Quotulatiousness

March 31, 2025

Remaking Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, but without the mocking satirical mis-interpretation

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

Heinlein is still my favourite science fiction author, and Starship Troopers was one of the first of his books that I read when I was in Grade 5. I still love the book and re-read it every few years … unlike a lot of authors’ works, Heinlein’s writing holds up well decades after being published. John Carter is also a fan of Starship Troopers, but not the movie adaptation (which I managed to avoid seeing). He starts out this post with an updated treatment of the opening scenes of the book for an honest screenplay, which I think would work very well:

And that is how the cinematic adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s seminal military-SF masterpiece Starship Troopers should have started: with all of the pathos, action, and emotional intensity of the novel’s famous first chapter. I’ve taken extensive liberties with the source material, but in my head, this is what the first ten minutes or so of the movie would look like. If it had been a good movie.

But it was not.

Instead, director Paul Verhoeven served up Saved By the Bugs, a cheesy 90’s high-school drama cum college movie which felt more like Beverly Hills 90210 than Full Metal Jacket, liberally slathered with unnecessary sexual drama and drenched in hamfisted satire of the source material, with all of the coolest elements – the powered armour, the orbital drops, the backpack nukes – conspicuously stripped out.

I’ve read that Verhoeven claimed the powered armour was left out for budgetary reasons, but this has always struck me as a weak excuse. The budget had enough for CGI bugs and CGI spaceships, so CGI powered armour wouldn’t have stretched the budget at all. That’s like Blizzard saying that after they animated the Zerg, they didn’t have enough left over for the Terrans. Utterly absurd.

That’s to say nothing of the gaudy high-tech training facility the film set the boot camp scenes in, which was an utterly superfluous waste of money. In the novel, the boot camp was deliberately low-tech: some tents out in the middle of a grassy field a hundred miles from nowhere. The recruits didn’t learn how to use high-tech weapons until they’d learned to make their entire body, their entire being, into weapons; that’s the origin of the famous scene in the movie in which Sergeant Zim chucks a knife through Ace’s hand (in the book, Zim merely describes the possibility of doing this as an example of how a warrior armed with a low-tech weapon can disable someone with a high-tech weapon: can’t use the high-tech weapon if you can’t use your hand. Zim doesn’t actually stab one of his own troops). Graduation includes a fun exercise where they’re dropped naked and alone in the middle of the Rockies, with the objective of making it back to civilization alive; recruits were expected to hunt their own food and make their own shelter, using whatever tools they could improvise from the natural environment. They were expected to be just as dangerous as cavemen as they were wearing powered armour. That’s one of the many scenes from the novel which is sadly missing from Verhoeven’s movie.

You may be getting the idea that I am not a big fan of Verhoeven’s execrable adaptation, and you would be correct. Some of you may be surprised by this. I expect many readers have only seen the movie, and of those who have read the book, the younger readers probably saw the movie first, and have a nostalgic attachment to it.

Look, you might say this is personal for me.

I was ecstatic when I found out Starship Troopers was being brought to the silver screen. This was, by far, my favourite science-fiction novel of all time. Not only was it the pioneering archetype for the military science-fiction subgenre, but it introduced at least three novel concepts that have since become tropes: powered armour, which went on to inspire half of Japanese anime, along with Ironman, the Adeptus Astartes of Warhammer 40K, the Terran faction in Starcraft, Halo‘s Spartans, the Battletech games, and by now makes an appearance in practically every science-fiction universe you can name; the orbital drop, in which armoured space marines are fired down to the surface in drop capsules like living bullets, which also appears in 40K and Halo, and plays a prominent role in Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series by way of the planet-breaking Iron Rain tactic; and the insectoid alien hive mind, seen also in 40K‘s Tyrannids, Starcraft‘s Zerg, and numerous lesser-known works. As if this creative efflorescence was not enough, Heinlein’s novel grappled with the weighty issue of the moral philosophy of organized violence and its relationship to human politics in a deeply serious way, using the coming-of-age story of a young man turned soldier during an existential war for the survival of the human species as the dramatic frame for the philosophical exposition. Heinlein did all of this in just over 80,000 words – a short, fun read accessible to a bright ten-year-old.

The travesty that confronted me therefore filled me with a hot rage.

The reason Verhoeven left out the powered armour is quite simple: it was too cool, and his intention was not to make the Mobile Infantry look cool. His intention was to ridicule the philosophical position that Heinlein put forward in the book: that violence is at the heart of the political, and cultures – or species – who forget this, get rolled by the ones who don’t.

Liberals have been appalled by Starship Troopers since it was published, considering it a work of warmongering crypto-fascist apologetics, with very light emphasis on the “crypto”. They’ve been somewhat baffled by it, as well: how could the man who wrote the hippie free love bible Stranger in a Strange Land, or the libertarian anti-state manifesto The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, argue so compellingly for a society in which “service guarantees citizenship”, thereby ensuring that political power forever remains firmly in the hands of the military (or, rather, veterans of the military)? What sort of right-wing maniac gleefully smashes the beloved idol of “violence never solves anything” to replace it with the dictum that nothing in history has solved so many issues so decisively as violence; insists that communism isn’t only a bad thing but wholly unsuited to human beings (although very well-suited to insectoid hive-mind aliens); and insinuates that letting the scientists run society “rationally” according to the principles of managerial technocracy would bring about its ruin?

Verhoeven, as a good liberal, therefore set out to make the novel’s arguments look ridiculous.

The first genuine “bozo moment” of the federal election campaign

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

I saw a mention on social media that an Ontario candidate had publicly suggested that his primary opponent be dragged off to the Chinese embassy for some kind of reward, and I assumed it was another example of something being taken wildly out of context … but no:

Liberal MP Paul Chiang, left, and Liberal leader Mark Carney, right.

So let’s just recap, because this is almost too surreal to believe.

