Quotulatiousness

November 10, 2024

Post-election thoughts from Andrew Sullivan

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

Given how … anguished … Andrew Sullivan seemed to be during the run-up to voting day, he’s either calmed down dramatically or he’s renounced the over-the-top hysterics for the moment:

    You can always spot a fool, for he is the man who will tell you he knows who is going to win an election. But an election is a living thing — you might almost say, the most vigorously alive thing there is — with thousands upon thousands of brains and limbs and eyes and thoughts and desires, and it will wriggle and turn and run off in directions no one ever predicted, sometimes just for the joy of proving the wiseacres wrong
    Robert Harris in his novel Imperium (2006).

This last decade or so, we’ve heard an awful lot about the new fragility of American democracy. So it bears noting that, after much angst, we somehow pulled this election off. Kudos to the election workers. Kudos to the voters for providing a clear and decisive result. Kudos to Harris for the graceful concession (in stark contrast to Trump in 2020). We have not lurched into another crisis of democratic legitimacy. No windows are being smashed; no statues are being torn down.

And there is, yes, a mandate. When one party wins the presidency, Senate, and probably the House, that’s usually the case. But this year, the policy divides were particularly clear, and the shift so clear and in one direction everywhere. Americans have voted for much tighter control of immigration, fewer wars, more protectionism, lower taxes, and an emphatic repudiation of identity politics. In the immortal words of Mencken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” We’ll soon see how that pans out.

But the good news is that we have become less tribal. The president whom Ta-Nehisi Coates derided as whiteness personified just won more non-white votes than any Republican since Nixon. The allegedly xenophobic campaigner against illegal immigration gained massively among various Spanish-speaking constituencies and many legal immigrants, especially men. The champion of rural whites somehow also made his biggest electoral gains in the big, non-white cities, and among Hispanic voters in Texas border counties. A Republican whom the left and the legacy media called a “white supremacist” won about 24 percent of the black male vote and 47 percent of the Latino male vote.

What about the huge impact of enraged women we were told about, especially in the wake of the Selzer poll in Iowa? Again: a nothingburger. Biden won women by 12 points; Harris — a woman candidate after the end of Roe — won by only 7 points. Ruy Teixeira runs through the other demos here. Gen Z? Biden won women under 30 by 32 points, and Harris by a mere 18. Meanwhile, men under 30 went from +15 for Biden to +14 for Trump — a truly staggering swing! Trump gained among Jews and Muslims! Harris was the candidate of the Upper West Side. The Bronx moved massively to Trump.

How could an entire left-liberal worldview be more comprehensibly dismantled by reality? And yet, the primary response among my own liberal friends was rage at the electorate. They texted me to insist that Harris lost because of white people — white women, in particular, their favorite bêtes blanches. The NYT’s resident race-baiter, Nikole Hannah-Jones, made her usual point:

    Since this nation’s inception large swaths of white Americans — including white women — have claimed a belief in democracy while actually enforcing a white ethnocracy.

In fact, among the few demos where Harris did better than Biden were white people earning over $100,000 a year, white women, white men, and “LGBT” voters — most of whom are now young, bi, white women in straight relationships. Warming to her racism, NHJ went after “the anti-Blackness … in Latino cultures as well.” Here’s how Joan Walsh put it:

    [Biden]’s got a couple things that my girl Kamala didn’t have. A penis, and that nice white skin.

But more whites went for Kamala than Biden! If you want proof that critical race, gender and queer theory is unfalsifiable, you just got it. The Dems and most of the legacy media have literally no frame of reference outside “white-bad/black-and-brown-good” and “men-bad/women-good”.

And no, Harris did not run a “flawless campaign“. Please. She ran one with no coherent message. She picked a woke weirdo as veep. She embraced neocons like Liz Cheney while never breaking decisively with Biden or the left. She had no credible answers on immigration and inflation. She had nothing coherent to say on foreign policy. She thought Cardi B and Stephen Colbert were arguments.

On Trump as a potential dictator, Americans keep telling us they don’t really buy it. They may be wrong … and maybe they are. But if you are going to respect democracy, you also need to respect their judgment, and honor their choice. I suspect they think he will throw his weight around, but will be constrained as he was last time around by the ability of the American system to stymie most radical moves. But they want him to end mass illegal immigration, and I suspect they will give him some leeway to get there. The Dems had their chance to enforce the border and instead chose to open the floodgates. What Trump now does is therefore their responsibility too.

WW2 in Numbers

Filed under: Britain, China, Economics, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 9 Nov 2024

World War II wasn’t just the deadliest conflict in history — it was a war of unprecedented scale. From staggering casualty numbers to military production and economic costs, this episode breaks down the biggest statistics that defined the global conflict.
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The 1896 US Presidential election

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

In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Ken Whyte looks back to the 1896 contest between William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan:

William Jennings Bryan, Democratic party presidential candidate, standing on stage next to American flag, 3 October 1896.
LOC photo LC-USZC2-6259 via Wikimedia Commons.

