The law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience through which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It is the sole case, now that negro slavery has been abolished, in which a human being in the plenitude of every faculty is delivered up to the tender mercies of another human being, in the hope forsooth that this other will use the power solely for the good of the person subjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1869.
February 18, 2022
QotD: Historical legal context of marriage
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February 17, 2022
QotD: What your book collection says about you
Both are correct. It has been my experience over the years that if people have explicitly political / social books in abundance, they are not really interested in contrary observations, no matter how genially offered; criticize the citizens of the shelves and you are criticizing them in an intimate fashion. The oft-expressed desire for a “conversation” on these matters rarely results in such.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2019-01-30.
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February 16, 2022
QotD: The fall of Kabul was “a margin call”
Kabul was a margin call. From now on, America may well be obliged to “pay cash”, viz., deploy combat capable formations of sufficient size to engage and win if we want anyone to take us seriously. A token “speedbump” force or a promise of “over the horizon” support — which is the majority of what the U.S. military now does — isn’t going to reassure any friends or deter any adversaries. At least not anyone who is paying attention.
Our adversaries will be emboldened. It is not so much that America’s military reputation has been irretrievably damaged, but the lessons that the Vietnamese, the Hmong, and now the Afghans have learned so painfully cannot fail to be appreciated by us or by the wider world. It appears that America (not the military, but America herself) has lost her stomach for a real fight. Americans taught the world the same lesson about the British Empire during the Revolutionary War (although Britain recovered enough to build her “second empire”), it would be foolish to fail to now see ourselves through that particular historical prism.
Garri Benjamin Hendell, “The Day After Kabul”, The Angry Staff Officer, 2021-11-02.
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February 15, 2022
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with tanks
In theory, a good tank ought to be effectively immune to machine-gun fire, able to cross trenches without slowing and physically protect the infantry (who could advance huddled behind the mass of it), all while bringing its own firepower to the battle. Tracked armored vehicles had been an idea considered casually by a number of the pre-war powers but not seriously attempted. The British put the first serious effort into tank development with the Landship Committee, formed in February of 1915; the first real tanks, 49 British Mark I tanks, made their first battlefield appearance during the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Reliability proved to be a problem: of the 49 tanks that stepped off on the attack on September 15th, only three were operational on the 16th, mostly due to mechanical failures and breakdowns.
Nevertheless there was promise in the idea that was clearly recognized and a major effort to show what tanks could do what attempted at Cambrai in November of 1917; this time hundreds of tanks were deployed and they had a real impact, breaking through the barbed wire and scattering the initial German defenses. But then came the inevitable German counter-attacks and most of the ground taken was lost. It was obvious that tanks had great potential; the French had by 1917 already developed their own, the light Renault FT tank, which would end up being the most successful tank of the war despite its small size (it is the first tank to have its main armament in a rotating turret and so in some sense the first “real” tank). This was hardly an under-invested-in technology. So did tanks break the trench stalemate?
No.
It’s understandable that many people have the impression that they did. Interwar armored doctrine, particularly German Maneuver Warfare (bewegungskrieg) and Soviet Deep Battle both aimed to use the mobility and striking power of tanks in concentrated actions to break the trench stalemate in future wars (the two doctrines are not identical, mind you, but in this they share an objective). But these were doctrines constructed around the performance capabilities of interwar tanks, particularly by two countries (Germany and the USSR) who were not saddled with large numbers of WWI era tanks (and so could premise their doctrine entirely on more advanced models). The Panzer II, with a 24.5mph top speed and an operational range of around 100 miles, depending on conditions, was actually in a position to race the train and win; the same of course true of the Soviet interwar T-26 light tank (19.3mph on roads, 81-150 mile operational range). Such tanks could have radios for coordination and communication on the move (something not done with WWI tanks or even French tanks in WWII).
By contrast, that Renault FT had a top speed of 4.3mph and an operational range of just 37 miles. The British Mark V tank, introduced in 1918, moved at only 5mph and had just 45 miles of range. Such tanks struggled to keep up with the infantry; they certainly were not going to win any race the infantry could not. It is little surprise that the French, posed with the doctrinal problem of having to make use of the many thousands of WWI tanks they had, settled on a doctrine whereby most tanks would simply be the armored gauntlet stretched over the infantry’s fist: it was all those tanks could do! The sort of tank that could do more than just dent the trench-lines (the same way a good infiltration assault with infantry could) were a decade or more away when the war ended.
