Quotulatiousness

December 16, 2024

The Price of Victory by N.A.M. Rodger

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Military, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Critic, Phil Weir reviews the final volume in N.A.M. Rodger’s three-book study of the history of the Royal Navy:

This October a major scholarly achievement was realised with the publication of The Price of Victory, the third and final instalment of N.A.M. Rodger’s great trilogy on the naval history of Britain from 660 AD to 1945. It has been an odyssey, albeit one that to complete took more than three times longer than Homer’s hero took to journey home.

The first volume, Safeguard of the Sea, was published back in 1997, some six years after Rodger had left his job as Assistant Keeper of the Public Records at the then Public Records Office to join the National Maritime Museum. Having moved to Exeter University, he completed the second volume, Command of the Ocean, covering the period from 1649 to 1815, in 2004.

Mindful of the fates of others who have attempted grand, multi-volume naval histories of Britain, Nicholas Rodger, now aged 74, was known to quip that one of his key aims was to become the first historian to live to see it completed. What he describes as “an exciting episode of brain surgery” delayed the completion of the final volume for several years, and left achieving this a closer-run thing than was — one suspects — entirely comfortable.

To the immense relief of all, Rodger recovered to complete his great work, and it has, emphatically, been well worth the wait. The Price of Victory is, like its predecessors, a most substantial work in both physical and scholarly senses.

At the outset of his task, Rodger aimed to create “not a self-contained ‘company history’ of the Royal Navy, but a survey of the contribution which naval warfare with all its associated activities has made to national history”. In doing so, he sought to link naval warfare “to political, social, economic, diplomatic, administrative, agricultural, medical, religious and other histories which will never be complete until the naval component of them is understood”.

He has succeeded handsomely, firmly entwining naval and naval-related matters into the core fabric of the history of the British Isles. The Price of Victory is a worthy conclusion to an epic series that will both stand in its own right and, as he hopes, serve as a baseline for future scholarly endeavours.

The vast, polyglot erudition underpinning Rodger’s prose wears no disguise. Yet, for all its great length and the density of knowledge each page imparts, The Price of Victory is, like its two preceding volumes, a lively read, leavened with the author’s dry wit.

Winners and losers from free trade

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Patrick Carroll responds to a recent Robert Reich rant about the winners and losers under free trade:

Image Credit: YouTube screenshot – Robert Reich

Myth #6 on Robert Reich’s list of economic myths is called “Global Trade Benefits Everyone”.

“Have you heard this lie?” Reich opens. “‘Global trade is good for everyone.'” His pants then light on fire. “Ahh!” he screams. “That’s bunk!”

Watching that opening sequence was an immediate déjà vu moment for me, because I had recently come across an article making the same claim as Reich. The article argued that free market economists are simply wrong to claim that “everyone gains” from free trade, because clearly there are some losers.

The ironic part is, that article was written by none other than Bryan Caplan, one of the world’s leading free market economists.

“What makes me so sure that ‘Everyone gains from X’ is invariably a blatant falsehood? Because every change causes price movements, which are automatically bad for someone or other,” Caplan writes. “The Industrial Revolution was great overall, but hurt traditional craftsmen. The Internet is great overall, but hurt travel agents. Congestion pricing is great overall, but bad for cheapskates with high traffic tolerance. Free trade is great overall, but not for workers and investors in industries that can’t survive at world prices.”

[…]

This would be a rather short article if Reich were simply making the same point as Caplan. “I agree, but Caplan said it better,” would probably be my thesis. But alas, Reich goes in a rather different direction than Caplan does, and that’s where some more rigorous analysis is needed. Here’s how he presents his argument:

    Many economists believe in the doctrine of comparative advantage, which posits that trade is good for all nations when each nation specializes in what it does best. But what about costs to workers and the environment? What if a country’s comparative advantage comes from people working under dangerous or exploitative conditions, or from preventing them from forming labor unions, or allowing employers to hire young children? Or from polluting the atmosphere or the ocean, or destroying rainforests and polluting groundwater?

Reich makes a fair point that global trade isn’t all sunshine and roses. Working conditions in some places are atrocious, and environmental damage is also a very real problem. But the fact that working and environmental conditions are far from ideal in many parts of the world does not mean that restricting trade will necessarily make things better. In fact, it’s quite likely that less trade would make things worse, because it would cut off the global poor from opportunities for production and economic growth.

Reich highlights the costs of trade, but there are also immense benefits that the global poor reap from the arrangement. If these benefits outweigh the costs — as they likely do in most cases — then who’s really the advocate of the downtrodden: the ones cheering on mutually beneficial trade, or the ones trying to stop it because they can only see the downsides?

