Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 12, 2024One of the first new weapons adopted and used by the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army after the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war was the Type 50, a copy of the Soviet PPSh-41. The story of its manufacture begins at the Japanese-occupied Mukden Arsenal. It was briefly occupied by the Soviets in 1945 before coming under control of the CCP. It was a huge manufacturing complex at the time, making artillery, small arms, ammunition, and more. A Nationalist bombing raid in 1949 led to the production being distributed among three separate smaller facilities, and the small remote town of Bei’an was chosen to become the new small arms factory site.
The town became so heavily focused on weapons manufacture that it gained the nickname of “Gun City”. The factory was formally named #626, and given the cover name of Qinghua Tool Company. It initially began with production of the Type 38 Arisaka, Type 24 Mauser (the Chiang Kai Shek rifle), the M1 Carbine (a failed project), and the Type 50 copy of the PPSh. In the spring of 1951 in response to UN advances northward in Korea, production was ordered to scale up on the Type 50, to 7500-9000 per month. This took a couple of months to achieve, but in June 1951 the first large shipment of the guns left the factory, and by December 1953 a total of 358,000 had been made. At that point, production shifted to the Type 54, a copy of the PPS-43.
The Type 50 is a close copy of the Russian Shpagin, but differs in a couple of details. The Chinese used a rear aperture sight, and the sights were placed slightly farther forward than on Russian guns. They are also generally very well made — better than most Russia wartime examples.
For many more cool small arms stories, check out WWII After WWII:
https://wwiiafterwwii.wordpress.com
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July 22, 2024
Chinese Type 50 PPSh: Founding “Gun City” in Manchuria
QotD: Post-apartheid South Africa
There were two things that finally caused the dam to break and muted criticism of the South African regime to start appearing in the international press: the first was the situation in Zimbabwe. Like South Africa, Zimbabwe had recently ended decades of white minority rule, but in Zimbabwe things went way more wrong, way more quickly. Robert Mugabe, the incumbent president of Zimbabwe, was running in a contested election, and decided to ensure his victory with a campaign of mass murder and torture which in turn triggered a famine and a refugee crisis.
All of this brought tons of international condemnation onto the Zimbabwean regime, and a lot of countries looking for ways to pressure it to stop the atrocities. The glaring exception was Mbeki’s South Africa, which staunchly defended Zimbabwe for years as the killing and the starvation just kept ratcheting up. It’s unclear why they did this, beyond the ANC and ZANU-PF (the Zimbabwean ruling party) having a certain ideological and familial kinship, both being post-colonialist revolutionary parties that had overthrown white minority rule. But whatever the reason, this was the straw that finally caused Western politicians and celebrities to wake up a little bit and realize that South Africa was now ruled by thugs.
The second, even more catastrophic event that caused the South African government to lose the sheen of respectability was the AIDS epidemic and their response to it. The story of how Mbeki buried his head in the sand, embraced quack theories on the causes of AIDS, and condemned hundreds of thousands of people to avoidable deaths is well known at this point, but Johnson’s book is full of grimly hysterical details that turn the whole story into the darkest comedy you’ve ever seen.
For example: I had no idea that Mbeki was so ahead of his time in outsourcing his opinions to schizopoasters on the internet. According to his confidantes, at the height of the crisis the president was frequently staying up all night interacting pseudonymously with other cranks on conspiracy-minded forums (an important cautionary tale for all those … umm … friends of mine who enjoy dabbling in a conspiracy forum or two). These views were then laundered through a succession of bumbling and imbecilic health ministers such as Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma or Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang who gave surreal press conferences extolling the healing powers of “Africanist” remedies such as potions made from garlic, beetroot, and potato.
Actually, the potions were a step up in some respects, the original recommendation from the South African government was that AIDS patients should consume “Virodene”, a toxic industrial solvent marketed by a husband-wife con-artist duo named Olga and Siegfried Visser. Later documents came to light revealing large and inexplicable money transfers between the Vissers and Tshabalala-Msiming. The Vissers then established a secret lab in Tanzania where they experimented on unsuspecting human subjects, engaged in bizarre sexual antics, and performed cryonics experiments on corpses. Despite this busy schedule, they also produced a constant stream of confidential memos on AIDS policy that were avidly consumed by Mbeki.
