Quotulatiousness

August 14, 2024

All the news the legacy media chooses to share

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

Mark Steyn grudgingly pays a bit of attention to US politics, or more accurately, the parts of US politics that the legacy media wants Americans to know:

Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024. One spectator was killed and two others were reported to be in critical condition. The shooter was killed by Pennsylvania State Troopers, according to reports in the succeeding hours.

In one party, the presidential candidate came within maybe an eighth-of-an-inch of having his head blown off on live TV.

In the other party, the presidential candidate was more successfully dispatched — and the millions of primary votes he’d supposedly received simply nullified.

Either of these would be extraordinary events in any other country. And yet, under the smooth narrative management of the American press, they were mere spasms of momentary discombobulation before the normal somnolent service was resumed. “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, The Washington Post informs its readers every morning. In fact, under the court eunuchs of the US media, democracy dies in broad daylight.

First, the Pennsylvania assassination attempt was memory-holed — in an industrial-strength illustration of Orwell’s brilliant coinage: any day now there will be some poll showing thirty-seven per cent of registered voters are entirely unaware that a would-be killer hit Trump in the ear. And this despite the fact that every few hours there are — oh, what’s the word they use in nations with a real press? — newsworthy revelations about all that the Secret Service did to facilitate the operation, to scrub the evidence afterwards, and to lie to Congress about both.

At this stage, they might as well remake In the Line of Fire with Clint lying on the roof next to the goofball lining up his shot and helpfully suggesting, “Think you might be maybe a half-centimeter off there, sonny …” (On the other hand, if you’re looking for some guys to break into a Massachusetts hair salon to use the toilet for two hours and then leave the joint unlocked for the rest of the weekend, this is the federal agency for you.)

In the American media, a tree can fall in the forest in front of twenty million people — and it still doesn’t make a sound.

On the other hand, we have … wossname, you know, the stiff who was nose-diving off the steps to Air Force One just twenty minutes ago. In the entirety of last week the so-called “President of the United States” had only one bit of state business to perform — a Monday telephone call with the King of Jordan. Her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II had a heavier workload the day before she died at ninety-six. But the same people who’ve spent the last three-and-a-half years insisting that Joe Biden was the chief executive of the United States can no longer be bothered with the elaborate pretence: the show supposedly has five months to run, but they’ve struck the set and sent the crew home, and left the star sitting slack-jawed and drooling in his Chinese Barcalounger in the dark on an empty stage. Joe’s sole residual presence in the news cycle is when Nancy Pelosi goes on TV and breezily claims to be the one who had him whacked (although the party’s other “senior powerbrokers” are reported to be mildly irked by her braggadocio: they assert that, as in Murder on the Re-Orient Express, everybody did it).

So who is running the United States? If the presidency is so important it’s worth holding a two-year contest to decide who gets to occupy it, why isn’t who’s exercising those powers right now of any interest?

Well, that’s been memory-holed, too. America’s uniquely unique “peaceful transfer of power” has begun six months early, that’s all.

So, on the one side, 24/7 coverage of the candidate being indicted, sued, tried, convicted and (coming soon!) banged up in Rikers Island will continue … but it doesn’t leave any resources to investigate him getting shot in the head on live TV.

And, on the other side, a candidate with not a single primary vote to her name has been imposed on the party by who knows who … but it would be grossly disrespectful to the majesty of her office (President-Designate) to expect her to sit down for a puffball interview with George Stephanopoulos. (“Do you think all these GOP demands that you be able to answer questions on your platform and if you know where it’s being kept are because many Republican men are still uncomfortable with the idea of a strong black Montreal schoolgirl running for president?”)

But it’s not just the regime-aligned mainstream media who want to control what you get to see and hear — the European Union seems to think it can dictate to American social media companies what they’re allowed to share:

“The European Union’s digital enforcer wrote an open letter to tech mogul Elon Musk on Monday ahead of a planned interview with former United States President Donald Trump to remind him of the EU’s rules on promoting hate speech,” reports Politico.

“As the relevant content is accessible to EU users and being amplified also in our jurisdiction, we cannot exclude potential spillovers in the EU,” wrote Digital Commissioner Thierry Breton on X. “With great audience comes greater responsibility.”

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports that Bruce Daisley, Twitter’s former vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, has said Musk should face “personal sanctions” — which are “much more effective on executives than the risk of corporate fines” — and even, possibly, an “arrest warrant” if he “continue[s] stirring up unrest” on the platform.

“The question we are presented with is whether we’re willing to allow a billionaire oligarch to camp off the UK coastline and take potshots at our society,” says Daisley. “The idea that a boycott — whether by high-profile users or advertisers — should be our only sanction is clearly not meaningful.” (All Musk has done, for the record, is criticize British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for his handling of riots over immigration, calling him a “hypocrite” and “two-tier Keir“.)