Moreover, of course, the doctrine – briefly the systems of thinking and patterns of training, habit and action – to actually pull off what tanks would do in 1939 and 1940 were also years away. It seems absurd to fault World War I era commanders for not coming up with a novel tactical and operational system in 1918 for using vehicles that wouldn’t exist for another 15 years and yet more so assuming that they would get it right (since there were quite a number of different ideas post-war about how tanks ought to be used and while many of them seemed plausible, not all of them were practical or effective in the field). It is hard to see how any amount of support into R&D or doctrine was going to make tanks capable of breakthroughs even in the late 1920s or early 1930s (honestly, look at the “best” tanks of the early 1930s; they’re still not up to the task in most cases) much less by 1918.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
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February 14, 2022
QotD: Canadians and imaginary peacekeeping
Canadians are fixated on peacekeeping. We believe that Mike Pearson invented it, that Canadians are the best in the world at it, and that if we do peacekeeping, ideally for the United Nations, then we will not need large numbers of troops or much expensive equipment. The idea of peacekeeping as our métier has certainly shaped Canadian defence policy, and not for the better. The billions of dollars that Liberals and Conservatives have belatedly pledged to rebuild the Canadian Forces will take years to make a difference and to undo four decades of neglect …
J.L. Granatstein, “Wake up! This is our war, too”, Globe and Mail, 2006-02-28.
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February 13, 2022
QotD: Marx’s labour theory of value gets tenure
At last, we know the answer to the question almost no one was asking: What happens when Karl Marx’s labor theory of value gets tenure?
The labor theory of value is very popular on the Left, probably because it makes no sense. Marx — who never labored once in his entire life — proposed that “labor” has inherent value, that “if we disregard the use-value of commodities, they have only one property left, that of being products of labor.”
I assure you it sounds even stupider in the original German.
The short version is that “labor” determines a product’s value, not the competitive marketplace.
It’s a crackpot theory, easily demolished.
Take the example of a skilled pastry chef and … me.
Give a few dollars worth of flour, sugar, butter, etc., to that chef and after a couple of hours of his labors, he can sell you a gorgeous and tasty cake that you would be happy to pay a lot of money to buy.
I don’t bake and have no interest in baking. Let me labor on those same ingredients for the same two hours, and you’ll get a hot mess worth less than the value of the ingredients that went into it.
(Apologies: This is not my example, but I can’t find an online resource listing the original author. [I first encountered this in a Robert Heinlein novel, but he may have been paraphrasing someone else])
It’s not the “labor,” it’s the results.
Now we’re supposed to apply this same thinking to grading English papers.
We’re supposed to accept that one student’s craptaculently-written essay has the same value as another student’s beautifully written paper because they both put the same amount of labor into writing them.
What Inoue wants college instructors to do is apply crackpot Marxist theory to those who will be disadvantaged the most if they aren’t taught proper English.
Stephen Green, “Fight ‘White Language Supremacy,’ Prof Will Grade on ‘Labor’ Not Results”, Vodkapundity, 2021-11-10.
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February 12, 2022
QotD: One of those pre-9/11 things we’ve lost … personal dignity
It was like a 1950s women’s prison movie. I got to be the girl from the streets who made a big mistake; she was the guard doing intake. “Name’s Veronica, but they call me Ron. Want a smoke?” Beeps and boops, her pointer and middle fingers patting for explosives under the back of my brassiere; the wand on and over my body, more beeps, more pats. The she walked wordlessly away. I looked around, slowly put down my arms, rearranged my body. For a moment I thought I might plaintively call out, “No kiss goodbye? No, ‘I’ll call’?” But they might not have been amused. And actually I wasn’t either.
I experienced the search not only as an invasion of privacy, which it was, but as a denial or lowering of that delicate thing, dignity. The dignity of a woman, of a lady, of a person with a right not to be manhandled or to be, or to feel, molested.
