Quotulatiousness

May 28, 2021

The essential — and largely non-replenishable — trust in government

Filed under: Government, Health, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Last week, Tom posted a then-recent discussion he overheard at The Last Ditch:

[Click to see full-size flowchart]

Two svelte American ladies of a certain age were having coffee today at my West London health club. They were in the next “pod” to me outdoors as I had a post-swim coffee before heading home. Perhaps it’s those wide-open prairies but Americans, bless them, always speak a little more loudly than us so I didn’t really have a choice but to listen to their conversation.

The topic was their mothers. Both moms back in the States are apparently unsure of the wisdom of being vaccinated. One cost of parenthood no-one tells you about beforehand is that one day you will be judged and found wanting by humans you could not love more; your children for whom you would cheerfully die. I confess their mothers immediately had my sympathy, regardless of the correctness of their views.

There was a good deal of sneering about conspiracy theories circulating on the internet. I found it surprising that both errant moms believed 5G was involved, but having listened quietly for another few minutes discovered that neither had ever said so. Their daughters were simply assuming that if they doubted government advice on vaccines, they believed all the other stuff too. One of the mothers is apparently a 9/11 “truther” and her daughter’s observation that no government is capable of keeping such a dark secret struck me as fair.

[…]

There are available facts and facts that will only become available in the future. People must make their choices based on their own risk assessment today. That useless truism is not the point of this post. The truly significant thing I overheard was this. Having sneered at her mother’s belief that “we can’t trust government”, one of the ladies said;

    I thought to myself – Mom, I don’t want to believe what you believe because if it’s true I can’t have any of the things I believe in.

There, I thought, was a moment of insight; a moment (almost) of self-awareness. If government can’t be trusted, then the societal change she wants isn’t possible. Therefore, whatever the evidence, government must be trusted. That pretty much sums up the statist mindset.

I don’t know whether these mothers or daughters are right about this issue. I do know that one of the daughters (and her companion seemed to agree) is allowing her desires to displace her reason. In consequence, sadly, her mind will only ever be changed by a catastrophe I would never wish upon her.

I suspect many such earnest, well-meaning souls as Goneril and Regan (as I christened them) felt they needed to believe the state could be trusted at key points in the deadly history of the 20th Century. If the brave new world of Communism was to happen, for example, government had to be trusted with enormous power to make immense change.

Many Gonerils and Regans must have ruefully reflected on that in the Gulag.

May 27, 2021

“Are you an ally of an all-powerful white supremacist, colonialist apartheid regime led by baby-killing oppressors, the likes of whose evil the world has never seen?”

Filed under: History, Media, Middle East, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Why, yes. Yes I am, Barbara Kay. And you should be too:

Nobody with eyes to see can press on with the myth that this is a political conflict. The anti-Semitism that lurks behind obsessive Israel-bashing can no longer be credibly passed off as “criticism of Israel”. It’s not about Israel and never was. It’s about those maddening Jews. Wherever they are, they make trouble. What is it with their stubborn insistence on their right to live and flourish in their homeland, when they know they are not wanted there?

Never mind the historical facts surrounding Jews’ indigenous rights, or the painstaking legal journey to national sovereignty (along with other newly minted Middle Eastern countries like Iraq and Syria, both of which have appalling human rights records, but never have their right to exist questioned). Treaties and international law are too dull, nuanced and complex. They take time and effort to understand. It’s very taxing for the brain. Narrative, though, takes no time at all to absorb. Stories of good and evil are simple, unnuanced and satisfyingly emotive.

If you attend to the myth-mongering on social media, it seems your choice is stark. Are you an ally of an all-powerful white supremacist, colonialist apartheid regime led by baby-killing oppressors, the likes of whose evil the world has never seen? Or are you a decent, compassionate human being, committed to social justice and ready to lend your support to those infamous Zionist monsters’ powerless, oppressed, racialized victims, who are languishing in their open-air prisons?

It’s a tough choice for progressive Jews. Before 1967, living with oneself as a Jew was easy. Socialist Israel was little David then and the massed hostile Arab states were Goliath. Even Bernie Sanders enjoyed his time on a kibbutz in 1963. (Mind you, that particular kibbutz, Sha’ar Ha’amakim, was so far left, one of its members was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union.)

Then those upstart Jews dared to win a war against incredible odds and had the chutzpah to take back territory that had been stolen from them in the 1948 War of Independence. The pivot from victim to victor, from powerlessness to power, was the kiss of death for their support from the left.