Madsen M50: From the Korean War to Star Trek

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published May 1, 2024

During World War Two, Madsen (DISA) manufactured a licensed copy of the Finnish Suomi (see: Danish M1941 Suomi SMG). When the war ended, they wanted to replace this with a more modern, inexpensive design of their own. The result was the Model 1946 Madsen, a creative clamshell design of stamped parts. It is a very simple blowback, open-bolt 9x19mm SMG that perfectly fit the post-war era. The M46 version was sold to a few countries, and after some continued development and refinement the M50 version was demonstrated to a public audience in November 1950. This pattern was even simpler than before, and proved a popular gun for many unaligned countries in Central and South America and Southeast Asia — so much so that it remained in production until the 1980s. A bunch were imported into the US in the 1950s and 1960s, and they found a home in the movie industry, where they were often used in fantasy/sci-fi films to avoid having guns that would be recognized by American movie audiences.
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QotD: The solipsism of the American media

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

… when it comes to solipsism, the American Media puts the average teenage girl to shame. The American Media doesn’t cover anything that happens outside the USA. In fact, if they can help it, they don’t cover anything that happens outside of New York, LA, or [Washington, DC], unless it somehow advances The Narrative. I am 100% certain that when the St. Floyd thing happened, more than one veteran “news” reporter had to look up where, exactly, this place called “Minneapolis” is.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-09.

August 13, 2024

“We just don’t understand the key role of ‘vibes’ in 2024”

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

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill admits to being an “old square” who hasn’t really been able to figure out the Kamala Harris campaigning style:

“Kamala Harris” by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

I was thinking the other day: what do I know about Kamala Harris? Off the top of my head, no Googling, I know she was the attorney general of California. I know she locked up lots of people for marijuana violations. I know she likes Venn diagrams. I know she didn’t fall out of a coconut tree. I know she’s “brat”, though I don’t know what that means. I know her ceaseless cackle will haunt me to my grave. I know she’s unburdened by what has been. And I know she was the border czar, even if she herself seems to have forgotten that fact.

And that’s it. That is the long and short of my knowledge about the possible future leader of the free world. You could torture me for days and I wouldn’t be able to tell you her positions on the big issues presidential candidates once held forth on. Iran, say. Or global trade. Or job creation. I’m open to the possibility that this is partly down to my lack of reading, but there’s also more to it than that. The truth is Harris is a wholly new kind of politician. One who’s not meant to be known but felt. It’s less her policies we’re meant to be wowed by than her vibes. Brace yourselves: America might soon be ruled by a meme made flesh.

[…]

There’s a twisted irony to this feverish beatification of Kamala as the vibe goddess, the mother brat, the “Gen Z Meme Queen” (kill me now). Which is that it’s the handiwork of the kind of sniffy liberals who laugh at rednecks for falling for the “Cult of Trump“. It’s being pushed by online leftists who spend the rest of the time wringing their hands over Trump’s “demagoguery”, his sinister ensnaring of supposedly dim voters with rhetoric and style. These people urgently need to take a look in a mirror. For their creepy worship of Harris is the very definition of demagoguery. Their excuse-making for her ivory-tower style of campaigning makes the most wide-eyed MAGA people look critically minded in comparison. As to their lying down so that the Kamala vibes might wash over them and provide with them an emotional kick – it’s giving North Korea.

What are “vibes”, anyway? All I know, being middle-aged and literal, is that vibes is short for vibrations. It’s a Sixties thing, originally. It’s about pressing pause on all your thinking and worrying and just letting the beat rush through you. That’s fine in a club or art venue. But in politics? In a presidential campaign? Surely we should expect more from our elected representatives than a fleeting therapeutic thrill. It is a testament to the almost total hollowing out of public life, to “the fall of public man“, as Richard Sennett described the crisis of modernity nearly 50 years ago, that in an era of economic downturn, social conflict, war and fear, all we’re getting from one of the presidential candidates in the United States of America is vibes. And brat. And memes. And laughing. So much laughing.

The new politics of vibes is even more degraded than the politics of personality. That political style of the 1980s and 90s also spoke to a decline in democratic seriousness, where politicians would seek votes less on the basis of what they believed than on their spin-doctored pose as intimate, authentic “good guys”. But at least they tried to connect with us, at least they talked to us. Aloof, inscrutable “brat” Kamala is something far worse – a politician without substance or personality. Bereft of both vision and character, all she has to offer is strange vibrations.

Taboo by Eric Kaufmann

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

In Quillette, John Lloyd reviews Eric Kaufmann’s Taboo:How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution:

Earlier this year, Eric Kaufmann, a Canadian professor of political science, left Birkbeck College in the University of London where he had taught for twenty years. He was also head of the political science department there, and already had a number of deeply researched books behind him. But neither long service, departmental prominence, nor publishing success offered much of a defence against three separate attempts to cancel him. Indeed, his 2018 book Whiteshift told against him, since it argued, inter alia, that white majorities should have as much right to protect their identity and culture as minorities, a position now perceived by some as evidence of racism. “Repressing white identity as racist”, he wrote, “and demonising the white past, adds insult to the injury of this group’s demographic decline. This way lies growing populist discontent, or even terrorism.”

During the first part of his career, Kaufmann mostly kept his conservative views to himself, and with good reason. When he revealed them in Whiteshift, he became a marked man and spent several years fending off persistent efforts to strip him of his job and livelihood. His academic colleagues were generally unsupportive, and some of them participated in the campaign against him. So, he left Birkbeck for the University of Buckingham, the first of a small clutch of private universities created since the 1970s with the enthusiastic backing of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Buckingham takes pride in rejecting leftist monoculture in favour of an approach that privileges open debate without the risk of career obliteration.

