Quotulatiousness

February 25, 2023

One year into Vladimir Putin’s “Three-Day War”

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tsar Vlad launched his short, victorious war a full year ago, expecting to have the troops home by spring if not sooner. It hasn’t worked out to his timetable at all. Ukraine still stands, although it’s taken one hell of a battering in the process and drawn in more and more vocal support in the west, which has belatedly been followed by actual military supplies and equipment to replace those expended holding back the Russian forces. CDR Salamander follows up his predictions from last year on how things looked to him at that moment in time:

On the day the war started I made 7-points. Let’s review them and see how I did back on 24 FEB 22.

    1. The remaining delusions about the post-Cold War security arrangements in Europe should be firmly buried. History is back and she has her Festivus pole front and center. She has some issues with us, and we’re going to hear about it.

This continues to get firmer and displayed in stark relief. All the “offsets” and “transformations” and “war is new” snake oil sold the last few decades really should not be allowed to have any public space besides to say, “I was wrong.” Rest assured, that won’t stop them — but the issues we raised over the almost 18-yrs of this blog and 14-yrs of the Midrats Podcast remain true. From the shallow magazines to the fact you never have enough large caliber guns to no war is short … we — and a lot of other people tut-tut’d for years — were correct.

    2. NATO has a German problem. While all the “right people” will not shut up about how wonderful former Chancellor Angela Merkle was, people need to be very clear eyed about what a complete disaster she and the German political class have been over the last two decades. They have starved what should be continental European NATO’s most potent military into irrelevance. Her disastrous feel-good, ethno-masochistic immigration policy weakened European cohesion and fed the worst parts of European political subcultures. Yes, she made a lot of well meaning Germans feel good about themselves, but it was a sugar-high that rotted the teeth and poisoned the national metabolism. While willing to defend Europe to the last Pole and Germany to the last American, she decided to preen in her neo-pagan EuroGreen superiority onomastic politics by ditching clean nuclear power and through the complete corruption of her elite, shacked herself to Russian energy oligarchs and thus the Kremlin. Germany needs to fix herself, and NATO needs to work around her and punish her until she starts to behave like a constructive 21st Century security partner.

Germany has made great progress, but is being dragged kicking and screaming in to the 21st Century.

    3. As our friend Jerry Hendrix pointed out yesterday, the moral leaders in NATO right now are the Baltic Republics and I would add Visegrad nations. You can throw Romania in there too. France will go hot and cold as she fights her desire to do the right thing for European security while at the same time nurse her 1,000 year old drive to be the premier leader of Western Europe. Serious but weaker nations will lean on a reluctant USA and limited United Kingdom … simply because — to be frank — much of the rest of the alliance is not that capable.

I think this graph tells that story well;

The front-line nations are putting their money where their existential threat is.

    4. In line with #1 above, it is time for Finland at least, and probably Sweden, to join NATO. They both have a long and bloody history with the Russians and should see clearly what time it is.

Another check.

    5. Ukraine waited too long to rearm. Weakened and distracted by a corrupt elite, the good parts of her nation could not get ready fast enough. After the first Russo-Ukraine war of 2014 she should have modeled the armed neutrality of Switzerland with a civilian populace trained and armed to the teeth. As we’ve discussed here before with the former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact nations, every village needs a few ATGM militia teams trained to slow any advance through their patch of land. If Ukraine can, in whole or part, survive without vassalhood, perhaps they could get there. They can only get there if they build a nation people are willing to fight and die for.

Everyone is rediscovering the utility of a good military-industrial complex that can quickly grow to scale. Amazing what the green-eye-shade accounts forced those who actually are supposed to study war to believe.

A few days ago, Dominic Sandbrook explained that the Ukraine-Russia conflict “is not complicated”:

A year ago, as Vladimir Putin launched his so-called “special military operation” to seize the Ukrainian capital, kill Volodymyr Zelenskyy and wipe much of the latter’s country from the map of Europe, who’d have imagined that the third week of February 2023 would begin with Joe Biden strolling around the streets of Kyiv in sunglasses? For that matter, who would have predicted that Mr Zelenskyy, only recently returned from his own trip to London, would be at his side — still the president of a free country, and still very much alive?

Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong. Like many, probably most Western observers, I held out little hope for Ukraine once the drums of war began to beat in earnest. A couple of days after Mr Putin’s brutal invasion began, I wrote a bullish essay looking back at Ukraine’s history of suffering and resilience. But even as I was agonising over my prose, the bleak news continued to pour in. “Now, while I have been writing, Russian tanks are rolling into the suburbs,” I wrote at one stage. Did I think they would be driven back? I didn’t. “Kyiv will rise again,” I wrote at the end. Stirring words, or so I hoped. But the person I was really trying to persuade was myself, and I didn’t succeed.

In truth, I underestimated the Ukrainian people’s resilience, their courage, their love of country. And I was wrong, too, about the Western alliance. After more than a decade of drift and inaction, from the shameful failure to respond to the seizure of Crimea to the near-criminal indifference to the suffering in Syria, I doubted whether any major Western leader would make more than a token protest about the first full-scale European invasion since the Forties. I never expected to see Finland and Sweden jump off the fence and apply for Nato membership. Nor did I imagine that Joe Biden would be so unswerving in his commitment, or so generous with US military aid. Above all, I never anticipated that Kyiv would hold out, that Kharkiv would stand or that Kherson would be retaken. As I say, it’s nice to be wrong.

It’s often said that the war in Ukraine feels like a throwback, returning us to an age when nationalistic strongmen nursed atavistic dreams of conquest, sending thousands of men to die so that they might scratch new frontiers into the soil of Europe. For all the drones and social media gimmicks, the fighting certainly feels old-fashioned: reading David Patrikarakos’s harrowing dispatch from the front line in Bakhmut, it’s impossible not to think of Passchendaele or Verdun. But for a child of the Seventies, perhaps the most old-fashioned thing of all is the spectacle of a genuinely clear-cut conflict, an unambiguous clash of right and wrong, that feels closer in spirit to the struggle against Hitler’s Germany than to most of the wars in my lifetime.

Andrew Sullivan is convinced that the war is just, but worries whether it is prudent — and he calls it not Ukraine’s but “the West’s defensive war against Russia”:

It is right and just to defend a sovereign country from attack by a much larger neighbor; to fight back against an occupying force committing war crimes on a massive scale; to oppose the logic of dictatorships and defend the foundations of democracy; to uphold a post-Cold War international order which forbids the redrawing of borders by force; to unite democratic countries in Europe against a resurgence of imperial Russia; to defang and defeat a poisonous chauvinism that despises modern freedoms for women and gay people.

It is indeed right and just. But is it prudent?

That’s the question I’m still grappling with, in a week which saw the conflict deepen and the two sides entrench their positions further. President Biden’s trip to Kyiv and his speech in Poland have heightened the stakes, turning this into a more obvious proxy war between the United States and Russia … edging gingerly but relentlessly toward something more direct.

He’s all in now: declaring that Ukraine “must triumph” and that Russia cannot win a war that the Russian leader deems existential. NATO armaments are pouring into Ukraine at an accelerating rate. The training of Ukrainian troops is happening across the Continent. Germany is sending tanks. Pressure is building on Britain to send fighter jets.

The US is ratcheting up arms production as fast as it can, while seriously depleting our own Stinger surface-to-air missiles, 155mm howitzers and ammunition, and Javelin anti-tank missile systems. These are good times for arms producers:

    The Army is planning a 500% increase in artillery shell production, from 15,000 a month to 70,000, according to Army acquisition chief Doug Bush … and intends to double the production of Javelin anti-tank missiles, make roughly 33% more Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems surface-to-surface medium-range missiles a year, and produce each month a minimum of 60 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles — which were “almost not in production at all”, according to Bush.

When Ukraine’s effective military is made up almost entirely of NATO equipment, and trained by NATO forces, there surely comes a point at which claiming NATO is not actually at war with Russia gets fuzzy.

Rise of Franco – The Spanish Rif War 1921-1926

Filed under: Africa, Europe, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Great War
Published 24 Feb 2023

The Rif War between Spain and the Rif Republic gave rise to a young Spanish officer named Francisco Franco — who later would become Spanish dictator. After Spain had almost lost the war against the Rifi people, they got help from France and WW1 hero Philippe Pétain.
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QotD: Feudalism versus “Manorialism”

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

… the economic system in much of medieval Europe is better understood under this term, manorialism, rather than “feudalism”. Feudalism, as a term, has been generally going out of style among medievalists for a long time, but it is especially inapt here. In a lot of popular discourse (and high school classrooms), feudalism gets used as a catch-all to mean both the political relationships between aristocrats and other aristocrats, and the economic relationships between peasants and aristocrats, but these were very different relationships. Peasants did not have fiefs, they did not enter into vassalage agreements (the feodum of feudalism). Thus in practice my impression is that the experts in medieval European economics and politics tend to eschew “feudalism” as an unhelpful term, preferring “manoralism” to describe the economic system (including the political subordination of the peasantry) and “vassalage” to describe the system of aristocratic political relationships.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-21.