May 26, 2021

POV you just turned on the History Channel for the first time in 15 years

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Joel Haver
Published 16 Feb 2021

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May 25, 2021

John McWhorter’s new book announced

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

Following on to his Nine Nasty Words, which just became a New York Times best-seller (somewhat to his surprise), John McWhorter’s next book will be Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America from Random Penguin:

That manuscript will be released as a book by Portfolio (also a Penguin Random House imprint) in October. It will be published under a new title: Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.

I should mention that the often sharp and insightful subscriber comments, as well as the brilliant editorial counsel of Bria Sandford at Portfolio, have already made Woke Racism significantly different from the The Elect excerpts. Woke Racism will express what the Substack excerpts did and then some. It will still analyze Third-Wave Antiracism as a religion. It will still make legions of black people see me as a race traitor. It will still make legions of white people see me as a tragically deluded white supremacist with brown skin who merits dismissal and ostracization.

And amidst all of that, it will still represent what I consider the most pro-black book I have ever written.

But this does mean that from now on, my Substack “newsletter” will be exactly that. I am glad many of you have enjoyed my posts here beyond the The Elect excepts, and they will continue, at the rate of once or twice (and I hope, more often, twice) a week. I have loved communicating to you as well as the feedback I get. Let’s keep this going.

Only: get “The Elect” as a real book, Woke Racism, around Halloween. Here, get my take on things as they happen, unfiltered.

May 24, 2021

History Buffs: Midway Part One

Filed under: China, History, Japan, Media, Military, Pacific, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

History Buffs
Published 21 May 2021

Thank you guys so much for your patience. Quarantine has made somethings difficult and I know its been a while but it’s finally here! I hope you enjoy it!

You can join Nebula today and get Curiosity Stream at 26% off for a year! Click on the link below

http://curiositystream.com/historybuffs
Part Two of this review will be out next Friday on the 28th of May!

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The hard core of “mostly peaceful protest” activists

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

In the most recent Libertarian Enterprise, Sarah Hoyt explains why the same people seem to show up at “mostly peaceful” riots protests in so many different cities and even in the rare cases they’re arrested, are quickly bailed out again:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

One of the advantages of the collectivists is that they organize like nobody’s business, while we liberty minded … Well — pats heads all around — well, you guys are adorable, but the individualists failed to organize, okay.

Now, while many of you translate this to a paramilitary clash and panic, don’t. Most of their supporters aren’t nor will they commit violence, unless the can do it when no one is looking, sneakily, and against someone old, disabled, frail or very young.

Most of their supporters are in fact the “go alongs to get along” who just want to be “nice people” by siding with lunatics who want to put a boot on their necks. Oh, they also want to be smart because their college professors told them every “very smart” person believes in Marxism. This is why at the back of their brains every single one of the infantile “activists” thinks he or she will be in charge and not one of the lumpenpoletariat. No, they have never looked at actual communist countries, and if they did, as their panic at the Xi-flu proved, they don’t get statistics or numbers at all.

So, yeah, the people they are using and weaponized-and-paid psychopaths, whom they bus from city to city. They’re armed and well organized partly because they do this all time and are given weapons and training. They’re very fearsome FOR ONE CITY AT A TIME.

In other words they are a Potemkin army, raging across the country to intimidate the citizens. Which is why they have to punish Kyle Rittenhouse, because he pierced the paper silhouette. And why blue states refuse to arrest the rioters. They have very few of them. They’re the precious.

It does work on corporations and — apparently — Supreme Court Judges who, being in a highly social profession just buy what the news tell them and don’t investigate anything for themselves.

Look, I don’t think this bullshit will hold. And it’s part of the reason I think we’re going to have a brief, intense, localized clash.

This is not the seventies. They really had a majority of the indoctrinated youth then, and the youth then were a majority. With the attendant side effect that the youth then hadn’t been raised as little emperors, because they were the all-too-precious single offspring.

Those were the real Marxist riots. This is the Memorex. And like Chinese troops clashing with Indian troops, their rank and file are more likely to cry for their mommies, if they meet real opposition.

They have the psychos they train and bus around and which have a rap sheet long as their arm, and then they have the daft survivals of the sixties, at protests with their oxygen bottles and walkers.

And they have the get alongs. Who are useless in battle, but quite good at coordinated action on other fronts.

QotD: The internet is rewiring our brains

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

… there’s a reason 99.998% of the Internet is porn, and that reason is: The Internet, itself, has rewired our brains.