Peggy Noonan, “Embarassing the Angels”, Wall Street Journal, 2006-03-02.
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February 11, 2022
QotD: “By their proposals, shall ye know them”
That is why the proposal that the IRS should have access to the data of all bank accounts from which or into which more than $600 a year are paid (hardly a king’s ransom) is so important, despite the fact that it has not been enacted. The very fact that someone wanted to enact it, and thought it right that it should be enacted, is highly significant — and sinister — in itself, for the proposal demonstrates a totalitarian mindset.
The ostensible purpose of the proposal, of course, is the elimination of tax evasion. (Incidentally, I have noticed recently an increasing tendency, in the press and elsewhere, for the term tax avoidance to be used interchangeably with that of tax evasion, as if the difference between legality and illegality were of no real importance. This conflation is itself indicative of a totalitarian attitude, according to which a governmental end may be reached without the necessity for any law.)
The people who proposed that, in effect, every bank account should be routinely available for examination by the IRS, without any specific warrant for such an examination, thereby revealed that they thought that the gathering of tax so important that it superseded all other considerations.
Psalm 24 begins: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.”
A better version, according to the proposers, would be: Money is the government’s, and the fulness thereof, money and they that have any. For it hath founded it upon the printing press, and established it as legal tender.
I do not go as far as some economists of my acquaintance, who believe that tax evasion is a citizen’s civic duty: at least it is not in the circumstances prevailing in any western country, however unsatisfactory they may be. In my own case, I do not evade taxes and even my attempts to avoid them are rather feeble, for unfortunately there is so little at stake.
But I reject completely the idea that, morally, the first call on anyone’s money is the government’s, which in effect has the right to leave you pocket money by its grace and favor after you have paid your taxes at any rate that it likes. This is the very tyranny that the founders of America feared in majoritarian democracy, untempered by inalienable rights — inalienable even, or especially, by or to the government.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Monitoring Bank Accounts Would Make the People of the Government, Not the Government of the People”, The Iconoclast, 2021-11-01.
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February 10, 2022
QotD: Classical Greek Polis governance
The standard ingredients of a Greek polis are an assembly of all adult citizen males (often called an ekklesia, meaning “assembly”), a smaller advisory committee (frequently called a boule), and then a set number of elected officials who carried out the laws of the other two (magistrates). I’ve given the common names for these components, but they often have different names in different poleis.
Those basic units don’t change from a democracy (like Athens) to an oligarchy (like Corinth) or even a tyranny (like Syracuse) – the type of government just reflects the division of power between them, and the method of selection. In a democracy, like Athens, the ekklesia will have most of the power, being able to overrule the boule or the magistrates. Often the members of the boule can come from a wide range of wealth classes or even be randomly selected.
In an oligarchy, power is generally focused in the magistrates – drawn from the upper-crust of society – and a smaller boule, with the ekklesia having much less power to restrain them. Alternately, the ekklesia may be restricted in size to only a wealthy subset of the citizenry. In a tyranny, a single person (the tyrant) is able to gain control of the system, through a mix of demagoguery, charisma and well-placed cronies. Even under a tyranny, the basic three-part system still exists, it is simply subverted and controlled by one person (much like how some modern dictatorships have all of the institutions of a democracy – courts, elections, etc – but all of the power is still in one set of hands and the elections are shams).
I want to note this up front because it is important to recognize that the existence of a popular assembly does not make a Greek polis a democracy, nor does the existence of a powerful magistrate make it a tyranny. As we’ll see, Sparta has an assembly, it is just laughably weak; it also has two very powerful magistrates, but their power is strongly checked. What matters is the division of power between these parts. I also wanted to start here because Sparta follows this basic model, but with some interesting variations. Knowing what the normal model looks like will make it easier to spot the variations that are unique to Sparta.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part V: Spartan Government”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
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February 9, 2022
QotD: Paper or plastic?
This point is illustrated in microcosm by those trying to get rid of single use plastic bags. The 5p charge for plastic bags has meant the sale of billions of so-called bags for life, which use twice as much plastic as the cheaper alternative. All those bags for life mean we use more plastic than we started with and even, possibly, more bags themselves. This was something that was warned about before the plastic bag charge was introduced, with some observing that even “single use” bags did tend to get used more than once.