The horror of it all is that by this point there were very good drugs that could massively cut the risk of mother-child HIV transmission and somewhat reduced the odds of contracting the virus after a traumatic sexual encounter. There were a lot of traumatic sexual encounters. A contemporaneous survey found that around 60 percent of South Africans believed that forcing sex on somebody was not necessarily violence, and a common “Africanist” belief was that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS, all of which led to extreme levels of child rape. The government then did everything in its power to prevent the victims of these rapes from accessing drugs that could stave off a deadly disease. At first the excuse was that they were too expensive, then when the drug companies called that bluff and offered the drugs for free, it became that they caused “mutations”.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: South Africa’s Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-03-20.
July 21, 2024
“Since 2012, NATO has experienced a revival and a return to relevance that would make any washed up 80’s movie star turn green with envy”
Big Serge considers where NATO came from, where it is now, and where it might be going:
NATO, in its original conception, was designed to resolve a very particular security dilemma in Western Europe. In the immediate wake of World War Two, Western Europe — specifically Britain and France — had to consider how it might be possible to mount a defense against the colossal Soviet forces that were now conveniently forward deployed in Central Germany. The 1948 “Western Union Defense Organization” (WUDO), which included the aforementioned Anglo-French allies along with the Netherlands and Belgium, was created with an eye to this problem. With the rapid demobilization of American armies in Europe, however, it was obvious that this threadbare European alliance had dismal prospects in the unthinkable event of war with the Soviet Union. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the supreme commander of WUDO forces, was asked what the Soviets would it would take for the Red Army to attack and push through all the way to the Atlantic, and famously replied: “Shoes”.
NATO, therefore, was an attempt to resolve the total strategic overmatch on the European continent through two expedients. The first of these, obviously was America’s membership, which brought both formal American security commitments as well as permanent American military deployments in Europe. The second strategic boost provided by NATO concerned Germany. Even after being ravaged by war and dismembered by the allied occupation, Western Germany remained the most populous and potentially powerful state in Western Europe. From the beginning, it was clear (particularly to the Americans and the British) that any sustainable strategy for deterring or fighting the Red Army would have to make use of German manpower — but this implied, axiomatically, that West Germany would have to be economically rehabilitated and rearmed. The prospect of *intentionally* rearming Germany was immensely upsetting to the French, for obvious reasons given the events of 1940-44. [NR: And 1914-18, and especially, 1870-71.]
The first NATO summit conference
NATO thus solved two major obstacles to a sustainable and viable defense of Western Europe, in that it formally and permanently tied the United States into the European defense architecture, and it provided a mechanism to rearm West Germany without allowing for the possibility of a truly autonomous and revanchist German foreign policy.
In many ways, NATO can be seen as a total reversal of the Versailles system which had doomed Europe after the First World War by guaranteeing the Second. The interwar period saw the Anglo-French alliance pitted against an adversarial Germany without American assistance; NATO ensured American commitment to European defense and rehabilitated Germany into a valuable partner — providing the command architecture to rearm Germany and mobilize German resources without allowing Germany to conduct an independent foreign policy.
Thus, the popular formulation, coined by the first General Secretary of NATO, Lord Hastings Ismay, that NATO existed to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down”. This statement, however, has frequently been misinterpreted. The idea of “keeping the Americans in” was not a plot by Washington to dominate the continent, but a contrivance by the Europeans to keep America engaged in their defense. As for “keeping the Germans down”, this is pithily stated but not entirely accurate — the entire point of adding West Germany to NATO was to allow it to rebuild and rearm in the interests of collective western defense. For the United States, NATO made sense as a way to mobilize European resources and calcify the “front” in Europe, in the context of a broader geopolitical struggle with the USSR.
This is what NATO was for. It was a mechanism for formalizing an American security commitment in Europe and mobilizing German resources to deter the USSR, and it worked — the frontline of the Cold War in Europe remained static up until the collapse of the Soviet Union due to the naïve and self-destructive political visions of one Mikhail Gorbachev.
But what is NATO for now? What purpose does it serve in the context of a broader American grand strategy? More to the point, does such a grand strategy exist, and is it coherent? These are questions worth asking.
The Atomic Age Begins! – WW2 – Week 308 – July 20, 1945
World War Two
Published 20 Jul 2024This week the Americans explode a nuclear bomb at the Trinity Test in New Mexico. The plan is to possibly use more such bombs against targets in Japan. US President Harry Truman is meanwhile in Germany for the Potsdam Conference with other Allied leaders to hammer out some details of the postwar global order. The active war continues, of course, in Burma, Borneo, the Philippines, and China, with the Japanese being defeated everywhere.
