Quotulatiousness

April 24, 2024

Alternative für Deutschland is gifted a blueprint for governing by their entrenched opponents

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

Was it Napoleon who said to never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake? If so, the German populist Alternative für Deutschland leaders must be congratulated for not interrupting the latest mistake by the statists they want to replace:

Every day I encounter yet another hamfisted pseudoacademic propaganda operation eagerly churning out oceans of text to shore up the German political establishment. The idea seems to be that with just enough whitepapers, bursting with just enough words, the situation might still be saved.

There are just so many of these outfits, they grow like weeds in the fertile soil of government funding. This Sunday, it has been my dubious pleasure to stumble across the “academic and journalistic open access forum of debate on topical events and developments in constitutional law and politics” billing itself as the Verfassungsblog (the “Constitution Blog”). This factory of tedious prose and political special pleading that nobody will ever read is not just the eccentric side project of a very socially concerned lawyer named Maximilian Steinbeis, oh no. It is funded by the WZB Berlin Social Science Center (and therefore, indirectly, by the German taxpayer) and also by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law. We would do well to take these people seriously, in other words, and you should keep that in mind, because things are about to get very ridiculous.

Last year, our state-funded Verfassungbloggers realised that elections were approaching in Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg. This worried them terribly, because Alternative für Deutschland dominates polling in all three states. They feared that this “authoritarian populist party” might seize control of one or more state governments, just as other authoritarian populist parties have seized control “in Poland and Hungary, in Florida and Texas”. These parties are very bad, because they “use … power … so that they no longer have to relinquish it”. They “manipulate electoral law” and “stifle opposition” and “pack the administration and judiciary with their own people”. As if that were not bad enough, they also “make the media, scientific and cultural institutions dependent on their will”. Of course, the Federal Republic is presently ruled by a party cartel system that is already doing all of that, but the difference is that none of the parties involved are “authoritarian” or “populist”. The priests of democracy get to do whatever they want, and whatever they do is by definition democratic.

In this spirit, our Verfassungsbloggers launched the “Thüringen Project”. Their aim is to identify how the forces for humanitarian pluralism might manipulate the law, stifle the opposition and pack the administration and judiciary in even more extreme ways than have yet been imagined, all to subvert the will of east German voters and more effectively blunt the power of the AfD when they become the strongest party in the Thuringian Landtag.

[…]

All of this iterative looping has culminated in an overproduced, 36-page .pdf file bearing the characteristically cumbersome title “Strengthening the resilience of the rule of law in Thüringen: Action recommendations from the scenario analysis of the Thüringen Project“. No syllable can be spared in our campaign to defend democracy. In the pages of this plan, they finally define what “authoritarian populist parties” are. These are parties that “use the narrative of a natural, ‘true’ people in opposition to ‘corrupt elites’, for the purpose of delegitimising pluralistic democracy and establishing an authoritarian regime”. The AfD are of course “a clear example of such a party”. The more panicked all of these people get, the closer they come to saying plainly what they’re really afraid of, namely the growing hostility of native Germans to an increasingly isolated political elite, which plainly does not care much about “authoritarianism” (they are responsible for plenty of that themselves) as much as they are terrified of losing their hold on power.

What Were Victorian Attitudes Towards Sex?

Filed under: Britain, Health, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Hit
Published Dec 15, 2023

They’re famously thought of as a buttoned up prudish bunch, but we all know they loved to bump uglies as much as anyone today.

Were the spanking punishments of boarding schools really the origins of brothels? Who were the pin-ups of Victorian women? And what did the saucy portrait Queen Victoria gave to Prince Albert look like?

Today we go Betwixt the Victorian Sheets with Dan Snow, from History Hit sister podcast Dan Snow’s History Hit, to find out all about Victorian relationships.
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April 23, 2024

Debating the economic impact of the Raj on India

Filed under: Books, Britain, Economics, History, India — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Daily Sceptic, Nigel Biggar looks at a few books making or refuting the narrative on how much or how little British rule in India extracted or contributed to the economic life of the subcontinent:

Beyond slave-trading and slavery, what were the economic effects of British imperial dominance? Can they be reduced to Britain’s leeching wealth from exploited subject peoples?