These days, Kaufmann is — as the Scots saying goes — a “bonnie hater” (or what others might call a “happy warrior”). With his new book, he joins the best of those (disproportionately American) writers, journalists, and politicians alarmed by the activities of ideologically motivated individuals and organisations operating under the vague umbrella term “wokeism”. This inchoate movement, Kaufmann maintains, is deeply destructive of freedom (and of freedom of speech in particular), learning, virtue, public morality, patriotism, and emotional continence. It is, Kaufman recently told the Daily Mail, an “Orwellian threat to the [E]nlightenment — free speech, equal treatment, due process, objective scientific truth. I believe this new woke ideology threatens the foundations of our civilisation.”

Wearying of the years of harassment he received for his views (none of which, he stresses, was ever physical), Kaufmann moved to Buckingham. He wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to establish a Centre for Heterodox Sociology where progressive doctrines could be studied, dissected, and debated, a pursuit he believes would be impossible anywhere else. Buckingham received first prize for free speech in last year’s National Student Survey. It will now be required to live up to that distinction, since Kaufman’s approach — after many years spent avoiding conflict — has become direct and uncompromising. Any determined left-leaning student or scholar would find this an intolerable provocation — a display of prejudice and bigotry meriting expulsion from the scholarly body lest it spread to innocent souls insufficiently prepared to counter it.

The list of progressive doctrines Kaufmann has compiled to define “wokeism” is probably the most comprehensive assembled to date. Much of what concerns him most relates to education. He believes that higher education, in particular, has become a place of inflexible dogmas on race, gender, emotional fragility, and anti-white bias rather than a home of serious study, reflection, and discussion. But he does not believe—as many other critics of contemporary progressivism do—that this is a kind of warmed-over Marxism, in which the fragile student has taken the place of the exploited proletarian. Instead, progressivism’s concern for the outnumbered, the vulnerable, and the frail can be traced back to Christ’s teachings, and especially to his Sermon on the Mount reported in Matthew 5:5: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” This injunction is now marshalled into a secular hallowing of blacks (above all), Muslims, women, and LGBT individuals.

Kaufmann calls the upshot of this genealogy “cultural socialism” — a movement that privileges equality, but equality of outcome not merely opportunity. He points to a speech that US president Lyndon Johnson delivered to students at the historically black Howard University in 1965, in which Johnson claimed that “we seek not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and equality as a result”. Suddenly, Kaufmann remarks, “the door was open to restricting liberty and equal treatment in the name of achieving ‘equality of result’.” Such a regime, he points out, will inevitably disincentivise effort and excellence. Why forgo pleasure to work hard when the dedicated and indolent alike will all be made equal in the end? It’s worth remarking, however, that socialism does not necessarily provide the low road to unequal equality. Kaufmann quotes the historian Eric Hobsbawm — an unapologetic communist until he died in 2012 — who insisted that privileging one group over another will destroy society by breaking it into mutually hostile communities.

August 12, 2024

Lions, foxes and wolves

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

N.S. Lyons tries to explain how Britain has gotten into its current social and political plight by recalling the works of Niccolò Machiavelli:

Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.

The riots that have recently wracked the streets of the UK reflect decades of pent up public frustration with the country’s governing elite, especially their total refusal to control mass immigration despite vote after vote demanding they do exactly that. The pot has now boiled over. But the ongoing back-and-forth of ethnic violence also represents a signal that the British elite’s whole broader strategy of governing – one based in the fundamental personality of the ruling class itself – may be beginning to break down. And that carries some significant implications.

To understand why, however, we need to take a brief detour back about five centuries to Niccolò Machiavelli. He identified two archetypical psychological profiles of people who become leaders: the cunning but weak fox, who can outmaneuver his opponents but is “defenseless against wolves”; and the strong and brave lion, who likes to fight and who can scare off wolves but who is “defenseless against traps”. Machiavelli argued that a true statesman must embody both personalities, or risk destruction.

A distant student of Machiavelli, fellow Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, would later expand the metaphor further. Observing history, he noted that the rise and fall of states and civilizations could be matched to a cyclical pattern in the collective personality of their ruling classes.

Nations are founded by lions, who are a society’s natural warrior class – its jocks, so to speak. They establish and expand a kingdom’s borders at the point of a sword, pacifying external enemies. Like Sparta’s Lycurgus or Rome’s Augustus, their firm hand often also puts an end to internal strife and establishes (or re-establishes) the rule of law. Their authority can be dictatorial, but it is relatively honest and straightforward in nature. They value directness and the clarity of combat. They are comfortable with the use of raw force, and open about their willingness to use it, whether against criminals or their own enemies. They have a firm sense of the distinction between enemies and friends in general – of who is part of the family and who is a prowling wolf to be guarded against. The security and stability they establish is what allows the nation to grow into prosperity.

Security and prosperity produce a proliferation of foxes. Foxes are unsuited to and deeply uncomfortable with the employment of force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, because they’re nerds. They seek to overcome obstacles through clever persuasion or the manipulation of people, information, narratives, and formal processes. If they have to use physical force they will, but prefer to disguise its nature and are prone to use it ineptly. The brainy and cosmopolitan foxes have talents the lions don’t, however: they are good at managing complexity and scale, navigating the nuances of diplomatic alliances, or extracting profits from an extensive empire.

As long as peace prevails, civilizations come increasingly to morally prize the indirect and diplomatic methods of foxes and to avoid and indeed abhor the strength and violence of lions. And as states grow larger and more complex, establishing new layers of bureaucracy, law, and procedure, this quickly favors the byzantine organizing and scheming of foxes. In comparison lions are inarticulate and unprepared for the traps of more underhanded mammals. So eventually a wholesale replacement of the elite occurs: the lions who founded the nation are pushed out of its leadership, marginalized and excluded by a class of foxes who see them as brutish relics of a barbaric age.

