The relations between the population and the state in Britain are those of duty and obligation: the duty and obligation of the population toward the state, not the other way round. During the first Covid lockdown — one is beginning to forget how many there have been — the population was enjoined to stay at home in order to “protect the NHS”, the behemoth centralized health-care system that has served it so ill for more than seventy years. In essence, the population was asked to modify its behavior for the convenience of a state bureaucracy. The government might as well have said, “Protect the Inland Revenue: Pay Your Taxes”.
The government was able to get away with so ludicrous a slogan because of one of the most successful propaganda campaigns of the second half of the 20th century, namely that the institution of the National Health Service was a great social advance. It was nothing of the kind: Before it was founded, the country had one of the best health systems in the developed world and soon found itself with among the worst. The intention of the new service was egalitarian — treatment free at point of care and paid for from general taxation — and no one really bothered to check whether its effect was egalitarian. And since it has very unpleasant aspects for practically everyone, rich or poor, the British people still believe that it is egalitarian in its effect, when it is nothing of the kind. Such benefits as it confers are conferred in the rich, educated, and articulate, for the general principle of British public administration is for something to be done only if not doing it is likely to cause the relevant bureaucrats more trouble in the end. The rich, educated, and articulate can make trouble; the poor, uneducated, and inarticulate can only shout or throw bricks at the window (usually bulletproof and often soundproof, too).
The British population, believing that equality is a good in itself irrespective of whatever is equalized thereby, has come to regard the sheer unpleasantness of the NHS — to obtain treatment from which is an obstacle race in shabby buildings operated by exhausted and disgruntled staff — as evidence of its essential moral virtue, for it is unpleasant for all. Everyone is a pauper at the NHS’ gates, and where everyone is a pauper, no one is.
In addition to being treated better, the rich, educated, and articulate have escape routes, albeit expensive ones. Private medicine is still permitted in Britain, but in conditions of scarcity prices rise and so it is vastly, indeed fantastically, more expensive than it need be, or is elsewhere in Europe. The rich can also go abroad for treatment, and do.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Beneath the Surface”, Taki’s Magazine, 2021-12-09.
March 21, 2022
March 20, 2022
QotD: The mythical Victorian conformity
Back in my youth, the “lifestyle” sections of big newspapers and magazines were always reporting on families cleaning out granny’s attic, only to find boxes full of great-grandpa’s translation of the Poetic Edda into Spenserian sonnets. Or great-grandma’s recreation of the Bayeux Tapestry in multicolored yarn. Or what have you. Everyday, plain-jane people back then were always undertaking these massively ambitious, frankly weird projects — great-grandpa was the village parson, and so far as is known, he never left his home parish, and yet he somehow got it in his head to write a history of the Assyrian Empire … and actually did write it, hundreds if not thousands of pages of it, based only on books in the parsonage library, or that he could borrow from the local squire.
In other words, the Victorians were extremely tolerant of “eccentricity”, sometimes extreme eccentricity, the kind of thing we Postmoderns would call “off their meds”. Just because the postmaster spends his off hours trying to commune with the fey folk doesn’t mean he’s not an effective postmaster …
That‘s the kind of thing we need to encourage. What kind of world do we want? A world where, above all, we recognize that people aren’t the same. “Reason” is just a tool, and a crude tool at that. Trying to force people to live “reasonably” always ends in tyranny. What we want is actual diversity. So long as he’s not harming himself or others — and the threshold here is actual physical harm, not feelz — who cares what the postmaster gets up to on his off hours? The supposedly stuffy, rigidly conformist Victorians didn’t, because c’est la vie.
Severian, “Truly Special Snowflakes”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-02.
March 19, 2022
QotD: The sterility of partisan political argument
If you are arguing with someone, say, who has a better education than you, a higher I.Q., with perhaps a doctorate in law and a career as a journalist and a published series of books on his resume, that does not matter. The mere fact that he comes to different conclusions than the Party line indicates that he is stupid uneducated Nazi bigot, and a stupid bigoted fascist racist moron.
This is argumentum ad cloaca —— ratiocination via offal. Whatever the loudest donkey laughs loudest at, you take to be untrue. Since that was the way (admit it!) you yourself were convinced, O ye of little mind, it is the first, usually the only means, to which you resort to convince others: the volume and clamor is what matters, not the content.