The 1880s and 1890s saw an enormous expansion in the number of newspapers in America. New printing technologies had drastically reduced barriers to entry in the newspaper field, while the emergence of consumer advertising was making the business more lucrative. By the election of 1896, there were forty-eight daily newspapers in New York (Brooklyn had several more), each vying for the attention of some portion of the city’s three million souls. The major papers routinely produced three or four editions a day, and as many as a dozen on a hot news day, making for a 24/7 news environment long before the term was coined. The individual newspapers were distinguished by their politics, ethnic, and class orientations. They advocated vigorously, often shamelessly, and occasionally dishonestly for the interests of their readers. Similar dynamics were afoot everywhere. America, in the 1890s, was noisy as hell.

Republican nominee William McKinley was the respectable candidate in 1896, heavily favoured. He had a state-of-the-art organization, buckets of money, and vast newspaper support, even among important Democratic publishers such as Joseph Pulitzer. The Democrats fielded William Jennings Bryan, who looked to be the weak link in his own campaign. He was a relatively unknown and untested ex-congressman from Nebraska, just thirty-six-years-old, a messianic populist with a mesmerizing voice and radical views. A last-minute candidate, he was selected on the convention floor over Richard P. Bland, against the protests of the party establishment.

Bryan broke all the norms of politics in 1896. At the time, it was believed that the dignified approach to campaigning was to sit on one’s porch and let party professionals speak on one’s behalf. Grover Cleveland had made eight speeches and journeyed 312 miles in his three presidential campaigns (1884, 1888, 1892). Bryan spent almost his entire campaign on the rails, holding rallies in town after town. He travelled 18,000 miles and talked to as many as five million Americans. He unabashedly championed the indigent and oppressed against Wall Street and Washington elites.

Inflation was the central issue of the 1896 campaign. The US was on the gold standard at the time, meaning that the amount of money in circulation was limited by the amount of gold held by the treasury. Gold happened to be scarce, resulting in an extended period of deflation, a central factor in the major economic depression of the early 1890s. The effects were felt disproportionately by the poor and working class. Bryan advocated the monetization of silver (in addition to gold) as a means of increasing the money supply and reflating the economy. This was viewed by the establishment as an economic heresy (not so much today). Bryan was viewed as a saviour by his followers, and that’s certainly how he saw himself.

The New York Sun heard among the Democrats “the murmur of the assailants of existing institutions, the shriek of the wild-eyed”. The New York Herald warned that Bryan’s supporters, disproportionately in the west and south, represented “populism and Communism” and “crimes against the nation” on par with secession. The New York Tribune warned that the Democrats’ “burn-down-your-cities platform” would lead to pillage and riot and “deform the human soul”. The New York Times asked, in all sincerity, “Is Mr. Bryan Crazy?” and spoke to a prominent alienist who was convinced that the election of the Democrat would put “a madman in the White House”. That Bryan’s support was especially strong among new Americans — the nation was amid an unprecedented wave of immigration — was especially disconcerting to the establishment. His followers were a “freaky”, “howling”, “aggregation of aliens”, according to the Times.

The only major New York newspaper to support the Democrats that season was Hearst’s New York Journal, a new, inexpensive, and wildly popular daily. I wrote about this in The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise of William Randolph Hearst. Loathed by the afore-mentioned respectable sheets, the Journal became the de facto publicity arm of the Bryan campaign and Hearst became the Elon Musk of his time.

William McKinley, 1896.
Photo by the Courtney Art Studio via Wikimedia Commons.

The unobjectionable McKinley didn’t offer Democrats much of a target, but his campaign was being managed and funded by Ohio shipping and steel magnate Mark Hanna. The Journal had learned that Hanna and a syndicate of wealthy Republicans had previously bailed out McKinley from a failed business venture. Hearst’s cartoonists portrayed Hanna as a rapacious plutocratic brute (accessorized with bulging sacks of money or the white skulls of laborers) and McKinley as his trained monkey or puppet: “No one reaches the McKinley eye or speaks one word to the McKinley ear without the password of Hanna. He has McKinley in his clutch as ever did hawk have chicken … Hanna and his syndicate are breaking and buying and begging and bullying a road for McKinley to the White House. And when he’s there, Hanna and the others will shuffle him and deal him like a deck of cards.” The cartoons were criticized as cruel, distorted, and perverted. They were hugely effective.

