Take another look at the conventional narrative. Almost every key event involves a battle, a period of time in a relatively localized area where combatants slugged it out to see who would occupy some bit of land or sea. To [How the War Was Won author Phillips Payson] O’Brien, this focus is silly, a relic of long-ago wars in ages with far less industrial capacity.
Start with theory. States fight to impose their will on another state in pursuit of some political goal. To do that requires that they achieve sufficient local military superiority that the other state can’t stop them from achieving their political goal.
Nazi Germany wanted to be the new administrators of the agricultural area of the western Soviet Union. To do that, they had to evict the Soviet military, whether through direct destruction or forcing the Soviet government to withdraw their armed forces. Individual battles for control of a localized area only matter if they are a means to that end.
Does the occupation or non-occupation of that point on the map affect the ability of a combatant to keep fighting?
In some limited cases, yes. Battlefield victory enabled Germany to overrun France before France could really focus its productive effort on the war. After their surrender, the French could not produce weapons, and they functionally could not organize their manpower to fight the Germans. But if the German army conquered, say, a random city in the Soviet Union, like Stalingrad, Soviet production and manpower was barely affected. The war goes on.
In theory, the German army could destroy so much of the Soviet military in one battle (or even a few discrete battles) that the Soviets run out of men or weapons. If there was ever a time this could have happened, it would have been the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, when the Germans basically won a series of crushing victories.
The problem for the Germans was that by World War II, people in the combatant countries were good at building stuff in vast quantities, and the major combatants of World War II generally had access to sufficient natural resources. Even massive armies could not destroy produced weapons systems (e.g., tanks, airplanes) on the battlefield fast enough to remove the other side’s ability to continue fighting. What could (and did) happen was the destruction of the other side’s ability to produce and distribute weapons.
Sure enough, if you look at the actual data from even the largest battles, neither side really destroys a hugely significant amount of stuff. Take the Battle of Kursk — the largest tank and air battle of World War II. Wikipedia will dazzle you with the numbers of soldiers involved (millions), tanks deployed (in the ballpark of 10,000), and aircraft in the sky (in the ballpark of 5,000).
In this entire vast battle that supposedly dictated the outcome of the Eastern Front, the Germans lost approximately 350 armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) during the most intense 10 days of fighting. In the two months around when the battle took place, the Germans lost 1,331 AFVs on the entire Eastern Front. In the year of the battle, 1943, the Germans built more than 12,000 AFVs. Also worth noting: they disproportionately lost older, obsolete tanks at Kursk, and built new, capable tanks. The Germans lost a very manageable amount of equipment at Kursk — less than a month’s worth of AFV production.
If modern war means you cannot realistically destroy enough weapons in one battle to matter — if the largest battle of all time didn’t really matter — what did?
Anonymous, “Your Book Review: How the War Was Won“, Astral Codex Ten, 2024-08-09.
November 15, 2024
QotD: Battles are over-rated
November 14, 2024
QotD: The tragedy of the commons in North London
One fact about those bathing ponds on the Heath:
Honesty boxes for bathers to pay to swim were introduced in 2005. There were plans for a compulsory charge in 2012, but they came to nothing.
We have open access to a resource, Marxian access. We also have one other fact:
It was once a well-kept secret. Now the bathing ponds on Hampstead Heath are among the most crowded parts of London on a hot summer’s day.
We have – by one measure at least – excessive use of that resource, use that needs to be limited in some manner.
This is a problem that has been noted before, it’s called the Tragedy of the Commons. As Garrett Hardin points out there are only two ways of restricting such access, capitalist – charge for it – or socialist – regulate.
The third option, Elinor Ostrom’s, does not work with this number of people. That communal agreement tops out at about 3,000 peeps, not 10 million.
Which of the two solutions works depends upon the specific circumstance and isn’t the point to be made here. Rather, the lesson to learn is that Marxian access just doesn’t work when demand is at or above capacity. A useful thing to think about when contemplating other areas of the economy.
Tim Worstall, “Hampstead Heath Ponds And The Tragedy Of The Commons”, Continental Telegraph, 2020-01-19.
