Adam Smith Institute
Published 3 Jan 2025In November 2023, Argentina elected Javier Milei, a libertarian economist armed with a chainsaw and a bold plan to rescue the country from decades of decline. Facing 142% inflation, a crumbling peso, and 40% poverty, Milei slashed spending, deregulated markets, and delivered a historic budget surplus — all within a year.
Sam Bidwell dives into Milei’s radical reforms, exploring the challenges that have made them necessary. He traces the country’s rise as a global economic powerhouse in the early 20th century, its decline through years of government intervention and Peronism, and its resurgence under Milei’s leadership.
Discover how this fiery libertarian turned Argentina’s economic fortunes around — and what the world can learn from his audacious blueprint for recovery.
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00:00 Start
00:53 Golden Years
02:59 Decline of Argentina
05:20 Peron
08:47 The Legacy of Peronism
11:56 After the Falklands
15:38 Javier Milei
18:17 Challenges
24:31 Lesson for the UK and the wider world
January 4, 2025
More on the “Boomers and Year Zero” thing
I sent the link I posted yesterday to Severian and asked for his reaction, saying that “Eric is three years older than me, so I’m on a cultural time-delay both for that and for not being American, but I still felt he was much more right than wrong here”. Sev’s thoughts as posted at FQ in the weekly mailbag post:
The upshot is that it isn’t the Boomers’ fault — they got tricked into it by Marxists, for whatever value of “it” is foremost in your mind, every time you’re tempted to say “OK, Boomer.”
I largely agree, with the caveat that “tricked” is a bit strong. There were conscious, indeed State-directed, attempts at outright cultural subversion — Raymond cites Yuri Bezmenov, and we’re all familiar with that. But there’s a limit to how much damage that kind of thing can do. What mostly happened, I think, circles back to that “excess calories” bit, above. That’s overly reductive — it’s a springboard for discussion, not a categorical statement — but the fact is, you need a certain baseline of physical security before Chesterton’s Fence becomes a thing. Or, as Confucius (or whoever) said, “The man with an empty belly has one problem, but the man with a full belly has a thousand”.
By 1960, at least in AINO, you had a critical mass of people who had never gone to bed hungry. Ever. And so it never crossed their minds that “going to bed hungry” is a thing people have to worry about. That had profound effects, that we’re still working through. It was never the case, ever, in the entire history of mankind, that the average person didn’t have to put some thought into where his next meal was coming from.
The entire human organism — physically, mentally, culturally — is oriented around the problem of caloric supply. Again, I acknowledge that’s overly reductive, but roll with me here: Our biochemistry has been profoundly fucked up by high fructose corn syrup, for the simple reason that a teaspoon of that shit has more, and more highly bioavailable, energy than an entire feast for our Paleolithic ancestors. At the risk of looking like a fool for using an engineering, especially an automotive, metaphor with this crowd, it’s like trying to run rocket fuel through a Model T.
You cannot blame the Boomers for fumbling a situation that has never before been seen, in the history of mankind.
And it’s even hard to blame them for not getting it, even now. One’s mental habits ossify, like one’s tastes, sometime in one’s twenties. It is very, very hard to break the conditioning of a lifetime, and it gets exponentially harder the older you get. I myself thought Ace of Normies was just crazy edgy — how can that maniac say these things?!? — when I first started reading him …
… back around 2004. That’s because I was in my 30s, which means my worldview was stuck a decade earlier. Even now, all my go-to cultural touchpoints are in the 1990s — Alanis, obviously, but pretty much all of them; the 21st century might as well not exist for me, culturally, if you go just by what I’ve written here. Which means that my own worldview tends to be kinda Boomerish, thanks to that weird telescoping effect TV had on the culture. The Boomers grew up watching TV, and then they made TV, such that you can ask anyone who was there — your typical college campus in 1994 was all but indistinguishable from a “liberal” campus in 1968 (your typical college campus in 1968 would’ve had sex-segregated dorms, a whole bunch of “married student housing”, and so on).
I got over it, obviously — and just as obviously tend to go a little overboard with my getting over it — but it takes tremendous effort. As I like to say, the Red Pill is really a suppository, usually administered by jackhammer. To expect a Donald Trump (born 1946), to say nothing of a million lesser lights, to fundamentally grok that it’s not 1968 anymore, is asking an awful lot. It is what it is.
Winning WW2’s Most Important Battle – Battle of the Atlantic
Historigraph
Published 15 Aug 2024The Second World War featured many important land battles on a colossal scale. They involved hundreds of thousands of participants, ranged across hundreds of miles and inflicted the most terrible destruction. But none of them were as long-running, as vast or as crucial to allied victory as that fought at sea in the Atlantic, where for four years Allied navies and civilian sailors fought a life or death struggle against Germany’s U-boats. This is the story of how it was fought, and how it was won.
00:00 – WW2’s most important battle
00:45 – The U-boat menace in the early years
08:53 – The massacre off the eastern seaboard
13:12 – American ship printer go brrrrrrrrr
19:31 – The Allies gain the upper hand
21:49 – Black May: the convoy battles of 1943
24:41 – The most important victory of WW2
(more…)
QotD: The “show pillows”
The female need to pile a bed with useless pillows is an old and not particularly novel observation. It mystifies men. It’s like serving a meal where the plate is loaded with Show Potatoes, and you have to remove ten tubers before you can start. It’s like having a workbench in the garage with Show Hammers. Don’t pound with that! That’s the nice hammer we want company to see! It’ll get nicked and dinged. Or like going to someone’s house and finding out they have a Show Dog. No, no, don’t pat him on the head. Here, use this dog. And there’s some panting happy mutt they pull out of a closet. This is the company dog.
It reminds me of the bathrooms of my childhood, which were stocked with forbidden things: decorative soap in a nice dish engraved with intricate patterns that evaporated on contact with water, and decorative towels. You ended up drying your hands on the curtains, or patting them dry on the inevitable polyester shag toilet-seat cover.
Anyway. You’re wondering how I recovered from this grotesque embarrassment. I fetched two pillows from Daughter’s unoccupied room, apologized on behalf of the male side of the species, and figured the matter was closed. Oh no. Ohhhh, no. The next morning my wife made up the guest room, and emerged with an expression of despair.
The pillowcases did not match.
One was white. The other — and I tremble with shame to write these words — was ivory.
Well, an apology was in order. But how? Maybe bring it up in a roundabout way at breakfast.
“So … how’d you sleep?”
“Oh … okay, I guess. Weird dreams. I was in a paint store, looking at those strips with the different hues, and two of the shades of white looked different but I couldn’t really tell if they were and then I started crying tears in two different shades of white and when the tears hit the floor they burned like acid, and then horrible off-white slugs oozed out of the hole and started singing ABBA songs in two different keys.”
“Huh. And you?”
“I had weird dreams too. There were two philosophers who agreed on everything except for one minor, obscure point, but instead of focusing on their agreement they argued about the small difference until they decided to have a duel, but the guns didn’t fire.”
“Ah, those would be the Show Pistols. Freud had something to say about those. Well, that’s on me. The pillowcase hues were not in sync. I hope we can get past this and enjoy the day.”
James Lileks, “Show Me the Pillows”, LILEKS (James), 2024-09-30.