But a curious thing then happens, Pareto observed: the instability of societies overly dominated by foxes begins to increase relentlessly. The foxes, reluctant to properly distinguish and identify real threats, or to openly employ force even when necessary, find themselves defenseless against wolves both internal and external. When faced with escalating challenges, the foxes tend to resort to doubling down on their preferred strategy of misdirection, manipulation, and attempting to bury or buy off threats rather than confront them directly. This does nothing to solve problems that require the firm use of force, or the threat of it, such as keeping packs of wolves on the other side of the borders. Eventually, when things get bad enough, foxes may desperately lash out with violence, but do so indecisively, ham-fistedly, or in entirely the wrong direction. The wolves, for their part, can instinctively smell weakness and just keep coming.

Like the rest of the West, Britain has been ruled for decades now by an effete managerial elite whose system of technocratic control is absolutely characteristic of foxes. There could be no better example of this than how the government has attempted to manage immigration and the ethnic tensions it has brought to unhappily multi-cultural Britain. It has sought to control public perception of the problem, and indeed has strived mightily to pretend the entire problem simply doesn’t exist.

It has done so, in classic foxlike fashion, through careful control of media and online information, engaging in an effort to downplay inconvenient facts, obscure the identity of terrorists and violent criminals, memory-hole potentially divisive events, and censor counter-narratives. Those who have continued to speak out on the issue are smeared with reputation-destroying labels like “racist”, “xenophobic”, or “far right” in order to deflect others from listening to them. This reflects foxes’ consistent instinct to turn first and foremost to information warfare and narrative manipulation over direct confrontation. Hence the ruling elite’s immediate reaction to the latest riots: blaming them on “misinformation” and “unregulated social media” – the implication being that nothing at all would be amiss if the information common people had access to could just be better suppressed.

Robin Hood, But Make it ⚔️ICONIC⚔️

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

Jill Bearup
Published Apr 29, 2024

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) is a classic, and I am hopefully unlikely to get in copyright trouble if I use huge chunks of it. So prepare for an exhaustive (or possibly exhausting) fight breakdown, and a few minor comments about Errol Flynn and parrying.
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August 11, 2024

Tears are still a powerful weapon for female politicians

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

Janice Fiamengo on the tactic available to — and resorted to frequently — only females in politics, turning on the waterworks to generate sympathy and support:

Recently, a friend sent me a news article that illustrates, in small, the world of Anglophone politics, in which notions of what is owed to women, who are understood to be far more sensitive and fragile than men, operate alongside stern interdictions against stating that women are in any manner unsuited for strenuous, high stress roles.

Last week, an ABC News report detailed years-old allegations against a former aide to Josh Shapiro, the Governor of Pennsylvania who was, at the time of the article, one of Kamala Harris’s touted VP possibilities (she has since chosen Tim Walz, Governor of Minnesota). Shapiro’s former staffer, Mike Vereb, who resigned in 2023 over a sexual harassment allegation, is said to have brought a woman to tears in 2018 with threats made over the phone (“You will be less than nothing by the time Josh and I get done with you”, he is alleged to have said).

The woman, who runs an advocacy group, was left “weeping and in shock standing alone in a parking lot”. She did not report the alleged incident until she heard about the aide’s resignation five years later.

[…]

With the staffer long gone from Shapiro’s administration, the story had legs only because it was about a man who made a woman cry.

The problem is that women do cry rather frequently in politics. And complain. And perform their sensitivity to criticisms, monikers, crude jokes, the faux terror of J6, and bantering innuendo. Far too often such women make politics about them as women and about the trouble men allegedly cause them.

Such was the case with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who earned plaudits from feminists in 2012 for a fury-filled speech in the House of Representatives about sexism, in which she accused the opposition leader of misogyny for a number of statements he’d made that were not at all misogynistic, including that women were likely under-represented in Australian institutions of power because men were “more adapted to exercise authority”. Gillard also said she was “personally offended” (a more serious state of affairs, one assumes, than simply being “offended”) by the opposition leader’s contention that abortion was “the easy way out”. (The text of her speech is here.) “Julia Gillard’s Attack on Sexism Hailed as Turning Point for Australian Women” ran one enthusiastic headline. And perhaps it was, signaling the point at which women in politics stopped thinking they should accommodate themselves to the rigors of public life, and decided that politicians must instead accommodate themselves to the rigors of women’s demands.

Even seemingly tough-as-nails Hillary Clinton has been allowed to go from interview to interview revisiting the now years-old indignity of her election loss in 2016, like a once-popular debutante who can’t believe she didn’t make the cheerleading squad. No man would ever be given such a prolonged pity party. Having contended for years that it was misogyny that prevented her from beating Donald Trump, she more recently pointed her finger at female voters’ failures of confidence: “They left me [in the final days of the campaign] because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect“, she explained in May, 2024. No one seems to have informed Clinton that nothing reveals her crippling unsuitability for leadership than her embarrassing refusal to stop feeling sorry for herself.

And she is, alas, far from unique. Nicola Sturgeon, former First Minister of Scotland, sat and sobbed at last winter’s Covid-19 Inquiry in Edinburgh, deflecting critical questions about her government’s actions during the pandemic by proclaiming that she would carry the impact of them for as long as she lived. Forget the thousands of Scots who suffered or even died because of those decisions: the woman in charge was the one in need of compassion. Sturgeon had previously made a career of complaining about the sexism that allegedly put obstacles in the way of female politicians. Her focus on her own emotional discomfort at the Covid inquiry did more than any naysayers to indict the feminine style. How refreshing if either of these women could simply accept responsibility for their failures.