00:00 Intro
00:22 Recap
00:51 The Trinity Test
02:46 The Potsdam Conference Begins
04:09 Bretton Woods Agreement
05:38 The Active War Continues
09:39 Summary
11:00 Conclusion
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LCBO strike reportedly settled
A tentative deal was announced on Friday afternoon, then un-announced after the LCBO claimed the union had added financial demands to the return-to-work conditions after the contract itself had been agreed, and then on Saturday, re-announced. If the deal is ratified by the union, LCBO stores across Ontario should re-open on Tuesday.
It was the first LCBO strike in Ontario history, and it’s open to debate whether the union members will get all that much for their two-week unpaid break. The National Post‘s Chris Selley thinks not, calling it the “Stupidest. Strike. Ever.”
“LCBO at Parkway Mall” by Xander Wu is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 
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A week into the strike, a scant 15 per cent of Ontarians told Leger marketing that shuttered LCBO outlets had “affected (them) personally”. Only 29 per cent said they felt the government should legislate or arbitrate LCBO workers back into stores as soon as possible. Eleven per cent said they didn’t even know the strike was happening. And 32 per cent said they had explored “alternative locations” to buy booze, of which there are nowadays myriad.
Many more explored those opportunities in week two of the strike, I suspect, as fridges and wine racks were depleted. That’s potentially bad news for the LCBO’s future retail market share. But you didn’t even need an alternative to the LCBO: With a few days’ planning you could get all your regular brands delivered for free. Delivery and wholesale options were running as normal. Restaurants and supermarkets supplied by the LCBO were still supplied, and though there were reports of empty shelves at some supermarkets, that wasn’t truer than normal at the one I visit.
[…]
So this all looks like a terrible miscalculation by union leadership on behalf of its members — both a fundamental misreading of who had leverage, and a bizarre tactical choice to make the strike first and foremost about expanding the sale of ready-to-drink cocktails and seltzers (RTDs) to supermarkets and convenience stores.
Not wages; not benefits; not the number of full-time positions — things people can at least relate to — but where you can and cannot buy a White Claw or a Caesar in a can. Did they really think people would care?
Near as I can tell, it was an attempt to make this about the LCBO’s retail future: RTDs are a big and growing slice of the alcohol market in Ontario, only accessible (before the strike) at the LCBO. OPSEU wanted us to believe that by allowing supermarkets to sell them, Ontario would make no profit on them. And that’s their baked-in advantage: An incredible number of Ontarians, including far too many journalists, cannot wrap their minds around the notion of the government taking its cut at wholesale rather than retail.
Still, this gambit clearly fell flat.
Update: Fixed broken link to NP.
Britain’s Weird Vietnam War
Real Time History
Published Mar 15, 2024Fall 1945: the Second World War is over, but there is fresh fighting in Vietnam. Now, former enemies become allies as British-Indian troops, French Commandos, and surrendered Japanese soldiers join in a rag-tag alliance against Ho Chi Minh’s Communists in Saigon. The outcome will shape Vietnam’s future for decades to come, in Great Britain’s weird Vietnam War.
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QotD: There’s no recovery mode from being a Basic College Girl
Do you have any examples of BCGs recuperating?
Sadly, very few. Part of this is just in the nature of the biz — I don’t see too many former students out and about, since they all leave College Town for the big wide world — but I do know this: Scratch a Karen, find a BCG. In fact, you could go so far to say that “Karen” simply IS the BCG after she hits The Wall. The faster the impact, the bigger the Karen (this is a testable hypothesis — given that our gal Taylor Swift is currently impacting The Wall at about Mach 3, if I’m right, she’ll soon unleash the kraken of Karens on an unsuspecting world).
I also strongly suspect that BCGs can’t recover. As any shrink will tell you, Narcissistic and Borderline Personality Disorders are almost impossible to treat. For one thing, treatment requires believing that you have a problem, and believing you don’t have a problem is pretty much diagnostic of those two syndromes. And while I’m not sure the BCG is clinically diagnosable with either of those, what they actually are is close enough that I’m betting whatever therapies “work” on actual clinical cases would “work” on them … but see above.