A sitting Liberal Member of Parliament — Paul Chiang — stood in front of a Chinese-language media outlet in January 2025 and said that if someone were to kidnap Joe Tay, a Conservative candidate and Canadian citizen, and deliver him to the Chinese Consulate in Toronto, they could “claim the one-million-dollar bounty”. That wasn’t some fringe YouTuber or anonymous social media post. That was a sitting MP, elected to represent Markham—Unionville, who also happens to serve as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Diversity and Inclusion.

Let me be crystal clear here: that’s not just inappropriate. That’s not just “deplorable”. That’s language lifted directly from the Chinese Communist Party’s playbook. Joe Tay is on a real bounty list. Not fantasy. Not fiction. A real HK$1 million bounty placed on his head by the Hong Kong police for supporting democracy and speaking out against tyranny.

And what happens when a Canadian MP echoes that threat — on Canadian soil?

Nothing.

As of right now—this minute — Paul Chiang is still an MP in good standing in with the Liberals. Not suspended. Not removed from caucus. No RCMP probe. No parliamentary discipline. Nothing.

And the Carney campaign? The Liberal Party’s new face? Crickets. Absolute silence. Carbon Tax Carney, Trudeau’s old money-man turned globalist messiah, who’s spent the last month talking about “foreign interference” and demanding Pierre Poilievre get a security clearance? Not a word. Apparently, if a Conservative doesn’t submit to Ottawa’s surveillance state, it’s a national crisis. But if a Liberal MP plays mouthpiece for Beijing and jokes about abducting a political opponent? It’s just … Tuesday.

Imagine for a second that a Conservative MP had said anything remotely close to this — maybe even joked about placing a bounty on a Liberal politician funded by a foreign regime. Every major newsroom in the country would have declared martial law. CBC would be live for 72 hours straight. The RCMP would have launched a task force. But because it’s a Liberal, they issue a press release. A shrug. A “deplorable” comment, followed by a half-hearted apology and — get this — no consequences.

As former prime minister Justin Trudeau amply demonstrated, consequences are for other people, not members of the Liberal caucus.

March 30, 2025

Recycling an old slogan – [Mark Carney] “didn’t come back for you”

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

I guess you could say that Elizabeth Nickson isn’t a Carney fan:

Doesn’t he look half-dead? Like a shroud covers his saggy emaciated face and spindly body. Indicative of lifelessness of his ideas. NOT his actual ideas because what he is currently selling are the ideas he stole from Canada’s Conservative Party. Those ideas are grass roots, labored over for decades in underfunded think tanks, all roundly mocked and slandered in our repellent media which never tells the truth when an easy lie is within reach. But now, in the hands of a “leader” who will not stop the Liberal Party and its Laurentian elite clients looting of the Canadian people, well now they are AOK. And genius. And a lie, because he will only perform the minimum to gratify the stupid, “educated” women who will elect him.

Because above everything Liberal Party looting must continue. And with Net Zero and all that elite clap trap there will be another three generations of Canadians to ruin, to steal from, to harvest their life’s energy to feed the Party’s enormous ego and the plush lifestyles in the posh suburbs of Canada. Scratch such a resident and whatever he does, his salary is boosted by government, in some form or other, via contracts which do not perform, ghost contracts, just money to play with for supporting the Liberal Party.

If Carney is elected, the country will break up.

First Alberta will go. Danielle Smith emerged grim from her last meeting with Carnage. Have you heard of stranded assets? That’s his goal for Alberta’s oil and gas. Albertas energy is responsible for one third of Canadas private sector economy and no matter what he says, he has worked for two decades for Climate Change sequestration nonsense. For solar and wind, for de-development, sliming his way around the world twisting arms. He was the grim reaper behind Justin’s authoritarianism. As a result our current economy is built on government and debt and refinancing loans and housing.

Oh he will lie and lie and lie and promise new industrial infrastructure. Sure he will. You know who will own that infrastructure? BIS, the Bank of International Settlements or some international banking outfit. They will own it because carbon credits and future use. They will retire some of our debt, not enough for us to actually grow, just to keep body and soul together. And we will grind forward another twenty years, piling up yet more debt, at which time the Liberal Party will broker off another hunk of our heritage.

Then Saskatchewan. BC and Manitoba will look at the powerhouse economy that the U.S. is building, and petition to strand the Eloi, with their banal life of ease on B.C. Coast, all as equally dumb and destructive as California’s ruinous elites. And join the U.S.

Canada has so much banked energy, so much thwarted ambition, so many lives wasted. So much potential lost. We are like a screaming adolescent banging ourselves against the wall, wanting nothing more than to get a job and get on with it. (Oh, wait, that was me)

Kaizen’s video is linked [here]. I STRONGLY recommend you listen to his powerful brief encapsulation of how fast the American economy is going to grow.

We tariff because we are broke. We are broke because we have regulated ourselves into stasis. This below represents what it is to do business in Canada. I have heard this from thousands of entrepreneurs.

The Conservatives “must perform all kinds of popular pantomimes, hide their conservative values, and they cannot act on principle”

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

James Pew on the trouble Canada’s Conservatives and right wing parties across the western world face in trying to get elected:

Trump vs. Poilievre
Image by Grok

“Knock it off.” That is Poilievre’s message to Trump concerning the so-called “trade war”. Honestly, I think Poilievre should take his own advice. I don’t think he can though. Rightwing parties, in all Western nations, with the sole exception of the U.S., are strategically unable to be honest. They must perform all kinds of popular pantomimes, hide their conservative values, and they cannot act on principle. Not if they want to win in general elections. In the current Canadian election, you absolutely must be seen as adversarial to Trump if you are to have a hope in hell of winning.

While someone like me, who is constantly yelling at the radio, or the newspapers, when I read or hear about the stupidity that passes for political analysis in mainstream Canada, would love a principled leader (like Maxime Bernier) to tell it like it is, to stick to conservative values, to defend the traditions of the Western world, this is just not going to happen anytime soon in Canada.

Let me take this opportunity to dress down the entire edifice of Canadian elites. The ones of today and of the past half-dozen decades. From the business leaders, to politicians (including Poilievre), to the media (the absolute worst), they have all shown that principles are not something they prioritize. I’m not even sure if the majority of Canadians care. I know readers of this newsletter do, but there aren’t enough of us. The country is literally full of low-information, unprincipled partisans. Many are unstable emotional wrecks. Things that should be approached logically, sensibly and analytically, are almost always treated instead with histrionics.