For over a century, that is what Indian nationalists have claimed. It is also what the politician Shashi Tharoor claims in his 2016 book, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. Against him, however, the Bengali-born, LSE-based economic historian Tirthankar Roy has declared of the nationalist critique that “generations of historians … have shown that it is not [true]”. Pace Tharoor, the statistic that India produced 25 per cent of world output in 1800 and 2–4 per cent in 1900 does not prove that India was once rich and became poor: “[i]t only tells that industrial productivity in the West increased four to six times during this period … The proposition that the Empire was at bottom a mechanism of surplus appropriation and transfer has not fared well in global history”.

On the contrary, the British Empire’s commitment to free trade gave Indian entrepreneurs new opportunities to grow. Some of them visited England in the late 19th Century, observed the workings of manufacturing industry, imported machinery and expertise to India, built factories employing Indians, and then outcompeted Manchester. This is exactly how the Tata Iron and Steel Company began in Bombay – the same company that now owns what remains of the British steel industry.

What is more, colonial governments often protected native producers against British business, in order to moderate economic and social disruption, partly because they genuinely cared for the welfare of native people and partly because they didn’t want to have to manage the political unrest that foreign commercial intrusion could excite. Famously, in 1910-11 colonial officials barred Lever Brothers from acquiring concessions in Nigeria on which to establish palm-oil processing mills with widespread hinterlands, since Africans were already producing for the world markets and generating tax revenue and because the alienation of large areas of land risked provoking native opposition.

Further still, the British were the leading exporters of capital from the mid-19th Century to at least 1929. Between 1876 and 1914, Britain invested over a third of its overseas capital in the Empire, over 19% of it in India. Of course, British investors often made a profit out of this. That’s the thing about investment: you tend to want to grow your money, not waste it. But if the British gained, so did colonial peoples. Take railways. By 1947, British India had 45,000 miles of railway track, most of it constructed with private capital, whereas five years later un-colonised China still had less than 18,000 miles. For sure, the railways served military purposes. But they also served commercial and economic ones: one estimate reckons that when the railway network reached the average district, real agricultural income rose by about 16%. And it served the welfare purpose of efficient famine relief, too.

A basic reason why the British sent their capital overseas to the Empire, enabling the growth of businesses and the building of infrastructure, was that colonial states provided sufficient political stability and legal certainty to make the risks of financial ventures worth taking. (Badenoch hints at this in her reference to the economic effects of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.) That explains why Australia’s economic growth compares so favourably with that of many Latin American countries, and why, between the 1860s and 1890s, Australia was the richest country on earth.

In sum, the considered judgement of the Swiss historian Rudolf von Albertini, whose work – according to the world’s “leading imperial economic historian”, David Fieldhouse – was based “on exhaustive examination of the literature on most parts of the colonial world to 1940”, was simply this: “colonial economics cannot be understood through concepts such as plunder economics and exploitation”.

April 22, 2024

Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones

Filed under: Books, Europe, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From last week’s blog post, Bret Devereaux reviews a book by a former instructor from his undergraduate days, documenting Roman values and attitudes and how understanding their views of themselves helps put their actions into context:

I studied under Barton as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but only looped back around to fully read her book on Roman honor during my Ph.D studies. This is a book about Roman culture and the Roman worldview – or more correctly the way the Romans view themselves and more crucially their innermost selves. This is an important exercise for the student of history, because, as L.P. Hartley famously put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”. And so part of what the historian aims to do is not merely know what happened, but in order to understand why it happened, to be able to get into the minds of those people in the past, doing things differently. To put another way: we must also understand the vibes. This is a book about some serious Roman vibes.

The focus of Barton’s book, of course, is the Roman concept of honor and the whole constellation of ideas and concepts that circle around it (virtus, pudor and so on). For Barton, the Roman lived for the discrimen or certamen – that moment of testing and decision for which we have so many well-worn phrases (“sorting the wheat from the chaff”, “separating the men and the boys” and so on).1 It is in that moment that the Roman is, in a sense, most alive, propelled forward by virtus, guided by the other virtues, to pass the test and thereby win honor.

Two things, I think, distinguish Barton’s approach. The first is a focus on how these ideas make Romans feel and act; the man of honor shines, he is fiery, he glows. He stands tall, while others defer to him. The man filled with shame is the opposite. Understanding how real these ideas could be in Roman culture is in turn important for understanding how the Roman state – republic and empire – works, because it is predicated on those values, on the assumption that those not yet tested defer to those with honos who have been so tested and have shown their virtus. Second, the way Barton engages with the sources leaves a strong impression: the reader is bombarded with quotations (translated in the text, original in the footnotes) where the Romans can speak themselves about their values. And goodness do the Romans ever speak for themselves – almost never one example but half a dozen or more.