Finally, I guess I can’t really blame the BCG for not realizing she’s got a problem, because she obviously doesn’t have a problem. Look around — society rewards this shit. AOC, for example, is going to be La Presidenta por Vida de los Estados Unidos here in a decade or so; if that’s a problem, I can’t really blame them for not fixing it. Eventually, of course, reality will intrude, and your BCG will be screaming for a real man to come save her … but, thanks to her BCG antics, there won’t be any real men around. Or, you know, we’ll all be in the OPFOR, so good luck with that, beeyatch.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag /Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-25.
July 20, 2024
Begun, the Cancellation Wars have!
At Postcards From Barsoom, John Carter discusses how the cancellation wars have gone over the last decade:
The left’s reaction to the missed shot heard around the world has been exactly as calm and measured as we have grown to expect. Sensing that America is teetering on the edge of the abyss of civil violence and realizing that they need to deescalate the situation, liberals have thrown open their arms with a message of conciliation and unity, as embodied by popular slogans such as “Make Aiming Great Again”. You can really feel the love.
Recently Xitter’s Libs of TikTok, neé Chaya Raichik, got a Home Depot employee fired from her job. The woman herself isn’t important – just another obese, frumpy hicklib convinced that Trump is Antichrist McHitler because her opinion box on her living room wall has spent the last eight years lying to her about Russia. The details aren’t all that interesting: the woman made an ill-considered comment on Facebook to the effect that she wished the would-be assassin hadn’t missed, which Raichik shared with her audience of ragebait junkies, which led to an angry veteran confronting the woman at her place of work, the video of which Raichik also shared, which led to Home Depot canning the unpleasant sow.
The result has been an immediate moral split on the right, between those who are appalled, and those who applaud. The former consider it a basic civic principle that people should not lose their jobs for getting mad on the Internet, no matter how objectionable or offensive their words. Isn’t free speech what we’ve been fighting for all these years? If the right starts using the power of the cancel mob, do we not become no different from the left?
[…]
The first incident in that series, the cancellation of space scientist Dr. Matt Taylor, was my personal emotional breaking point with the left. Before that I considered myself to be broadly aligned with the left, mainly due to disgust over the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, and disillusionment with the then-ongoing, pointless, costly horror of the perpetual terror war. What happened to Matt Taylor shook me out of it. Here was a guy who had just landed a robot on a comet, reduced to a mass of blubbering jello because shrieking women didn’t like the way the sexy Barbarella prints on his Hawaiian shirt objectified women i.e. made the ugly ones feel bad. At the time, that hersterical1 mob included many I counted as friends. I tried reasoning with them, pointing out that his shirt had been designed by a friend of his, an independent female artist, and that by wearing the shirt at the press conference at the apex of his career, with many more millions of eyes focused upon him than had ever looked his way before or would ever glance his way again, he was helping that friend, who is a woman herself, to expand her business. It didn’t matter, of course. Caught up in the digital maenad frenzy, there was no reasoning with them.
Over the decade subsequent to Dr. Taylor’s defenestration, we have seen people get cancelled for refusing to use the right pronouns, for refusing to genuflect before the rainbow, for wearing red hats in public, for donating to the wrong political causes, for getting into arguments with black people, for being related to someone who used a racial slur, for voicing words in Chinese that sound like racial slurs, and on and on without rhyme, reason, or limiting principle.
The left has been absolutely ruthless and relentless in its pursuit of total monolithic discursive purity.
This is not merely an Internet phenomenon, with consequences limited to those who draw the terrible gaze of the beast with a million eyes. You have almost certainly felt this in your personal life, the subtle, steady pressure to bite your tongue in every social and professional situation, the knowledge that if you say too much, if you cross one of the myriad invisible, ever-shifting red lines in the left’s mutable cat’s cradle of taboos, you risk total social and professional death.
All the more galling has been that leftists themselves feel absolutely no shame about voicing their demented gibberish at every opportunity, no matter how professionally or socially inappropriate. Again, most of you will have experienced this. Maybe there’s that Thanksgiving dinner, at which you did your best to avoid anything divisively political, only to endure sermons from your liberal aunt, who felt it her moral duty to correct her wayward relations, who are ignorant and need to educate themselves, on the urgency of climate change or the ethical imperative of confronting whiteness wherever it may be glimpsed. Maybe you’ve had to grit your teeth at an office meeting, the purpose of which was ostensibly to discuss the new sales tracking software, at which Debby from accounting inserted an egregious dig at the Bad Orange Russian Agent under the mistaken impression that this would meet with universal approval.