Caught off guard by Bryan’s tactics, but unwilling to put McKinley on the road, Hanna instead arranged for 750,000 people from thirty states to visit Canton, Ohio and see McKinley speak from his front porch. He meanwhile made some of the most audacious fundraising pitches Wall Street had ever heard. Instead of asking for donations, he “levied” banks and insurers a percentage of their assets, demanding the Carnegies, Rockefellers, and Morgans pay to defend the American way from democratic monetary lunatics. Standard Oil alone coughed up $250,000 (the entire Bryan campaign spent about $350,000). Hanna printed and distributed a mind-boggling 250 million documents to a US population of about 70 million (the mails were the social media of the day), and fielded 1,400 speakers to spread the Republican gospel from town to town. All of this was unprecedented.

The Republicans generated their own conspiracy theories to counter the stories about Hanna’s controlling syndicate. Pulitzer’s New York World published a series of articles on The Great Silver Trust Conspiracy — “the richest, the most powerful and the most rapacious trust in the United States”. Bryan was said to be a puppet of this “secret silver society”, for which the World had no evidence beyond that the candidate was popular in silver mining states.

There were violent motifs throughout the campaign. The Republicans accused the Democrats of fostering division and rebellion, threatening national unity by pitting the south and the west against the east and the Mid-West. This was charged language with the Civil War still in living memory. Hanna funded a Patriotic Heroes’ Battalion comprising Union army generals who held 276 meetings in the last months of the campaign. They would ride out in full uniforms to a bugle call, advising the old soldiers who came out to see them to “vote as they shot”. Said one of their number: “The rebellion grew out of sectionalism … We cannot tolerate, will not tolerate, any man representing any party who attempts again to disregard the solemn admonitions of Washington to frown down upon any attempt to set one portion of the country against another.” Senior New York Republicans vowed that if the Democrats were elected, “we will not abide the decision”. These belligerent tactics were cheered by the majority of New York papers.

Democratic and populist leader William Jennings Bryan, climaxed his career when when he gave his famous “Cross of Gold” speech which won him the nomination at the age of 36.
Grant Hamilton cartoon for Judge magazine, 1896 via Wikimedia Commons.

Bryan did nothing to cool tempers by claiming, in his famous “cross of gold” speech, that he and working-class Americans were being crucified by financial and political elites.

On it went. There were many echoes of 1896 in 2024. The polarized electorate, the last-minute candidate, record spending, unprecedented campaign tactics, populism and personal charisma, relentless ad hominem attacks, class and culture and regional warfare, inflation, immigration, racism, misinformation and conspiracy theories, comedians and plutocrats, threats of authoritarianism and violence and revolution, all of it massively amplified, and sometimes generated, by messy new media.

Of course, some of the echoes are coincidental, and there are also many contrasts. It was a different electorate. The alignment of the parties bore little resemblance to what we see today. Bryan, aside from his megalomania and zealotry, was as personally decent as Trump isn’t. And Bryan lost the campaign.

My point is I don’t think it’s an accident that the likes of Bryan and Trump — mavericks who thoroughly dominate their parties (both thrice nominated) through a direct and unshakeable bond with their followers — surface when the public sphere is most chaotic. New media environments, by their nature, are amateurish, turbulent, unsettling. There are fewer guardrails, which is a major reason outsiders and their followers gravitate to them. They see a way to change the rules and end-run established media (establishment candidates are naturally more comfortable using established channels to reach voters). New forms of political communication develop, contributing to new political norms, tactics, and strategies, and long-lasting political realignments.

For better or worse.

The Sixties, Cicero, Catiline, Cato and Caesar – The Conquered and the Proud Episode 9

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

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jul 3, 2024

Continuing our series on the the history of Rome from 200 BC to AD 200, this time we look at the turbulent decade following the consulship of Pompey and Crassus in 70 BC. These years saw Pompey being given major commands against the pirates and Mithridates. Men like Cicero, Caesar and Cato were on the ascendant. Cicero’s letters can make the decade seem calm, but further consideration reveals the threat and reality of political violence, seen most of all in Catiline’s conspiracy which led to a brief civil war.

In this talk we explore the themes we have already considered and consider how imperial expansion continued to change the Roman Republic.

This talk will be released in July — and as this is the month named after Julius Caesar, it seemed only appropriate to have a Caesar theme to most of the talks.

Next time we will look at the Fifties BC and the start of the Civil War in 49 BC.

QotD: The low social status of shepherds in the ancient and medieval world

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

When thinking about the people involved in these activities, at least in most agrarian contexts, it is often important to distinguish between two groups of people: the shepherds themselves who tend the sheep and the often far higher status individuals or organizations which might own the herd or rent out the pasture-land. At the same time there is also often a disconnect between how ancient sources sometimes discuss shepherding and shepherds in general and how ancient societies tended to value actual shepherds in practice.