That strength can also be a weakness: to get that many references, Barton has to cast a wide net, especially chronologically and it isn’t unusual to see different examples for a point covering centuries, for instance from Plautus (late 3rd cent. BC) to Seneca (mid-late 1st cent. AD) in the same paragraph. That somewhat weakens the book’s ability to address chronological change, though Barton does work a bit of that chronology back in some of the later chapters. That said, Barton’s conception remains rooted with the bulk of her sources in the Late Republic (c. 133-31 BC) and while she stretches beyond this and notes some changes, this is fundamentally not a chronologically focused work. On the upside, the book is printed with footnotes (often taking up half a page or more!) with both original text for the translations and other useful notes, so for the student a trip from Barton’s prose to the original sources is quick and often quite fruitful.

Barton’s prose is very readable. As someone who sat in her classes, I can hear her lecture voice in the pages – she is well-known among the students as a passionate lecturer (now retired) who would shout and gesture, jump up and down and even get a bit misty-eyed at the fall of the Gracchi. The passion, I think, comes through in the book as well, to its benefit and that’s important, because this is fundamentally about things the Romans themselves were passionate about. I will also note, I think this book combines well with J.E. Lendon’s Empire of Honor (somewhat harder to obtain) to give a the fullest picture of honor in Roman affairs. But for someone looking to understand how the Romans thought about their own inner-lives and emotions, Roman Honor is, I think, the place to start.

    1. One thing that’s striking: whereas the Greek equivalent, the agon is a contest against another, the Roman discrimen is a test against any sort of challenge or hardship. Greek arete (“excellence”) tends to be comparative in nature: the best, the strongest, the fastest and so on, whereas the Roman equivalents are less inherently comparative. Virtus is not zero-sum. That doesn’t mean the Romans aren’t competitive, but it is, I think, a subtle but real difference in ethos (especially aristocratic ethos).

Did Japan Attack Pearl Harbor Because Of China?

Filed under: China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published Dec 1, 2023

December 7, 1941: The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor shocked the world and brought the US into the Second World War. But why did the Japanese resort to such an attack against a powerful rival and what did it have to do with the Japanese war in China?
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QotD: Before England could rely on the “wooden walls” of the Royal Navy

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

… given this general lack of geographical knowledge, try to imagine embarking on a voyage of discovery. To an extent, you might rely on the skill and experience of your mariners. For England in the mid-sixteenth century, however, these would not have been all that useful. It’s strange to think of England as not having been a nation of seafarers, but this was very much the case. Its merchants in 1550 might hop across the channel to Calais or Antwerp, or else hug the coastline down to Bordeaux or Spain. A handful had ventured further, to the eastern Mediterranean, but that was about it. Few, if any, had experience of sailing the open ocean. Even trade across the North Sea or to the Baltic was largely unknown – it was dominated by the German merchants of the Hanseatic League. Nor would England have had much to draw upon in the way of more military, naval experience. The seas for England were a traditional highway for invaders, not a defensive moat. After all, it had a land border with Scotland to the north, as well as a land border with France to the south, around the major trading port of Calais. Rather than relying on the “wooden walls” of its ships, as it would in the decades to come, the two bulwarks in 1550 were the major land forts at Calais and Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Anton Howes, “The House of Trade”, Age of Invention, 2019-11-13.

April 21, 2024

300,000 Germans Surrender in the Ruhr – WW2 – Week 295 – April 20, 1945

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

World War Two
Published 20 Apr 2024

The Soviet drive on Berlin continues, but it is now very much a race between the forces of Georgy Zhukov and those of Ivan Konev. In the west, over 300,000 Germans surrender to the Allies as the Ruhr Pocket is eliminated, though there are advances by all Allied armies this week on the whole Western Front. There is even an Allied breakthrough in Italy, though on Okinawa American attacks get nowhere. The Japanese are advancing in China, and in Burma the Allied drive for Rangoon continues.
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Publius Rutilius Rufus, an honest man in a dishonest era

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Lawrence W. Reed discusses the life and career of Publius Rutilius Rufus, Roman consul and historian, who suffered the revenge of corrupt tax farmers (publicani) after attempting to protect taxpayers from extortion in the province of Asia:

In the last decades of the Roman Republic, as its liberties crumbled and the dictatorship of the subsequent Empire loomed, honesty decayed with each successive generation—an omen we should think long and hard about today. Among the lessons of the Roman experience is this: Liberty is ultimately incompatible with widespread indifference to truth. A society of liars succumbs to the tyrant who brings “order” to its chaos and corruption.