So far, then, we have learnt that the planning deployed to reduce plastic has had the opposite effect. That, however, has not stopped the central planners from redoubling their efforts. The necessary charge for a bag is to double, the system is to be expanded to the tens of thousands of small shops that don’t currently have to charge. “It doesn’t work, let’s have more of it”, the cry of bureaucracies through the ages.
But this is the blending of government planning with the fashionable nostrums of our day so of course it gets worse. It’s not even true that the bags for life – and especially not the cotton ones, even less so the organic cotton – are more environmentally friendly than the single use ones. Even recycled ones use more resources than single-use ones – for yes, recycling is an industrial activity using energy and other resources.
We can even construct a little spectrum here. How many times do we need to reuse a bag for it to have as little resource use – and thus environmental effect – as just the one use of those thin single use plastic ones? Obviously enough, the single use that we’re told not to use has a value of one here. The bag for life must be reused 35 times. A bag for life from recycled plastic 84 times. A paper bag must be reused 43 times – yes, paper. A cotton bag 7,100 times and an organic cotton? 20,000.
Which is the environmentally friendly option here? Clearly and obviously the one that everyone insists we must not use. So much for fashionable nostrums then.
Tim Worstall, “Plastic bags and the problem with central planning”, CapX, 2019-01-02.
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February 8, 2022
QotD: The East India Company’s rise to power
In many ways the EIC was a model of corporate efficiency: 100 years into its history, it had only 35 permanent employees in its head office. Nevertheless, that skeleton staff executed a corporate coup unparalleled in history: the military conquest, subjugation and plunder of vast tracts of southern Asia. It almost certainly remains the supreme act of corporate violence in world history. For all the power wielded today by the world’s largest corporations – whether ExxonMobil, Walmart or Google – they are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company. Yet if history shows anything, it is that in the intimate dance between the power of the state and that of the corporation, while the latter can be regulated, it will use all the resources in its power to resist.
When it suited, the EIC made much of its legal separation from the government. It argued forcefully, and successfully, that the document signed by Shah Alam – known as the Diwani – was the legal property of the company, not the Crown, even though the government had spent a massive sum on naval and military operations protecting the EIC’s Indian acquisitions. But the MPs who voted to uphold this legal distinction were not exactly neutral: nearly a quarter of them held company stock, which would have plummeted in value had the Crown taken over. For the same reason, the need to protect the company from foreign competition became a major aim of British foreign policy.
The transaction depicted in the painting [Wiki] was to have catastrophic consequences. As with all such corporations, then as now, the EIC was answerable only to its shareholders. With no stake in the just governance of the region, or its long-term wellbeing, the company’s rule quickly turned into the straightforward pillage of Bengal, and the rapid transfer westwards of its wealth.
Before long the province, already devastated by war, was struck down by the famine of 1769, then further ruined by high taxation. Company tax collectors were guilty of what today would be described as human rights violations. A senior official of the old Mughal regime in Bengal wrote in his diaries: “Indians were tortured to disclose their treasure; cities, towns and villages ransacked; jaghires and provinces purloined: these were the ‘delights’ and ‘religions’ of the directors and their servants.”
Bengal’s wealth rapidly drained into Britain, while its prosperous weavers and artisans were coerced “like so many slaves” by their new masters, and its markets flooded with British products. A proportion of the loot of Bengal went directly into Clive’s pocket. He returned to Britain with a personal fortune – then valued at £234,000 – that made him the richest self-made man in Europe. After the Battle of Plassey in 1757, a victory that owed more to treachery, forged contracts, bankers and bribes than military prowess, he transferred to the EIC treasury no less than £2.5m seized from the defeated rulers of Bengal – in today’s currency, around £23m for Clive and £250m for the company.
William Dalrymple, “The East India Company: The original corporate raiders”, Guardian, 2015-03-04.