August 10, 2024

British NPCs have all downloaded the latest patch – “Spaceship Man Bad!”

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

Elon Musk is the new Emmanuel Goldstein for British NPCs:

I always knew Britain’s liberals were secretly illiberal. That our chattering classes who genuflect at the altar of “human rights” would happily snatch away the rights of anyone who says something offensive online. That these dwellers of the leafy suburbs who weep over the jailing of dissidents in China will chortle over the sacking or blacklisting of dissidents at home, whether it’s women who think you can’t have a knob and be a lesbian or ex-Muslims whose criticisms of Islam are a tad too salty. And yet even I’ve been shocked by their frothing rage against Elon Musk in recent days. By their priestly demands that X be censured and possibly even wiped from the web. It’s one of the most batshit things I’ve seen in ages.

It’s not enough to call this a “mask-off moment”. It’s more like the phoney liberals have ripped their masks to shreds and stomped them into the dirt for good measure. Their rage is linked to the riots currently rocking the UK. Musk’s own tweets, they say, not least his chatter about Britain being on the road to “civil war”, have helped to whip up the mayhem. Worse, his “free-speech absolutism”, as one “liberal” magazine snottily refers to it, has meant that every tosser with a smartphone has been able to tweet their inflammatory views on the riots and even to spread misinformation. In essence, says a writer for the Guardian, Musk has been “leading from behind on UK thuggery and race riots”.

Got that? The reason Britain is going to shit is not because of any internal rot but because a billionaire in Texas said “civil war” on the internet. Glad we cleared that up. Even worse than the great and the good’s shameless deflection tactics – where they try to pin the blame for their own failures on a foreigner with money – is their tinpot solutions to this supposed problem. It might be time, says that sexagenarian Marxian in a leather jacket, Paul Mason, to “pull the plug” on X entirely. Yesteryear’s tyrants smashed up printing presses and chased booksellers out of town – today’s want to switch off a website on which no fewer than half a billion souls regularly share their thoughts and feelings.

They really have taken leave of their senses. Musk’s “horrific version of Twitter” is “a bit like Paris under Nazi occupation”, says Peter Jukes of Byline Times, the preferred publication of rich liberals who’ve been in a state of red mist since the plebs voted for Brexit eight years ago. Just like Paris in the 1940s, says Jukes, some are fleeing Musk’s X, while others are sticking around to “work for liberation”. The narcissism of it. Imagine thinking that keeping your X account open so you can continue spouting bollocks in your echo chamber is as brave as when Parisians stayed in Paris to resist Nazi rule.

Any mention of the Nazis is usually a reliable sign of madness. And so it is with the outburst of Muskphobia among Britain’s influencers. Musk’s antics on X led “straight to” rioting in the UK, says Will Hutton of the Observer (my italics). Do they really believe this? Do they really believe the reason that young shirtless fella looted the Greggs in Hull is because Elon Musk said “#TwoTierKeir” on X? Apparently they do. And there’s only one solution. “Pass a bill closing down Twitter in the UK”, says barrister and arch Remoaner Jessica Simor. That she said this on Twitter at least provided us with fleeting comic relief amid the elite’s lunacy. Does she know she can deactivate her account? Can someone tell her?

It’s the haughtiness of Britain’s influential haters of Musk that is most irksome. Alastair Campbell accused Musk of talking “utter shite” about Britain and its riots. That’s big talk from the undisputed king of shite, the man whose BS about Iraq helped to start a war in which tens of thousands of Arabs perished. Look, I know Musk’s words hurt liberals’ feelings, but at least they don’t hurt people’s lives and limbs.

“Elon Musk’s menace to democracy is intolerable”, pronounced Edward Luce of the Financial Times. That’s the paper that regularly made the case for overthrowing the largest democratic vote in British history. “Democracies can no longer ignore” the threat posed by Musk’s X, says Luce. I don’t like the term dogwhistle, but this is a tyranny dogwhistle, isn’t it? It’s a nod and a wink at “democracies” to clamp down on the “menace” of unfettered online speech. Lewis Goodall of The News Agents – a podcast hosted by ex-BBC staff for whom the BBC wasn’t quite wanky enough – wonders if “unmediated platforms” like Musk’s X are “beyond redemption”. “Should we stop using it?”, he wonders. Please, yes.

“Heavy casualties” in a modern western army might count as “a skirmish” in earlier conflicts

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

I sent a link to Severian a few weeks ago, thinking it might be an interesting topic for his audience and he posted a response as part of Friday’s mailbag post. First, my explanation to him about why I thought the link was interesting:

I know that Edward Luttwak is what the Brits call “a Marmite figure” … people love or hate him and not much in between. I’ve read several of his books and found he had interesting things to say about the Roman and Byzantine armies in their respective eras but I haven’t found his modern analysis to be anywhere near as interesting. This time, however, he might well have found that acorn … is the dramatic casualty-aversion of western nations going to be a key element of future, shall we say “adventurism”?

Clearly, [Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu] can still get their legions moving when they feel they need to, but could [insert current US President here] get the 101st Airborne into a high-casualty environment (let’s not pretend that Rishi Sunak or Keir Starmer could or would, and Macron’s posturing is nearly as bad as Baby Trudeau’s total lack of seriousness)?