In a book I strongly recommend, The Lives of the Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, authors Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman tell us about a man named Publius Rutilius Rufus (158 B.C.-78 B.C.). They regard him as “the last honest man” of the dying Republic. Though that description surely contains ample hyperbole to emphasize a point, Rufus’s exceptional honesty was indeed notable in his day because it was no longer the rule in a decadent age. As Mark Twain would note many centuries later, “an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere”.

Rufus, the great-uncle of Julius Caesar (his sister Rutilia was Caesar’s maternal grandmother), built an illustrious career in the Roman military. Those under his command were known as “the best trained, the most disciplined, and the bravest” of the legions. He garnered enormous respect because of his Stoic virtues — courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. In 105 B.C., he served in the highest political post in the Republic, the consulship. He was incorruptible, which meant he was a target of those who weren’t.

It had become a common practice in the late Republic for the government to hire private contractors to collect taxes. These “publicani” often extorted more from their victims than the taxes required because that’s the way the contracts were written. The government didn’t care what the publicani kept for themselves if it got its expected revenues. When Rufus attempted to stop the injustices this arrangement created, the publicani and their allies in the Roman Senate fought back. They arranged a sham trial with a pre-ordained verdict and charged Rufus with the very thing of which they themselves were guilty: extortion and corruption.

Historian Tom Holland in Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic writes that Rufus’s conviction was “the most notorious scandal in Roman legal history” and “an object lesson in how dangerous it could be to uphold ancient values against the predatory greed of corrupt officials”. With utterly no evidence and all credible testimony to the contrary, the accusers claimed Rufus had extorted money from Smyrna in the Roman province of Asia (what is now western Turkey).

Another historian, Mike Duncan, notes, “The charges were ludicrous as Rutilius [Rufus] was a model of probity and would later be cited by Cicero as the perfect model of a Roman administrator”.

As punishment for his trumped-up offense, Rufus was sent into exile but in deference to his past service, the court gave him the option of choosing where that would be. He chose Smyrna, the place he was charged with victimizing. When he arrived there, he was celebrated as the man who had tried to end the very practices of which he was wrongly convicted. Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman describe what happened to Rufus as “a very old trick”:

    Accuse the honest man of precisely the opposite of what they’re doing, of the sin you yourself are doing. Use their reputation against them. Muddy the waters. Stain them with lies. Run them out of town by holding them to a standard that if equally applied would mean the corrupt but entrenched interests would never survive … Smyrna, grateful for the reforms and scrupulous honesty of the man who had once governed them, welcomed [Rufus] with open arms … Cicero would visit there in 78 B.C. and call him “a pattern of virtue, of old-time honor, and of wisdom”.

How The Channel Tunnel Works

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Railways, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Practical Engineering
Published Jan 16, 2024

Let’s dive into the engineering and construction of the Channel Tunnel on its 30th anniversary.

It is a challenging endeavor to put any tunnel below the sea, and this monumental project faced some monumental hurdles. From complex cretaceous geology, to managing air pressure, water pressure, and even financial pressure, there are so many technical details I think are so interesting about this project.
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QotD: The “omni-spear” of the Mediterranean World

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

So I first want to suggest a set of basic characteristics for what I am going to term the “omni-spear“, the standard kind of iron-tipped one-handed thrusting spear that almost everyone fought with in the Mediterranean world.

So let us posit a spear. Its haft is made of wood – our ancient sources tend to be particular that certain kinds of wood, particularly ash and cornelian cherry (cornel wood), are best – and about 2.5 to 3m in length and roughly 2.5cm in diameter. Obviously, on one end we’ll have our iron spear head. On the other end, we probably have a smaller iron spear butt, sometimes called a ferrule.

For our spear tip, we’re going to have a hunk of iron about 250-450g in mass. It’s going to have a circular socket, about 2 to 2.5cm in diameter (to fit the haft) at its base. That socket will then proceed upwards into the tip as a “mid-ridge”, though it generally stops being entirely hollow at some point. In two directions from the mid-ridge are going to project some “blades” – if we’re French, we’ll call them flamme, “flames”, while if we’re Spanish they’ll be hoja, “blades”, and if we’re German they’re Blätter, “sheets, leaves”. These taper at the tip and widen towards the base, usually before curving gracefully inward on the socket a few inches up from its base. Often scholars have called this a “leaf shaped” spearhead, which I always find a bit awkward in phrasing (leaves can have many shapes), but the alternatives, like “tear-drop” shaped, aren’t any less awkward. If you are having a hard time conceptualizing that picture, here is an example of what I mean.