Yeah, I’m a history guy, not a biologist, and no, I can’t show you the specific spots on the fMRI that prove it, but look, you can test this yourself. Ever been around kids? It’s easiest to see in the early grades, so go to a daycare or afterschool program. Trust me, you can pick out right away, with 100% accuracy, the kids who spend more than 3 hours a day at daycare. This is not a knock on daycare providers, lots of whom are good, dedicated people doing hard work. Rather, it’s a knock on the situation, because if a kid’s in daycare that long, it means the parents both work long-hour, high-stress jobs. How do you think the kid’s home life is, under those conditions?

You know as well as I do that when the kid gets home from day care, he gets plunked in front of a tv, a video game, an iPad, a smartphone, some kind of glowing box. That’s what’s rewiring their brains. That’s not “ADHD,” which doesn’t really exist. “ADHD” is a cope, a bit of shorthand, to describe what’s actually going on, which is: These kids’ heads have been rewired. They need constant stimulation. Everything needs to be in five-minute chunks for them, because they’ve never known anything different. Asking them to sit down and pay attention for any length of time – say, in a 60 minute lecture, like our old Prussian (from the 18th century!) system requires – is like asking one of us to suddenly run a marathon, or bench press 300 lbs. It can’t be done; we don’t have the equipment.

Severian, “Bio-Marxism Grab Bag”, Founding Questions, 2021-01-21.

May 22, 2021

Guns in the Movies – like this S&W Model 29

Filed under: Media, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Feb 2017

Today we have not so much an examination of a specific firearms, but rather a look at how Clint Eastwood’s film portrayal of Dirty Harry Callahan drove a huge wave of popularity of the Smith & Wesson Model 29 — “the most powerful handgun in the world.”

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May 21, 2021

Andrew Potter – “the greatest gift you can give a generation is to ignore them”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line Andrew Potter speaks up for those forgotten folks who were born after the end of the Baby Boom but before the Millennials appeared:

Generation X Word Cloud Concept collage background
Best Motivation Blog: What Generation Is X https://fatinsl.info/?arsae=https%3A%2F%2Fbestmotivationblog.blogspot.com%2F2020%2F04%2Fwhat-generation-is-x.html

… just as a sense of futurelessness, futility and invisibility catalyzed the original Generation X mentality in the early 90s (as well as the music, art, film and writing that mentality made manifest), this atavistic indignation spurred [Generation X author Douglas] Coupland to write his wonderful screed. It’s great stuff, with quotable lines in every paragraph. (I especially liked “Immunology is not a smorgasbord. How dare you make us subsidize your cluelessness with our bodies.”)

But I want to take issue with the claim that this is a case of Gen X getting screwed yet again. As a fully paid-up member of Gen X, I’ve grown to appreciate over the decades the extent to which the greatest gift you can give a generation is to ignore them.

Let’s back up a bit. Does Generation X even exist? Does any generation exist for that matter? Sociologists and demographers argue that the concept of a “generation”, be it Boomer, Millennial, Zoomer, what have you, is just the result of confusing cohort effects with generational effects. The idea of distinct generations might be good for selling soft drinks or cars or condos or nostalgia, but there is nothing remotely predictive or explanatory about it.

But as I’ve argued before, this just misunderstands what a generation is, and the role they play in our ongoing cultural self-understanding. Whatever else it is, a generation is something that has its own tastes and moods and fashions and jargon, its own sense of what is in and what is out, what is cool and what’s square, and who belongs and who does not. In short, more than anything else a generation is a scene. It is about who and what you claim as your own, and who claims you.

A big part of what helps define a generation are the battles it chooses to fight. The Boomers spent decades obsessed with their countercultural campaign against The Man, while Millennials have spent their time and energy mining the deepest recesses of identity politics. As for Generation X, our principal preoccupation was the question of authenticity and the fear of selling out.

It is hard to underestimate the role of technology in all of this. It is commonly argued that a generation is formed by the technological ecosystem in which it grows up, and while there’s obviously something to that, what is important for Gen X is not what our technology allowed us to do, but what it protected us from.

In particular, what we were protected from was surveillance. I don’t know a single person I grew up with who doesn’t thank their lucky stars that there were no cellphones with cameras around when we were growing up, that there was no Twitter or Facebook or YouTube or TikTok. I can’t imagine what it is like to grow up under the glaring distributed panopticon of social media, knowing that all your friends, everyone at your school, and even your parents are watching your every move, judging your every utterance.