One the one hand, there is a robust literature, beginning in the Greek and Roman literary corpus, which idealizes rustic life, particularly shepherding. Starting with Theocritus’ short pastoral poems (called eidullion, “little poems” from where we get the word idyll as in calling a scene “idyllic”) and running through Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics, which present the pure rural simplicity of the countryside and pastoralism as a welcome contrast to the often “sordid” and unhealthy environment of the city (remember the way these “gentlemen farmers” tend to think about merchants and markets in cities, after all). This idolization only becomes more intense in Europe with the advent of Christianity and the grand metaphorical significance that shepherding in particular – as distinct from other rural activities – takes on. It would thus be easy to assume just from reading this sort of high literature that shepherds were well thought of, especially in a Christian social context.

But by and large just as the elite love of the idea of rural simplicity did not generally lead to a love of actual farming peasants, so too their love of the idea of pastoral simplicity did not generally lead to an actually high opinion of the folks who did that work, nor did it lead shepherds to any kind of high social status. While the exact social position of shepherds and their relation to the broader society could vary (as we’ll see), they tended to be relatively low-status and poor individuals. The “shepherds out tending their flocks by night” of Luke 2:8 are not important men. Indeed, the “night crew” of shepherds are some of the lowest status and poorest free individuals who could possibly see that religious sign, a point in the text that is missed by many modern readers.

We see a variety of shepherding strategies which impact what kind of shepherds might be out with flocks. Small peasant households might keep a few sheep (along with say, chickens or pigs) to provide for the household’s wool needs. In some cases, a village might pool those sheep together to make a flock which one person would tend (a job which often seems to have gone to either fairly young individuals or else the elderly – that is, someone who might not be as useful in the hard labor on the farm itself, since shepherding doesn’t necessarily require a lot of strength).

Larger operations by dedicated shepherds often involved wage-laborers or enslaved laborers tending flocks of sheep and pastured owned by other, higher status and wealthier individuals. Thus for instance, Diodorus’s description of the Sicilian slave revolts (in 135 and 104 BC; the original Diodorus, book 36, is lost but two summaries survive, those of Photios and Constantine Porphyrogennetos), we’re told that the the flocks belonging to the large estates of Roman magnates in the lowland down by the coast were tended by enslaved shepherds in significant numbers (and treated very poorly; when a Greek source like Diodorus who is entirely comfortable with slavery is nevertheless noting the poor treatment, it must be poor indeed). Likewise, there is a fair bit of evidence from ancient Mesopotamia indicating that the flocks of sheep themselves were often under state or temple control (e.g. W. Sallaberger, “The Value of Wool in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia” or S. Zawadzki, “‘If you have sheep, you have all you need’: Sheep Husbandry and Wool in the Economy of the Neo-Babylonian Ebaddar Temple at Sippar” both in Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean eds. C. Breniquet and C. Michel, (2014)) and that it was the temple or the king that might sell or dispose of the wool; the shepherds were only laborers (free or unfree is often unclear).

Full time shepherds could – they didn’t always, but could – come under suspicion as effective outsiders to the fully sedentary rural communities they served as well. Diodorus in the aforementioned example is quick to note that banditry in Sicily was rife because the enslaved shepherds were often armed – armed to protect their flocks because banditry was rife; we are left to conclude that Diodorus at least thinks the banditry in question is being perpetrated by the shepherds, evidently sometimes rustling sheep from other enslaved shepherds. A similar disdain for the semi-nomadic herding culture of peoples like the Amorites is sometimes evident in Mesopotamian texts. And of course that the very nature of transhumance meant that shepherds often spent long periods away from home sleeping with their flocks in temporary shelters and generally “roughing it” exposed to weather.

Consequently, while owning large numbers of sheep and pastures for them could be a contributor to high status (and thus merit elite remark, as with Pliny’s long discussion of sheep in book 8 of his Natural History), actually tending sheep was mostly a low-status job and not generally well remunerated (keeping on poor Pliny here, it is notable that in several long sections on sheep he never once mentions shepherds). Shepherds were thus generally towards the bottom of the social pyramid in most pre-modern societies, below the serf or freeholding farmer who might at least be entitled to the continued use of their land.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-05.

November 9, 2024

Did US Indecision Encourage Stalin in Korea?

Filed under: Asia, China, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 8 Nov 2024

In March 1950, Stalin finally approves Kim Il-sung’s plans for an invasion of South Korea. But why now? Today Indy looks at the wider Cold War context that fed into Stalin and Mao Zedong’s decision making. He also examines whether the lack of a clear and public commitment from the US to defend the Asian theatre helped to invite the invasion.
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Bill C-413 “is aimed at preventing her fellow Canadians from saying anything positive about Indian residential schools”

Filed under: Cancon, History, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Nina Green suggests that Bill C-413’s sponsor might be the first person in Canada to face criminal charges in that piece of legislation if her private member’s bill gets Royal Assent:

On 31 October 2024 Member of Parliament Leah Gazan called a press conference to lobby for Bill C-413, her private member’s bill designed to criminalize her fellow citizens for disagreeing with her views.