What responsibility does the media (Canadian, American, and other media around the world) hold for both creating and escalating what should more accurately be considered trade negotiations, maybe even a trade dispute, not “trade war”!? This is exactly what Trump wants (at least I think it is, there is no way to really know). He is a master provocateur. He is playing the media, and as a consequence, the public too. The media are reacting in the way Trump and everyone else expects. I think far too many of us secretly love the drama; things are getting exciting, instead of boring as usual. The whole mess, which really should be a major bore of a story involving trade policy wonks, diplomats and business leaders, has been artificially amplified and exaggerated into an existential economic crisis. Pearl-clutching on the fainting couch has been the anticipated response of literally all involved, most importantly, Trump himself (again, this is little more than an educated guess). And the public eats it up (no guessing about that).

All of this is not to insincerely or callously downplay the very serious implications on Canadian businesses and workers. I absolutely put Canada first. Although, I see no sense in engaging in anything that can be construed as a “war”, against a nation we rely on economically and that protects us militarily in a world that grows more hostile by the day. It is the Chinese Communist Party and expansionist Islam whom I see as existential threats to Canadians (and the West). And, while I do not agree with or appreciate Trump’s rhetoric and actions towards Canada one bit, I cannot help pondering the situation Canada’s past leaders have placed us in, which makes us utterly reliant on American economic and military strength — is that not our own fault? Everything Trump is doing in the world, or at least everything he thinks he is doing, is meant to bolster the two things Canada relies on most: the American economy and military. This reality makes Canadian fightin’ words directed at America ring hollow.

Paradoxically, since the failure of Canada’s elites has rendered the country unable to stand on its own, anything Trump can do to strengthen America (including hurting Canada unfortunately) is in Canada’s overall best interests. What a tragic circumstance for any sovereign nation to find itself in. This would not have been the case, if over the lost Trudeau decade, and many decades before that, the country had been led by nation-builders engaged in ambitious nation-building. In the modern period, we have failed at nation-building. Maybe not miserably, but the overall effort has been inadequate. The post-national era of Trudeau being the height of this failure, and the absolute depths of our current despair. And now, sadly, pathetically, we are at the mercy of the orange one.

March 29, 2025

“Spending time with his family” palled remarkably quickly for Liberal minister Sean Fraser

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

Now that we’re officially in an election period, The Line has revived their “Bullshit Bulletin”, covering what it says on the label: the obvious bull crap excreted by all the parties during the campaign. One of the easier targets in this week’s roundup was a Liberal cabinet minister who announced he would not be seeking re-election as he felt he needed to spend more time with his family, only to change his mind once the writ dropped:

The 2026 Poutine
The Line.

You might remember the now-former member of the Trudeau cabinet announcing some months ago that he was leaving politics to spend more time with his young family. “Today is a decision I’ve made for personal reasons”, he said, “because my kids aren’t getting any younger and deserve to have their dad around”. You might also remember the number of Liberals who rushed to his defence, insisting that he was totally sincere and that the then-grim fortunes pollsters were forecasting for the Liberals had nothing to do with Fraser deciding to tap out. He’s a family man, we were told. That’s all this is. Leaving politics to spend more time with the family.

Well, anyway, he’s decided to run again.

It’s all about public service, you see. It’s about standing up for Canada.

Sure. Just like bowing out was all about his kids.

Fraser insists he and Carney had a talk and he’s been assured he’ll be able to spend more time with his family, which is a weird thing for someone who’s experienced to pretend to believe — elected political office is an intensely consuming job, and the only people who succeed in it, as Fraser has, are the kind of people prone to being consumed. So we call bullshit on that. But, to be honest, we probably wouldn’t have even mentioned this if the circumstances weren’t so blatantly egregious. It’s low-level bullshit. Other Liberals changed their minds, too. As Liberal polling fortunes have improved, we saw Anita Anand, for example, reverse her earlier decision to bow out and decide to run again. And we didn’t really comment on that, because, well, it’s her choice.

What’s different about Fraser’s decision, though, is that clearing the way for him to run again meant dumping the man who had stepped forward to run in his place. Graham Murray had been declared to be the Liberal candidate in the Central Nova riding just a few days ago, and had even begun to campaign. He had signs and an office. The announcement of his candidacy is now a dead link on the Liberal party’s website.

Now you see it:

Now you don’t:

So yeah. Murray was the guy. He’d probably told his family and friends and everything. I’m sure they’d said nice things about him. And then Fraser — apparently tired of hanging out with his family after a solid few months, and having duly concluded his kids did not in fact deserve having their dad around — glanced at the latest polls and had the poor son of a bitch who stepped forward to run in his seat shoved into a disintegration chamber so that Fraser could come back.

Look, we’re not here to shed any crocodile tears for a political candidate being roughly handled by their party. But in this case, we still can’t help but feel some human sympathy for Murray. The poor guy. This is like campaigning to get a job, being told you’ve got the gig, and then showing up on your second day of work and being told you’re fired because the last guy wants his job back.

Carney, our unelected PM, announces the end of our generations-long bilateral relationship with the US

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

As many folks on Twit-, er, I mean X have pointed out, Mark Carney is just a caretaker PM, not having ever been elected to the position, so it’s more than a bit breathtaking that he’s making announcements like this without any mandate from the voters:

Later, we get to vote on whether he made it to the podium

The last Liberal leader promised real change too. Apparently this one uses a different definition.

“It is clear that the United States is no longer a reliable partner,” Mark Carney said after a cabinet meeting on Thursday. “It is possible that with comprehensive negotiations we will be able to restore some trust. But there will be no turning back.”

Uh, sir, you’re sounding kind of categorical —

“The next government — and all that follow — will have a fundamentally different relationship with the United States,” Carney said.