The reason for the inadequacy of these condemnations, the reason why they are so unimaginative, is because of the paucity of the moral vocabulary of the Left. They do not have words to express outrage, so they sneer and yodel. They are like creature struck dumb, and only able to act out their condemnation by means of antic pantomime.
The more closely they follow Marx, the more impoverished their moral vocabulary becomes. You cannot call someone evil once you accept the proposition that all standards of good and evil are merely genetically-determined group survival behaviors, or merely culturally determined artifacts, or merely ideological superstructures meant to promote class interests. Your concept has lost its referents: it can be used only metaphorically, or ironically.
Likewise, you cannot call someone damned if you don’t believe in damnation. There is no such thing as blasphemy if there is nothing sacred, supernatural, or divine.
Likewise again, you cannot call someone illogical if logic is no longer the standard used to separate self-consistent from self-contradictory statements: because then you would have to argue the merits of the case, and rely on reason, like Adam Smith, rather than on verbal fetishes, like Karl Marx.
Our Progressive detractors have to call the object of their scorn a racist (or a parallel word, such as sexist, lookist, homophobe, capitalist, colorist, agist, whateverist) because that is the only arrow in their quiver. That is the only thing they have to shoot, so they shoot, and do not care how short of the target the dart falls.
John C. Wright, “The Crazy Years and their Empty Moral Vocabulary”, John C. Wright, 2019-02-18.
March 18, 2022
QotD: Tactics, operations, and strategy
We break these layers into tactics, operations and strategy. Put very simply, tactics is the layer of military thinking that concerns how an army fights; […] Operations is the layer of thinking that is concerned with getting the army to the fight – large-scale coordination and logistics live here. Strategy is concerned with bigger picture questions: what wars are worth fighting and for what objectives? Grand strategy extends this thinking to cover not only the military, but also political, cultural and economic institutions.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
March 17, 2022
QotD: The curse of creativity
Gregory Wolfe, “In God’s Image: The virtue of creativity”, National Review, 2005-05-27.
March 16, 2022
QotD: Muslim views of western culture
a collection of casinos, supermarkets and whore-houses linked together by endless highways passing through nowhere. All that money, all that effort all those resources that are wasted so that idiotic women and shallow men can prolong their lives … You see ancient women who refuse to die at a normal time and who continue to paint themselves and crave youthful lovers right to the edge of the grave … To eat tons of hamburgers and popcorn, to imbibe oceans of Coca-Cola and whisky, to watch hundreds of hours of stupid television, to copulate mechanically a few hundred times, to be on guard minute against being robbed, raped or murdered. That is the American way of life.
Our civilisation is regarded as evil, and its destruction is taken as a sacred duty for reasons both defensive and offensive.
Defensive
There can be no doubt that Khomeini was a firm anti-communist. But, unlike the timid monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula, he saw quite clearly where the true threat to Islam lay. Throughout his reign, the Russians presented at least a potential threat to the northern borders of Iran, But this was as nothing to the actual ideological threat of the west, Marxism in Iran had converted its tens of thousands, and influenced its hundreds of thousands. But western civilisation — with its clothing fashions, its films, its music, its enshrinement of individual happiness, its secular knowledge — had captured its millions. There was a “Great Satan” devouring Islam; and its body was not communism, but the West; and its head was not Russia, but America, “We must break those pens” he wrote, “that teach people there is something other than divine law. We must smash those mouths that tell the people they are free to say whatever they please, regardless of right and wrong in accordance with the commands of the Almighty”. On this reasoning, to carry the fight from Iran, or wherever, into the west, is the equivalent of turning from the periphery to the centre of an infection.
Offensive
In one of his occasional attempts at humane argument, Khomeini justified a war of extirpation against the west on the following grounds:
If one allows the Infidels to continue playing their role of Corruptors on Earth, their eventual moral punishment will be all the stronger. Thus, if we kill the Infidels in order to put a stop to their [corrupting] activities, we have indeed done them a service. For their eventual punishment will be less.