February 24, 2023

“… they are all weedy, weird sylphs who are essentially un-people, without any wisdom or sense”

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

Elizabeth Nickson on the current cohort of raised-in-a-vat, cloned “leaders” of most of the western world:

Easily the most destructive cohort in the culture is the financially secure, semi-educated female on the cultural left. She reads nothing but literary fiction, is a book and knitting club member and knows absolutely nothing about the real world. But she is “bold” and “powerful” and never shuts up. Her views are confirmed, amplified and imposed by corporate media, for whom she is the aspirational shopper from whom all wealth flows.

It is the opposite of a virtuous circle. Ignorant protected women of all colors are courted by corporations because she makes 90% of buying decisions (and less fortunate women emulate her). Corporations force the press to slavishly pander to her every stupid whim and deep feel of the month so their adverts work like charms.

All the above leaders [Jacinda, Trudeau, Nicola, Rishi, and Macron] are manufactured in some MKULTRA facility to appeal to her ignorance, her prejudices, her over-weening self-regard. With the exception of the vegetable in the White House, they are all weedy, weird sylphs who are essentially un-people, without any wisdom or sense. They’ve lived their lives in classrooms and meeting rooms. They serve as pretty, platitudinous ciphers on which to project a profound political ignorance and emotional immaturity.

Our girl, for she has never grown up, has abandoned adult responsibility to luxuriate in narcissism.

She is ruthlessly used by the vicious communist left (as described below) and she has no idea who or what they are. She is the stupidest person on the planet.

And Michelle Obama? If you are thinking of running, think again. Because the hell we will unleash on your ignorant self will make Jacinda tremble with PTSD.

Let someone far less impassioned and far more knowledgeable than me describe Ardern’s humiliating failures below. The damage she caused to her people, to her party, to her country’s economy was as titanic as her ego. Every single other leader listed in the head of this piece is following the same dictated-from-above public policy initiatives. Their fate and that of their citizenry will be the same.

By their fruits ye shall know them.

If you want to know more about the rise and fall of Justin Trudeau’s New Zealand counterpart, Elizabeth’s post includes an extensive discussion of Jacinda Ardern’s career from Dr Muriel Newman of the New Zealand Centre for Political Research.

Up Close and Personal – Mountain Warfare in Italy – WW2 Special

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

World War Two
Published 23 Feb 2023

Thanks to Curiosity Stream for sponsoring today’s video

Even as the Allied and Axis commanders focus on the sweeping warfare of the Eastern Front and the planning for the invasion of Europe, their men continue to fight a grinding war of attrition high in the Italian mountains. It’s a war of merciless terrain, brutal close-quarters combat, and vast quantities of artillery and bombs. They may be playing second fiddle, but the soldiers on the Italian front will never forget these battles.
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War of 1812 – Freshwater Edition

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Drachinifel
Published 4 Sept 2019

Today we take a look at the War of 1812 as it progressed on the Great Lakes.
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February 23, 2023

Doctor Who – long-term sleeper agent for the WHO?

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

I haven’t followed the TV series for a very long time (“my” Doctor was William Hartnell, then Patrick Troughton and by the time I watched another episode there’d been two more Doctors), but I still have fond memories of the show. Along comes Caroline Kaye to suggest that I was an unwitting victim of globalist propaganda:

The BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who has been a part of British popular culture since 1963. It is centred on the Doctor figure, a scientist who works to save civilisations, help people in need and to prevent evil forces from harming people. Remember that description.

A Doctor Who fanatic once told me that the “Who” of the Doctor’s name obliquely refers to the other WHO, the World Health Organisation. There appears to be something in this, however implausible. I find the strange coincidences between fiction and reality curious and uncanny.

The Doctor is a scientific adviser to the organisation UNIT, standing for United Nations Intelligence Unit, which happens to be based in Geneva, home of the WHO. UNIT has its military element in the form of “the brigadier” who liaises with the government and occasionally has to reach out to Geneva to “gain authority” when government does not co-operate.