To be fair, Reich doesn’t come out and advocate for cutting off trade. But this raises the question: what exactly is he advocating for? Anyone can point out problems, but the real question is: what solution are you proposing? Maybe he’ll tell us in the next section:

    My old boss Bill Clinton called globalization “the economic equivalent of a force of nature, like wind or water”. But globalization is not a force of nature. Global trade is structured by rules negotiated between nations about which assets will be protected and which will not. These rules determine who benefits and who is harmed by trade. Over recent decades, trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) and agreements under the World Trade Organization (WTO) have protected the assets of US corporations, including intellectual property.

Reich goes on to list a few ways that these rules have helped large corporations, such as oil companies, financial institutions, Big Pharma, and Big Ag.

Watching this part of the video ushered in a second instance of déjà vu. I remembered reading somewhere, just recently, that NAFTA was rotten to the core, just like Reich was saying.

Yet again, it was a staunch free market economist making this point — Murray Rothbard, in a number of incisive articles that were part of his 1995 anthology Making Economic Sense. The problem, said Rothbard, is that NAFTA was really the opposite of free trade.

The academic battle over the legacy of the British Empire

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, India, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the Washington Examiner, Yuan Yi Zhu reviews The Truth About Empire: Real histories of British Colonialism edited by Alan Lester:

… the story fitted awkwardly with the new dominant historical narrative in Britain, according to which the British Empire was an unequivocally evil institution whose lingering miasma still corrupts not only its former territories but also modern-day Britain.

When Kipling lamented, “What do they know of England, who only England know?” he was not being elegiac as much as describing a statistical fact. Contrary to modern caricatures, apart from episodic busts of enthusiasm, Britons were never very interested in their empire. At its Victorian peak, the great public controversies were more likely to be liturgical than imperial. In 1948, 51% of the British public could not name a single British colony; three years later, the figure had risen to 59%. Admittedly, this was after Indian independence, but it should not have been that hard. Proponents of the “imperial miasma” theory are right in saying that British people are woefully ignorant about their imperial past; but that was the case even when much of the world was colored red.

The Truth About Empire: Real Histories of British Colonialism is a collection of essays edited by Alan Lester, an academic at the University of Sussex who has been at the forefront of the cultural conflict over British imperialism on the “miasma” side — though, like all combatants, he denies being a participant. Indeed, one of the book’s declared aims is to show that its contributors are not engaged in cultural warring.

Their nemesis, whose name appears 376 times in this book (more often than the word “Britain”) is Nigel Biggar, a retired theologian and priest at the University of Oxford. In 2017, Biggar began a project to study the ethics of empire alongside John Darwin, a distinguished imperial historian. The now-familiar academic denunciations then came along, and Darwin, on the cusp of a quiet retirement, withdrew from the project.

Lester was not part of the initial assault on Biggar but has since then emerged as his most voluble critic. He disclaims any political aims, protesting that he and his colleagues are engaged in a purely scholarly enterprise, based on facts and the study of the evidence.

Yet some of Lester’s public interventions — he recently described a poll showing that British people are less proud of their history than before as an “encouraging sign” — are hard to square with this denial. Biggar, by contrast, is refreshingly honest that his aims are both intellectual and political. I must add that both men are serious scholars, which is perhaps why neither has been able to decisively bloody the other in their jousts.

[…]

“What about slavery?” asks Dubow’s Cambridge colleague Bronwen Everill. Unfortunately, her four pages, which read like a last-minute student essay, do not enlighten us. The most she can manage is to point to an 18th-century African monarch abolishing the slave trade as evidence that the British do not deserve any plaudits for their abolitionist efforts across the world, whose cost has been estimated at 1.8% of its gross domestic product over a period of 60 years.

Meanwhile, Abd al Qadir Kane, Everill’s abolitionist monarch, only objected to the enslavement of Muslims but not to slavery generally, his progressive reputation resting mainly on the misunderstandings of Thomas Clarkson, an overenthusiastic English abolitionist. (Either cleverly or lazily, Everill quotes Clarkson’s misleading account, thus avoiding the need to engage with the historiography on Islamic slavery in Africa.)

Everill’s central argument is that abolitionism allowed Britain to rove the world as a moral policeman and to overthrow rulers who refused to abolish slavery. It is never clear, however, why this was morally bad. If anything, Britain did not go far enough: Well into the 1960s, British representatives still manumitted slaves on an ad hoc basis in its Gulf protectorates, when the moral thing would have been to force their rulers to abolish slavery, at gunpoint if necessary.