For the most part, however, it is conversion to Islam that is desired of people in the west. Only those refusing to convert are to be slaughtered. In the first instance, all those areas of the world that were once Islamic, but have since been lost, are to be restored; and all those areas that contain sizeable Moslem minorities are to be Islamised. In 1982, a new map of the world was presented to Khomeini by the Cartological Society in Teheran. It was divided into three regions, distinguished by three colours. First, in green, came the House of Islam — this being the 41 member states of the Islamic Conference, together with soviet central Asia, southern Spain, Malta and Lampedusa, Albania, part of Yugoslavia, north eastern China, parts of Siam, Burma, the Philippines, and most of Africa. The remaining areas, the red and black, were divided between communism and the west. But the final state of affairs is to be a totally Islamic world. No part whatever is to be left in the hands of the “Cross worshippers”, as the Christians are contemptuously termed. Moslems in Great Britain at the moment comprise barely three per cent of the population. Nonetheless, “[t]hose Moslems” says Dr Shabbir Akhtar of the Bradford Council of Mosques, “who find it intolerable to live in a United Kingdom contaminated with the Rushdie virus need to seriously consider the Islamic alternatives of emigration (hijira) to the House of Islam or a declaration of holy war (jihad) in the House of Rejection. The latter may well seem a kind of hasty militancy that is out of the question, though, with Allah on one’s side, one is never in the minority. And England, like all else, belongs to Allah.
March 15, 2022
QotD: Pecan pie
I won’t even discuss the lowly pumpkin pie, which reminds me of nothing more than the goo that seeps out of a broken sewage pipe or the remains of the vegetable bin after a 10-day blackout.
You apple pie people may have a point, but really, the best part of any apple pie is the crust, so just climb down off that high horse!
Blueberry you say? Yes, I will grant the glory of a well-made blueberry pie, but on the second day it is a soggy mess, while my pecan pie is a wonderful accompaniment to a great cup of coffee. And bacon. But that doesn’t even have to be said.
Key lime and Boston cream and … um … other pies are certainly good eating, but for sheer pie power and authority there is nothing quite like American pecan pie served after a sumptuous Thanksgiving dinner.
[Here’s my go-to recipe … probably from Cooks Illustrated, but I don’t remember]
CBD, “Food Thread: Family, Friends And Pecan Pie … But Mostly Pecan Pie … And Family And Friends!”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2021-11-21.
March 14, 2022
QotD: Crime and (lenient) punishment
And certainly, no intellectual ever earned kudos from his peers by arguing that punishment was necessary, let alone that current punishments were too lenient. In general, the more lenient he was in theory, and the more willing to forgive wrongs done to others, the better person he was thought by his peers to be.
In a way, this was understandable. The history of punishment is so sown with sadism and cruelty that it is hardly surprising that decent people don’t want to be associated with it.
Often, horrific punishments were carried out in public, half as deterrence and half as entertainment. Clearly, they failed to result in a law-abiding society, from which it was concluded that what counted in the deterrence of crime was not severity of punishment but the swiftness and certainty of detection.
While the latter are important, however, they are obviously not sufficient. It is not the prospect of detection that causes people to refrain from parking in prohibited places, but that of the fine after detection.
This is so obvious that it would not be worth mentioning, had not so much intellectual effort gone into the denial of the efficacy of punishment as such. Despite this effort, I doubt whether anyone, in his innermost being, has ever really doubted the efficacy of, or necessity for, punishment.
In Britain, leniency has co-existed with a very large prison population. This is not as contradictory as it sounds: for the fact is that something must eventually be done with repeat offenders, who do not take previous leniency as a sign of mercy and an invitation to reform but as a sign of weakness and an invitation to recidivism. Instead of nipping growth in the bud, the British system fertilises the plant.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Our Leniency, and the Necessity of Punishing Crime”, The Iconoclast, 2021-11-29.
March 12, 2022
QotD: Defining an empire
That definition goes back to the root of the word in Latin: imperium, literally meaning a command or control; imperium comes from the Latin verb imperio (lit: “to order or command”). Thus imperium was a sphere of command over others. In Roman politics, this could mean an individual had the authority to command an army or to set up courts (consuls, praetors and dictators had this sort of imperium), but the Romans understood their empire as a sort of command exercised by the Senate and People of Rome over non-Roman people, thus they called that too imperium – an imperium of the Roman people (imperium populi Romani), crucially over the non-Roman people; once cannot, after all, have imperium over one’s self. An imperium of the Roman people must be an imperium over someone else.
