head size; Consequences of not choosing proper blade (6:44). Repairing blade head on shank if damaged; Front and side view of properly ground screw driver (7:37). Special heavy duty model screwdriver with extra large square shank; Primitive Pete damages screw driver by using wrench (8:19). Pliers: combination pliers, diagonal cutting pliers, long round-nose pliers, side-cutting pliers (8:50). Details of side cutting pliers design and uses: detailed how-to steps for using these pliers to make an electrical connection (9:09). Use of long round-nose pliers to make loop to fit a terminal (9:43). Use of diagonal cutting pliers for removing and installing cotter pins (10:01). Use of combination pliers: design elements (slip joint, shear) and uses (10:26). Wrenches and size range of wrench head (measurements refer to distance between jaws) (11:09). Primitive Pete demos bad wrench use followed by demo of proper usage (11:34). Open end wrench: adjustable jaw; Correct use of wrench; Proper care – keep tool well oiled (12:38). Medium sized monkey wrench: adjustable jaw for tight fit against nut; Proper use (13:35). Primitive Pete shown destroying tool by trying to force stubborn nut by hammering on wrench handle (14:11). Pipe wrench: how to use on pipes and other round objects, protective measures to prevent teeth marks (14:43). Box wrench: 12 notches in its head for good fit over nuts; head and handle offset at 15-degree angle (15:25). Combination box and open end wrench “half and half” (16:02). Boxes of socket wrenches: normal box set and one ideal for mechanic workshops which includes hinged offset handle, T handle, ratchet handle (16:23). Primitive Pete uses early model hammer against rock before film cuts to closing credits (17:40).
(more…)
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QotD: Comparative advantage
David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), quoted on the Library of Economics and Liberty site.
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July 25, 2024
David Friedman on the economics of trade
David Friedman discusses how, for example, the US and China manage their trading relationship:
“United States Balance of Trade Deficit-pie chart” by Shirishag75 is marked with CC0 1.0 
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I recently read a thread about US/China trade on a forum occupied mostly by intelligent people. As best I could tell, all participants were taking it for granted that things that make it more expensive to produce in the US, such as regulations or minimum wage laws, make the US “less competitive”, increase the trade deficit, give the Chinese an advantage. Reading Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s battle plan for a future conservative president, I observed the same pattern, with only one exception.
It did not seem to have occurred to any of the forum posters that US costs are in dollars, Chinese costs in Yuan, and what determines the exchange rate between them is the cost of producing things. Discussing trade policy in terms of absolute advantage, pre-Ricardian economics, isn’t quite as bad as discussing the space program on the assumption that the Earth is at the center of the universe with sun, moon and planets embedded in a set of nested crystalline spheres surrounding it — Copernicus was about three centuries earlier than Ricardo — but it is close. It is a point that I made here about a year ago, but since the question came up in my most recent post and in a thread on my favorite forum, it is probably worth making again.
The Economics of Trade
It is easiest to start with the simple case of two countries and no capital flows. The only reason Americans want to buy yuan with dollars is to buy Chinese goods, the only reason Chinese want to sell yuan for dollars is to buy American goods. If Americans try to buy more yuan than Chinese want to sell, the price of yuan in dollars goes up, if Chinese want to sell more yuan than Americans want to buy, the price goes down, just as in other markets. The price of yuan in dollars, the exchange rate, ends up at the price at which supply equals demand, which means that Americans are importing the same dollar (and yuan) value of goods that they are exporting.
Suppose the US government, inspired by the mercantilist view that countries get rich by exporting more than they import, tries to produce a “favorable” balance of trade by imposing a tariff on Chinese imports. Chinese goods are now more expensive to Americans. Since they want to buy less from China they don’t need as many yuan so the demand for yuan goes down, the price of yuan in dollars goes down, which reduces the cost of Chinese goods to Americans. Just as before, the exchange rate ends up at a level at which the dollar value of US exports equals the dollar value of US imports. Both imports and exports are now less, since trade is being taxed, but the balance of trade is exactly what it would be without the tariff.
Suppose the US becomes less good at making things due to an increase in government regulation or some other cause. Dollar prices of US goods in the US go up. That makes US goods more expensive to Chinese purchasers so they buy fewer of them, decreasing the demand for dollars on the dollar/yuan market. The exchange rate shifts — dollars are now less valuable so their price falls. Trade still balances. The US is not “less competitive”, merely poorer.