Whippet – Fast and Furious 1918 | Tank Chats Reloaded

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

The Tank Museum
Published Aug 16, 2024

Was the British Medium Mk A Whippet the world’s first proper tank?

Able to do 8mph, but incredibly difficult to drive, Whippet was far faster than the British heavy tanks of WW1. Using their speed, Whippets were able to operate behind the enemy front line to destroy enemy formations and create chaos. At a stroke, the tank was transformed from what was effectively a siege engine to a fast-moving weapon of attack and exploitation.

At Amiens in August 1918, a Whippet called Musical Box went on a nine-hour rampage in the German Army’s rearward area destroying an infantry battalion, a divisional supply column and an artillery battery, an unheard of feat.

In this film, we look at the Tank Museum’s rare surviving Whippet, what she was like to crew and fight, tell the story of Musical Box‘s rampage and examine the unique achievement of the Whippet on the WW1 battlefield.

00:00 | Intro
02:08 | Breaking the Stalemate
03:45 | A New Design
08:29 | Does It Work?
09:36 | The Tank Corps’ Surprise
11:41 | Proving Its Worth
16:25 | Armoured Warfare Revolutionised

This video features archive footage courtesy of British Pathé.

QotD: Movie and video game portrayals of generalship in pre-modern armies

Filed under: Gaming, History, Media, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

As we’ll see, in a real battle when seconds count, new orders are only a few minutes away. Well, sometimes they’re rather more than a few minutes away. Or not coming at all.

This is also true, of course, in films. Our friend Darius III from Alexander (2004) silently waves his hand to mean “archers shoot!” and also “chariots, charge!” and then also “everyone else, charge!” Keeping in mind what we saw about the observation abilities of a general on horseback, you can well imagine how able Darius’ soldiers will have been to see his hand gestures while they were on foot from a mile or so away. Yet his army responds flawlessly to his silent arm-gestures. Likewise the flag-signalling in Braveheart‘s (1995) rendition of the Battle of Falkirk: a small banner, raised in the rear is used to signal to soldiers who are looking forward at the enemy, combined with a fellow shouting “advance”. One is left to assume that these generals control their armies in truth through telepathy.

There is also never any confusion about these orders. No one misinterprets the flag or hears the wrong orders. Your unit commanders in Total War never ignore or disobey you; sure the units themselves can rout, but you never have a unit in good order simply ignore your orders – a thing which happened fairly regularly in actual battles! Instead, units are unfailingly obedient right up until the moment they break entirely. You can order untrained, unarmored and barely armed pitchfork peasant levies to charge into contact with well-ordered plate-clad knights and they will do it.

The result is that battleplans in modern strategy games are often impressive intricate, involving the player giving lots of small, detailed orders (sometimes called “micro”, short for “micromanagement”) to individual units. It is not uncommon in a Total War battle for a player to manually coordinate “cycle-charges” (having a cavalry unit charge and retreat and then charge the same unit again to abuse the charge-bonus mechanics) while also ordering their archers to focus fire on individual enemy units while simultaneously moving up their own infantry reserves in multiple distinct maneuvering units to pin dangerous enemy units while also coordinating the targeting of their field artillery. Such attacks in the hands of a skilled player can be flawlessly coordinated because in practice the player isn’t coordinating with anyone but themselves.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part II: Commands”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-03.

December 15, 2024

The fall of the house of Assad

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple considers the fall of Syria’s dictator as the al-Assad family is finally toppled from power:

When I saw video clips of the joyful toppling of statues of Bashar al-Assad, as well as the tearing from walls of his ubiquitous portrait, I wondered what it must be like to be a dictator and see images of yourself everywhere (not that I have any ambitions myself in that direction).

Do you come to imagine, for example, that they are a manifestation of genuine popular affection for yourself, or are you like the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, of the poem by Ernesto Cardenal “Somoza Unveils a Statue of Somoza in the Somoza Stadium” (the fact that Cardenal, a Nicaraguan priest, was a commie doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a good poet).

The Somoza of the poem is perfectly clear-sighted. He knows that people didn’t erect the statue spontaneously, out of love for him, because he knows that he himself ordered it to be erected. Nor does he think that it will be a perpetual monument to himself because he knows also that the people will tear it down as soon as they can. No, he had it erected because he knew that the people would hate it, in other words that it would humiliate them, and a humiliated people is easy to cow into submission, at least until — to use a word of slightly different zoological connotation — the worm turns. (A note to pedants before they write in: I do not think that the verb to cow has any etymological link with the female herbivore known as the cow.)