Gazan led off the press conference with this statement:

    Good morning, everybody. I’m Leah Gazan, and I’m the Member of Parliament from Winnipeg Centre, and we’re here to discuss support of Bill C-413 to amend the Criminal Code to include the willful promotion of hate against Indigenous peoples by condoning, downplaying, justifying the residential schools.

To evoke an emotional response, Gazan used the word “violence” a dozen times during her press conference, falsely equating speech with violence, although violence by definition involves physical force.

Gazan’s bill is obviously not aimed at preventing physical violence against Indigenous people. It is aimed at preventing her fellow Canadians from saying anything positive about Indian residential schools.

Earlier, on 27 September 2024, Gazan made the bill personal, telling CTV News that “my family has been impacted by residential school”, implying that she had been motivated to introduce her bill because of the serious harm residential schools had inflicted on her own family.

In fact, the exact opposite is true. Residential schools had a positive effect on Leah Gazan’s family.

On her father’s side, Gazan is Jewish, and her maternal grandfather was Chinese. Thus her only possible connection to Indian residential schools is through her maternal grandmother, Adeline LeCaine, the daughter of Leah Gazan’s great-grandfather, John LeCaine (1890-1964).

What we learn about John LeCaine turns out to be surprising. He was the son of a white North West Mounted Police officer, William Edward Archibald LeCain (1859-1915), and Emma Loves War, whose Lakota Sioux family sought refuge in Canada with Chief Sitting Bull and 5000 of his people after the massacre of Custer and his men at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. […]

Since he had a white father and an American Indian mother, John LeCaine was, in the terminology of the day, a half-breed, and ineligible to attend a residential school since federally-funded Indian residential schools were reserved for status Indians under the Indian Act. However an exception was made, and both John LeCaine and his sister Alice LeCaine (1888-1976) were admitted to the Regina Industrial School. John LeCaine attended for seven years, from 1899 to 1906 when he was 9 to 16 years of age. While there he learned to read and write English proficiently, and mastered agricultural and carpentry skills which equipped him to apply, like white settlers at the time, for a homestead, which he proved up in 1913. In 1914 he wrote to the Department of the Interior asking for a ruling on whether his two half-brothers — who were full-blooded Sioux — could also apply for homesteads.

The proficiency in English he acquired at the Regina Industrial School enabled John LeCaine to became a writer and a historian of the Lakota people. In later years he mapped the places he and his stepfather, Okute Sica, had visited on a journey to the Frenchman River in 1910, and wrote a collection of stories told to him by Sioux Elders, Reflections of the Sioux World, as well as other articles, including some published in the Oblate journal, The Indian Record.

History of SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon) use in the US Army

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Jul 26, 2024

The first squad automatic weapon used by the US Army was the French Mle 1915 Chauchat, which was the primary LMG or automatic rifle for troops in the American Expeditionary Force in World War One. At that time, the Chauchat was a company-level weapon assigned where the company commander thought best. In World War Two, the Chauchat had been replaced by the BAR, and one BAR gunner was in each 12-man rifle platoon. The BAR was treated like a heavy rifle though, and not like a support weapon as light machine guns were in most other armies.

After Korea the value of the BAR was given more consideration and two were put in each squad instead of one, but the M14 replaced the BAR before it could gain any greater doctrinal importance. The M14 was intended to basically go back to the World War Two notion of every man equipped with a very capable individual weapon, and the squad having excellent flexibility and mobility by not being burdened with a supporting machine gun. The M60 machine guns were once again treated as higher-level weapons, to be attached to rifle squads as needed.

After Vietnam, experiments with different unit organization — and with the Stoner 63 machine guns — led to the decision that a machine gun needed to be incorporated into the rifle squad. This led to the request for what became the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, and its adoption in the 1980s. At last, the American rifle squad included an organic supporting machine gun.

Today, the USMC is once again going back to the earlier model with every rifleman carrying the same weapon, now an M27 Individual Automatic Rifle. The Army may also change its organizational structure with the new XM7 and XM250 rifle and machine gun, but only time will tell …
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QotD: George Bernard Shaw