Now add in more countries. One reason Chinese want to buy dollars is to sell them to Germans who want dollars with which to buy American goods. We end up with a trade deficit with China, since some of the dollars they get for their exports are being used to import goods from Germany instead of the US, but a matching trade surplus with Germany, since they are using both the dollars they get by selling things to us and the dollars they get from China to buy goods from us. The same logic applies with more countries.
To explain how it is possible for the US to have a trade deficit we now drop the assumption of no capital movements. One reason Chinese want dollars is to buy goods and ship them to China but another is to buy assets in America — government bonds, shares of stock, real estate. Dollars bought and dollars sold are still equal but exports of goods no longer equal imports of goods. Part of what the US is “exporting”, selling to foreigners, is assets located in the US.
Suppose the US government wants to reduce the trade deficit. One way would be to reduce the budget deficit, since if the US is borrowing less it will not have to pay lenders as high an interest rate, which will make US bonds less attractive to Chinese buyers. Another way would be to block capital movements, make it illegal for foreign buyers to buy US assets. Doing that, however, means less capital investment in the US, hence higher interest rates. With fewer lenders to buy US bonds, the government will have to offer a higher interest rate to sell them.
One argument sometimes offered for restricting foreign investment is that if the Chinese own a lot of US assets that gives them power over us. The same argument was offered in the early 19th century when European investors were paying to build railroads and dig canals in the US. Daniel Webster pointed out that, if there was a conflict with European powers, their assets were sitting on our territory under our control. It wasn’t like they could repossess the Erie canal.
What about imposing a tariff in order to reduce imports? The logic of the previous argument still applies — the exchange rate will shift to make imports more attractive, exports less. Any effect on the deficit will depend on what happens to the attractiveness of US assets to Chinese investors. Figuring out the net effect is complicated, depending in part on what people expect trade policy and exchange rates to be when they collect on their capital investments.
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Poptimism?
Freddie deBoer has a few things to say about “poptimism” (whatever the heck that might be):
this piece is by a literature professor btw
I mean, honestly, what are we doing here? Where does this go? When does the madness end? What degree of all-swallowing society-wide celebration of pop music might be considered sufficient, for pop fans? How much more slavish devotion can Taylor Swift engender before they stop calling her an underdog? What is the endgame? What level of delusion is yet to be achieved, in the space of pretending that pop music is somehow marginalized or disrespected? This is, I’m told, “pop girl summer“, and it is genuinely difficult to find new music that gets any burn that isn’t some 18 to 28 year old photogenic woman, autotuning over shlocky overproduced midtempo backing tracks complete with beats stolen from mid-2010s EDM and muddy indistinct synth lines that all sound exactly the same. (Jack Antonoff should be put to death for his crimes.) My friends: you get all the streams, you get all the good reviews, you get all the Grammys, you get all the magazine covers. There exist almost no mainstream publications that regularly cover any music other than the kind you like. If anyone uses words like “authenticity” in music criticism, they will be sent to the gulag; if anyone suggests that musicians who write their own songs possess some sort of intimate connection to them, that person receives the digital equivalent of being pressed to death like Giles Corey. What more adulation do you want for your stars? What additional level of respect is there for them to secure? What do you want?
NPR says “This summer’s music charts are dominated by pop girl underdogs”. Underdogs cannot dominate! Definitionally! If they are dominating, they are not underdogs! This is the modern hell of crybullying, the person who tells you that you’re oppressing them while they’re busy mashing your face into the asphalt.
And, of course, it’s mostly all a negotiation with aging. As one of the oldest Millennials, I’m watching as my generation reaches middle age and reacts to that transition, and I can give you an initial verdict on how it’s going: not well, at all. We’re mostly adjusting to it by not adjusting to it. So, so many Millennials are confronting the end of their youth by performatively embracing youth culture, loudly declaring that the only music that matters is that which you discover on TikTok. They need everyone to know that they’ve spent the cost of a new Toyota on tickets to the Eras Tour. (Which soaks up seats that might otherwise be available to actual young people, not wine moms with too much money, but nevertheless.) They might like music. But in a much deeper way, they need it. They need what they think it represents.
Of course, this is all made a little bleaker by the fact that elder Millennials were once defined as the “hipster” generation, Williamsburg residents swilling PBR at backyard parties where they listened to the latest indie darling. In other words, they — we — have gone from being ostentatiously countercultural to ostentatiously mainstream, in the span of twenty years, which makes it hard not to conclude that they — we — never actually had aesthetic tastes at all and have instead lived like little reeds in the wind, terrified of ever appearing to not be The Right Kind of Person, which can only ever be defined through our capitalist consumption, since we think that all we are is our capitalist consumption.