Contrary to the venerable Wikipedia, empire does not require a monarchy. Rome was an empire while it was still a Republic, and France continued to hold an empire after it stopped being a monarchy. Athens, famously, converted the Delian League into an Athenian Empire (the Greek word used is ἀρχή (“arche“, pronounced ar-KHAY) while it was still, internally, a democracy. Often, when discussing the internal politics of these states (especially for Rome and France) we will distinguish between a period of “empire” and “republic” to note the shift from a republic to a monarchy or vice-versa, but that sort of nomenclature should not be taken to disguise the fact that, for instance, the Roman Republic in 150 B.C. was very much possessed of an empire, while still functioning as a republic.
Empire, I should note, seems to be one of – if not the – dominant form of large-scale human social organization since at least the bronze age (which is to say: since as far back as our sources let us see clearly). Ideas like loose federations of states (e.g. the EU) or nation-states are relatively new; in many cases, our modern nation-states are merely the consolidated form of what were originally empires of various sizes (e.g. China, Russia, but also France (see: Crusade, Albigensian), etc.). We don’t think about them that way anymore, because the steady application of state power created the shared culture that subsequently formed the foundation for the nation […] In many respects, empire is normal (which, please note, does not mean it is good), whereas this modern world composed primarily of nation-states is an unusual aberration.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-22.
March 11, 2022
QotD: In 1939, Stalin never imagined Finland would refuse his demands
[…]
When Molotov summoned a Finnish delegation to the Kremlin on October 12th, 1939, Stalin made a personal appearance to heighten the intimidation factor, and he handed the Finns a brutal ultimatum demanding, among other things, “that the frontier between Russia and Finland in the Karelian Isthmus region be moved westward to a point only 20 miles east of Viipuri, and that all existing fortifications on the Karelian Isthmus be destroyed.” Stalin made it clear that this was the price that Finland had to pay to avoid the fate of Poland.
Aggressive and insulting as the Soviet demands on Finland were, Stalin and Molotov fully expected them to be accepted. As the Ukrainian party boss and future general secretary Nikita Khrushchev later recalled, the mood in the Politburo at the time was that “all we had to do was raise our voice a little bit and the Finns would obey. If that didn’t work, we could fire one shot and the Finns would put up their hands and surrender.” Stalin ruled, after all, a heavily armed empire of more than 170 million that had been in a state of near-constant mobilization since early September. The Red Army had already deployed 21,000 modern tanks, while the tiny Finnish Army did not possess an anti-tank gun. The Finnish Air Force had maybe a dozen fighter planes, facing a Red Air armada of 15,000, with 10,362 brand-new warplanes built in 1939 alone. Finnish Army reserves still mostly drilled with wooden rifles dating to the 19th century. By contrast, the Red Army was, in late 1939, the largest in the world, the most mechanized, the most heavily armored, and the most lavishly armed, even if surely not — because of Stalin’s purges — the best led.
One can imagine, therefore, Stalin’s shock when the Finns said no. Stunned by this unexpected resistance, Stalin and Molotov did not, at first, know quite what to do. With his highly placed spies in London, Stalin must have known that the mood in foreign capitals was becoming agitated by Soviet moves in the Baltic region. On October 31st, 1939, the British war cabinet took up the question of “Soviet Aggression Against Finland or Other Scandinavian Countries”. And earlier in the month, FDR had written to Moscow, demanding clarification of the Soviet posture on Finland. At this point, the Finnish cause seemed to have the potential to transform the so-far desultory and hypocritical British-French resistance to Hitler alone into a principled war against armed aggression by both totalitarian regimes.
On November 3rd, after yet another encounter in the Kremlin had gone sour with the Finns, Molotov warned the delegates that “we civilians can’t seem to do any more. Now it seems to be up to the soldiers. Now it is their turn to speak.” However, the truth was that, in November 1939, neither side was ready to wage war. Having expected the Finns to come around, Stalin had issued no orders to begin invasion preparations until after talks had finally broken down.
Sean McMeekin, “Stopped Cold: Remembering Russia’s Catastrophic 1939 Campaign Against Finland”, Quillette, 2021-04-20.
March 10, 2022
QotD: Orwell on Capitalism, Socialism, and Fascism
However, it has become clear in the last few years that “common ownership of the means of production” is not in itself a sufficient definition of Socialism. One must also add the following: approximate equality of incomes (it need be no more than approximate), political democracy, and abolition of all hereditary privilege, especially in education. These are simply the necessary safeguards against the reappearance of a class-system. Centralized ownership has very little meaning unless the mass of the people are living roughly upon an equal level, and have some kind of control over the government. “The State” may come to mean no more than a self-elected political party, and oligarchy and privilege can return, based on power rather than on money.