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

… Shaw is not at all the heretic his fascinated victims see him, but an orthodox Scotch Presbyterian of the most cock-sure and bilious sort. In the theory that he is Irish I take little stock. His very name is as Scotch as haggis, and the part of Ireland from which he comes is peopled almost entirely by Scots. The true Irishman is a romantic; he senses religion as a mystery, a thing of wonder, an experience of ineffable beauty; his interest centers, not in the commandments, but in the sacraments. The Scot, on the contrary, is almost devoid of that sort of religious feeling; he hasn’t imagination enough for it; all he can see in the Word of God is a sort of police regulation; his concern is not with beauty but with morals. Here Shaw runs true to type. Read his critical writings from end to end, and you will not find the slightest hint that objects of art were passing before him as he wrote. He founded, in England, the superstition that Ibsen was no more than a tin-pot evangelist — a sort of brother to General Booth, Mrs. Pankhurst, Mother Eddy and Billy Sunday. He turned Shakespeare into a prophet of evil, croaking dismally in a rain-barrel. He even injected a moral content (by dint of abominable straining) into the music dramas of Richard Wagner, surely the most colossal slaughters of all moral ideas on the altar of beauty ever seen by man. Always this ethical obsession, the hall-mark of the Scotch Puritan, is visible in him. He is forever discovering an atrocity in what has hitherto passed as no more than a human weakness; he is forever inventing new sins, and demanding their punishment; he always sees his opponent, not only as wrong, but also as a scoundrel. I have called him a good Presbyterian.

H.L. Mencken, “Shaw as Platitudinarian”, The Smart Set, 1916-08.

November 8, 2024

“The Science™, that thing we’re supposed to believe in and obey – is distinctly and increasingly political”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Politics, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

President-elect Donald Trump has a vast array of options to tackle in the traditional first hundred days of his administration. Chris Bray says that one of the very first of these should be the depoliticization of the federal science agencies:

Donald Trump has spoken very clearly about his day-one determination to end the mutilation of children in the service of gender ideology, but let’s look for the roots of that poison tree. Via Billboard Chris, here’s a sample descriptive section from a National Institutes of Health grant given to a pediatric gender physician in Los Angeles, and read this carefully to find the most important sentence:

Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy has worked to push gender hormone treatment down to eight year-olds, with research funding from the federal government. Now, big finish: the dates on the NIH grant that Billboard Chris highlighted:

This is a project — gender hormones for eight year-olds — that operated with federal funding during the first Trump administration. Policy expressed in words meets policy expressed in cash. This is what matters, year after year, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike (click to enlarge):

The money, the money, and the money. What you fund is what you’re doing. It may not seem like a big target, but the politicization of federal science funding is a root cause of institutional decay and pathological narrative-making, and cutting the money pipeline to politicized science is the policy action that will matter for decades. Remaking the funding pipeline for federal science grants is a day one priority, because the money will shape policy far more than any declaration of intent.

The problem is everywhere: the NIH, the NSF, NASA, NOAA, and so on. SpaceX is catching rockets; NASA is funding this: “21-EEJ21-0020 ASSESSMENT OF THE GULF COAST ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE LANDSCAPE FOR EQUITY.”

And this: “EXPLORING SYNERGISTIC OPPORTUNITIES BETWEEN CHARLOTTE-AREA ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE INITIATIVES AND NASA EARTH SCIENCE INFORMATION.”

Pick a federal science grant website and spend some time exploring it. Here’s the National Science Foundation’s funding opportunities page. Sample grant program: “Growing Research Compliance Support and Service Infrastructure for Nationally Transformative Equity and Diversity”.

Today’s funded program for transformative science equity and environmental justice is tomorrow’s new policy measures. This is the pipeline to programs. What you fund today is what you’re going to do in five years.

An alternative path to meeting Canada’s 2% of GDP defence-spending aspirations

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’m not convinced that Brian Graff is correct here, but it’s certainly a bit of unusually out-of-the-box thinking on Canada’s defence shortcomings:

Canada has sent a few tanks over to Ukraine, as well as other supplies and financial aid. We will have to replenish these things, and this might be an opportunity to expand Canada’s capacity to make and export military arms and equipment. Maybe our defense policy and spending has been wrongheaded. Since we have so few troops, are unlikely to need to defend our own soil, and are far from any country likely to be in conflict, we may be able to meet our 2% target with some innovative thinking.

Since the Second World War, the US has described itself as the “arsenal of democracy”, a phrase which Franklin Roosevelt used in 1940 when the US was supporting Britain (and Canada) by sending arms, most notably through the “Lend Lease” program that sent ships and equipment to Britain, technically on loan.

Maybe a bigger part of Canada’s own defence policy should be to make and stockpile arms, equipment, and supplies to send to our allies or friends in times of need. Such equipment need not be “state of the art” like F-35 fighter jets. Canada could also expand production of parts for equipment assembled in other NATO countries – particularly for spare parts we need for ourselves.

We need not limit this to new equipment. Canada could also promote companies that refurbish older equipment to be stockpiled or resold. And of course, Canada could determine which countries benefit from our stockpiles of military equipment. We could ensure that this equipment is not acquired by countries with regimes we oppose, and we would have the leeway to give or sell only to the “right” side of a conflict, possibly with strings attached.

Take our Leopard 2 tanks that were built in Germany. We have given some to Ukraine. We have unfortunately scrapped even older Leopard 1 tanks, that could have been refurbished or modified to serve as platforms for other uses. Canada should probably give the rest of our tanks to Ukraine, then get into the business of buying older Abrams tanks from the US to refurbish as replacements or for re-export.