All it takes is one of these people to ruin a workplace for everyone. The moment one of them sees or hears anything that triggers them, no matter how innocuous, they run to HR, and your job is on the line. They are active in this, spontaneously discovering new ways to be offended, such that no one can predict what will send them off into a tantrum next. Everyone knows this, with the result that everyone is constantly walking on eggshells, aware that the walls have ears, as do the blue-haired women built like walls. For all the hand-wringing over the Home Depot lady’s firing, I suspect a lot of her coworkers sighed with relief when they got the news that they would no longer have to dance around her tender sensibilities in the lunch room.
1. To quote William M Briggs, who coined this term: there is no misspelling.
When diversity and competence requirements conflict
Janice Fiamengo compares the iconic Trumpian reaction after being wounded by a sniper with the cries for diversity at all costs from others:
Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024.
Many observers have had harsh words for the female Secret Service agents who performed poorly in response to the attempt on Trump’s life last Saturday (see this Wired article for a catalogue of the charges, in which the author cannot muster a single rebuttal). Some noted that Trump’s security detail for the Republican National Convention is now, it appears, exclusively male. And rightly so. There is no equality when bullets start to fly, and it is lethal to pretend there is.
When the first shot rang out, 50-year-old Pennsylvanian firefighter Corey Comperatore is reported to have done what men typically do in such situations: he shielded his wife and daughters, taking a bullet to the head. Women far more rarely perform such acts of self-sacrifice.
Comperatore lost his life because of a multitude of errors on the part of the Secret Service, including a long hesitation by snipers tasked with neutralizing threats. Video shows that at least one of these snipers, seemingly with the gunman in his sites, failed to take action until seconds after the gunman began firing. The agent seemed befuddled, scrambling back when the first shot came. Was he new on the job, inadequately trained, or sub-par in his skills? Or directed not to fire?
I am not equipped to answer these or the many other, darker, questions about the bungled security operation. What can be said for certain is that if some element of the Secret Service was not treasonously complicit in the attempt on Trump’s life, it was certainly massively inadequate to its task of protecting him and others at the rally. The gunman was allowed to gain access to his rooftop shooting position, and Trump was not extracted the moment the shooter’s presence became known.
Director Kimberly A. Cheatle, who expressed to CBS News in interview her concern with “developing and giving opportunities to everyone in our work force, and particularly women“, has a lot to answer for.
Perhaps the women we saw in Trump’s security detail were new recruits helping Cheatle reach her target of 30% women by 2030. They looked amateur, panicked, and unpracticed. One of the women attempting to remove Trump from the stage was simply too small, and hesitant, for the task; she looked at one point as if she were engaged in a group hug at a United Church reconciliation ceremony. (As many have noted, her small stature enabled Trump’s fist-raised gesture of masculine defiance and his exhilarating “Fight! Fight! Fight!”). As Trump was being taken into the security vehicle, the four women surrounding the car looked jumpy and confused, scared and awkward. One woman was visibly unable to holster her gun.
I’ve never seen so many women guarding a former president, and I’ve never seen so many women obviously incapable.
We know that men and women have different strengths and aptitudes. Nearly a decade ago, the United States Marine Corps demonstrated through a year-long study of hundreds of Marines that even women who could pass the physical exam simply could not carry out standard military tasks as efficiently as men. The study found, unsurprisingly, that “The males were more accurate hitting targets, faster at climbing over obstacles, better at avoiding injuries.” The women struggled to carry weapons and ammunition, and even to use the weaponry properly. Women’s higher injury rate was marked: “The well documented comparative disadvantage in upper and lower-body strength resulted in higher fatigue levels of most women, which contributed to greater incidents of overuse injuries such as stress fractures.”
Counting citation numbers in “Chomskys”
The latest anonymous reviewer in Astral Codex Ten‘s “Your Book Review” series considers the work of Noam Chomsky, and notes just how his works dominate the field of linguistics:
Noam Chomsky speaks about humanity’s prospects for survival in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States on 13 April 2017.
Original photo by Σ, retouched by Wugapodes via Wikimedia Commons.
You may have heard of a field known as “linguistics”. Linguistics is supposedly the “scientific study of language“, but this is completely wrong. To borrow a phrase from elsewhere, linguists are those who believe Noam Chomsky is the rightful caliph. Linguistics is what linguists study.