For the bottom of the spear we could just go with nothing. We could also make a simple conical socket in iron and secure it with a rivet or, if we’re being really creative, a nail hammered into the base of the shaft. If we want to be really fancy, we might make a spear-butt that combines a circular socket with a long square-sectioned projection so that it serves better as a backup point in a pinch. If you want to see the more developed version of that, here is a Greek “sauroter“, about the most elaborate this part of the spear gets.

And there we go. We have the “omni-spear”. Basic spear-butt, “leaf-shaped” spearhead with a strong mid-ridge, both generally in iron, joined by a 2.5-3m long wooden haft, about 2.5cm thick (though the haft might be thicker, as it could taper before meeting the socket) made of hardwood, with a grip at the center of balance.

That basic description describes the famous Greek dory, the spear of the hoplite. It also describes one of the more common forms of the Roman hasta, one with what I’ve termed a “Type A” Roman spearhead. And it also describes the La Tène spear, the native name of which we don’t know.1 And it also describes common thrusting spears of the Iberian Peninsula, both those used by the Iberians living in the coastal Levante and the Celtiberian peoples living on the Meseta; the names of those spears too are lost to us.2 And it also describes the common weapon of the Persian infantry, including their elite infantry which Herodotus calls “Immortals”. Almost certainly it describes spears even further afield, but we are rapidly reaching the edge of my expertise, so I’ll stop with the Persian Empire.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Mediterranean Iron Omni-Spear”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-11-10.

    1. And before you jump up to tell me “oh, it was called a gaesum“, no, that’s a javelin and we do not know what sort of javelin correlates to that name preserved in our sources.

    2. And before someone jumps up and tells me, “oh, it was called a soliferreum, no, that’s also a javelin and we do know exactly what sort of javelin that correlates to. They’re super cool, but they are throwing weapons, not thrusting spears. Interestingly, all over the Iberian peninsula it seems to have been standard for warriors to carry one javelin (often, but not always a soliferreum) and one thrusting spear. We find that pattern over and over again in burial deposits.

April 20, 2024

How much of your language do you have to destroy to avoid the taint of historical fascist usage?

Filed under: Germany, History, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

For understandable reasons, German governments since the end of World War 2 have been twitchy about any symbols, songs, words and phrases that were used by Hitler’s various fascist organizations … to the point of making many things illegal. eugyppius outlines one particular case where the use of a simple German phrase by an AfD politician has landed him in court, facing a possible three-year prison sentence even though he denies that he knew the phrase had such connotations:

Today, the leader of the Alternative für Deutschland faction in the Thuringian state parliament, Björn Höcke, appeared before the district court in Halle for the first day of his long-awaited speech trial. He stands accused of having used a forbidden Nazi slogan favoured by the Sturmabteilung at a political rally in Merseburg on 29 May 2021. Höcke pleads that he used the three-word phrase in a moment of spontaneous elaboration at the end of his speech, without knowing its National Socialist associations. Out of an abundance of caution, I won’t quote the phrase here, even in translation, but I’ll provide it in context below; it begins with the words “Everything for” (“Alles für“) and concludes with the name of the Federal Republic. As slogans go, it is so seemingly banal that before the trial many Germans would have been surprised to know it had any Nazi associations at all.

For the moment, not much has happened. Höcke’s lawyers filed a variety of requests, among them that the Federal Constitutional Court answer a question surrounding the court’s jurisdiction. In consequence, it’s unclear whether the trial will continue as scheduled next week or whether it will have to be substantially delayed. The state prosecutor’s position is that Höcke’s background as a history teacher makes his claims of ignorance implausible. The prosecutors’ office have also added an additional charge for Höcke’s defiance at a rally in Gera last December, where he shouted the first two words of the slogan at the crowd, and invited them to supply the last one. I fear that this was a grave mistake, because as we will see, the original case against Höcke is laughably weak.