Israel is a good example of a nation that builds up its military capacity with secondhand tanks and other equipment, and is now a major exporter of military equipment that it developed at least in part for its own defence.

The trend in US equipment has been to build state of the art equipment, and buy smaller quantities of it. But the conflict in Ukraine has shown that even when fighting a country with advanced military technology like Russia, using some older equipment combined with innovative new designs has been successful for both sides. Along with the introduction of drones, the Russians have modified older bombs to become guided bombs that are accurate and far cheaper than building new missiles.

The McDonald’s ice cream machines are always broken because of bad IP laws

Filed under: Business, Government, Law, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Even if you never to to a McDonald’s yourself, you’ve undoubtedly heard that the ice cream machines are always broken. I hadn’t really given it any thought — it’s been years since I visited one of the restaurants and I don’t eat much ice cream — but Peter Jacobsen explains the weird and infuriating reason for the phenomenon:

Image Credit: Magnus D via Wikimedia | CC BY 2.0

How could it be that the ice cream machines at McDonald’s are so consistently broken? It turns out that, until just recently, it was illegal to hire most people to fix them. To understand why, we’re going to have to take a detour into the world of intellectual property.

DMCA Woes

So why has it been illegal for McDonald’s to hire people to fix their ice cream machines? Well, that’s where the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) comes in. If you’re familiar with the DMCA, this is probably confusing to you.

Generally the DMCA is a big concern on content creation platforms like YouTube. If someone uses copyrighted music, he or she gets DMCAed. This is slang for when a video gets its monetization redirected to the owner of whatever copyrighted content was used.

DMCA takedowns draw a lot of ire, because the law is clumsily applied and often even legitimate uses of copyrighted content (e.g., fair use) are punished.

But the DMCA extends beyond content creation, as chronicled by Elizabeth Chamberlain of iFixit, an organization dedicated to ensuring that product owners have the right and ability to fix their property. Many machines ranging from phones to ice cream machines utilize copyrighted software to function. Sometimes, this software limits product users more than they’d like.

For example, iPhone software locks users into particular user interfaces. If a user wants to customize past some point, he’s going to have to modify the software more than the company intends. This process, called jailbreaking, involves breaking through “digital locks”. The DMCA often interprets breaking these locks as a violation of the intellectual property of the copyright holder.

The problem gets even worse when you recognize that fixing things — say, McDonald’s ice cream machines — means breaking past those digital locks. This means anyone hired to repair the machine would need an official blessing from the manufacturer.

However, things have changed. As of October 18th, the opening of digital locks for “retail-level commercial food preparation equipment” is now exempt from this DMCA rule. McDonald’s will now be able to hire from a larger group of people to fix their ice cream machines.

DMCA has allowed a lot of intellectual property owners to collect unearned rents while neglecting the needs of the customers who’ve bought, leased, or rented things that incorporate their IP.

Note, this is only an exemption to the rule. The rule itself has not changed. Second, other regulations still hamper McDonald’s franchise owners from fixing their own machines. As Chamberlain points out:

    While it’s now legal to circumvent the digital locks on these machines, the ruling does not allow us to share or distribute the tools necessary to do so. This is a major limitation … few will be able to walk through it without significant difficulty.

    It is still a crime for iFixit to sell a tool to fix ice cream machines, and that’s a real shame … Without these tools, this exemption is largely theoretical for many small businesses that don’t have in-house repair experts.

So your chance of getting a McFlurry has improved, but you can’t quite celebrate a total win yet.

The battle against these DMCA laws isn’t limited to ice cream machines. The “right to repair” movement spearheaded by organizations including iFixit has already battled for exemptions for medical devices, consumer devices like phones and tablets, vehicles, and assistive technologies for people with disabilities.

Highlights of Herculaneum (Part II)

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

Scenic Routes to the Past
Published Jul 12, 2024

This second part of my survey of Herculaneum explores some of the site’s incredibly well-preserved houses.
(more…)

QotD: David Lloyd George and the British Liberal Party

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Lloyd George is one of the most obviously fascinating figures in modern British political history, for three reasons. The first is his background. The Liberal Party, since its formal inception in 1859, had always responded to a touch of the purple. Lord Palmerston was a viscount; Lord John Russell was the son of a duke; William Gladstone was Eton and Christ Church; Lord Rosebery was Lord Rosebery; Henry Campbell-Bannerman and H.H. Asquith at least went to Trinity, Cambridge and Balliol, Oxford respectively.

Lloyd George was from nowhere. He grew up in Llanystumdwy, Caernarfonshire, where he lived in a compact cottage with his mother, uncle, and siblings, and was trained as a solicitor in Porthmadog. He rose to dominate British politics, and to direct the affairs of the most expansive empire the world had known, seeing off thousands of more privileged rivals, on the basis of truly exceptional native gifts, and without even speaking English as his first language.