The most famous Doctor Who monsters will always be the Daleks. In the story Genesis of the Daleks (1975), the Doctor’s nemesis is Davros, the creator of the Daleks. Davros sounds rather like Davos, the home of the World Economic Forum, the WEF.

In the story, the Doctor is tasked with preventing the creation of the Daleks and faces a moral dilemma when confronted with the means to destroy them. He ponders in a renowned scene, “Have I the right [to destroy them]?” Declining to destroy the Daleks, the Doctor escapes, and the Daleks continue on their path of evil.

Doctor Who‘s other famous monsters, the Cybermen, are cyborgs – amoral, unfeeling transhuman creatures of our nightmares; surely the creations of mad or evil persons. Yet the idea of cyborgs and transhumanism is being pushed enthusiastically by the WEF, inspired by the ideas of Yuval Noah Harari who sees human beings merely as “hackable animals” to be augmented as necessary.

The WHO acronym is the emblem of an organisation supposedly formed, like the Doctor, to help people and protect them. Instead, in the last three years we have seen, at the behest of the WHO, the poorest and weakest of the world economically hammered, a swathe of unnecessary deaths from a treatable coronavirus, worldwide harms and deaths through forced vaccination, all of which break every human right established in the wake of WWII. This is outlined in devastating detail by Toby Green and Thomas Fazi in their book, The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor – A Critique from the Left.

Now the WHO is preparing a new treaty which ultimately will result in signing member states becoming legally subordinate to the WHO. It is designed to subsume us all into a malleable collective. In other words, as per the sprawling EU project, our politicians will be able to blame the WHO for mandating medical treatments, lockdowns and prevention of travel, all of which could happen at the whim of the director general. Or more likely, its biggest, unelected, non-medically trained funder Bill Gates.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon had become “a marmite figure during her time in office, loathed and loved in equal measure”

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

In The Line, Andrew MacDougall looks at what caused the departure of Nicola Sturgeon despite the continued strong support for her party in Scotland:

Last week, Scotland’s most popular politician suddenly announced that she would retire. While Sturgeon’s popularity has dipped in recent days, she remains, by a long way, the most recognized and respected politician in the land. And she is leaving absent any obvious firing offense, nor any looming electoral deadline.

More importantly, Sturgeon is leaving without her raison d’être — Scottish independence — fulfilled, with the next election having already been framed as an (unofficial) referendum on that most cherished of prizes for any leader of the Scottish Nationalist Party. That Sturgeon would choose this moment to exit has prompted a flurry of speculation.

To Sturgeon’s credit, she was admirably clear with her reasons during the press conference announcing her decision to stand aside. She decried the “brutality” and “intensity” of modern political life, stating the job took everything she could give and that, like Jacinda Arden before her, she had come to the realization she didn’t quite have enough left to get independence over the line.

On that front, Sturgeon also said it would be unfair on her colleagues and her party to have her views on independence — and how best to achieve it — bind them if she no longer had the will or energy to contest the next election. And fair enough. Sturgeon has been First Minister for eight years, and was number two to former First Minister Alex Salmond for the eight years prior to that, having assumed the leadership after Salmond’s failed push for Scotland’s independence in the 2014 referendum.

And yet, with support for Scottish independence still fairly strong — a poll taken in late January had it at 52 per cent, an eight-point gap over the forces of unity — it still seems a strange time for someone whose entire life’s work has been ditching the UK to ditch the most powerful post to help usher it along.

So, what gives?

February 22, 2023

Mosquito Bombers Bust Out French Resistance – War Against Humanity 098

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

World War Two
Published 21 Feb 2023

Across Europe the anti-Nazi Resistance continues to rise as does the infighting. In France the RAF carry out Operation Jericho to break out captured resistance members held at the prison in Amiens.
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Toward a taxonomy of military bullshit

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Bruce Gudmundsson linked to this essay from “Shady Maples“, a serving officer in the Canadian Army, on the general topic of bullshit in the military:

Armies, as a rule, are quagmires of bullshit. The Canadian Army is no exception. We accept that bullshit is an occupational hazard in the Army, but it’s a hazard that we struggle to manage and it’s one that threatens our effectiveness as a force.

In order to understand bullshit we need a taxonomy, that is, a map of bullshit and the common varieties found in the wild. Using our taxonomy, we can develop diagnostic tools to detect bullshit and expose its corrosive effects on our integrity and professional culture. I assume that bullshit is also a hazard in other environments and government departments, but since my experience is in the land force I will be focusing my attention on that.