So if I understand correctly, what you’re saying is —

“Coming to terms with this sobering reality is the first step in taking necessary actions to defend our nation,” Carney said. “But it’s only the first step.”

In a career that now stretches back to before many of my readers were born, I’ve covered speeches like this before, of course. Maybe five. Well, two. No, strike that, this was new.

“Over the coming weeks, months, and years we must fundamentally reimagine our economy,” the rookie leader of the Liberal Party of Canada said.

Well, you know, “fundamentally” can mean a lot of things —

“The old relationship we had with the United States, based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.”

Oh, so you mean fundamentally.

In French, a language that fits this Savile Row man like a hand-carved barrel — it covers the essentials while leaving the odd splinter — Carney did a version of the Doug Ford thing where he asked for a strong mandate to undertake negotiations. Unlike Ford he put no real effort into selling it. Was he being overconfident? Not at all, he said, as every man ever has in response to that question. He still needs to “win every vote,” he insisted.

But it “would be better” to have a large mandate “to have a large, comprehensive negotiation, the most important in our life.” Here he didn’t pause, really, so much as consider the ramifications of what he was saying while the words were still coming out.

“Especially in my life. When I was born the Auto Pact was created.” Which sounds grandiose, sure, but to be fair I believe Carney, who was born in Fort Smith in 1965, was merely asserting correlation, not causality. “And now it’s over.”

Wait, what? The AUTO PACT is over? That’s like saying it’s time to shut the ski operation at Whistler down, if Whistler contributed 11.5% to Canada’s manufacturing GDP. “It’s very serious, this situation,” he concluded, mildly.

Later, some of the early reaction to Carney’s remarks seemed to me to skip too lightly over the plain meaning of the Prime Minister’s words. And yes, it feels odd to call him the Prime Minister. We haven’t yet had a vote on the matter, although I’m told one will be held shortly. But the people in the cabinet room were people Carney had appointed, and the Parliamentary Protective Service let them in, so I guess in a rough-and-ready way, he really is — Anyway. It’s possible Carney’s words meant nothing. Or that he’ll be forced to eat them later. Or that, it being election season, he’ll never get a chance to implement them. In the latter case, the Carney Tariff Scrum of March 2025 would become an item of wonk trivia, like Kim Campbell’s genuinely impressive government reorganization of 1993.

March 28, 2025

Mistaking popular fiction for real life

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

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter recounts an odd but revealing experience with a young progressive entity:

Image by Paul Jackson

Some years ago I was provided a fascinating psychological experience in the form of a young graduate student in the English literature program, whom I encountered because they (you heard me) was (God that’s grammatically awkward) married to a colleague. She (I’m not doing this anymore) specialized in the study of propaganda, by which of course she meant everything her backwards conservative parents in Nowhere, Nebrahoma believed, and not anything she believed. One evening, after enthusiastically explaining the symbolism of the inverted pentagram tattooed on her shoulder, she informed me with invincible confidence that not only was gender an arbitrary social construction, but that even the idea of biological sex was nothing more than convention. Her reasoning, which I presume she’d gleaned from a seminar on radically liberatory queer theory, was that testosterone levels fluctuated during the day, so “males” changed their degree of “maleness” all the time, and how can something that’s constantly changing be used as the basis for a hard binary distinction?

“But that’s not how biological sex is defined,” I replied. “Testosterone is just a hormone. It’s only present in vertebrates. Insects don’t have it, and neither do plants, but they still have biological sex. Sex is defined according to whether an organism produces mobile gametes or sessile gametes, which is basically universal across multicellular life forms.”

“I don’t understand what that means,” she chirped, still thinking we were playing language games. “Like I don’t know what a ‘sessile gamete’ is.”

“Oh,” I responded helpfully, “A gamete is just a reproductive cell. Sessile means it doesn’t move. So –”

The horrible reality of what I was saying dawned upon her. “I just realized that this isn’t a conversation I should be having,” she cut me off, and walked away.

It was remarkable. The mindworm parasitizing her consciousness had detected a threat to its structural integrity, and ordered its host to remove herself from the interaction before she consumed a malinformative infohazard. She didn’t even pretend that this wasn’t what she was doing. I’d never before seen something quite like it.

There’s a long-standing joke that liberals don’t know things, that their entire worldview seems to be formed by the ersatz experiences of visual entertainment. When they discuss the war in Ukraine, they express it in terms of Marvel comic book movies or Star Wars; when thinking of President Trump, in terms of Harry Potter. Black people are all wise and benevolent and great dancers because this is what Fresh Prince and Morgan Freeman told them; white men are all inbred stupid Klansmen because of Mississippi Burning and Roots; girls are just as strong as boys (stronger, actually) because Black Widow kicks butt; and so on. Even their favourite point of historical reference – World War Two, the Nazis, Hitler – seems to be almost entirely a palimpsest of Steven Spielberg movies like Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List.

It isn’t just that they use fictional references as metaphors or allusions. That’s a very human thing to do, and the right is certainly no stranger to Tolkien analogies. But liberals seem to do this a lot, with only the most tenuous connection back to reality. Their inner world is a series of self-referential fantasies. The right uses fictional references as metaphors to explain facts; the left substitutes fictional metaphors for facts, and then forgets that it does this.

The recent Netflix drama Adolescence is a striking case in point. It portrays the fictional story of a 13-year-old white boy who stabs a female classmate to death because his brain was twisted into a pretzel by exposure to the incel subculture over social media. Following its premier, the British government has been using it to gin up a moral panic, with calls to censor social media to tackle the urgent problem of toxic masculinity.

QotD: Prosopography

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

In the History Biz, prosopography is the study of quasi-familial relationships, a kind of “collective biography”. It’s different from genealogy, which studies direct lineal descent — So-and-So begot Wossname, like in the Bible. Your classic prosopography is Beard’s Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, which you still see Leftards on the Internet hauling out all the time, though of course they don’t know where it comes from (or that modern historians, who are far more flamingly Leftist than Beard ever dreamed of being, consider it largely discredited).