Anyway, here’s the Marmite Man’s latest – https://unherd.com/2024/06/who-will-win-a-post-heroic-war

Sev responded:

US Army soldiers assigned to 2-7 Cavalry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team (BCT),3rd battalion 1st Division, rush a wounded Soldier from Apache Troop to a waiting USMC CH-46E Sea Knight helicopter during operation in Fallujah, Iraq, during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM.
Photo by SFC Johan Charles Van Boers via Wikimedia Commons.

I’ve often said that, from what I can tell — and bearing in mind my entire military experience consists of a .500 record at Risk! — AINO‘s entire force philosophy amounts to “zero casualties, ever”.

Note that this was true even in the 20th century, when America was still America. “Stupendous casualties” by American standards would hardly rate “a spot of bother” by Soviet. Wiki lists the bloodiest American battle as Eisenborn Ridge (part of the Bulge), with approximately five thousand fatalities.

A Soviet commander who didn’t come home with at least five thousand KIA could probably expect to be court-martialed for cowardice.

That same Wiki article separates “battles” from “campaigns” for some reason. There’s an entire “methodology” section I’m not going to wade into, but even looking at “campaigns”, the bloodiest (by their definitions) is Normandy — 29,204 KIA. That’s an entire campaign, which might rate “a hard week’s fighting” by Soviet, German, or Japanese standards.

Please understand, Americans’ unwillingness to take casualties was greatly to their credit. You want to know about “meat assaults”, ask the Germans, Russians, or Japanese (or the British or French in WWI). George Patton might not have been the best American commander, but he was the most American commander — the whole point of battle is to make the other stupid bastard die for his country. I am 100% in favor of minimal losses, for everyone, everywhere.

But “minimal” does not mean “none”. People die in wars. People die training for wars. People die in the vicinity of the training for war, because it’s inherently risky. It doesn’t make one some kind of monster to call these “acceptable” losses; it makes one a realist. One could just as easily say — and with the same justification — that a certain number of car crash fatalities, or iatrogenic deaths, etc. are acceptable losses, because there’s no way to have “interstate commerce” and “modern medicine”, respectively, without them.

The Fistagon seemingly denies this. Forget human losses for a moment, and consider mere equipment. You read up on, say, Air Force fighter planes, and you’re forced to conclude that their operations assume that all planes will be fully operational at all times. Again, saying nothing of the pilots, just the airframes. The Navy seems to assume that all ships everywhere will not only be serviceable, but actually in service, at all times. Just recently, they shot off all their ammo at Houthi and the Blowfish … and seemingly had no idea what to do, because as Milestone D walked us through it, it’s impossible to rearm while underway.

Think about that for a second. How the fuck is that supposed to work in a real war? Can we just put the war on pause for a few months, so all our ships can head back to port to reload?

In fact, I’d go so far as to speculate that that’s the origin of the phrase “meat assault”. What The Media are calling a “meat assault” is simply what was known to a sane age as “an assault”. No qualifiers. You know, your basic attack — go take that hill, and if you take the hill, and if enough of the attacking force survives to hold it, that’s a win. People who absolutely should know better, though, don’t see it that way.

Since we’re here … I remember having conversations with some folks in College Town re: the Battle of Fallujah, while it was happening (technically the Second Battle of Fallujah). Now, obviously quite a few of my interlocutors were ideologically committed to the position that this was senseless butchery. And in the fullness of time, I too have come around to the position that the entire Operation Endless Occupation was senseless butchery. But leaving all that aside, the point I was trying to make was a simple one: Total US casualties were 95 killed, 560 wounded.

Every one of them a senseless crime, I now believe, but considering Fallujah strictly as a military operation, that’s amazing. House-to-house fighting in a heavily urban area, against a fanatically committed opponent who was willing, indeed eager, to use every dirty trick in the book … and US forces took 655 total casualties. That’s about as well as it can possibly be done. The Red Army probably lost 655 men on the train ride getting to Stalingrad. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that 655 is the daily casualty figure across the entire front in Ukraine … hell, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are lots of individual sectors in Ukraine taking those kinds of daily losses. 655 is pretty damn good …

… but I was called every dirty name they could think of for suggesting it. I was called dirty names by people who called themselves conservatives, who were such ostentatious “patriots” that they’d embarrass Toby Keith.

Fallujah was fought in 2004, a time that seems like the Blessed Land of Sanity compared to now. AINO simply won’t take casualties. The Pentagram won’t — lose a tank, and you lose your job. (In battle, obviously. If you abandon it to the Taliban, no problem. And of course if you lose an entire war, it’s medals and promotions for everyone). And because the high command won’t, the field commanders won’t either. And because they won’t … well, “desertion” is an ugly word, but let’s just say Tim Walz won’t be the only guy who suddenly needs to be elsewhere right before it’s time to ship out. And as for the guys actually shanghaied into whatever foreign fuckup … well, “mutiny” is an even uglier word, but does anyone want to bet against it?

August 9, 2024

Domicidal maniacs in charge

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

Lorenzo Warby provides an oh-so-useful word to accurately capture what the diversity-at-all-costs elites running most western countries these days are actually up to:

Domicide is the destruction of home. It comes in the “hard” version — the physical destruction of houses and infrastructure.

