I have never forgotten these visitors, or ceased to marvel at them, at how they have gone on from strength to strength, continuing to lighten our darkness, and to guide, counsel and instruct us. They are unquestionably one of the wonders of the age, and I shall treasure till I die as a blessed memory the spectacle of them travelling with radiant optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about squalid, over-crowded towns, listening with unshakeable faith to the fatuous patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating like schoolchildren a multiplication table, the bogus statistics and mindless slogans endlessly intoned on them. There, I would think, an earnest office-holder in some local branch of the League of Nations Union, there a godly Quaker who had once had tea with Gandhi, there an inveigher against the Means Test and the Blasphemy Laws, there a staunch upholder of free speech and human rights, there an indomitable preventer of cruelty to animals, there scarred and worthy veterans of a hundred battles for truth, freedom, and justice – all, all chanting the praises of Stalin and his Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It was as though a vegetarian society had come outwith a passionate plea for cannibalism, or Hitler had been nominated posthumously for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time, 2006.
September 21, 2015
QotD: True believers visit the Workers’ Paradise
September 19, 2015
QotD: Why do we have armed forces?
Polite Canadian society does not like to admit, though it is perfectly understood, that Canada’s presence is but dust in the military balance. It’s been about half a century since anyone regarded the Canadian military as a significant player. Current events in Iraq are not, whatever some conservatives might imagine, a replay of World War Two. This is a minor policing operation in which the middle powers are providing diplomatic cover for the actions of the Great Powers.
Among the relatively large nations of human history Canada is almost unique in one respect: We don’t strictly speaking need a military. There has not been a direct existential threat to Canada in more than a century. The only nation capable of invading is the one nation that would never try. Our security has been under written by either Britain or the United States for over two centuries. Tomorrow we could dispense with the whole of the Canadian Forces and, leaving aside the communities in which our few military bases are located, I doubt anyone would notice.
So why have a military when we don’t really need one?
Richard Anderson, “Macho Man”, The Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2014-10-10.
September 18, 2015
QotD: “… on the shoulders of giants”
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants is correct as far as it goes, but it gives dullards the wrong idea. Those giants don’t hoist you up there for a piggy back. You have to climb up them like a kitten that hasn’t been fed yet, and the giants swat at you while you make the ascent. Once you’re standing on their shoulders, you realize that the giants are drunk half the time and palsied the rest. They were only giants because you were so short. You can’t see as far as you had hoped. There’s a lot of work left to do.
Nobody understands that you have to be able to do it first. You can’t deconstruct a goddamned thing until you can do it, and if you could do it, you wouldn’t get the urge to deconstruct it. Frank Gehry can’t design a proper two-holer so he designs giant monstrosities to hide the fact.
Politics is the same. You will never elect anyone to take the government apart. Once you know how to work it well enough to get in charge of it, you don’t want to wreck it. You want to lord over it and add to it. No one wants the bulldozed empty lot where a Post Office once stood to be named after them. Humans don’t work that way.
Sippican Cottage, “The Cover Charge to Greatness”, Sippican Cottage, 2015-08-23.
September 17, 2015
QotD: Corporate culture and management overstretch
Corporate culture is another limiting factor: The larger your company gets, the harder a great corporate culture is to maintain. From all accounts, WinCo has a great community of workers, and it has 15,000 of them, which sounds like a lot. But Wal-Mart has more than 1 million employees in the U.S. It might be hard to maintain that level of excitement as you get into the hundreds of thousands of employees. If you try to expand quickly to get scale, your core of loyal employees who have been with you forever shrinks relative to the newcomers who don’t yet have the same commitment to the company. This is particularly a problem in employee-owned companies; as you get more employees, you can dilute the sense of ownership, because each employee’s contribution makes such a tiny impact on the bottom line — or you may get wars between groups of employees, as we saw with United Airlines.