It seems to me, however, that Cardenal may have simplified a little. Such is the complexity and potential dishonesty of the human mind that a dictator would be perfectly capable of imagining that a statue of himself is a manifestation of people’s affection for him and that there are people plotting to bring down both the statue and him because they hate him. This is not totally irrational or impossible. After all, as Americans know, even in a free democracy some people love the leader and some people hate him (usually more of the latter after he has been in power for some time).

Assad junior, it seems to me, is a living refutation of Solzhenitsyn’s famous remark that Macbeth was capable of killing only a handful of people because he was motivated by no ideology, and it requires an ideology to bring about hecatombs of the Nazis or Communists. Assad junior had a self-justification for his rule, no doubt, as every ruler and dictator has and must have, but he did not really possess a full-blown ideology in Solzhenitsyn’s sense. His trajectory is worth recalling.

The son of a monstrous dictator, he seems at first to have had no inclinations in that direction himself. Among other things, he didn’t seem to have the physical attributes of a dictator, but rather of someone pliant and weak, more herbivore than carnivore, more giraffe rather lion (though giraffes can kick a lion to death). And it spoke rather well of him that he should qualify as a doctor, apparently quite genuinely so, and wish to become an ophthalmologist, to which end he studied in London, where his conduct was not that of a spoilt brat but by all accounts rather modest — laudably so, in the circumstances.

Nazi Tanks Advance on Kursk: Prokhorovka Part 1

Filed under: Germany, History, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 14 Dec 2024

German tanks advance on Kursk, smashing through Soviet defences and setting the stage for one of history’s most legendary tank battles — The Battle of Prokhorovka. In this six part miniseries we will cover the fierce fighting, the strategies, and the men and machines that take part in this battle.
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“Outside Sub-Saharan Africa, Homo sapiens are vermin, in the Australian sense — an introduced species with no co-evolved local predators”

Filed under: Africa, Asia, Australia, Economics, Europe, History, Science — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

You have to admit that Lorenzo Warby has a way with words to introduce a new essay, yes?

Outside Sub-Saharan Africa, Homo sapiens are vermin, in the Australian sense — an introduced species with no co-evolved local predators. That means that their strongest selection pressures — both genetic and cultural — have almost always been about dealing with other humans.

We are the cultural species par excellence. Cultures can be reasonably thought of as collections of life-strategies. Culture tends to be persistent — aspects of culture can be highly persistent.

It is worth keeping in mind that genetic selection can occur surprisingly quickly — i.e., in a relatively short number of generations, depending on the intensity of the selection pressures. A very clear example of this is the evolution of lactase persistence in pastoralist, or agro-pastoralist, populations. (The decades-long experiment in domesticating silver foxes is an extreme example.)

The great advantage of cultural selection is that it is faster than genetic selection but culture still has to show some “stickiness”, some persistence, to be useful. Especially in the evolution of signals, norms and social strategies.

The regions where the local physical environment has been successfully managed longest — or most thoroughly — are Europe, particularly North-West Europe, East Asia and India (especially by high-jati Indians). So, those are the areas where natural and cultural selection has been most focused on selection for dealing usefully with other humans. Those populations have also been the most successful in dealing with the modern world, wherever they go. This hardly seems a coincidence.

The regions where dealing with the local physical environment has been most salient are Sub-Saharan Africa — all those co-evolved parasites, pathogens, predators and mega-herbivores — and Australia — which is full of deserts and spiky things likely to poison you. Much of Africa is also semi-desert forager lands, while the tsetse fly stopped the central African plains generating the equivalent of the connecting — for good or ill — pastoralist cultures of the Eurasian steppes. Both continental-scale regions therefore historically had low human population densities.

The consequence in Africa was that Sub-Saharan Africa has, for millennia, been a region of endemic slavery. Labour was more valuable than land, which led — as it usually did historically — to labour bondage: the violent/coercive extraction of labour’s scarcity value. In this case, the low population density meant that folk were regularly seized and transported, thus requiring the level of domination for folk to be moved at will — i.e., slavery rather than some form of serfdom.

Increased selection to deal with the physical environment meant comparatively less selection to deal with other humans. Sub-Saharan African and Australian Aboriginal populations have been rather less successful at dealing with the modern world than have other populations. (Claims about the success of recent African immigrants seem to be overstated.) The key element of the modern world is domination of social outcomes by human interactions to the greatest extent yet achieved in history. Again, that relative lack of success hardly seems like a coincidence.