November 13, 2024
QotD: The 1990s
Consider that if we really do live in a computer simulation, then everything the #wokesters are always going on about is actually true. Everything really IS a “social construction”, because “society” was literally constructed. All that stuff about “systemic racism” is true, too, because again, we’re dealing with a design. Nothing evolves organically inside The Matrix, because there’s nothing organic in there at all. It’s ALL on purpose …
… and you, #wokester, are the only one who can see it. Unlike Karl Marx, who was able to see beyond his class situation enough to say that no one can see beyond his class situation, because reasons, you, #wokester, can do it because you’re Neo. That, too, is built into the system. It’s an endless recursion … but one that entails that you, and you alone, are special, on purpose.
That, kameraden, was the 1990s. Even those movies our author mentioned — Beverly Hills Cop III, Lethal Weapons 3 and 4 — weren’t just copies of copies, they were ironic, snarky commentaries on copies of copies. See also Scream, which was a “deconstruction” of every slasher picture ever made. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em … but since both beating ’em and joining ’em entail making a sincere effort and sincerity is forbidden, all you can do is mock ’em. That’s what “deconstruction” is, one long polysyllabic mockery of the very idea of excellence. It’s the perfect philosophy for people who know themselves to be mediocre but have been told from day one that they’re special.
See also the tv show Friends, where five ludicrously attractive people and David Schwimmer all pretend to be just normal folks (who happen to live in 3,000 square foot apartments in Manhattan) — each episode is “the one that’s just like The Brady Bunch, but snarky”. Or Seinfeld, which was deliberately designed to be a grating mockery of stuff like The Odd Couple. All snarky mockeries of the very concept of sincerity.
See what I mean? That’s normal now, which is why the 90s must be dragged into an alley and shot, for Western Civ’s sake.
Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.
November 12, 2024
QotD: Roger Scruton, terroiriste
>Good wine is a “somewhere”, not an “anywhere”. It is stamped with a place and a year. Rooted, literally. The fancy French word for this is terroir, referring to the way in which environment — soil, geology, even the history of a place — is all responsible for a wine’s character. Terroir is a sense of place in a glass. Roger Scruton often referred to himself as a “terroiriste“. And this could describe his political philosophy as much as his philosophy of wine. From 2001 to 2009, Scruton wrote a wine column in the New Statesman, enabling him to smuggle into that otherwise exclusively Left-wing journal, all sorts of reactionary political ideas: about God, about fox-hunting, about beauty, about his love of the countryside.
Wine, for Scruton, was never just about the taste, never a merely aesthetic sensation. Indeed, he was extremely sniffy about all those “blind tastings” — the ones where we delight when an expert fails to spot the difference between plonk and Premiere Cru. They miss the point, says Scruton. Blind tasting, he explained, is like blind kissing — not a good way to distinguish, for example, between someone who is sexy and someone who is not. Indeed, if the experiment on Love Island is anything to go by, it’s not even a good way to distinguish who your own girlfriend is.
That’s because sexual chemistry, like wine, is a great deal more than some momentary sensation on the lips. It’s a great deal more than a message sent by taste receptors to the brain. It is all about the terroir. And this is not just a comment about wine but about aesthetic experience in general. When we encounter a work of art, we bring a whole hinterland of knowledge that makes sense of that specific experience and gives it its character as art. Music is more than a vibration of the air and its reception by the ear and the brain. So too with wine and taste.
Giles Fraser, “Raise your glass to Roger Scruton, the terroiriste“, UnHerd, 2020-01-15.
November 11, 2024
QotD: Military glamour
In the 19th century, warfare was one of the first contexts in which English speakers used the term glamour in its modern metaphorical sense. (The word originally meant a literal magic spell that made people see things that weren’t there.) “Military heroes who give up their lives in the flush and excitement and glamour of battle”, opined a U.S. congressman in 1885, “are sustained in the discharge of duty by the rush and conflict of physical forces, the hope of earthly glory and renown”.
Even people who hated military life could feel the attraction. Writing after the briefest of conscriptions (a single night in the barracks), D.H. Lawrence in 1916 lamented “this terrible glamour of camaraderie, which is the glamour of Homer and of all militarism”.
The slaughter and apparent futility of the Great War changed all that. Peace activists and bitter veterans now saw the “glamour of battle” as a dangerous delusion rather than a valuable inspiration. “Are you going to tell your children the truth about what you endured,” an American challenged fellow veterans in 1921, “or gild your reminiscences with glamour that will make them want to have a merry war experience of their own?” In 1919, the British painter Paul Nash wrote that the purpose of The Menin Road, his bleak portrait of a desolate and blasted landscape, was “to rob war of the last shred of glory, the last shine of glamour.”