Prosopography is vital in the study of Classical Antiquity, especially the Roman Republic. The Romans, as I’m sure you recall, practiced “patronage and clientage” — a man’s clients were often in a very real way more important than his biological family. Prove that Wossname was So-and-So’s client, and you know a lot about Wossname, even if you can’t find it in the archaeological record, and what you do know about him from the record takes on a whole new meaning. For instance, under Gaius Marius (et al.), the patron / client relationship got extended to the army — coteries of officers and NCOs personally loyal to their commanding general, not to the State — and there’s your Fall of the Roman Republic.

Kremlinology required something similar. Since the important levels of the Apparat all went to the same Higher Party Schools in Moscow, the fact that So-and-So was Wossname’s roommate for a few semesters was potentially of much greater importance than anything So-and-So did as the People’s Commissar of Whatever. He might’ve looked like a real up-and-comer based on his early promotion to a prestige post, but based on his prosopography an experience Kremlinologist might deduce that this was just horse-trading — someone high up in the Politburo owed Wossname’s father a favor for something back in the Great Patriotic War, and so this was payback; Wossname wasn’t going any higher than that.

It’s even more important in a completely ideologized society like the USSR. No Roman client would ever go so far as to openly stab his patron in the back — no one in his society would ever trust him again; he’d get shanked the very minute he donned the purple — but a Roman could have a change of heart. He might get religion, of either the philosophical (Epicureanism, Stoicism) or the actual cultic sort. This would significantly change the patron / client relationship. But in a society like the USSR — ostentatiously dedicated to the World Proletarian Revolution — ideology imposed some hard limits …

Severian, “Alt Thread: A Brief Bit of Brandonology”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-01.

March 27, 2025

Ban the swastika? Are you some kind of racist?

Filed under: Government, History, India, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Ontario, the elected council for the Region of Durham has been reacting to a few painted swastika graffiti around the region over the last couple of months. To, as a politician might say, “send a message”, they proposed banning the use of the swastika altogether … failing to remember that it’s not just neo-Nazi wannabes who use it:

Durham council is adjusting the wording of its calls for a national ban on the Nazi swastika, or “Hakenkreuz“.

This follows efforts by religious advocates to distance their own symbols from the genocidal German fascist regime.

Swastikas often appear in Jain, Hindu and Buddhist iconography.

“The word ‘swastika’ means ‘well-being of all’,” explained Vijay Jain, president of Vishwa Jain Sangathan Canada, at Wednesday’s regional council meeting. “It’s a very sacred word. […] We use it extensively in our prayers.”

“Many Jain and Hindi parents give their children the name ‘Swastika’,” he added. “Many Hindi and Jain people, they keep their [business’s] name as ‘Swastika’. If you go to India, you’ll find the ‘Swastika’ name prominently used.”

“We stand in solidarity with the Jewish community and fully support all of the efforts by authorities to address growing antisemitism in Canada,” he said.

Regional council made its initial call for a ban on Nazi swastikas in February, after two separate incidents of the antisemitic symbol being scrawled inside a washroom at the downtown Whitby library.

On Wednesday, councillors voted to revise that motion to replace the word “swastika” with the term “Nazi symbols of hate”.

B’nai Brith Canada has been spearheading a petition campaign to have the Nazi symbol banned across the country.

The group has increasingly opted to refer to it by the alternative names “Nazi Hooked Cross” or “Hakenkreuz“.

On March 20, B’nai Brith put out a joint statement with Vishwa Jain Sangathan and other religious advocacy groups, calling for further differentiation between the symbols.

“These faiths’ sacred symbol (the Swastika) has been wrongfully associated with the Nazi Reich,” wrote Richard Robertson, B’nai Brith Canada’s Director of Research and Advocacy. “We must not allow the continued conflation of this symbol of peace with an icon of hate.”

March 25, 2025

Analyzing the structure of Tim Walz’s “joke”

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

On his Substack, Jim Treacher shares his deep knowledge of the cultural and linguistic complexities of the humour of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz:

Tim Walz as a standup comedian
Fake image generated with Grok

A joke is a delicate thing.

Let’s say you write a joke and then tell it to some people. The joke might “kill” (get a big laugh) with one audience, but then it might “die” (be met with stony silence or outright anger) with another audience.

Maybe you don’t get the wording quite right: “Why did the chicken cross the street? Wait, no …” Maybe the crowd doesn’t understand a reference you’re making. Maybe it’s just not your day. It can take a lot of work to perfect a joke, and any number of things can still go wrong. You’ll fail at least as often as you succeed, and past performance does not guarantee future results.

I’ve never done stand-up comedy because it would require me to leave the house, but I do have a bit of experience writing jokes for television. And sometimes, a joke I thought was funny when I wrote it in the morning just doesn’t land with that evening’s audience. It’s a crummy feeling, but that’s showbiz.

So, I know just how Tim Walz feels these days!

Last week he made a really funny joke, but a lot of people weren’t smart enough to get it because they’re not Democrats […]

    I was saying, on my phone, some of you know this, on the iPhone they’ve got that little stock app? I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day. 225 and dropping!

    And if you own one, we’re not blaming you. You can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off, you know.

Ha ha ha ha ha! [SLAP KNEE, BUST GUT, ETC.]

I will now analyze this brilliant joke, using my hard-won comedy experience, and explain why you’re misguided for not laughing.

You’re welcome.

Now, to the uninitiated, it might sound like Tim Walz is celebrating the misfortune of an opponent. “Ha-ha, your stock is dropping. It’s funny because I don’t like you!” The humor of the bully. Trying to out-Trump Trump.

You might think the audience laughed because they hate Elon Musk so much that they’re happy when he fails, even when it hurts a lot of other people. Maybe even themselves.

But here’s the big twist: That’s not it at all!

See, Governor Walz was being self-deprecating.

When he made that really, really good joke, he already knew that his own state holds 1.6 million shares of Tesla stock in its retirement fund. He was well aware that he was celebrating the misfortune of his own constituents.

But his stage persona didn’t know that.

