World War Two
Published 10 Apr 2025February 1931 sees unprecedented chaos in Germany’s parliament as Nazis and Communists stage a dramatic walkout, ironically enabling democratic parties to pass reforms unopposed. Meanwhile, Hitler pushes eastward expansion, Berlin bans extremist newspapers — including Goebbels’ Der Angriff — and Röhm militarizes the Nazi SA. With democracy under strain and political extremes emboldened, what’s next for the Weimar Republic?
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April 11, 2025
Nazis and Communists Unite Against Weimar – Rise of Hitler 14, February 1931
Critical Trade Theory
A discussion at the amusingly named Handwaving Freakoutery on the ongoing wave of tariff activity under the Trump II administration, characterizing them as “woke” tariffs:
The great argument playing out in the media right now about the relative value and ethical implications of reciprocal tariffs is not relevant. It is not relevant because these tariffs are not reciprocal tariffs in any measurable way. They aren’t reciprocal, they aren’t sensible, and the justification for them is Woke in every sense of the word. Let’s take a close look at what we might call Critical Trade Theory, back our way into an understanding of what a woke tariff is and how this is definitely that, and close with a quick word about how political realignments portend doom for the left even though the right is really screwing this up. Then we’ll all buy mop handle futures.
Awokening
The Great Awokening of the prior decade was founded in part on the False Cause Fallacy. Our major institutions for the better part of the last ten years were operated by wokerists, who used an Intersectional Matrix of Culturally Encouraged Race and Gender Prejudice to counteract what they viewed as hidden unmeasurable forces such as “systemic racism”. They couldn’t point to the systemic racism, but they knew it must be there because of the imbalance in socioeconomic metrics, and they denied any other possible explanation for the imbalance. Once the False Cause was in place, the devout wokerist was forced to fight the hidden prejudice with overt reverse prejudice, because they couldn’t conceive any other cause.
For example, if black folks have a hard time getting into Harvard or UNC, it must be because society is systemically racist against black people, and no other reason, therefore we should redirect admission slots from Asians who earned them to blacks who didn’t, for race balancing.
Harvard did exactly that, for exactly that reason, and admitted it, and it was sent to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court banned it, and then Harvard kept doing it and is still doing it using different words.
Some of our other institutions are still running this wokery program, although the Trump Administration purged much of it from the halls of federal power this year under their DEI ban, and many other institutions used Trump as cover to independently purge it from theirs. But this same smooth-brained thinking wiggled its way right into Trump’s tariff plan last week, through an equation that looks fancy but is something my middle school son could figure out.
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The media thinks these woke tariffs are going to bomb the economy back to the stone age, but when I make the abhorrent choice to read the graphs myself it looks more like January 2024. A 20% tariff on Chinese goods is rough. Adding 34% more to it is rougher. But a 54% tariff on Chinese goods is nothing compared to Shenzhen closing its entire manufacturing sector down because they found a germ, and probably not significantly worse than the Fed turning off the free money spigot in 2022.
These tariffs are going to do goofy shit to the economy. I don’t like the goofy shit they’re likely to do. I think that trade balancing through tariffs is an idea so stupid that only Rust Belt union workers could come up with it, which is why they probably did come up with it, and also probably why Trump won the election by flipping the Rust Belt.
Beretta 93R: The Best Machine Pistol?
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Dec 2024The Beretta 93R (“Raffica”) was developed in the 1970s by Beretta engineer Paolo Parola at the request of Italian military special forces. It took the basic Beretta 92 pistol design and added a well-thought-out burst mechanism under the right-side grip panel. It does not have a plain full-auto setting, but only semiauto and 3-round burst. To help keep the gun controllable, it has a heavier slide to reduce cyclic rate, a detachable shoulder stock, and a folding front grip to help control the muzzle. It uses extended 20-round magazines and is actually remarkably controllable (or so I am told; I have not had a chance to shoot one myself).
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QotD: Teaching in modern universities
Leys’s essays often combine delicacy with deep irony — a combination that few writers, especially in our times of stridency and parti pris, achieve. Here, for example, is the beginning of his essay “An Introduction to Confucius”: “If we consider humanity’s greatest teachers of wisdom — the Buddha, Confucius, Socrates, Jesus — we are struck by a curious paradox: today, not one of them could obtain even the most modest of teaching posts in any of our universities”. We laugh — which, of course, is the best tribute to the seriousness of the point that he is making. He goes on to explain, “The reason is simple: their qualifications are insufficient — they have published nothing”.
In two sentences, Leys has pinned, like a butterfly to an entomologist’s board, the bureaucratic sickness that has overtaken our institutions of higher learning (and not only those institutions). There is no madness more difficult to treat than that which believes itself sane, and there is no irrationality greater than that which believes itself perfect. It is no surprise that Leys retired early from his university chair because the university no longer bore any resemblance to what it had once been and misled students and the rest of society into believing it still was. A community of scholars had become an organization of foremen on a production line.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Rare and Common Sense”, First Things, 2017-11.