This is related to another key challenge: management. As organizations grow, they have to change. Anyone who has been through a startup can attest to this — when you start out, you don’t need to have many meetings; you just hash stuff out impromptu when the need arises. As the company grows, you start to need management reporting lines, and defined roles, and scheduled meetings, and other bureaucratic unpleasantness that everyone hates. But if you try to do without it, everything quickly degenerates into a chaotic mess.
Not every company is good at this transition. If one of the things that made you great as a little baby company was your informality and flexibility, you may find that growing makes your key producers unhappy and ultimately saps the creative flux that made you great at what you do.
This is also a big challenge as the company moves beyond “small” and into “large”; in fact, every time you dramatically increase the size of your business, you will find that it needs to gut-rehab its management structure. Your three great managers who made all the trains run on time can no longer oversee things at the level of detail they once did; they need to spend more of their time making sure that other people do so. Some of them aren’t good at that role, but they will be unhappy if someone else is promoted or hired over their head. You start to rely more and more on well-standardized processes rather than individual initiative, which may require some compromises on quality to maintain the price point that your customers expect. It is the difference between an exquisitely pulled shot at your local coffee shop and the massive amount Starbucks has invested in machines that make exactly the same coffee every time.
Megan McArdle, “In-N-Out Doesn’t Want to Be McDonald’s”, Bloomberg View, 2014-10-02.
September 16, 2015
QotD: A booming economy gives more power to individual workers
A few days ago there was a big debate about a New York Times expose on working conditions at Amazon.com. (BTW, it would have been useful for the NYT to compare labor practices at the Seattle company to working conditions at firms operating in the Amazon region of Brazil.)
Many liberals were appalled, while conservatives often wondered why, if working conditions were so bad at Amazon, people didn’t simply “get another job.” I have sympathy for both sides, but probably a bit more for the conservative side.
One liberal objection might be that it’s not easy to get another job. And perhaps that’s because monetary policy since 2008 has been too contractionary. And perhaps that’s because conservatives have complained about the Fed’s QE/low interest rate policies, which has made the Fed reluctant to do more.
Regardless of how you feel about monetary policy, it’s clear that if employers feel they have a “captive audience” of workers, who are terrified of losing their jobs, it would be easier for the employer to crack the whip and drive the employees to work extremely hard. One advantage of a healthy job market is that workers have more power to negotiate pleasant working conditions.
Scott Sumner, “How bad government policies make us meaner”, Library of Economics and Liberty, 2015-08-25.
September 15, 2015
QotD: The Ex-Im Bank
… every time the Ex-Im Bank gets involved in a deal, there are only two possibilities: The government is needlessly subsidizing something that would have happened anyway, giving away cheap money to a huge corporation. Or else it’s subsidizing a deal that wouldn’t have happened anyway, in which case we are defending the use of taxpayer dollars to sell cheap manufactured goods to foreigners. It’s not even as if we’re picking out especially needy foreigners, who may require a charitable contribution from the prosperous citizens of the United States; the subsidy is distributed on the basis of who is willing to, say, buy cut-rate U.S. airframes. And guess who benefits? U.S. corporations that export a lot.
This is not a good use of taxpayer dollars, and conservative ideologues, bless their hearts, are quite right to want to get rid of it. Their passion is a little out of proportion to the harm that this agency does, but even a small step in the right direction is better than none. The bank’s opponents concede that. For them, the appeal of taking on Ex-Im is that they might be able to take it down.
Against this impeccable economic and political logic, the bank’s supporters marshal a few arguments. First, they often claim (as Nocera implies) that the Ex-Im Bank generates a lot of money for the Treasury. Which is sort of true … except. First of all, it doesn’t account for the opportunity costs of the distortion; resources are diverted into production of certain goods, and away from others. And second of all, government accounting for loans is rather weird. According to the Congressional Budget Office, if we used a fair value accounting method, which would account for the risk of changing market conditions, the Ex-Im Bank’s six largest programs would be generating a deficit, not a surplus.