Virginia Postrel, “Casualty of War”, Virginia’s Newsletter, 2023-08-10.
November 10, 2024
QotD: The low social status of shepherds in the ancient and medieval world
One the one hand, there is a robust literature, beginning in the Greek and Roman literary corpus, which idealizes rustic life, particularly shepherding. Starting with Theocritus’ short pastoral poems (called eidullion, “little poems” from where we get the word idyll as in calling a scene “idyllic”) and running through Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics, which present the pure rural simplicity of the countryside and pastoralism as a welcome contrast to the often “sordid” and unhealthy environment of the city (remember the way these “gentlemen farmers” tend to think about merchants and markets in cities, after all). This idolization only becomes more intense in Europe with the advent of Christianity and the grand metaphorical significance that shepherding in particular – as distinct from other rural activities – takes on. It would thus be easy to assume just from reading this sort of high literature that shepherds were well thought of, especially in a Christian social context.
But by and large just as the elite love of the idea of rural simplicity did not generally lead to a love of actual farming peasants, so too their love of the idea of pastoral simplicity did not generally lead to an actually high opinion of the folks who did that work, nor did it lead shepherds to any kind of high social status. While the exact social position of shepherds and their relation to the broader society could vary (as we’ll see), they tended to be relatively low-status and poor individuals. The “shepherds out tending their flocks by night” of Luke 2:8 are not important men. Indeed, the “night crew” of shepherds are some of the lowest status and poorest free individuals who could possibly see that religious sign, a point in the text that is missed by many modern readers.
We see a variety of shepherding strategies which impact what kind of shepherds might be out with flocks. Small peasant households might keep a few sheep (along with say, chickens or pigs) to provide for the household’s wool needs. In some cases, a village might pool those sheep together to make a flock which one person would tend (a job which often seems to have gone to either fairly young individuals or else the elderly – that is, someone who might not be as useful in the hard labor on the farm itself, since shepherding doesn’t necessarily require a lot of strength).
Larger operations by dedicated shepherds often involved wage-laborers or enslaved laborers tending flocks of sheep and pastured owned by other, higher status and wealthier individuals. Thus for instance, Diodorus’s description of the Sicilian slave revolts (in 135 and 104 BC; the original Diodorus, book 36, is lost but two summaries survive, those of Photios and Constantine Porphyrogennetos), we’re told that the the flocks belonging to the large estates of Roman magnates in the lowland down by the coast were tended by enslaved shepherds in significant numbers (and treated very poorly; when a Greek source like Diodorus who is entirely comfortable with slavery is nevertheless noting the poor treatment, it must be poor indeed). Likewise, there is a fair bit of evidence from ancient Mesopotamia indicating that the flocks of sheep themselves were often under state or temple control (e.g. W. Sallaberger, “The Value of Wool in Early Bronze Age Mesopotamia” or S. Zawadzki, “‘If you have sheep, you have all you need’: Sheep Husbandry and Wool in the Economy of the Neo-Babylonian Ebaddar Temple at Sippar” both in Wool Economy in the Ancient Near East and the Aegean eds. C. Breniquet and C. Michel, (2014)) and that it was the temple or the king that might sell or dispose of the wool; the shepherds were only laborers (free or unfree is often unclear).
Full time shepherds could – they didn’t always, but could – come under suspicion as effective outsiders to the fully sedentary rural communities they served as well. Diodorus in the aforementioned example is quick to note that banditry in Sicily was rife because the enslaved shepherds were often armed – armed to protect their flocks because banditry was rife; we are left to conclude that Diodorus at least thinks the banditry in question is being perpetrated by the shepherds, evidently sometimes rustling sheep from other enslaved shepherds. A similar disdain for the semi-nomadic herding culture of peoples like the Amorites is sometimes evident in Mesopotamian texts. And of course that the very nature of transhumance meant that shepherds often spent long periods away from home sleeping with their flocks in temporary shelters and generally “roughing it” exposed to weather.