Domicide also comes in a “soft” version — flooding localities with new people, separating people from, and otherwise degrading, their heritage. When folk say Britain is becoming “unrecognisable”, it is the domicidal effect of mass migration they are referring to.

The UK is suffering from a domicidal elite, one that uses mass migration to break up working-class communities; asymmetric multiculturalism to elevate incoming cultures over those of native English (the Celtic fringe get minority brownie points); favours non-“white” faces in advertising; asymmetric race-swapping in entertainment against the native English; denigration of British history as racist, white supremacist, imperialist, colonialist, etc.

Much of this is insulting virtue-signalling allied to, or presenting, cartoonish (simplified) and caricature (distorted) history. It all undermines social cohesion. But it is the use of migration policy as a systematic weapon against the resident working class which does the most damage. Though two-tier policing — obviously treating Muslims in particular with a deference not shown to the natives, especially when it comes to policing speech — is also highly corrosive of social cohesion.

Many working-class communities in Britain were already fairly dysfunctional — though the British state is not innocent in those dysfunctions1 — and sections of the British working class are very far from admirable. None of this justifies the use of mass migration to make things worse for such folk, however much it may help to explain the moralised class contempt that underlies so much of modern progressivism and modern managerialism.

To improve such things, to “level up”, requires a strong sense of how to create and maintain social order. Modern progressivism is strongly antipathetic to such understanding. To “level up” also requires a strong sense of custodianship, which managerialism typically lacks: particularly progressivist managerialism.

Indeed, modern feminist, progressivist, managerialism—in its lack of custodianship; lack of social solidarity;2 in its antipathy to taking the problems of social order seriously — is running the British state into the ground. The post-medieval British aristocratic and mercantile elite did a much better job of state management. But those elites had mechanisms — such as duelling, that forced men to defend their reputation at the risk of their life, and grand country houses, that turned into expensive investments in social isolation if you behaved badly — that selected for character.

Nowadays, the British elite only selects for capacity and even that is being degraded by DEI undermining the signals of competence. It turns out, over the longer term, character matters more than capacity. For capacity without character selects for manipulative, anti-social personalities that degrade institutions over time.

    1. For a particularly brutal depiction in fiction of the dysfunctional British welfare state — especially its school system — see Christopher Nuttall’s Mystic Albion series, especially the first book.

    2. Feminisation of institutions and discourse has tended to degrade social solidarity, see Benenson et al, 2009. The most conspicuous example of this in the UK is how uncouth it is in elite circles to mention the systematic rape and sexual exploitation of underage working class girls by overwhelmingly Muslim gangs.

Why Oil Paint Is So Expensive | So Expensive

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

Business Insider
Published Jul 13, 2019

Oil paint is simple. At its most basic, it’s just a mixture of oil and pigment. But depending on the color and quality, a liter of this paint could cost you $285 to $1,100.

While the rise of oil paint is associated with the Renaissance, paintings using poppy-seed oil have been dated as far back as seventh-century Afghanistan. So what is it that makes this paint so special? And why is it so expensive?
(more…)

QotD: Celebrity fund-raising for foreign aid

Filed under: Africa, Economics, Government, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Unlike private capital, foreign “aid” enters a country not because conditions there favor economic growth but because that country is poor — because that country lacks institutions and policies necessary for growth. And the more miserable its citizens’ lives, the more foreign “aid” its government receives.

Can you imagine a more perverse incentive? The poorer and more wretched are a nation’s people, the more likely celebrities such as Bono will convince Westerners and their governments to take pity on that country and to send large sums of money to its government. And because that country’s citizens are poor largely because their government is corrupt and tyrannical, the money paid in “aid” to that government will do nothing to help that country develop economically.

The cycle truly is vicious. Aid money naively paid by Westerners to alleviate Third-World poverty is stolen or misspent by the thugs who control the governments there. Nothing is done to foster the rule of law and private property rights that alone are the foundation for widespread prosperity. The people remain mired in ghastly poverty, their awful plight further attracting the attention and sympathy of Western celebrities, who use their star attraction and media savvy to shame politicians in the developed world into doling out yet more money to the thugs wielding power in the (pathetically misnamed) “developing world”.

If I could figure out a way to measure the long-term consequences of this new round of debt relief — a way that is so clear and objective that even the most biased party could not quibble with it — I would offer to bet a substantial sum of money that years from now this debt relief will be found to have done absolutely no good for the average citizens of the developing world.

It’s a bet I would surely — and sadly — win.

Don Boudreaux, “Faulty Band-Aid”, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 2005-06-18.

August 8, 2024

“The future was then” – the Avant-Garde is so passé

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

Ted Gioia shares some observations on the Avant-Garde in modern culture, where the bourgeoisie seem to have become immune — or at least inured — to all the épater-ie:

Some time back, I was invited to attend a concert by an up-and-coming avant-garde band. These musicians were hellbent on disruption and mayhem, proving their transgressive credentials at every turn.

My companion that evening was a well-known jazz musician and, at the end of the concert, he turned to me and said:

“The future was then.”

I laughed, because this was so true. The performance we had just experienced wanted to be cutting-edge and futuristic, but every note played reflected a notion of the avant-garde as it existed sixty years ago.

The future was then.

I thought of that concert recently when a magazine convened a group of artists and intellectuals and asked them a troubling question:

What happened to the avant-garde?

Few people paid attention to their hand-wringing. I didn’t even hear about this online colloquium until months had passed — and I try to stay on top of precisely these kinds of issues. Nobody I know mentioned it, and I stumbled upon it purely by chance.