March 24, 2025

QotD: Communism and western intellectuals

Filed under: China, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is a curious fact that Communist dictatorships were at their most popular among Western intellectuals while they still had the courage of their brutality. Once they settled down to gray, everyday oppression and relatively minor acts of violent repression (judged, of course, by their own former high, or low, standards in this respect), they ceased to attract the extravagant praises of those intellectuals who, in their own countries, regarded as intolerable even the slightest derogation from their absolute freedom of expression. It is as if not dreams but totalitarian famines and massacres acted as the Freudian wish fulfillment of these Western intellectuals. They spoke of illimitable freedom, but desired unlimited power.

Mao Zedong was the blank page or screen upon which they could project the fantasies that they thought beautiful. China was a long way off, its hundreds of millions of peasants inscrutable but known to be impoverished and oppressed by history; its culture was impenetrable to Westerners without many years of dedicated and mind-consuming study; Western sinologists, almost to a man, upheld the Maoist version of the world, some of them for fear of losing their access to China if they did not, and thereby created the impression that Maoism was intellectually and morally respectable; and so perfect conditions were laid for the most willing and total suspension of disbelief. Mao’s Thoughts — that is to say, clichés, platitudes, and lies — were treated by intelligent and educated people as if they were more profound, and contained more mental and spiritual sustenance, than Pascal’s. As so often before, mere reality as experienced by scores of millions of people was of little interest to intellectuals by comparison with the schemata in their minds and their own self-conception. “Let the heavens fall so long as I feel good about myself” was their motto. One didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Rare and Common Sense”, First Things, 2017-11.

March 22, 2025

“Humiliate yourself before us,” I was being told, “And we still won’t hire you, lol”

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

The accelerating downfall of the academic-political complex is the subject of John Carter’s most recent post at Postcards from Barsoom:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

Look. In any given case, for any given scientist working inside the university system, there are exactly two possibilities.

One: they embraced all of this with cheerful, delirious, evangelical enthusiasm. Religious devotees of the unholy cause of converting every institution to the One False Faith of Decay, Envy, and Incompetence, they have spent the last decade or more enforcing campus speech codes, demanding inclusive changes to hiring policies, watering down curricular requirements to improve retention of underrepresented (because underperforming) equity-seeking demographics, forcing their research collaborations to adopt codes of conduct, and mobbing any of their colleagues who voiced the mildest protest against any of this intellectual and organizational vandalism.

Two: they had reservations, but went along with it all anyhow because what were they to do? They needed jobs; they needed funding; and anyhow they didn’t go into STEM to fight culture wars. As the article says, “They’d prefer to just get back to the science,” and the easiest way to get back to the science was to just go along with whatever the crazies were demanding. Even if the crazies were demanding that they abandon any pretense of doing actual science.

The first group are enemies.

The second are cowards.

Both deserve everything they get.

And I am going to enjoy every moment of them getting it.

Look, I am going to vent here a bit, okay? Because the mewling in this article succeeded in getting under my skin.

Not long ago I was considered a promising early career scientist, with an excellent publication record for my field, a decent enough teaching record, and all the rest of it. After several years as a semi-nomadic postdoc – which had followed several years as a semi-nomadic graduate student – it was time to start looking for faculty positions. My bad luck: Fentanyl Floyd couldn’t breathe, and the networked hive consciousness of eggless harpies infesting the institutions was driven into paroxysms of preening performative para-empathy.

What this meant was two things. First, more or less every single university started demanding ‘diversity statements’ be included in faculty application packages, alongside the standard research statements, teaching statements, curriculum vitae, and publication list. The purpose of the diversity statement was to enable the zampolit in HR and the faculty hiring committee to evaluate the candidate’s level of understanding of critical race theory, gender theory, intersectionality, and all the rest of the cultural Marxist anti-knowledge; to identify candidates who had already made contributions to advancing diversity; and to identify candidates who had well-thought-out ten-point plans to help advance the department’s new core principle and overriding purpose, that being: diversity.

The second thing it meant was that hiring policies now implicitly – in the United States – and explictly (in Canada) mandated diversity as an overriding concern in hiring. As everyone knows, this means that if you’re a heterosexual cisgendered fucking white male, you are not getting hired.

In other words, I was now expected to write paeans praising the very ideology that had erected itself as an essentially impermeable barrier to my own employment, pledging to uphold this ideology myself and enforce it against others who look like me. “Humiliate yourself before us,” I was being told, “And we still won’t hire you, lol.”

Having some modicum of self-respect, I refused to go along with this. This meant that I simply could not apply for something like 90% of the available positions. And when I did apply to positions that didn’t require a diversity statement, and successfully got an interview, guess what? One of the first questions out of the mouth of one of hiring committee members would be “what will you do for diversity”, or “I see you didn’t mention diversity in your teaching statement …” See, even if it isn’t mandated by the administration, that doesn’t stop the imposter-syndrome-having activist ladyprofs from insinuating the diversity test on their own initiative. I once had a dean, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, tell me “women in science are very important to me” right at the beginning of the interview; I very nearly got that job, because everyone on the committee wanted me, but later – after they inexplicably ghosted – found out that she’d nixed it. They just didn’t hire anyone.

Right around the same time, of course, we were in the thick of the COVID-19 scamdemic. You remember, the one that was just the flu, bro, until it became the new Black Death that definitely did not come from a laboratory shut up you conspiracy theorist; which couldn’t be stopped by masks so don’t be silly until suddenly masks were the only thing that could save you; which led to us all being locked in our houses for a year because some idiot wrote a Medium article called “the dance of the hammer with your soft skull” or whatever which then went viral inside the hysterosphere; which motivated the accelerated development of a novel mRNA treatment that no one was going to get because you couldn’t trust the Evil Orange Man’s bad sloppy science until suddenly it was safe and effective and then overnight absolutely mandatory and anyone who refused to take it should be sent to a camp.

Yeah, remember that?

I guarantee you that every single credentialed scientist in that article was on board for all of it.

How do I know this?

Because they all were.