We are also told that Ex-Im is a vital matter of national security. I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m pretty sure that if the U.S. government needs to find some money to give foreigners as a vital matter of national security, they will manage to find it even if the Ex-Im Bank is shuttered and its silent halls hold only the lingering ghosts of departed exporters.
Megan McArdle, “Ex-Im Bank Is a Tiny But Tempting Target”, Bloomberg View, 2015-08-03.
September 14, 2015
QotD: “Fair” prices
I think that there’s a lot of very dumb rhetoric about “fair trade” and “fair pricing,” usually coming from people who want to tell others how to set their prices. I generally distrust the word “fair.” But there is an emotional side to pricing. Smart businesses want their customers to feel good about transactions, especially repeat-business propositions such as restaurants. That’s why bartenders give out the occasional free drink, restaurateurs sometimes send out a free appetizer or dessert, etc. And, all the management consultants and books notwithstanding, there’s a lot of gut in business; if a cafe proprietor in New Mexico thinks that a price feels right, or wants to know whether his customers think a price feels right, I don’t think that’s insignificant. Businessmen want to do the right thing, too, at least as often as anybody else.
It does get tricky, sometimes, e.g. the car-dealer who adds $1,000 to the price of everything so he can tell gullible buyers he’s giving them $1,000 off. I think the Internet has made pricing “fairer” in the sense that sellers cannot as often get away with charging above-market rates; there are a fair number of stores that will sell you a product at whatever the lowest price you can document is. It’s hard to say no when somebody’s showing you the same product at a better price on his phone.
Kevin D. Williamson, “A Fair Point”, National Review, 2014-09-29.
September 12, 2015
QotD: “Carbon offsets are dumb”
“Well if you want to be greener perhaps we could look at carbon offsets.”
“Carbon Offsets,” I say, working up a head of steam, “are dumb. I could word it better than that but it’s so dumb that the people that support it wouldn’t understand those words.”
“What’s wrong with carbon offsets?”
“Analogy-wise, paying someone in South America to grow trees so that I can burn trees is a bit like me paying someone in Uganda 10 quid to be good to someone else so that the PFY can punch you and the Boss here in the face.”
“I think that’s being rather simplistic — carbon offsets will negate the harm you do in the shorter term while you look for better alternatives,” says the Architect.
“Yes, but it doesn’t cancel it out geographically. If that were the case I could pay someone in Africa to filter water while I pee in your bathtub!”
“They could pay me to do their carbon offsets,” the PFY suggests.
“You don’t have sustainable forestry plantations,” the Architect blurts.
“Yes I do, I have acres of them in Scotland,” the PFY lies.
“Are they CDM approved?”
“Of course.”
“So I could actually go and see them?”
“Absolutely. In fact I would insist upon it. You, me, possibly the Boss, a shovel, some lime — it would make a great day out!”
It appears stupidity does know some bounds as our greenie takes on a little of the colour after doing some mental arithmetic.
“I think we’ll just stick to the original plan.”
“Well, have at it, maestro!” I say, gesturing for the PFY that it’s time to be moving on.
“Nutters!” the PFY says as we exit the meeting room.
“No,” the Boss says. “It’s very important to the board. They want to be carbon-neutral by 2040.”
“You mean after they’re all dead — with some token greenification stuff to happen in the next 20 years and all the major changes left till the last few years?” I suggest. “I’m surprised they even stumped up the cash for the consultation.”
“Oh, they didn’t,” the Boss says. “Our director put up 70k of our equipment budget, given that IT is one of the highest power consumers.”
“70k — of OUR budget you mean.”
“It’s not really your money, it’s the company’s!”
. . .
Ten minutes later I’m sending 100 quid to Uganda and the PFY to the Director’s office…
Simon Travaglia, “BOFH: On the PFY’s Scottish estate, no one can hear you scream…”, The Register, 2014-03-21.