The subject of bullshit entered the mainstream in 2005 when Princeton University Press issued a hardcover edition of Harry G. Frankfurt’s 1988 essay “On Bullshit“. Frankfurt doesn’t mince words: “[one] of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share.” He argues that even though we treat bullshit as a lesser moral offence than lying, it’s actually more harmful to a culture of truth. I believe this wholeheartedly, for reasons which will become clear.

In Frankfurt’s view, even though a liar and a bullshitter both aim to deceive their targets, bullshitting and lying require different mental states. In order to lie, someone must believe that they know the truth and intentionally make a false account of it. For example, if you believe that today is Monday but today is in fact Tuesday, and somebody asks you what day it is, you’re not a liar if you say “today is Monday”. You’re not lying because you really do believe that today is Monday, even though this belief is incorrect. In order to lie, you have to intentionally make a statement that is contrary to the truth as you understand it. In this example, you would be lying if you said “today is Tuesday” while believing that today is actually Monday. You would be accidentally correct, but you would still be lying because you are providing a false account of what you believe is true.

This means that lying actually requires a tacit respect for the truth on the part of the liar. The liar has to at least acknowledge the existence of truth in order to avoid it. To provide a false account of the truth, the liar must first believe in the truth.

The bullshitter, by contrast, does not operate under this constraint. Bullshit according to Frankfurt is speech without any regard for the truth whatsoever. To Frankfurt, “[the bullshitter] does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” Bullshit, Frankfurt argues, is speech that is disconnected from a concern for truth. The bullshitter will say anything if it helps them achieve their desired ends.

[…]

Let’s move on to the topic of “bull”, which is discussed at length by British psychologist Norman F. Dixon, author of On the Psychology of Military Incompetence. Dixon beat Frankfurt to the punch by publishing his own theory of bullshit in 1976, twelve years before “On Bullshit”. Dixon is a Freudian psychologist writing in the 1970s, so I am skeptical of the scientific merit of his book. Nonetheless, he provides an interesting outsider’s perspective of British military culture from the Crimean War up to the Second World War and how that culture enabled terrible officers while punishing competent ones (spoiler: aristocrats and nepotism are bad for meritocracy).

There is an entire chapter of the book about bullshit as a contributing factor to military incompetence. Dixon attributes the origin of the word “bullshit” to Australian soldiers, who in 1916 “were evidently so struck by the excessive spit and polish of the British Army that they felt moved to give it a label”. His theory of the Australian origin of bullshit is supported by Australian philosopher David Stove, who believed that it’s a signature national expression.

[…]

Canadian political philosopher G. A. Cohen added some depth to the discourse when he responded to Frankfurt in “Deeper into Bullshit“. Cohen wasn’t satisfied that Frankfurt had explored full range of bullshit as a social phenomenon. Frankfurt anchors his definition of bullshit in the intention or mental state of the speaker (the bullshitter) whose lack of concern for truth is what makes their statements bullshit. Cohen responds to this by pointing out that there are many people who honestly profess their bullshit beliefs. Reading this brought me back to my undergrad days. I had a TA in a 300-level philosophy course who claimed that he doubted his own existence. Personally, I wondered whether he would still doubt his own existence if I punched him in the balls for spewing such performative bullshit in class. So I think that Cohen makes a good point: there are bullshitters who honestly believe their own bullshit.

Cohen’s argument is squarely aimed at a certain style of academic writing, which he calls “unclarifiable unclarity.” These are intentionally vague statements which cannot be clarified without distorting their apparent meaning or dropping the veil of profundity altogether. If you want an example, you can try reading Hegel or a postmodernist philosopher, or just save yourself the effort and click on this postmodern bullshit generator (trust me, it’s indistinguishable from the real thing). Pennycook et al. label statements of this type as “pseudo-profound bullshit“. Hilariously, they ran a series of experiments to see if test subjects would find the appearance of profound truth in both real and algorithmically-generated Deepak Chopra tweets. The result, disappointingly, was yes.

Cohen adds a fourth type of bullshit to our taxonomy: “irretrievably speculative comment”. Basically, when someone is arguing for a proposition which they have no way of knowing is true or false, or they put forward an argument that’s completely unsupported by readily available evidence, then that argument is bullshit.

[…]

Still with me? So far we’ve identified and defined four types of bullshit (BS):

BS1 (Frankfurt): propositions made without concern for truth.