But that only proves that there really is a crisis in the avant-garde. It’s a crisis of neglect. Of disinterest.

People once got worked up about cutting edge art and transgressive culture. They loved it or hated it, but they always had strong feelings. Nowadays they hardly notice.

Perhaps they are just deadened to it from over-exposure.

You can put up the strangest statue in the town square nowadays — let’s say Albert Einstein getting swallowed by a monster snail — and people just walk by it. They’ve seen it all before.

You have too.

Artists can make the most bizarre music, destroying instruments, shouting obscenities, and creating all sorts of noise. But — yawn! — somebody’s great-grandpa was doing all that three generations ago.

Tulsi Gabbard is reportedly on a US government terrorist watch list

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

Publicly demolish the candidate who goes on to become Vice President and then Presidential candidate, get on a terrorist watch list, apparently:

Former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard hasn’t exactly been toeing the progressive line since she left the House. In fact, she’s been on a bit of a rampage, destroying the extreme left with every public appearance.

Yet as a former federal lawmaker and a military veteran — one who didn’t leave her unit high and dry as they prepared for deployment, unlike some others I could name — you’d think she’d be someone we wouldn’t suspect of anything illegal.

And I’m willing to bet that no one does suspect her of anything.

That didn’t stop the feds, though.

    In an exclusive breaking story, several Federal Air Marshal whistleblowers have come forward with information showing that former U.S. Representative and Presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard is currently enrolled in the Quiet Skies program. Quiet Skies is a TSA surveillance program with its own compartmentalized suspected terrorist watchlist. It is the same program being weaponized against J6 defendants and their families. Quiet Skies is allegedly used to protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists. The photo below is a screenshot from the actual Target Package used by the FAMS to surveil Gabbard.

    The whistleblowers first shared the information with Sonya LaBosco, the Executive Director of the Air Marshal National Council (AMNC), a national advocacy group for the Federal Air Marshals (FAMs). According to LaBosco, at least one of the whistleblowers is ready to go on the record with pertinent documentation. LaBosco shared that Gabbard is unaware she has two Explosive Detection Canine Teams, one Transportation Security Specialist (explosives), one plainclothes TSA Supervisor, and three Federal Air Marshals on every flight she boards. LaBosco has attempted to contact Gabbard and her staff but has not received a response.

There’s literally nothing about Gabbard that should warrant this kind of attention. I can think of a few folks where I can at least comprehend an argument for such a thing, but Gabbard is far from one of them.

So what gives?

Matt Taibbi has more:

This story began two weeks ago, when the former Hawaii congresswoman returned home after a short trip abroad. In airport after airport, she and her husband Abraham Williams encountered obstacles. First on a flight from Rome to Dallas, then a connecting flight to Austin, and later on different flights for both to cities like Nashville, Orlando, and Atlanta, their boarding passes were marked with the “SSSS” designation, which stands for “Secondary Security Screening Selection”. The “Quad-S” marker is often a sign the traveler has been put on a threat list, and Gabbard and Williams were forced into extensive “random” searches lasting as long as 45 minutes.

“It happened every time I boarded,” says Gabbard. The Iraq war veteran and current Army reservist tends to pack light, but no matter.

“I’ve got a couple of blazers in there, and they’re squeezing every inch of the entire collar, every inch of the sleeves, every inch of the edging of the blazers,” she says. “They’re squeezing or padding down underwear, bras, workout clothes, every inch of every piece of clothing.” Agents unzipped the lining inside the roller board of her suitcase, patting down every inch inside the liner. Gabbard was asked to take every piece of electronics out and turn each on, including her military phone and computer.

That was the other strange thing. “I use my military ID to get through security sometimes,” says Gabbard, who among other things traveled to her reservist base in Oklahoma during this period. Once, she was unable to get through security with military ID. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) agent saw the “SSSS” marker. “The TSA agent said, ‘Why are you Quad-S? You’re in the military’,” explains Gabbard. “And I said, ‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’

Gabbard goes on: “Then I said, ‘The only thing I can think of is, I work in politics’. And he said, oh.”

The agent told her he’d encountered supporters of a certain former president who’d had no issues traveling before, but were now “marked quad-S every time they traveled”. Gabbard shrugged and slogged through, still encountering extra security. At one flight, she says, there were “at least six TSA agents doing additional screening”, along with canine support. “There were dogs in Dallas when we got there, dogs at a couple of the gates.”

It’s not just high profile people like Gabbard who’ve been added to this domestic harassment enhanced security list, it’s apparently anyone deemed to be too closely identified with a current presidential candidate who can be added to these lists:

Quite the contrary, according to LaBosco, who says the program has grown “off the charts”, especially since January 6th. “They’re watching 8-year-old children. They’re following 17-year-old cheerleaders that were traveling for cheer competitions, people who lost their legs in combat … TSA is out of control against the American people.”

Gabbard’s recent political career has already been marked by bizarre attacks and harassment. A feature describing her as a favorite of the Putin government was timed to the launch of her 2020 presidential campaign, and Hillary Clinton made waves by denouncing her as a Russian “asset”. After this episode, she intends to fight back. “I’m going to be encouraging former colleagues of mine in Congress who I know are concerned about this to exercise their oversight authorities,” she says.

“These actions are those of a tyrannical dictator. There’s no other way to describe what they’re doing.”

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