But what then is Fascism?
Fascism, at any rate the German version, is a form of capitalism that borrows from Socialism just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes. Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a Socialist state. Ownership has never been abolished, there are still capitalists and workers, and – this is the important point, and the real reason why rich men all over the world tend to sympathize with Fascism – generally speaking the same people are capitalists and the same people workers as before the Nazi revolution. But at the same time the State, which is simply the Nazi Party, is in control of everything. It controls investment, raw materials, rates of interest, working hours, wages. The factory owner still owns his factory, but he is for practical purposes reduced to the status of a manager. Everyone is in effect a State employee, though the salaries vary very greatly. The mere efficiency of such a system, the elimination of waste and obstruction, is obvious. In seven years it has built up the most powerful war machine the world has ever seen.
But the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite. The driving force behind the Nazi movement is the belief in human inequality, the superiority of Germans to all other races, the right of Germany to rule the world. Outside the German Reich it does not recognize any obligations. Eminent Nazi professors have “proved” over and over again that only Nordic man is fully human, have even mooted the idea that non-Nordic peoples (such as ourselves) can interbreed with gorillas! Therefore, while a species of war-Socialism exists within the German state, its attitude towards conquered nations is frankly that of an exploiter. The function of the Czechs, Poles, French, etc., is simply to produce such goods as Germany may need, and get in return just as little as will keep them from open rebellion. If we are conquered, our job will probably be to manufacture weapons for Hitler’s forthcoming wars with Russia and America. The Nazis aim, in effect, at setting up a kind of caste system, with four main castes corresponding rather closely to those of the Hindu religion. At the top comes the Nazi party, second come the mass of the German people, third come the conquered European populations. Fourth and last are to come the coloured peoples, the “semi-apes” as Hitler calls them, who are to be reduced quite openly to slavery.
However horrible this system may seem to us, it works. It works because it is a planned system geared to a definite purpose, world-conquest, and not allowing any private interest, either of capitalist or worker, to stand in its way. British capitalism does not work, because it is a competitive system in which private profit is and must be the main objective. It is a system in which all the forces are pulling in opposite directions and the interests of the individual are as often as not totally opposed to those of the State.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
March 9, 2022
QotD: Cynicism
Lois McMaster Bujold, Borders of Infinity, 1989.
March 8, 2022
QotD: Modern pop music
James Lileks, “Turning into an old crunker”, Star-Tribune, 2005-05-29.
March 7, 2022
QotD: Historical fiction and fantasy works usually leave out the vast majority of the people who did all the work
But the actual human landscape of the pre-modern period was defined – in agrarian societies, at least – by vast numbers of farms and farmers. Their work proceeded on this cyclical basis, from plowing to sowing to weeding to harvesting and threshing to storage and then back again. Religious observances and social festivals were in turn organized around that calendar (it is not an accident how many Holy Days and big festivals seem to cluster around the harvest season in late Autumn/early Winter, or in Spring). The uneven labor demands of this cycle (intense in plowing and reaping, but easier in between) in turn also provided for the background hum of much early urban life, where the “cities” were for the most part just large towns surrounded by farmland (where often the folks living in the cities might work farmland just outside of the gates). People looked forward to festivals and events organized along the agricultural calendar, to the opportunities a good harvest might provide them to do things like get married or expand their farms. The human drama that defines our lives was no less real for the men and women who toiled in the fields or the farmhouses.
And of course all of this activity was necessary to support literally any other kind of activity.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part III: Actually Farming”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-08-06.
March 6, 2022
QotD: The academic rat-race
Since only “scholars” who publish get tenure, and since journals only publish original “research”, the only way to publish consistently is to make shit up. Given that Shakespeare ain’t writing no more sonnets, the only way to get tenure in, say, English Literature is to argue that, properly “deconstructed”, the list of contents on a packet of beef jerky is just as valuable — indeed, more valuable — as a “cultural artifact” than anything the Bard, curse his CisHetPat White soul, ever wrote. Hence, the road to tenure takes only left turns.
Severian, “I Learned A New Word”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-01-23.