Yes, it is true that selection for transportation across the Atlantic as slaves was negative in all sorts of senses. The churn of slavery massively undermined cultural transmission, the selection was for physical robustness and, if anything, against executive functions (which are highly heritable). Nevertheless, with the partial exception of recent African immigrants — who are selected for initiative and education — both populations have been markedly less successful than other groups.

There are certainly factors which affect that either way. Not inflicting on Australian Aborigines the dual metabolic disasters of the farming and processed-food revolutions at the same time would be good. Not under-policing the localities in which folk live is also good.

Nevertheless, there is no reason to think that capacities — which are a genetic, epigenetic and cultural matter — will be evenly distributed across all populations. Indeed, we have very good reasons to think that that will not be the case, due to the variations in selection pressures — whether genetic, environmental or cultural, including interactions between the three. It is not a good idea, for instance, to spend 1400 years marrying your cousins.

Even when means and medians are the same in the distribution of some trait across groups, differences in the size of tails — i.e. the number of extreme outliers — can lead to differences in the distribution of outcomes. Any population with a persistently larger tail of high physical robustness and lower executive functions — which can be an ethno-racial pattern but also a class pattern — will tend to have higher rates of violent crime. Conversely, any population with a smaller tail of lower executive functions — for example, East Asians with a long history of underclass males not breeding but selection for reproductive success through passing examinations and cooperative farming — will tend to have lower rates of violent crime.

Sufficient variance in traits — so having a larger “right tail” of positive-for-human-flourishing characteristics — can be enough on its own to increase a group’s success. Tail effects matter.1

The persistence of gene flows across human populations does undermine any strong notion of human subspecies among Homo sapiens. It does not imply equal distributions of capacities across human populations.

Hence, evolutionary thinking is neither comfortable nor comforting.

    1. Given that human males — like males across species — have a flatter distribution of traits — so more positive and negative outliers — having equal numbers of males and females at the top ends of hierarchies suggests some level of discrimination against males. Conversely, having female prison populations begin to approach male populations in size suggests some level of discrimination against, even persecution of, females.

Cooking on the American Homefront During WWII

Filed under: Food, History, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Aug 6, 2024

T-bone shaped seasoned ground beef with Wheaties

City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1943

Rationing didn’t begin in the United States until May 1942, and in order to buy certain foods, you used a combination of stamps and money. Better cuts of meat required more stamps, so there came a slew of recipes that either replaced meat, or made lesser cuts seem like better ones, like this recipe.

This “emergency steak” is actually very nice. It’s essentially a kind of meatloaf, and is surprisingly flavorful given the scant ingredient list. Is it like a T-bone steak? No. Is it tasty? Yes.

    Emergency Steak
    (1 lb.—serves 6)
    Mix …
    1 lb. ground beef or hamburger
    1/2 cup milk
    1 cup WHEATIES
    1 tsp. salt
    1/4 tsp. pepper
    1 tbsp. chopped onion
    Place on pan, pat into T-bone steak shape, 1 in. thick. Broil 8 to 15 min. at 500° (very hot). Turn once.
    Meats … 7
    — Your Share by Betty Crocker (General Mills), 1943

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QotD: Elite luxury beliefs – cultivated non-disgust

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Then there is the acceptance of what can only be described as unconventional lifestyles. Gay rainbow gender-bending madness is one thing. It seems progressive. Sodomites used to get ten years of hard labour. Look how advanced we have become.

But now they’ve moved on to the kids. It is easy to believe a listless, drug-addled elite might indulge in sexual degeneracy just for the hell of it. But how do we explain kindergarten teachers teaching their pupils about pronouns? Doctors emotionally blackmailing parents by insisting that the alternative to mutilating their children is their suicides? Or civil servants quietly putting gender-neutral bathrooms in public spaces?

How do we explain any of this? How do we even explain the emergence of transgenderism at all? There have been transexuals and gender dysphorics throughout history. They were typically understood as an offshoot of homosexuality, the extreme end of the effeminacy spectrum, and a vanishingly small fraction of the population.

But the current contagion is unusual and is clearly artificial. Its scale can only be a result of active promotion. Much of that is accomplished via the media and fellow travellers who champion these activities. But it is helped along by a collection of other professionals, and any attempt to question it is met with energetic pushback.

It is apparent that much of this comes from on-high, a literal top-down initiative. In less than twenty years we have witnessed a journey that began with gay rights and now includes active promotion of sexual deviancy to children, none of it natural or wanted by the majority. There is lots of speculation as to why this may be, including the part it may play in a comprehensive depopulation agenda.