How he got into the position to direct World War I is one of the most remarkable personal trajectories in British history. Contemporaries everywhere saw it as an astonishing story, even in the most advanced democracies. As the New York Times asked when Lloyd George visited America in 1923, “Was there ever a more romantic rise from the humblest beginning than this?”

The second reason why Lloyd George is fascinating is his extraordinary command of words. Collins is good on this. The book is full of speeches that turn tides and smash competitors. Lloyd George could exercise an equally mesmeric command over both the Commons and mass audiences, typically rather different skills. Harold Macmillan called him “the best parliamentary debater of his, or perhaps any, day”.

Biblical references and Welsh valleys suffused his speeches. As another American journalist put it, when Lloyd George was speaking, “none approaches him in witchery of word or wealth of imagery”, with his “almost flawless phraseology” communicated through a voice “like a silver bell that vibrates with emotion”. Leading an imperial democracy through a global war demanded rhetorical powers of the rarest kind. Asquith lacked them. That, amongst other reasons, is why Lloyd George was able to shunt him aside.

The last reason we should all be interested in Lloyd George — as readers will have anticipated — is that he was the last British politician to inter a governing party. His actions during the war split the Liberals into Pro-Asquith and pro-Lloyd George factions, and the government he led from 1916 until 1922 was propped up by the Conservatives. Though the Liberal split was partly healed in 1923, it was all over for the party as a governing force. By the time Lloyd George at last became leader of the Liberal Party (in the Commons) in 1924, he had only a rump of 40 MPs left to command.

By the 1920s, Lloyd George’s shifting ideologies could not easily accommodate the old party traditions or the new forces reshaping allegiances and identities in the aftermath of the war. In 1918 he described his political creed to George Riddell, the press magnate, as “Nationalist-Socialist”. The consequence was an unprecedented redrawing of the map of British party politics, producing the Labour/Conservative hegemony we have lived with ever since.

The rot had arguably begun to set in for the Liberals in the elections of 1910, when they lost their majority. Fourteen years later, in 1924, Lloyd George stepped up to the Commons leadership of an exhausted, defeated party, and neither he nor his successors could arrest the slide into irrelevance. […] The Liberals could not come back because they were left with no clothes of their own. What had once been distinctive lines on economics, religion, welfare, the constitution, foreign policy and even “progress” were either appropriated by their competitors or ceased to be politically relevant. The party’s history as the dominant political force of the last near-century was no proof against radical structural change.

Alex Middleton, “Snapshot of the PM who killed his party”, The Critic, 2024-08-01.

November 7, 2024

Kemi Badenoch portrayed by the left as “the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class”

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

The left likes to think themselves the faction of racial equality, yet they often reveal themselves to be anything but when someone steps out of line (from their point of view) and chooses a different political worldview:

For centuries, Britain was ruled by an aristocracy. In recent decades, however, this concept has become rather passé, and we have been doing away with it — most recently with the vote to abolish hereditary peers in the House of Lords.

Yet, as the old guard fades, a new elite has taken its place. Inherited traits — particularly skin colour and sex — now grant special dispensations. Utterances that would be unthinkable for most are allowed, and positions incommensurate to talent are dispensed.

This is because the new aristocracy is flush, often through little toil of its own, with moral authority — a valuable currency wielded by what we might call the Patricians of Victimhood.

Their power rests on the idea that Britain is a fundamentally racist country, brimming with other nasty “isms” that can be contained only by them. To deny this is heresy — but to disprove it is a crime for which no punishment is too great.

This was evident when Kemi Badenoch, a black woman, was elected Saturday to lead the Conservative Party. This historic first for Britain might have been expected to please those preoccupied with combating racism, perhaps even chalked up as a win.

Instead, Badenoch was lambasted by politicians who have built careers campaigning about racism. Dawn Butler, a Labour MP, shared a post accusing Badenoch of representing “white supremacy in blackface” — an insult so improbable that it conjures only an image of a face-painted Justin Trudeau.

The post, now removed from Butler’s X account, read: “Today the most prominent member of white supremacy’s black collaborator class (in Britain) is likely to be made leader of the Conservative Party. Here are some handy tips for surviving the immediate surge of Badenochism (i.e. white supremacy in blackface).”

Another Labour MP, Zara Sultana, said Badenoch was “one of the most nasty & divisive figures in British politics”, for, among other things, “downplaying racism”.

Badenoch is opposed to identity politics. She believes in meritocracy and that Britain — as she told her children recently — “is the best country in the world to be black”. Badenoch’s optimism is well founded: a 2023 World Values Survey found that Britain is indeed one of the least racist countries in the world.

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