BS2 (Dixon): ritualistic activity which doesn’t serve its stated aim or justification.

BS3 (Cohen/Pennycook): unclarifiable unclarity aka pseudo-profound bullshit.

BS4 (Cohen): speculation beyond what’s reasonably permitted by the evidence.

The common denominator of all four types of bullshit is their disconnection from reality. Bullshit statements don’t enhance our understanding and bullshit activity doesn’t get us any closer to achieving our goals in the real world. Bullshit doesn’t necessarily move us further away from truth, like lies do, but it certainly doesn’t get us any closer to it either. Essentially, bullshit lowers the signal-to-noise ratio of discourse.

The endless carousel of bullshit.

True Size of a Roman Legion

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

Invicta
Published 29 Oct 2022

The True Size of a Roman Legion.

A history documentary on the True Size of a Roman Legion. This is our first episode in the new True Size series which seeks to bring history to life in 3D using Unreal Engine 5. In this episode we cover the organization of a Roman Legion from the soldier to the Contubernium, the Century, the Cohort, and the Legion. Along the way we not only include the troops and their officers but all the slaves, mules, support, staff, and gear which accompanied them. This makes for a much better understanding of the Roman army structure.

We then put these into context by looking at a Roman army camp, a Roman army on the march, and a Roman army in battle order. This gives the viewer a full 3D history of a legion like never before.
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QotD: The soul of the bureaucrat

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

It is amazing how a small circumstance can in a trice overturn a mood from one of equanimity to one of anxiety and irritation. What most upset me was the thought of having to deal with the British bureaucracy in order to obtain some kind of travel document or other. I could just see in my mind’s cinema the drab room in the consulate where a minor official, who hated his work and was thoroughly bored with and disgusted by the procession of incompetents, liars, and con men who day after day appeared before him claiming that their case was particularly urgent or in some way deserving of his special attention, eked out his miserable existence, praying every day for the time of closure of the consulate to approach quickly rather than at its usual snail’s pace. Nominally, of course, he was the servant of the citizenry whose taxes paid his salary, but drawing this to his attention would only have slowed him down and made him more determined than ever to draw out the agony of the scum with whom he had always to deal. The fact is that no Middle Eastern or Central Asian peasant at the diwan of the potentate’s vizier was ever more a powerless petitioner than is the average Western citizen in a situation such as this. The citizen is nothing and the bureaucrat is everything.

I had all kinds of documents with me to prove that I was the person I said I was, namely me; besides which, it was surely obvious, even to the most casual observer, that I was a respectable citizen not given to obtaining travel or other documents by false pretensions. But these days we live under a regime, if not exactly of laws rather than of men, at least of regulations rather than of men, and an official such as the one with whom I would have to deal would be allowed to exercise no discretion in case he thereby revealed his social prejudices. “Let justice be done though the heavens fall,” said Cicero, which we have changed to “Though the heavens fall, let the forms be filled and the boxes ticked.”

To do my imaginary official justice, I would have behaved just like him if our positions had been reversed. There are many jobs whose sole pleasure or delight must be in disobliging the public. Bureaucrats are themselves so oppressed by bureaucracy that their only way of finding relief is to make others suffer like them. The wonder, then, is not that they are bad, but that they are not worse.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Bureaucrat’s Point of View”, Taki’s Magazine, 2018-05-12.

February 21, 2023

Medieval Mardi Gras

Filed under: Food, Germany, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Feb 2022
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February 20, 2023

“There is no way Justin Trudeau won any of the last three elections”

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

Elizabeth Nickson on recent rather alarming confirmation of many things told by various “conspiracy theorists” and purveyors of “misinformation”:

Cracks are beginning to appear in the massive election fraud strategy prosecuted against western democracies. Berlin last week reversed its city election because it had been stolen by the left, and Berliner-Zeitung revealed that a team of reporters from The Marker, Haaretz and Radio France had gone undercover for six months as clients of a company that did nothing but election theft. That company, Jorge, had “intervened in 33 national election campaigns and votes. In 27 cases, it is said to have influenced the elections in favor of its clients. In order to control the opinion on the Internet, the secret company controls over 30,000 credible fake accounts on social media platforms”.

And in Canuckistan this morning, in the organ of the bien-pensant liberal establishment, there was this nugget.