Fundraising is much tougher for Democrats right now … and they’re not coping well

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

It’s not just Canadian politicians getting driven completely insane by the Bad Orange Man’s antics — he’s even doing it to his domestic opponents in the Democratic party as well:

“REMINDER: It Is Offensive And Possibly Illegal To Photoshop Anything On These Democrats’ Signs That Would Make Them Look Foolish.
The Babylon Bee.

Kansas City Star:

    Democrats Suffer Blow Ahead of Senate Elections

It’s a goddamn slide show, but as it might be amusing I shall wade in. The things I do for you people …

    Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s retirement is expected to significantly impact the Democratic Party’s prospects for the upcoming Senate elections, amplifying pressure on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The party’s challenges ahead have heightened with the departures of Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). Democrats must regain four seats to reclaim the majority.

It sure looks like the Donks are planning to get clobbered in 2026. Or, more likely, they anticipate a series of bruising primary fights as the old grift-and-grin Democrats are challenged by True Believers, because as HGG has taught us — credit where it’s due — SJWs always double down. Batshit insanity is the hill they’ve chosen to die on — Trump keeps handing them 80/20 issues, and they keep jumping on the 20 with both feet.

    CNN’s Chris Cillizza recently noted the Party’s challenges in the upcoming Senate elections. With the need for a net gain of four seats, Cillizza expressed concern over potential financial limitations that may hinder effective campaigning.

Yes. “Financial limitations”. Democrat donors are stupid — if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be Democrats — but even they can see that 80 is way, way bigger than 20.

Oh, and also: It doesn’t help that you’re openly, gleefully endorsing no-shit terrorism against Tesla dealerships — and drivers! — calling for Musk’s assassination, and so on. It’s a bad look in general, and a bad look in particular, because now the guys with the big checkbooks are wondering if that kind of thing won’t happen to them if they get crosswise with the most lunatic members of the lunatic fringe (hint: It will. As the scorpion said to the frog: can’t be ‘elped, mate, it’s me nature).

    Cillizza said, “The money that gets spent there playing defense, just to hold Democratic seats, means money that doesn’t get spent playing offense in, let’s say, a state like Ohio, where Democrats are trying to recruit Sherrod Brown, the former senator, to take on John Huston, the appointed Republican senator.”

Yes, a dwindling asset pool forces those kinds of choices. It also doesn’t help that you keep going back to the well like that. One assumes there’s a reason Sherrod Brown is a former senator. Do you have no one else?

Haha, just kidding, obviously you don’t have anyone else. That’s one of the biggest problems with gerontocracy — the Groovy Fossils are going to have to be carried out at room temperature, so anyone with anything on the ball has been giving Government a pass since the 1980s. Trump went around the Official GOP for lots of reasons, but not the least of them was: he had to. They have the same gerontocracy problem as the other side of the Uniparty. It’s turtles all the way down.

    Cillizza concluded, “I just do not see it. I don’t see the money there. I don’t see the energy there. I don’t see the candidates there to expand the playing field”.

It won’t be for lack of trying, though. You’ve still got The Media in your pocket, and they can still do some damage. You’ll never get to the 80 side of those 80/20 issues, but you might get it to 50/50 — as has been done with abortion, gay “marriage”, and so on. On the other hand, those took 40, 50 years, and The Media hadn’t totally pissed away all its credibility back then. It’s a real corner you’ve backed yourselves into, guys gals persyns.

It also doesn’t help that you’re stupid:

    Democrats have identified potential pickup opportunities in Maine and North Carolina, targeting Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).

Holy breakdancing Buddha, why would you target them? Thom Tillis is the very definition of “RINO”; Collins is a Leftist, full stop. The next time they vote against the Democrats on any issue of substance will be the first time they’ve ever done it. It’s as predictable as sunrise, so much so that it’s a joke to anyone right of Mao — the GOP officially has X number of seats, minus Collins and Murkowski.

    Vulnerabilities among current incumbents, especially Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), have added to the party’s challenges.

    Oh, don’t worry about it — the GOP will find some way to throw it. Georgia, Georgia … hey, what’s Herschel Walker up to these days? Think he’s up for another run? Why not parachute in Alan Keyes or Ben Carson? They’re still alive, right? What about “Nikki” “Haley”? She’s gotta keep her arm loose for the 2028 primaries …

      Some Democrats have remained optimistic despite the hurdles. Discussions have included potential candidates such as Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-MI) for key races. New Hampshire Democrats have prepared for competitive primaries, with Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) considering a bid for Shaheen’s seat.

    As we know, when it comes to crime 13 does 50. When it comes to Leftism, though, it’s more like 20 does 100, and there’s no better illustration than New Hampshire. It should be the reddest state in the union, and people who live there tell me it really is… except for their Congresscritters, because the good people of New Hampshire didn’t shoot every Masshole they could catch. The fine folks in Oregon, Colorado, and (soon enough) Texas know what I mean — y’all didn’t introduce migrating Californians to wood chippers when you had the chance.

March 21, 2025

QotD: Gordon Brown and the “Gillian Duffy affair”

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

The Gillian Duffy affair, the start of this People’s Decade, was fascinating on many levels. Fundamentally, it revealed the schism in values and language that separated the elites from ordinary people. To the professional middle classes who by that point — after 13 years of New Labour government — had conquered the Labour Party, people like Mrs Duffy were virtually an alien species, and places like Rochdale were almost another planet. Indeed, one small but striking thing that happened in the Duffy / Brown fallout was a correction published in the Guardian. One of that newspaper’s initial reports on the Duffy affair had said that Rochdale was “a few hundred miles” from London. Readers wrote in to point out that it is only 170 miles from London. To the chattering classes, it was clear that Rochdale was as faraway and as foreign as Italy or Germany. More so, in fact.

The linguistic chasm between Duffy and Brown spoke volumes about Labour’s turn away from its traditional working-class base. Yes, there was the word “bigot”, but, strikingly, that wasn’t the word that most offended Mrs Duffy. No, she was most horrified by Brown’s description of her as “that woman”. “The thing that upset me was the way he said ‘that woman'”, she said. “I come from the north and when you say ‘that woman’, it’s really not very nice. Why couldn’t he have just said ‘that lady’?”