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February 7, 2022
QotD: The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The term lends a scientific name and explanation to a problem that many people immediately recognize — that fools are blind to their own foolishness. As Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
An Overview of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
This phenomenon is something you have likely experienced in real life, perhaps around the dinner table at a holiday family gathering. Throughout the course of the meal, a member of your extended family begins spouting off on a topic at length, boldly proclaiming that he is correct and that everyone else’s opinion is stupid, uninformed, and just plain wrong. It may be plainly evident to everyone in the room that this person has no idea what he is talking about, yet he prattles on, blithely oblivious to his own ignorance.The effect is named after researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the two social psychologists who first described it. In their original study on this psychological phenomenon, they performed a series of four investigations and found that people who scored in the lowest percentiles on tests of grammar, humor, and logic also tended to dramatically overestimate how well they had performed. Their actual test scores placed them in the 12th percentile, yet they estimated that their performance placed them in the 62nd percentile.
Kendra Cherry, “What Is the Dunning-Kruger Effect?”, verywellmind, 2018-04-09.
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February 6, 2022
QotD: Marcus Tullius Cicero
Cicero was a key politician in the Late Republic, but it was his misfortune that his life was spent in an era where words meant less than weapons. He sided with Pompey against Caesar, but was granted clemency after Pompey’s defeat. He was not involved in Caesar’s assassination – he was still too much an outsider for some of the stuck-up Roman elitists who made up the conspiracy (though he correctly pointed out at the time that leaving Antony alive would be a fatal mistake). In the aftermath of the assassination, he identified (correctly) Antony as the key threat to the Republic and worked to discredit him politically in a devastating series of speeches named the Philippics (in honor of a similar set of speeches made by the Athenian Demosthenes against Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander). Cicero’s political assault on Antony succeeded – his reputation was ruined and his popularity in Rome never recovered – but it cost Cicero his life when Antony, in league with Octavian, moved into the capital and had Cicero murdered. Cicero’s literary legacy survived him, however, in part because it was useful for Augustus’ own political ends (e.g. Plut. Cic. 49.5-6).
Cicero’s position as the most eloquent orator of the Latin language – and probably its best prose stylist – is largely uncontested. It was his speaking skills – honed in the courts – that made him so politically successful. He was also a prolific writer and a tremendous amount of his writings survive, including both legal and political speeches, private letters, handbooks on oratory, and a set of philosophical works. As anyone who has read Cicero can tell you, he also has a deserved reputation for pride and self-aggrandizement. While many of Cicero’s contemporaries and readers down to the modern era have been impressed by Cicero’s thinking and eloquence, I feel confident in asserting no one – alive or dead – will ever be more impressed by Cicero than Cicero was impressed by himself.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: A Trip Through Cicero (Natural Law)”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-12-12.
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February 5, 2022
QotD: I get a faint sense that he’s not a fan …
His new band, anyway, consists of four competent but unimaginative player-songwriters, and him. And the album’s a turgid lukewarm brew of reworked Oasis numbers which Liam’s brother Noel, every bit as ugly, every bit as unpleasant but a fraction less stupid would have rejected; the band switch between a dazzling selection of Rickenbaker and Gretsch guitars — funny, isn’t it, how a fiddler will manage with one Stradivarius, Robert Johnson played only a two-dollar guitar, Rory Gallagher the same battered old Strat and yet the current lot switch from one expensive instrument to another between songs, maybe even during songs, the rock’n’roll of Consumerism — to produce the same sounds, the same chords, the same figures over and over, to sing the same harmonies, the same shouty, angry, miserable, hateful, retarded adolescent drivel, tripe, every fucking bar of it; Liam, stooped inside his ugliness, howling and frothing his whining, meaningless doggerel; forty year old men, there oughta be a law against them doing this shit. Liam, rock hero caricature posturing, grunts at one point that this is whaditsallabout knoworramean, fucking keeping on playing and touring, selling the albums, to the kids, otherwise I’d end up working in fucking McDonalds, knoworramean; setting his sights way too high, there, overestimating his personal qualities, I mean, Billy Bragg might get a job in McD’s, on the mop bucket, Paul Weller, maybe, but they wouldn’t let Gallagher within a hundred yards.
Ishmael, “The Sunday Ishmael 31/10/2021”, Call Me Ishmael, 2021-10-31.
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February 4, 2022
QotD: Don’t drive on the interstate highways
Kim du Toit, “Don’t Do That”, Splendid Isolation, 2019-01-28.
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