If found guilty, Höcke could be fined or sentenced to prison for up to three years. It is also conceivable that his right to vote and run for office could be suspended. Whatever you think of Höcke or his politics, the political dimensions of this trial are undeniable, as it is occurring mere months ahead of the Thuringian state elections, and as Alternative für Deutschland commands a solid plurality of polling numbers in that state.

[…]

That Höcke deliberately used the SA slogan as a subtle enticement to the extreme right is more than doubtful; that he also did so in hopes that he would be prosecuted and profit politically from his victimisation is so ridiculous, I can’t imagine that even Hillje really believes this. This obnoxious thesis nevertheless recurs whenever the German press report on the harassment of AfD politicians; it is somehow their fault, because they are held to benefit from it.

Der Spiegel, always a source of unintentional amusement, ran a headline today mocking Höcke as a “history teacher with no knowledge of history“. “He claims not to know it was an SA slogan”, they report, “but there are doubts about this”. Alas, the very same news magazine last September accidentally used the forbidden phrase to headline an approving article on Olaf Scholz’s proposed “Germany Pact”. They rapidly changed the headline, appending this brief and embarrassing correction to the bottom:

    An earlier version of the article was headed with a line that was used by the SA as a slogan. This was not intended by the author and editors and has now been changed.

Russian and French Nazis Defend the Reich – ϟϟ Foreign Fighters Part 3

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

World War Two
Published 19 Apr 2024

As the war turns ever more against Germany, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler keeps loosening the racial standards of his Waffen SS. More and more non-Germans fill the ranks of his forces. Some of these non-German fighters will be among the last defenders of the Third Reich.

Click here for parts one and two:

• ϟϟ Foreign Fighters
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“Identity quakes”

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Doyle explains why some people cling to aspects of their worldview so tightly because to admit that they were mistaken would actually threaten their individual identity:

Both Gosse’s memoir and Potter’s dramatisation grapple with what Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay (in their book How to Have Impossible Conversations) call an “identity quake”, the “emotional reaction that follows from having one’s core values disrupted”. Their point is that when arguing with those who see the world in an entirely different way, we must be sensitive to the ways in which certain ideas constitute an aspect of our sense of self. In such circumstances, to dispense with a cherished viewpoint can be as traumatic as losing a limb.

The concept of identity quakes helps us to understand the extreme political tribalism of our times. It isn’t simply that the left disagrees with the right, but that to be “left-wing” has become integral to self-conceptualisation. How often have we seen “#FBPE” or “anti-Tory” in social media bios? These aren’t simply political affiliations; they are defining aspects of these people’s lives. This is also why so many online disputes seem to be untethered from reason; many are following a set of rules established by their “side”, not thinking for themselves. When it comes to fealty to the cause, truth becomes irrelevant. We are no longer dealing with disputants in an argument, but individuals who occupy entirely different epistemological frameworks.

Since the publication of the Cass Review, we have seen countless examples of this kind of phenomena. Even faced with the evidence that “gender-affirming” care is unsafe for children, those whose identity has been cultivated in the gender wars will find it almost impossible to accept the truth. Trans rights activists have insisted that “gender identity” is a reality, and their “allies” have been the most strident of all on this point. As an essentially supernatural belief, it should come as no surprise that it has been insisted on with such vigour, and that those who have attempted to challenge this view have been bullied and demonised as heretics.

Consider the reaction from Novara Media, a left-wing independent media company, which once published some tips on how to deceive a doctor into prescribing cross-sex hormones. Novara has claimed that “within hours of publication” the Cass Review had been “torn to shreds”. Like all ideologues, they are invested in a creed, and it just so happens that the conviction that “gender identity” is innate and fixed (and simultaneously infinitely fluid) has become a firm dogma of the identity-obsessed intersectional cult.

Identity quakes will be all the more seismic within a movement whose members have elevated “identity” itself to hallowed status. When tax expert Maya Forstater sued her former employers for discrimination due to her gender-critical beliefs in 2019, one of the company’s representatives, Luke Easley, made a revealing declaration during the hearing. “Identity is reality,” he said, “without identity there’s just a corpse”.

This sentiment encapsulates the kind of magical thinking that lies at the core of the creed. So while it becomes increasingly obvious that gender identity ideology is a reactionary force that represents a direct threat to the rights of women and gay people, there will be many who simply will not be able to admit it. In Easley’s terms, if their entire identity is based on a lie, only “a corpse” remains. From this perspective, to abandon one’s worldview is tantamount to suicide.