What is apparent is that the professional class who endorse and promote this perceive it as an exercise in tolerance.

The notion of tolerance has typically been invoked for the distasteful, a last line of defence when direct measures fail, not a behavioural response indicating sophistication.

We rely on tolerance for things we dislike but cannot avoid. We learn to tolerate a persistent whine from an air conditioning unit, a noisy neighbour, or a noxious smell. But our goal is always to remove the source of the problem. Tolerance is a stopgap only when more permanent solutions are absent.

Their belief that tolerance is a virtue is one of the greatest shortcomings of today’s chattering classes. It is exactly the kind of signal error that exemplifies the disconnect between globalist elites and their obedient cheerleaders. The mechanism here seems to be a kind of learned override to natural disgust or discomfort. When others then object to whatever letter they have just added to the LGBTQWERTY+ community on the basis that it can’t be healthy or normal to endorse this stuff, that learned response includes the flare of superiority at your obvious backwardness.

How satisfying it must feel to have your natural inclination toward superiority endorsed in this way. Like whole food vegans at a Medieval banquet, it must provide an irresistible sense of smugness to know that you are the one-eyed man in the rainbow-decked land of the blind, with the uneducated hopelessly lost in their backward understanding of the benefits of sexual liberation.

While elites and their public relations machine happily endorse this misplaced emphasis on tolerance, all evidence suggests the elites themselves are not tolerating anything, despite what their obedient minions may think. They really are indulging in the cocaine-fuelled all-star human sacrifice orgies for real because they are cosmically bored and rich.

They aren’t rising above intrinsic disgust responses, they have sexualized them. They seem to have fetishized everything we consider unacceptable. Trafficked kids, femboys, chicks with dicks, gangbangs, farmyard orgies, human sacrifice, the lot.

They may even experience a thrill in seeing just how far they can push public morality as many have suggested, and especially how far they can get otherwise normal middle-class people to champion deviancy and hedonism most cultures find distasteful enough to ban.

The excessive promotion of tolerance is a defence against unnatural practices bored elites are rumoured to engage in. The professional class, for all their faults, probably aren’t into human sacrifice or animal orgies. So their response is to elevate the importance of visible acceptance of alternative lifestyles, hence gay kids, castrated boys, invented genders and other absurdities they cannot possibly believe themselves, and all of it instantly conveyed to one’s peers with nothing more than a multicoloured flag.

To top it all when they see how normals react, those unmoved by inept calls to be more understanding about sexual abuse, when they see parents reach for the shotgun at the very idea of sexually mutilating children, they get to invoke the conjoined twin of their cultivated tolerance, namely artificial superiority. The deep belief that they see further than the yokels with their primitive instinct to actually protect the vulnerable and embrace some basic sense of public morality.

These absurd beliefs can be observed in our educated classes because they ostentatiously demonstrate tolerance and its newfound position as the supreme virtue of the post-Christian age, one of the most successful public relations campaigns ever run by elites.

Spaceman Spiff (guest-post) “Praying to Absent Gods”, Postcards from Barsoom, 2024-07-16.

December 14, 2024

Matt Gurney’s final thoughts from the Halifax International Security Forum

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

One of the things I regret about being totally broke is that I can’t pay for a full subscription to The Line, which is one of Canada’s best sources of (relatively) unbiased commentary on current events both in Canada and around the world. This is the third instalment of Matt Gurney’s report from the recent Halifax International Security Forum (earlier parts linked here and here):

This next one is going to be very brief, since it’s really just an observation. There was very little discussion of Israel. As I noted at the top, there was discussion of the situation in the Middle East. But it was mostly in the context of “The world is currently a mess”. Parts of the Forum involve breaking into smaller groups for more focused discussion on specific issues, and some of those might have focused on Israel or the Middle East more broadly. I can’t speak to what I didn’t see. But I was surprised by a relative lack of focus on the ongoing fighting around Israel in the main events.

A notable exception was the presence of Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy on one of the on-record panels. An international law expert, she has spent the months since the October 7th attacks documenting the mass sexual violence that was such an awful feature of Hamas’s attack. Her comments were brief but powerful and can be seen here starting at around the nine-minute mark. I’d like to zoom in on one comment in particular. Dr. Elkayam-Levy told the audience how the invaders were able to capture the personal devices of many of their victims, and use those devices to broadcast the abuse and sometimes murder of these victims via the victims’ own social media apps. This was something that was discussed shortly after the October 7 attacks but not much after: by seizing the victims’ phones, the invaders were able to spread terror and traumatize the loved ones of the victims by showing their friends and family, via photos and videos and live streams, exactly what the victims were being made to suffer.

