Quotulatiousness

February 19, 2025

Europe’s moral leaders stand strong against grotesque American fascism

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

You have to hand it to the great and the good of Europe … they sure can find every. last. rake. to step on as they hysterically react to the slightest hint of disagreement or contradiction:

Germany is right. Opposition parties must be forbidden or firewalled. Political criticism must be criminalized. The public sphere must be firmly controlled by government, with guardrails against disagreement and heterodoxy. If we don’t do these things, we might descend into authoritarianism.

Margaret Brennan’s bizarre response to JD Vance’s speech in Munich — free speech? but that’s the weapon the Nazis used to commit the Holocaust! — wasn’t mere ignorance or accident. It’s a maneuver. You’re going to see more of it, in an urgent wave of moral inversion. Case in point, from the New Republic today:

Remember that Vance said things like this:

    The good news is that I happen to think your democracies are substantially less brittle than many people apparently fear.

    And I really do believe that allowing our citizens to speak their mind will make them stronger still. Which, of course, brings us back to Munich, where the organisers of this very conference have banned lawmakers representing populist parties on both the left and the right from participating in these conversations. Now, again, we don’t have to agree with everything or anything that people say. But when political leaders represent an important constituency, it is incumbent upon us to at least participate in dialogue with them …

    I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people.

So governments should live in dialogue with the populations they govern; citizens should speak freely; banning or limiting political parties makes society less free and less open. From start to finish, Vance spoke for liberty and openness, for free expression and societies organized through unfettered debate.

The calculated response — the calculated response, a deliberate deflection — is: Oh no, he’s saying we should turn into Nazis! Look at the subhed to the thing in the New Republic: arguing for freedom is aligning ourselves with international fascism.

Openness is genocide. Freedom is fascism. Speech is violence. Free societies arrest people for saying the wrong thing. Free speech — you mean like ADOLF HITLER!?!?

Read the piece in the New Republic, and look closely at Michael Tomasky’s language, which is full of Stasi-adjacent framing: “The Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been declared a ‘suspected extremist’ organization by the German domestic intelligence agency.”

The Korean War 035 – The Battle of Chipyong-ni – February 18th, 1951

Filed under: Britain, China, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 18 Feb 2025

Chinese Commander Peng Dehuai has launched his 4th Phase Offensive, pushing the UN forces back in the center of Korea, and should his forces take Chipyong-ni, they will compromise the entire UN position. Chipyong-ni must hold!

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:21 4th Phase Offensive
03:07 Retreat from Hoengsong
06:27 Chipyong-Ni Must Hold!
08:50 First Relief Attempt
10:22 The Battle of Chipyong-Ni
15:34 Battle Side Notes
17:36 29th Brigade
19:36 Summary
19:59 Conclusion
(more…)

A brief nod to the shade of Missouri Representative James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I was aware that the greatest Liberal Prime Minister in Canadian history, Sir Wilfred Laurier, had lost an election on the basis of a negotiated free trade deal with the United States, but I was not aware of exactly how that happened. Colby Cosh provides the gory details that got Laurier out of office for good:

Funny thing I noticed: Friday marked the anniversary of the 20th century’s most remarkable explosion in Canadian-American relations, which took place on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1911. On that day, Feb. 14, Missouri Democratic congressman James Beauchamp “Champ” Clark gave a short speech in defence of a free-trade agreement that had been hammered out between the (Republican) Taft administration and Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal government.

Clark, a progressive and witty westerner who had already been chosen to become Speaker of the House in April, was widely expected to be the Democratic nominee for president in 1912. He was, in other words, a man who counted. And on the floor of the House, he advocated passage of the free-trade deal on grounds that eventually doomed it: namely, that it was a conscious step toward total American absorption of the Dominion of Canada.

When Clark’s remarks hit the newspapers up north — and no news story hit harder between 1900 and the dawn of the Great War — there was a spasm of anti-American and pro-Empire feeling throughout the country. As any schoolbook will tell you, this helped lead to the defeat of Laurier and the ruin of the trade deal in September 1911’s general election. This gaffe is indeed now what Clark is best remembered for, along with his eventual fumbling away of the 1912 presidential nomination to an unassuming professor named Woodrow Wilson.

When I was an undergraduate, we all had to have it explicitly explained to us that back in Edwardian days, the Liberals were the party of free trade, and the Conservatives the great defenders of tariff protection (although Sir John A. had sometimes sought without success to kick-stark “reciprocity” negotiations with the U.S.). Perhaps the most confusing feature of the 1911 controversy to students of today will be Champ Clark’s idea that the U.S. government would want to lower trade barriers to facilitate eventual annexation of Canada, rather than raising them to mutually punitive levels as a matter of crude antagonism.

Between Confederation and Champ’s time, Americans often just assumed as a matter of course that Canada would fall into their laps without any need for aggression or invasion. We northerners would eventually see that the benefits of American citizenship were more valuable than our romantic imperial attachments, and we would come beat down the door. This was certainly Clark’s own idea, and it created no controversy among Americans themselves when he expressed it.

Of course, in Laurier’s day “liberal” meant something closer to the modern sense of “libertarian” than it does to the current incarnation (or shambling corpse) of that party.

HBO’s Rome – Ep 4 “Stealing from Saturn” – History and Story

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

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 28 Aug 2024

Vidcaps taken from the dvd collection and copyright belongs to the respective makers and channels.
Transcript

QotD: The inborn bias of all mankind

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“I would strangle everyone in this room if it somehow prolonged my son’s life.” That’s what I blurted into a microphone during a panel discussion on ethics. I was laughing when I said it, but the priest sitting next to me turned sharply in horror and the communist sitting next to him raised her hand to her throat and stared daggers at me.

Why was I on a panel with a priest and a revolutionary communist? Long story — not very interesting: we were debating the future of ethics with special attention to the role of religion. The interesting part, however, is that at some point, after we all shook hands like adults and I was on my way home, I realized that I meant it — I would choke them all. Well, of course, one can’t be entirely sure that one’s actions will follow one’s intentions. The best-laid plans of mice and men, and all that. But, given some weird Twilight Zone scenario wherein all their deaths somehow saved my son’s life, I was at least hypothetically committed. The caveman intentions were definitely there.

The utilitarian demand — that I should always maximize the greatest good for the greatest number — had seemed reasonable to me in my 20s but made me laugh after my son was born. And my draconian bias is not just the testosterone-fueled excesses of the male psyche. Mothers can be aggressive lionesses when it comes to their offspring. While they are frequently held up as icons of selfless nurturing love, that’s mostly because we offspring — the ones holding them up as icons — are the lucky recipients of that biased love. Try getting between a mammal mother and her kid, and you will see natural bias at its brutal finest.

Stephen T. Asma, “Confucius Got It Right: Giving in to ‘Bias’ is Part of Living an Ethical Life”, Quillette, 2020-02-01.

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