I’m only half-joking, because Chomsky’s impact on the study of language is hard to overstate. Consider the number of times his books and papers have been cited, a crude measure of influence that we can use to get a sense of this. At the current time, his Google Scholar page says he’s been cited over 500,000 times. That’s a lot.
It isn’t atypical for a hard-working professor at a top-ranked institution to, after a career’s worth of work and many people helping them do research and write papers, have maybe 20,000 citations (= 0.04 Chomskys). Generational talents do better, but usually not by more than a factor of 5 or so. Consider a few more citation counts:
- Computer scientist Alan Turing (65,000 = 0.13 Chomskys)
- Neuro / cogsci / AI researcher Matthew Botvinick (83,000 = 0.17 Chomskys)
- Mathematician Terence Tao (96,000 = 0.19 Chomskys)
- Cognitive scientist Joshua Tenenbaum (107,000 = 0.21 Chomskys)
- Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (120,000 = 0.24 Chomskys)
- Psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker (123,000 = 0.25 Chomskys)
- Two-time Nobel Prize winner Linus Pauling (128,000 = 0.26 Chomskys)
- Neuroscientist Karl Deisseroth (143,000 = 0.29 Chomskys)
- Biologist Charles Darwin (182,000 = 0.36 Chomskys)
- Theoretical physicist Ed Witten (250,000 = 0.50 Chomskys)
- AI researcher Yann LeCun (352,000 = 0.70 Chomskys)
- Historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt (359,000 = 0.72 Chomskys)
- Karl Marx (458,000 = 0.92 Chomskys)
Yes, fields vary in ways that make these comparisons not necessarily fair: fields have different numbers of people, citation practices vary, and so on. There is also probably a considerable recency bias; for example, most biologists don’t cite Darwin every time they write a paper whose content relates to evolution. But 500,000 is still a mind-bogglingly huge number.
Not many academics do better than Chomsky citation-wise. But there are a few, and you can probably guess why:
- Human-Genome-Project-associated scientist Eric Lander (685,000 = 1.37 Chomskys)
- AI researcher Yoshua Bengio (780,000 = 1.56 Chomskys)
- AI researcher Geoff Hinton (800,000 = 1.60 Chomskys)
- Philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1,361,000 = 2.72 Chomskys)
…well, okay, maybe I don’t entirely get Foucault’s number. Every humanities person must have an altar of him by their bedside or something.
Chomsky has been called “arguably the most important intellectual alive today” in a New York Times review of one of his books, and was voted the world’s top public intellectual in a 2005 poll. He’s the kind of guy that gets long and gushing introductions before his talks (this one is nearly twenty minutes long). All of this is just to say: he’s kind of a big deal.
[…]
Since around 1957, Chomsky has dominated linguistics. And this matters because he is kind of a contrarian with weird ideas.
Build the Square-Leg Craftsman Table (Part 1)
Rex Krueger
Published Apr 3, 2024A satisfying project starts with square pieces.
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QotD: Comparing gun crime in Canada and the United States
Whatever, dude. Unlike Moore, I have homes on both sides of the border and it’s the Quebec one I keep locked. By the time you read this, I’ll be in New York, but my home in New Hampshire will be unlocked, and so will my car at the airport, the key in the ignition, so I’ll know where to find it. By contrast, in Quebec it’s illegal to leave your car unlocked, even if you stop for a pee on an ice floe up by Hudson’s Bay. Pace Moore, Canada has vastly lower rates of handgun ownership. Long-gun ownership is much closer, but, statistically, Canadians are slightly more murderous than Americans in this sphere: in the US, there are 1.7 homicides per 100,000 long guns; in Canada, it’s 1.9. So European visitors to North America should be aware they’re more likely to be killed by a homicidal Canadian rifleman than an American one.
On the overall murder rate, if Moore’s interested in “cultural differences”, it seems odd that he should avoid the most obvious one. Alberta Report‘s Colby Cosh, a braver man than I, points out that black Americans are 13 per cent of the US population but commit over half the murders. Once you factor those out, non-black Americans murder at about the same rate as Canadians.
Mark Steyn, “Bowling for Columbine”, Steyn Online, 2002-11-30.
July 19, 2024
Argentina’s decades-long struggle with inflation
At the Foundation for Economic Education, Marcos Falcone provides an update on President Javier Milei’s ongoing efforts to drag the Argentine economy back from hyperinflation:
As Javier Milei rose to power in December of last year, Argentina suffered from an annual inflation rate of over 211 percent, only behind Venezuela and Lebanon. Having risen consistently for over two decades, a combination of perpetually unbalanced budgets and investors’ distrust made money creation (and thus inflation) almost unavoidable.