April 19, 2024

Humza Yousuf, the “Thug King of Scotland”

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

I don’t know what Scotland did to deserve Humza Yousuf as their first minister, but it must have been really bad:

Not what you were hoping for.

Assuming he doesn’t get removed by a leadership coup before voters sink the leaking Tory battleship, Sunak will be gone by January of 2025 at the latest. That just leaves Humza Yousuf, characterized by Morgoth as The Thug King of Scotland: a post-ideological, apolitical opportunist interested purely in power for its own sake and quite happy to use the absurd public morality of the despised rubes that he rules over to keep the wretches in their place.

And boy, does he despise them.

Yousuf first came to the Internet’s attention in 2020, when he was filmed ranting in the Scottish parliament about how disgustingly racist it was that most of the high public offices in a country with an overwhelmingly White population were occupied by presumptively racist White cavebeasts:

    The Lord President is white, the Lord Justice Clerk is white, every High Court judge is white, the Lord Advocate is white, the Solicitor General is white, the chief constable is white, every deputy chief constable is white, every assistant chief constable is white, the head of the Law Society is white, the head of the Faculty of Advocates is white and every prison governor is white.

    That is not the case only in justice. The chief medical officer is white, the chief nursing officer is white, the chief veterinary officer is white, the chief social work adviser is whiteand almost every trade union in the country is headed by white people. In the Scottish Government, every director general is white. Every chair of every public body is white. That is not good enough.

If you haven’t watched the video, you should. You need to hear the contempt dripping off of his tongue, the way he spits out the awful word “White” like bitter venom.

In the immediate aftermath of this angry foreigner’s tirade, a sane country would have immediately marched their ill-mannered guest out of parliament, stripped him of office and citizenship, thrown him on a rusty fishing vessel, hauled him up north of the Orkneys, tossed him into the North Sea wearing nothing but a life preserver, and sent him on his way with a cheery wave and a reminder to mind the orcas.

Instead, they gave him the keys to the kingdom.

But while the infamous White Speech might not have prevented his elevation to the highest office in the land – indeed, given the derangement of our elites, if anything it smoothed his ascent – it has come back to haunt him. Thin-skinned and insecure as he is, Yousuf’s first priority on taking office was to ram through a new hate speech law with which to prevent the contemptible White worms from critiquing him or his noble tribe of vape-shop owners, cabbies, and grooming gang pimps. The law was ridiculously broad and invasive: one could be reported for the criminal offence of hate speech merely for making a remark in the privacy of one’s home, around the dinner table, with no one present but one’s kith and kin.

The day that the bill was finally forced through the Scottish parliament, and predictably enough for anyone who glanced at the law and had a passing understanding of the Scottish national character, the Scottish people responded by DDoSing the police with a deluge of hate crime reports, a very large number of which were reporting Yousuf’s rant as a hate crime … which, apparently, under the strict interpretation of the new law, it certainly was, with the only thing standing between Yousuf and indictment under his own half-baked law being that his ill-considered harangue took place prior to the law being passed. Which hasn’t stopped the Scots from taking the piss and continuing to report him.

It turns out that the Scots really do not like a ban on bantz, not one bit, and respond to demands that they cease the bantz by cranking up the bantz. Yousuf, being a humourless Pakistani who is confused and angered by this entirely foreseeable reaction, has risen to the occasion with all the grace, poise, and wit you would expect. In an attempt to stem the savage tide of mockery, Yousuf has tried claiming that reporting his hate speech is hate speech (lulz); has ordered Scottish police to read verbatim a prewritten transcript defending him each time his hate speech is thrown back at him (because that doesn’t look ridiculous); and faked a hate crime against himself by having his house sprayed with graffiti (did anyone fall for this?).

The next Scottish general election is two years away. Whether Humza survives the interim as First Minister, and if so whether he is able to guide the “Scottish” “National” Party to victory, remains to be seen. I don’t fancy his chances. He is a cunning and ruthless brute, to be sure. But he is also clumsy, clueless, and very stupid. Yousuf’s popularity has already plummeted. I’m sure he can find ways to plummet further. I believe in you, Yousuf. You can do it!

The Führerbunker – Hitler’s Grave

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

World War Two
Published 18 Apr 2024

The man who once conquered Europe, Adolf Hitler, now cowers underground in the Führerbunker as bombs and artillery rain down on the ruins of the Reich. Today Sparty gives you a tour of the damp and claustrophobic concrete maze that will soon become the dictator’s coffin.
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