September 11, 2015
QotD: Ayn Rand
Let it be said at the outset that I have never been an Objectivist nor am I now a Libertarian, albeit, obviously, I share many of their aims. There is much in Ayn Rand’s philosophy I admire, and much I despise. She has the odd ability to write pages and pages of very insightful wisdom argued with almost Thomistic rigor and logic, and then to stagger like a screaming drunk into page after page of vituperation and nonsense based on an apparently inability to distinguish radically unalike concepts, such as selfishness versus self-interest, or altruism versus communism.
John C. Wright, “Ayn Rand as Author”, John C. Wright’s Journal, 2014-09-24.
September 10, 2015
QotD: “Bookless” liberalism
The enduring strength of both conservatism and libertarianism as intellectual movements is that they acknowledge that they are, in fact, intellectual movements. We not only know what we believe, we know why we believe it. But while liberals know what they believe, they have a hard time explaining why they believe it. That’s because, as E. J. Dionne, Martin Peretz, and other liberals have written, they’ve turned their backs on their own intellectual history. Liberals, in Peretz’s memorable phrase, are “bookless,” so they follow an ideology without knowing why it upholds and cherishes its ideas. As a result, they don’t know when, or how, to subordinate their ideology to larger concerns (and when you cease to be aware that you have an ideology, it doesn’t make you a pragmatist; it makes you a dogmatist).
Driven by feelings more than fact, they seek rationalizations. Or as William Voegeli puts it in his book Never Enough, liberalism has lost its ability to articulate a “limiting principle” to the size, cost, and ambition of government. Indeed, as we saw during the oral arguments before the Supreme Court over Obamacare, this administration is incapable of articulating any principled limit to the apparently infinite powers of the Commerce Clause and the living Constitution.
There’s perhaps no better proof that liberals are terrified of admitting their own ideological aspirations than the effort to mint fresh clichés to preserve the integrity of old ones. That’s the apparent goal of the group No Labels, whose official motto is “Put the Labels Aside. Do What’s Best for America.” (Or at least that’s one of them; for a group that doesn’t like labels, they sure have a lot of mottoes.)
Jonah Goldberg, excerpt from The Tyranny of Clichés, published by National Review, 2012-04-22.
September 9, 2015
September 8, 2015
September 7, 2015
QotD: The Crusades
So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression — an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity — and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion — has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.
With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt — once the most heavily Christian areas in the world — quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.
That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.
Thomas F. Madden, “The Real History of the Crusades”, Crisis Magazine, 2002-04-01.
September 4, 2015
QotD: Joe Biden’s memoirs
I must admit, I have read neither Biden’s memoir nor Dole’s preamble to full erectile function. But I think that the vice president may have a great book in him — not Grant’s memoirs great, but pretty great. I dream of Joe Biden’s writing a postmodern surrealist political manifesto titled Literally Delaware: This Book Has No Subtitle, which I suspect would be colorful reading inasmuch as in his role as under-cretin to the World’s Most Powerful Man™ he has access to the 152-color “Ultimate” Crayola set, though presumably he is allowed to use the included sharpener only under adult supervision. The book would be available only at stores in Amtrak stations and should be read only on the train, a piece of locative literature.
Kevin D. Williamson, “A Plague of Memoirs: A courageously awesome American story of awesomely American courage”, National Review, 2014-10-06.
September 3, 2015
QotD: The lingering malady of poetry
For no man, of course, ever quite gets over poetry. He may seem to have recovered from it, just as he may seem to have recovered from the measles of his school-days, but exact observation teaches us that no such recovery is ever quite perfect; there always remains a scar, a weakness and a memory.
Now, there is reason for maintaining that the taste for poetry, in the process of human development, marks a stage measurably later than the stage of religion. Savages so little cultured that they know no more of poetry than a cow have elaborate and often very ingenious theologies. If this be true, then it follows that the individual, as he rehearses the life of the species, is apt to carry his taste for poetry further along than he carries his religion — that if his development is arrested at any stage before complete intellectual maturity that arrest is far more likely to leave hallucinations.
H.L. Mencken, “The Nature of Faith”, Prejudices, Fourth Series, 1924.