In that context, Javier Milei’s first promise in his inaugural address was to avoid hyperinflation. In order to do that, his highest priority was to balance the budget so as to stop monetizing the deficit. And indeed, after just one month, the government announced in January that Argentina achieved its first financial surplus in 16 years. In successive months, the budget has been kept balanced.
Quick action seems to be causing quick effects. Indeed, inflation has plunged from 25 percent in December to an expected 4 percent in July. This is happening in a context of price readjustments, with prices like rent going down (after the government repealed rent control laws) and energy and transport prices going up (as the government is cutting subsidies). Even the IMF has admitted that inflation is falling faster than expected. In fact, inflation is coming down so fast that banks have started offering mortgages for the first time in seven years. This signals that the market expects inflation to stay down.
Milei told Argentines that the process of defeating inflation would hurt—and it has. The downside of the government’s economic plan is that the country has entered a recession which is likely to last until at least the end of the year. Amid some layoffs, the country’s industrial output is decreasing. The spending cuts that allowed the country to balance the budget have resulted in less income for provinces and specific groups like retirees.
The rise of the reactionaries – Gen X poised to pounce and seize
Andrew Potter tries to explain why Gen X are much more likely to support conservative policies than the groovy fossil Boomers and the painfully Socialized Millennials and GenZ’ers:
Generation X Word Cloud Concept collage background
Best Motivation Blog: What Generation Is X
As North American politics continues its rightward lurch, it is becoming increasingly commonplace to note the outsized role of Gen Xers in pushing this trend. In 2022, a Politico essay tried to explain “How Gen X became the Trumpiest generation“. That same year, an essay in Salon lamented how “of course Gen X was always going to sell out and vote Republican”. Writing in The Line last year, Rahim Mohamed wondered “how Generation MTV became Generation GOP?” These aren’t outliers – there is a whole sub genre of cultural commentary devoted to trying to explain just why Gen Xers are so right wing, compared to both their Boomer predecessors and the Millennials and Zs who followed.
This raises a couple of questions, the first of which is: is it even true? And if so, why?
On the facts of the matter, it appears that members of Generation X are, on the whole, more conservative than other generations, and this is especially true in the United States. For the past three or four years, polls have consistently shown that Gen Xers are more likely to see the country as going in the wrong direction, more likely to disapprove of Joe Biden, and more likely to support Donald Trump and vote Republican, than any other generational cohort. And while every generation tends to become more conservative as it ages, it is a tendency that accelerated under Gen X.
Pollsters have found similar support for these trends in Canada. An Abacus survey conducted last August found Gen Xers had the highest level of support for the Conservatives, with 41 per cent of those surveyed intending to vote CPC. And just this past June, the pollster Frank Graves released a series of charts tracking sentiment in Canada on a number of issues, including national attachment, social cohesion, and voter intention. He found significant intergenerational discord, with members of Gen X showing the highest level of support for smaller government, and Gen X males having the highest level of support for the CPC.
So why is this the case? How did the generation that fought (and won) the first culture war against conservatives, that launched the antiglobalization movement, that made heroes out of left wing icons like Kurt Cobain and Naomi Klein, become the most right wing cohort of all? Did we follow our Boomer parents’ hippies-to-yuppies trajectory in selling out? Or is there something else at work, beyond crass financial self-interest?
There’s probably at least something to be said for the “crass self-interest” angle. Despite the long-standing claim to being the first generation to do worse than their parents, the truth is, Gen X is raking it in. Starting right around the pandemic, Canadian Gen Xers quietly overtook Boomers as the generation with the highest average household net worth. It may also explain why alone amongst the generations, members of Gen X list “cost of living” as their most salient political issue, in contrast with both the older and younger cohorts who identify things like climate change, health care, and the environment as the most important issues facing Canada.
Airline Food During the Golden Age of Air Travel
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Apr 9, 2024Back before airlines could compete with lower prices, they competed with the quality of atmosphere, service, and, of course, food.
I’d be happy to have this pot roast on the ground, let alone on an airplane. The meat is so tender that it falls apart, the vegetables and herbs give it wonderful flavor, and you get the added bonus of it making your house smell awesome as it simmers.
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