One reason Brown probably didn’t say “lady” is because in the starched, aloof, technocratic world New Labour inhabited, and helped to create, the word “lady” had all but been banned as archaic and offensive in the early 2000s. Since the millennium, various public-sector bodies had made moves to prevent people from saying lady to refer to a woman. One college advised against using the word lady, as it is “no longer appropriate in the new century”. An NHS Trust instructed its workers that “lady” is “not universally accepted” and should thus be avoided. In saying “that woman”, Brown was unquestionably being dismissive — “that piece of trash” is what he really meant — but he was also speaking in the clipped, watchful, PC tones of an elite that might have only been 170 miles from Rochdale (take note, Guardian) but which was in another world entirely in terms of values, outlook, culture and language.

“I’m not ‘that woman'”, said Duffy, and in many ways this became the rebellious cry of the People’s Decade. She was pushing back against the elite’s denigration of her. Against its denigration of her identity (as a lady), of her right to express herself publicly (“it’s just ridiculous”, as Brown said of that very public encounter), and most importantly of her concerns, in particular on the issue of immigration and its relationship to the welfare state.

The Brown-Duffy stand-off at the start of the People’s Decade exposed the colossal clash of values that existed between the new political oligarchy represented by Brown, Blair and other New Labour / New Conservative machine politicians and the working-class heartlands of the country. To Duffy and millions of other people, the relationship between welfare and nationhood was of critical importance. That is fundamentally what she collared Brown about. There are “too many people now who are not vulnerable but they can claim [welfare]”, she said, before asking about immigration. Her suggestion, her focus on the issue of health, education and welfare and the question of who has access to these things and why, was a statement about citizenship, and about the role of welfare as a benefit of citizenship. But to Brown, as to virtually the entire political class, it was just bigotry. Concern about community, nationhood and the impact of immigration is just xenophobic Little Englandism in the minds of the new elites. This was the key achievement of 13 years of New Labour’s censorious, technocratic and highly middle-class rule — the reduction of fealty to the nation to a species of bigotry.

Brendan O’Neill, “The People’s Decade”, Spiked, 2019-12-27.

March 20, 2025

Oh, goodie … the ever-bouncing F-35 fighter decision is back in play

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Europe, Military, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

My initial reaction on seeing Alex McColl’s headline was to immediately reject the notion of the Royal Canadian Air Force operating two completely different fighter aircraft, both for cost and for personnel reasons: the RCAF is already underfunded and short on trained aircraft technicians for a single fighter (the CF-18 Hornet), never mind two even higher-tech replacements. But on reading the article, I’m open to further investigation of the idea:

“F-35 Lightning II completes Edwards testing” by MultiplyLeadership is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Canada’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney didn’t waste any time standing up to Donald Trump’s illegal trade war. Within hours of being sworn in, Bill Blair — who was minister of national defence under Justin Trudeau and remains in the role under Carney — went on CBC’s Power & Politics to deliver a bombshell: Canada is going to re-examine our plan to purchase 88 American F-35A fighter jets.

This was in response to a question about if Canada would emulate Portugal, which announced that it was reconsidering a planned purchase of American F-35 jets: “We are also examining other alternatives, whether we need all of those fighter jets to be F-35s or if there might be alternatives. The prime minister has asked me to go and examine those things and have discussions with other sources particularly where there may be opportunities to assemble those fighter jets in Canada, to properly support them and maintain them in Canada, and again we’re looking at how do we make investments in defence which also benefits Canadian workers, Canadian industry and supports a strong Canadian economy.”

When asked about a partial cut to the F-35 order, Blair responded: “The direction I’ve been given by the prime minister is go and look at all of our options to make sure that we make the right decision for Canada.” He noted that this didn’t mean the government planned to outright cancel the F-35 contract.

[…]

With the first 16 F-35s already on order, and the first four already in production on the assembly line in Texas, it’s likely too late to cancel the F-35 order without significant penalties.

Saab JAS-39 Gripen of the Czech Air Force taking off from AFB Čáslav.
Photo by Milan Nykodym via Wikimedia Commons.

This opens the door to a mixed fleet that includes a smaller number of expensive F-35A fighter-bombers and a larger number of affordable Gripen-E fighters. All of Canada’s G7 allies fly a mixed fleet of fighter jets today, some have 3 or more types. While it wouldn’t be easy, it is possible for a serious nation to fly a mixed fleet. Before the CF-18, Canada had 3 different types of armed fighter jets in service. The RCAF wanted to replace them all with expensive F-15 Eagles, but Pierre Trudeau made them settle for the cheaper F/A-18 Hornet. His government ordered 138 CF-18s, but that fleet shrank over time as a cost saving measure. The big cut happened during the CF-18 modernization under the Harper Government, when the hornet fleet shrank from 120 to 80 jets.

Living up to our commitments to our NATO allies is about more than just spending 2 percent of GDP, it also means living up to our mission requirements. Keeping our word means showing up, and 88 F-35As was never going to be enough jets for us to meet our commitments to NORAD and NATO at the same time. To do that, we need at least 120 jets. Reevaluating our options does not mean starting from scratch. To paraphrase minister Blair: A great deal of work was done during the FFCP evaluation. Two jets met the requirements: the expensive American F-35, and the Swedish Gripen-E with an offer to make them in Canada. Let’s just buy them both.

The first step is easy: Have Saab and IMP refresh their FFCP submission with new delivery deadlines and place an order for 88 Gripen-E jets. The second is to announce that we’re reducing the F-35 order down to 65 jets – the number that the Harper government planned to sole source but never ordered. Finally, we put our elbows up and announce that the F-35 order would be cut by 5 jets for every week the Trump administration maintains their threats of illegal tariffs, down to a minimum of 40 jets.

The F-35A has a total cost of ownership about double that of the Gripen-E, so we could afford to add two Gripens for every F-35 cancelled. A mixed fleet of about 120 Gripen-Es and 45 F-35As would help us get to 2% of GDP while reliably pulling our weight on NORAD and NATO missions.

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