There is no way Justin Trudeau won any of the last three elections. And, honey, this little story from Canada’s most prestigious newspaper is just the beginning.

But first, a story of my own …

When I turned right I had been hired to write an op-ed column for the above Globe and Mail, and what unfurled from my fingers was pure conservatism. I’d hold up my fingers and think, What the hell? Where did that come from? But I continued, and as I did, family and friends sheered away until, except for my mother, I was left virtually friendless.

I had moved back to Canada, you see, and we are 100% captured by the left. There are a handful of conservative writers in the country, but they are soft and weak and they prevaricate because otherwise they would not eat. Luckily I had spent most of my adult life out of the country, had a broader pool to draw from, and given my new thinking, mirable dictu for every friend I lost, I made five new ones. And they were smarter, more responsible, more interesting people. I missed the clothes, restaurants and parties for a while, then I gave up on those too. Essentially, sickening. Finally corrupting.

But it continues, since we live in a hard-left community. We are isolated. Even Jamie, because he lives with me, has lost friends and family. We have his sons, his ex-wife, one of my brothers. The rest are just cold, pitiless. Cruel.

This has happened to hundreds of thousands of people. It’s called “bad-jacketing” and is part of the Fifth Generation Warfare launched against malcontents large and small (like me) up and down the social ladder. Millions. Tens of millions. The competent are targeted, isolated and bad jacketed. It is meant to drive the competent out of the culture. Why is everything breaking? Why is the economy failing? Everyone left in the system is incompetent and vicious with it. It’s why Soviet Russia failed, why the Eastern Bloc collapsed, it is why China went for a capitalist hybrid. Everywhere socialism is tried it destroys the competent and then destroys everything else.

The left is implacable and they punish. They hurt you until you give up. They will break anything you have. Thinking about helping a young neighbor last month, which would require a week or more of brutal work, I finally thought: I have not helped or befriended one single socialist — and she was an avowed socialist — who hasn’t eventually stabbed me in the back. Not one.

When I was driven out of the profession, I spent ten years studying. Was I right? Was I wrong? I should have signed up for a remote doctoral program, because I worked. I study, therefore I am. I studied therefore I was, should be written on my cremation plaque in the family plot. Not that they’ll let me in.

We are all intimidated by that level of hate and exclusion. All of us, politicians, editors, bureaucrats, charities, all of us are terrified of being taken down in our personal lives. Bad-jacketed, rejected by those you love deeply. I know how that feels and I bet you do too.

Thirteen reasons the Dutch did better financially than the English in the Seventeenth Century

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

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes investigates the huge differences between the rival English and Dutch financial markets in the 17th century:

The courtyard of the exchange in Amsterdam (De binnenplaats van de beurs te Amsterdam), 1653.
Oil painting by Emanuel de Witte (1617-1692) from the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collection via Wikimedia Commons.

One of the weird things about Britain, despite its being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is that its financial infrastructure was for a long time remarkably backward. Its “Financial Revolution”, by which both people and the state began to borrow at ever lower interest rates, only really took off in the early eighteenth century — long after London’s extraordinary growth in 1550-1650, when it had suddenly expanded eightfold to become one of Europe’s most important commercial hubs. Indeed, even for much of the late seventeenth century, England lacked many of the most basic financial institutions that had been used for decades and decades by their most important rival and trading partner, the Dutch Republic.

I was especially intrigued when I stumbled across a discussion of Dutch policies and customs, written up in around 1665 by the young merchant Josiah Child, and published a few years later: a kind of wishlist of many of the things that made the Dutch so wealthy, and which the English continually failed to emulate:

  1. The Dutch councils of state and war always included merchants who had experience of trading and living abroad — Child was perhaps just angling for some influence here, but for all that merchants were getting more influential, in England they were not actually in charge.
  2. Gavel-kind succession laws, whereby all children got an equal share of their parents’ estates, rather than it all going to the eldest. English primogeniture, by contrast, apparently left a lot of gentlemen’s younger sons having to become apprenticed to merchants.
  3. High regulatory standards for goods. A barrel of Dutch-packed herring or cod would apparently be accepted by buyers just by viewing the marks, without having to open them up to check. English-packed goods, by contrast, were rarely trusted because the fish would turn out to be rotten or even missing — the English regulators’ stamps of approval were reputedly given to anyone who would pay.
  4. Encouragement for inventors of new products, techniques, and import trades, who received rewards from the state, and not just temporary monopoly patents.
  5. Ships, called fluyt, which were cheaper to build, required fewer sailors, and were easier to handle. Despite being only very lightly armed, they sailed in fleets for protection, when necessary being convoyed by ships of war. English trading ships, by contrast, were each heavily armed, but with those cannon taking up room and weight that could have been used for carrying merchandise.
  6. Education of all children, even girls, in arithmetic and keeping accounts. As Child put it, this infused in the Dutch “a strong aptitude, love, and delight” for commerce. It also meant that husbands and wives were real partners in many businesses — something that impressed almost all foreign visitors to the Netherlands.
  7. Low customs duties, but high consumption taxes. Very low customs duties, on both imports and exports, meant that it was often very profitable to trade with the Netherlands. The Dutch were famed for their many ships, and for their granaries bursting with grain, despite growing hardly any trees or crops themselves. To fund their state, they instead overwhelmingly relied on the gemene middelen — taxes on the sale of wine, beer, meat, fuel, candles, salt, soap, flour, cloth, and a host of other goods, with many of the higher rates reserved for expensive luxuries. Much like modern value-added taxes, these taxes on consumption raised revenue while preserving the all-important incentive to save and invest.
  8. Thrifty living — which, come to think of it, was probably related to the high consumption taxes, although Childs doesn’t seem to have noticed the connection. Dutch thrift was thought by the English to be especially useful because it allowed wage costs to be kept low — essential for maintaining competitiveness in international markets — while preventing the country having a trade deficit. The English always worried they were sending too much of their silver abroad to pay for French wines and other luxuries, but the Dutch appeared to have prevented this without resorting to import tariffs that might annoy trading partners and prompt retaliation.
  9. Religious toleration, which attracted all sorts of industrious immigrants to bring their families and wealth. (Incidentally, as I’ve mentioned before, this was also one of the key attractions of Livorno, set up by the Medici Dukes of Tuscany to be a major trading hub.)
  10. The use of the Law-Merchant, which meant that all controversies between merchants and tradesmen were decided in just 3 or 4 days’ time. England, rather strangely for such an increasingly commercial nation, did not develop merchant courts with a specific jurisdiction or a distinct body of merchant law — disputes instead had to be resolved in the royal common-law or equity courts, in the Admiralty court, or else abroad. The English courts, however, were often slow. Child complained that cases often took half a year, and often much longer. (Incidentally, slow and rotten justice in the Court of Chancery, the key equity court used by merchants in England, was one of the reasons Francis Bacon was impeached by Parliament and sacked as Lord Chancellor.)
  11. Transferrable bills of exchange — in other words, the circulation of credit notes as a currency. These were not properly supported by English laws, but allowed Dutch merchants to trade a lot more frequently. English merchants often had to wait some six months to a year before receiving all the coin from selling their foreign goods in London, so as to purchase goods again to make fresh trades. They spent much of their time chasing shopkeepers for payment. But the Dutch, by being able to easily buy and sell their credit notes, could “turn their stocks twice or thrice in trade”, immediately settling their accounts and making fresh purchases. (I intend to look into this in a lot more detail soon, as finding a way to bills of exchange transferrable in England appears to have been a major project for many of the mid-seventeenth-century inventors and improvers — after just a cursory glance, transferability was only secured in law as late as 1704.)
  12. Banks. Or rather, as Child actually put it, “BANKS”. In England many of the functions of banks gradually evolved from the practices of individual goldsmiths and the scriveners — legal clerks who specialised in property transfers and mortgages. There was certainly nothing so secure as the municipal Wisselbank of Amsterdam, established in 1609, which had various monopoly powers as a clearing-house for bills of exchange and was backed by a vault full of bullion. Nor the municipal Bank van Lening, established in 1614, which was a pawnbroker modelled on the Italian Monte di Pietà, or mounts of piety, designed to make small and low-cost loans to the poor.
  13. “PUBLIC REGISTERS” — again capitalised by Child — of all lands and houses sold or mortgaged. This item on the policy wishlist would not be ticked off for England until two centuries later, but the key advantage was to prevent lawsuits over land titles — still cited as a major problem even in the 1690s — and so make land more genuinely secure for mortgages.

Finally, the result of many of these policies was the Dutch had significantly lower interest rates — often just 3-4% when the English were still lending and borrowing at 6-8%. Indeed, this list was made because of a long-standing English policy debate I’ve been researching, on whether to lower the legal maximum rate of interest.

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