May 20, 2021

The Birth Control Movement and Eugenics – A Curious Link | B2W: ZEITGEIST! I E.18 – Winter 1923

Filed under: Books, Britain, Europe, Greece, Health, History, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 19 May 2021

In the winter of 1923, a controversial activist takes a Catholic doctor to trial for libel. The proceedings capture a much bigger moment in the history of the interwar period: the controversial — but inherent — link between birth control and eugenics.
(more…)

May 18, 2021

What is Maskirovka? Russian Military Deception #Military101

Filed under: History, Media, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Military History Visualized
Published 5 May 2017

A short introduction into Russian Military Deception — called Maskirovka. “Maskirovka is most simply defined as a set of processes designed to mislead, confuse, and interfere with accurate data collection regarding all areas of Soviet plans, objectives, and strengths or weaknesses.” (Smith, Charles L.: “Soviet Maskirovka“, in: Airpower Journal – Spring 1988)

Military History Visualized provides a series of short narrative and visual presentations like documentaries based on academic literature or sometimes primary sources. Videos are intended as introduction to military history, but also contain a lot of details for history buffs. Since the aim is to keep the episodes short and comprehensive some details are often cut.

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Maier, Morgan: A Little Masquerade: Russia’s Evolving Employment of Maskirovka
http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/si…

Smith, Charles L.: “Soviet Maskirovko“, in: Airpower Journal – Spring 1988
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/ai…

Lindley-French, Julian: NATO: Countering Strategic Maskirovka. Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute. (2015)

Glantz: The Red Mask: The Nature and Legacy of Soviet Military Deception in the Second World War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian…

Keating, Kenneth: The Soviet System of Camouflage
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/…

Krueger, Daniel: Maskirovka – What’s in it for us?
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/…

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In future, if you’re on TV, do not use your hands or fingers under any circumstances … OK?

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

… as a Jeopardy contestant has recently discovered, there is no hand gesture that is free from the slightest hint of an emanation of a penumbra of white supremacy:

And then they came for the integers. The small social universe surrounding the syndicated game show Jeopardy has been boiling over for the past month because of a hand gesture made by a contestant, Kelly Donahue, at the outset of the April 27 episode. Donahue, returning to the show as a three-time winner, held up three fingers in a gesture of triumph and tapped his chest with them. He had done something similar on earlier episodes, flashing a “one” after his first win and a “two” after his second.

Needless to say, he had to be immediately chastised. A small number of conspiracy theorists felt his use of three fingers to represent three of something “resembled very closely a gesture that has been co-opted by white power groups, alt right groups and an anti-government group that calls itself the Three Percenters.”

That quote is taken from an indignant open letter signed by almost 600 members of a private Facebook group for former Jeopardy contestants, in which the signers demanded to know why Donahue’s heinous Nazi code, “whether intentional or not,” hadn’t been cut from the show before broadcast.

[…]

Smith’s column doesn’t actually get around to answering the question, although with a little legwork he was able to establish that the Facebook group had actually approached the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the Jewish grandparent of all anti-hate monitoring groups, for advice. The ADL told the addled ex-contestants, “Uh, it looks to us like the guy’s just making a three,” which led some in the internet cocoon to conclude they were being “gaslit.” Smith also talked to members of the Facebook group who knew that their fellow contestants were talking twaddle and fomenting harassment of an innocent man, but who were afraid to contradict the leaders of a witch hunt, lest the purifying fire be kindled beneath their own tootsies.

Smith does identify a crucial point in what is otherwise a workaday tale of cancel culture run mad. Former Jeopardy contestants, every last three-o-phobic one of them, are people selected specifically for high intelligence and wide knowledge. This didn’t make the signers of the letter any less obtuse, or any more resistant to a complicated conspiracy theory. It was their knowledge of disaggregated facts that made them susceptible in the first place.

May 17, 2021

An older BBC dramatization on the slave trade that seems to have gone down the memory hole

Filed under: Africa, Britain, History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Samizdata, Niall Kilmartin wondered why the BBC hadn’t gotten around to showing a 1970s historical series through the year-and-more of the pandemic lockdowns. He doesn’t mention the name of the series, and an unusually unhelpful BBC site search didn’t turn up a name but IMDB suggests it was 1975 and the series was called The Fight Against Slavery:

Fifty years ago, the BBC screened a dramatised documentary series about the fight to abolish the slave trade. Even a year of the virus limiting new series, at a time of great BBC eagerness to talk about racism, has not made them screen it again.