“I thought I had seen the worst,” the doctor told the assembled audience. “But really, if there is hell, this is what it looks like. Someone abusing your kin. Someone killing your loved ones in front of your eyes.”

Though it was only a small part of the official agenda, Dr. Elkayam-Levy’s comments left an outsized impression on me, and I suspect on many others.

He also discussed his own professional path which he regrets didn’t include a lot of traditional on-the-spot reporting on tragedies and interviewing survivors, as he feels he doesn’t have a good “game face” for those times when he now finds himself doing that kind of work:

I am 100 per cent on side with Ukraine in its war with Russia. I’m not blind to flaws in Ukraine today or in Ukraine’s history, but I have absolutely no doubt who’s the good guy and the bad guy in that ongoing war. I’ve had wonderful opportunities to speak with many Ukrainians since their country was invaded. I have heard their stories and tried to share them on my platforms. I’ve also had opportunities to meet and talk to many Ukrainians who are living now in my own hometown, mostly women with young children, who fled the fighting or once lived in parts of the country that are now occupied by Russia.

I feel so profoundly that these people have been wronged, and tremendously wronged. I believe so sincerely that they should have our full backing as they try and drive back the invaders and liberate their country. That their cause is not just in the West’s strategic interests, and I very much think that it is, but also that it is morally just.

But I have concluded that they’re screwed. We’ve lost interest, and Ukrainians are about to get the Kurd treatment, if I can be so crass. And I just didn’t have the heart to tell them that. I don’t even know how I’d begin to say that to them. I write and speak for a living. And words still failed me.

During a meal in Halifax, a woman who’d flown in to give a presentation on the work her organization does in Ukraine assisting displaced people told me a story of her own experience with the war. The original Russian invasion in 2014 hadn’t been anywhere near where she lived. She was somewhat shocked, she told me, when in 2022, her hometown came under attack. She described the first time she heard air raid sirens. The first time she heard a bomb blast. The first time she could hear the gunfire of advancing ground troops. She told me about the first person from her small community to die, a paramedic who was on her way to collect wounded when their ambulance was hit. And then she told me how, months later, she realized she couldn’t remember any of those things anymore, except for the first time, because they’d happened so much. Constant sirens. Constant bombings. Constant gunfire. The deaths of more people she personally knew than she could even remember.

And as she told me this story, I found myself near tears. I was able to cover it up, I think. I wish I had better game face, but I have some. But my tears weren’t even of sympathy. I wasn’t overwhelmed by her sad story, though it was awfully goddamned sad. No, the tears I felt were tears of shame. I knew that at the end of the conference, I’d get to go home. Toronto is a bit rougher than it was when I was growing up, but it ain’t a war zone.

This woman doesn’t get to go home, assuming her home is even still standing. She knew it, I think. I knew it. I think we both knew that the other knew. But we talked around it.

History is going to judge us harshly for our failure to do more, faster, to help Ukrainians defend themselves.

And alas, we’ll deserve it.

Tulsi Gabbard as the Director of National Intelligence

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

To the left, Gabbard is widely criticized as some sort of Russian pawn, while to many on the right she’s unacceptable as a former Democrat and “girlboss”. Despite this, J.D. Tuccille says President-elect Donald Trump seems quite confident that she’s the right person for the job:

Tulsi Gabbard speaks at the “People’s Rally” in Washington DC on 17 November, 2016.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.

United States President-elect Donald Trump is standing behind Tulsi Gabbard, his pick to be director of national intelligence. Like several of Trump’s nominees, former Democratic congresswoman Gabbard is controversial in D.C.-insider circles, and understandably so; she’s skeptical of the political establishment, often criticizes foreign policy and was apparently subject to surveillance and put on a terrorist watch list because of her dissident ways. In other words, she’s a rather promising nominee for an incoming administration that wants to completely revamp government institutions that desperately need reform.

Asked this week by NBC’s Kristen Welker if he has confidence in Gabbard despite objections raised in certain circles to her past actions and positions, Trump responded, “I do. I mean, she’s a very respected person.”

Trump was specifically asked about two meetings Gabbard had in 2017 with then-Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Now in exile, al-Assad and his relationships with American politicians shouldn’t be much of a worry anymore, but he plays a part in the official panic over Gabbard’s views on foreign policy.

In 2019, former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton famously called Gabbard a “Russian asset“. Gabbard, a veteran of the Iraq war, aroused Clinton’s ire with her anti-interventionism in foreign policy matters and criticism of the political establishment and its hawkishness during the course of a short-lived campaign for her party’s presidential nomination.

“There are brutal dictators in the world. Assad of Syria is one of them. That does not mean the U.S. should be waging regime-change wars around the world,” Gabbard told CNN in early 2019. Her long-standing fears of Islamist extremism led her to consider al-Assad a less-bad alternative to a potential fundamentalist regime.

Gabbard returned Clinton’s slight by calling her “the queen of warmongers” and the “embodiment of corruption”. It’s unsurprising that the two no longer share a political party.

Gabbard’s dissent from establishment orthodoxy doesn’t stop at military matters. In 2020, she joined with libertarian-leaning Republican Thomas Massie, from Kentucky, to call on the U.S. government to cease its persecution of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Assange ran afoul of the U.S. government when he published leaked documents revealing embarrassing details about official misconduct in Iraq and elsewhere.

Explaining the collapse in North American birth rates

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

The demographic collapse of both Canadian and American birthrates has many causes, but kulak definitely identifies a major one here:

📜Antidiscrimination law is the reason for the Birthrate Collapse.

In North America, for a guy to marry a girl, it’s basically expected that he must make enough more than her that he can pay for himself and support her while she provides for kids, without a decline in her lifestyle… and his status, quality of wife, and whether the marriage will be rocky or happy is determined by whether or not he can actually materially IMPROVE her lifestyle over unmarried life. Which was very achievable in the 50s and 60s when women were paid poorly and largely couldn’t get high status complex careers, and didn’t want to have to, and couldn’t, compete to male standards…

Whereas after antidiscrimination laws it is MANDATED 30-50% of high paying jobs must go to to women, no matter how many more hours men put in, or how less productive the women are. Ie. It is literally legally impossible for the average man to earn more than the average woman, no matter how hard or effectively he works… and because he WILL work harder to try, and because he competing against other men who are working harder to compete for the few high status jobs men can get, Men across the board are effectively POORER than women, they are doing way more work for equal or less pay and status.

It’s a meme now that girls will goof off at office jobs doing tik toks while the male workers are stressed and annoyed in the corner trying to keep the business afloat for the same pay. As such those girls won’t even date those men… because if you have to be stressed at the job for the same pay, you naturally seem poorer.

This is why western marriage and birthrates are collapsing.

And a follow-up response to another comment:

THis leads to spoiled delusional women convinced men are useless on the one hand, and the few self-aware women having to medicate to overcome their “imposter syndrome” as they subconsciously know they’re dead weight which psychologically breaks them.

I Tried All The Cheap Bench Grinders … Here’s what happened

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Rex Krueger
Published Aug 14, 2024

GRINDERS!!!
(more…)

QotD: The One Ring in Lord of the Rings

Filed under: Books, Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Arguably the most famous piece of jewellery in all of fiction, the Ring is not only a brilliant plot device, capable of linking events that take place centuries apart; it is also the focus of one of Tolkien’s most important themes: power.

Unlike his friend C.S. Lewis, Tolkien was not fond of allegorical fiction. He had no time for the idea that the Ring — extremely dangerous but hard to get rid of — was an allegory of the atomic bomb. Rather, it was exactly what he said it was: an embodiment of power and the corrupting effects of power.

Tolkien shows us that the only people who can be trusted with great power are those who don’t really want it — or who do, but have the moral strength to reject it. Even then, it’s touch-and-go, the burden of responsibility taking a terrible toll on the reluctant bearer.

Numerous commentaries have been written on this aspect of the story — often summed up by the Lord Acton quote: “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”. Which is true enough. But Tolkien was onto a whole lot more than that …

Let’s begin at the beginning. The Ring was made at great cost to Sauron, its creator. He poured much of his own strength into an external object — one from which he could be separated, which in due course he was. So why take the risk? Sauron, though evil, was possessed of great cunning — why did he expose himself to such a vulnerability? Did old JRR just not think it through? Does the Ring actually represent a massive hole in the plot?

Not a bit of it. When you understand what Tolkien understood about the nature of power, it all makes perfect sense.

In a letter, he once wrote that the Ring was a “mythological way of presenting the truth that potency … if it is to be exercised, and produce results, has to be externalised and so as it were passed, to a greater or less degree, out of one’s direct control”. This is a crucial insight into the way Tolkien understood power to work.

Peter Franklin, “Tolkien’s guide to contemporary politics”, Unherd, 2019-12-24.

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