– I see one reason why they have not: the series displayed sleazy white slave traders and abusive white slave owners prominently, but it also showed white people eager to end the slave trade and (much worse) black people eager to continue it. It included the king of Dahomey’s threat: “if you do not allow me to sell you my slaves, their fate will be a great deal worse” (a very brief scene of the Dahomey murder spectacle lent meaning to his remark). After abolition was voted, it showed a white slave trader assuring the Dahomans, as a drug dealer might his suppliers, “It is one thing for parliament to pass a law …”, hinting at the Royal Navy’s long and hard campaign to enforce it.

– Only recently did I spot another reason why they would not want to show it again – the scene in which a corrupt old white slave trader warns his young colleague that “it’s more than your life’s worth” to doubt the ability of their slave-selling hosts to count very accurately the quantity of trade goods being handed over in exchange, and to assess their quality knowledgeably. The traders well knew that Africans counted two plus two as four, just as they did. Any trader who imagined that black ability to add diverged enough from white to enable an attempt to short-change them had learned otherwise long before the 1780s.

– The southern Confederacy thought the same. Until its death throes, it forbade enlisting a southern black as a Confederate soldier because, as one Confederate senator put it, “If blacks can make good soldiers then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.” (Perhaps also because even southern white Democrats realised that southern black desire to fight against blacks being freed was likely to be a very minority taste.) But there was one exception. Every regiment had its regimental band, which played to set the pace at the start and end of marches, used trumpets to signal commands in battle – and fought when other duties did not supervene. From its start to its end, Confederate law said any black could enlist as bandsman, with the same pay and perquisites as a white – a very rare example of formal legal equality. (Playing music requires the ability to count time. For the woke, “dismantling the legacy of the Confederacy” apparently includes dismantling its realisation – shared by the Victorian composer Dvorak – that blacks often excelled in music so much as to overcome prejudice against black ability. Today, it’s “racist” to value instrumental skill.)

“Politically correct” has meant “actually wrong” ever since the first commissar explained to the first party comrade that it was neither socialist nor prudent to notice a factual error in the party line. “Structurally racist” is PC’s modern companion. No longer are the woke content merely to imply (“mathematics is racist”, “punctuality is racist”, “politeness is racist”) that blacks can’t count, can’t tell the time and can only behave crudely. They’re starting to say it in words of fewer syllables.

If I’d scrolled down to the comments, I’d have discovered that Natalie Solent had also dug up the name of the series:

Natalie Solent (Essex)
May 10, 2021 at 4:30 pm
Outstanding post, Niall. Was the BBC series you mentioned “The Fight Against Slavery“, written and narrated by Evan Jones? I have not seen it – given that I was ten or eleven in 1975 my parents probably thought I was too young too see it.

However someone called “InternetPilgrim” has put up three videos of the series on YouTube. There is a link to Part I here, Part II here and Part III here, so I will try to remedy that lack soon.

May 15, 2021

Baelin’s Route review, a discussion on why Viva La Dirt League’s Baelin’s Route is such a great story

Filed under: Gaming, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Writers Block
Published 10 May 2021

In this video we will discuss why Viva La Dirt League’s movie Baelin’s Route is such a masterpiece of story telling.

Viva La Dirt League — Baelin’s Route https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEe-Z…

May 13, 2021

QotD: Blogging

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

A wire story consists of one voice pitched low and calm and full of institutional gravitas, blissfully unaware of its own biases or the gaping lacunae in its knowledge. Whereas blogs have a different format: Clever teaser headline that has little to do with the actual story, but sets the tone for this blog post. Breezy ad hominem slur containing the link to the entire story. Excerpt of said story, demonstrating its idiocy (or brilliance) Blogauthor’s remarks, varying from dismissive sniffs to a Tolstoi-length rebuttal. Seven comments from people piling on, disagreeing, adding a link, acting stupid, preaching to the choir, accusing choir of being Nazis, etc.

I’d say it’s a throwback to the old newspapers, the days when partisan slants covered everything from the play story to the radio listings, but this is different. The link changes everything. When someone derides or exalts a piece, the link lets you examine the thing itself without interference. TV can’t do that. Radio can’t do that. Newspapers and magazines don’t have the space. My time on the internet resembles eight hours at a coffee shop stocked with every periodical in the world — if someone says “I read something stupid” or “there was this wonderful piece in the Atlantic” then conversation stops while you read the piece and make up your own mind.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2002-10-10.

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