Consequently, while owning large numbers of sheep and pastures for them could be a contributor to high status (and thus merit elite remark, as with Pliny’s long discussion of sheep in book 8 of his Natural History), actually tending sheep was mostly a low-status job and not generally well remunerated (keeping on poor Pliny here, it is notable that in several long sections on sheep he never once mentions shepherds). Shepherds were thus generally towards the bottom of the social pyramid in most pre-modern societies, below the serf or freeholding farmer who might at least be entitled to the continued use of their land.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-03-05.
November 9, 2024
QotD: George Bernard Shaw
H.L. Mencken, “Shaw as Platitudinarian”, The Smart Set, 1916-08.
November 8, 2024
QotD: David Lloyd George and the British Liberal Party
Lloyd George was from nowhere. He grew up in Llanystumdwy, Caernarfonshire, where he lived in a compact cottage with his mother, uncle, and siblings, and was trained as a solicitor in Porthmadog. He rose to dominate British politics, and to direct the affairs of the most expansive empire the world had known, seeing off thousands of more privileged rivals, on the basis of truly exceptional native gifts, and without even speaking English as his first language.
How he got into the position to direct World War I is one of the most remarkable personal trajectories in British history. Contemporaries everywhere saw it as an astonishing story, even in the most advanced democracies. As the New York Times asked when Lloyd George visited America in 1923, “Was there ever a more romantic rise from the humblest beginning than this?”
The second reason why Lloyd George is fascinating is his extraordinary command of words. Collins is good on this. The book is full of speeches that turn tides and smash competitors. Lloyd George could exercise an equally mesmeric command over both the Commons and mass audiences, typically rather different skills. Harold Macmillan called him “the best parliamentary debater of his, or perhaps any, day”.
Biblical references and Welsh valleys suffused his speeches. As another American journalist put it, when Lloyd George was speaking, “none approaches him in witchery of word or wealth of imagery”, with his “almost flawless phraseology” communicated through a voice “like a silver bell that vibrates with emotion”. Leading an imperial democracy through a global war demanded rhetorical powers of the rarest kind. Asquith lacked them. That, amongst other reasons, is why Lloyd George was able to shunt him aside.
The last reason we should all be interested in Lloyd George — as readers will have anticipated — is that he was the last British politician to inter a governing party. His actions during the war split the Liberals into Pro-Asquith and pro-Lloyd George factions, and the government he led from 1916 until 1922 was propped up by the Conservatives. Though the Liberal split was partly healed in 1923, it was all over for the party as a governing force. By the time Lloyd George at last became leader of the Liberal Party (in the Commons) in 1924, he had only a rump of 40 MPs left to command.
By the 1920s, Lloyd George’s shifting ideologies could not easily accommodate the old party traditions or the new forces reshaping allegiances and identities in the aftermath of the war. In 1918 he described his political creed to George Riddell, the press magnate, as “Nationalist-Socialist”. The consequence was an unprecedented redrawing of the map of British party politics, producing the Labour/Conservative hegemony we have lived with ever since.
The rot had arguably begun to set in for the Liberals in the elections of 1910, when they lost their majority. Fourteen years later, in 1924, Lloyd George stepped up to the Commons leadership of an exhausted, defeated party, and neither he nor his successors could arrest the slide into irrelevance. […] The Liberals could not come back because they were left with no clothes of their own. What had once been distinctive lines on economics, religion, welfare, the constitution, foreign policy and even “progress” were either appropriated by their competitors or ceased to be politically relevant. The party’s history as the dominant political force of the last near-century was no proof against radical structural change.
Alex Middleton, “Snapshot of the PM who killed his party”, The Critic, 2024-08-01.
November 7, 2024
QotD: Fear of … freedom
Since this is my blog and it’s Friday and all that, I’ll go ahead and expand this into a nebulous Theory of Everything: What people really want, deep down, is drama within limits. Ideally, you have the sense that something better is possible — and that something worse is possible — but, most importantly, the sense that if you follow the rules, and make sure everyone else follows the rules, neither of them will happen.
If you reach what appears to be an end state — that is, there’s no realistic possibility of anyone going higher or lower — you see nasty Karen-ish behavior. From everyone, everywhere, always. The Z Man did a piece the other day on Sayre’s Law, which anyone who has ever dealt with eggheads instinctively understands: “The fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small”. If you read the bios of the real lunatics — the insane-by-egghead-standards, I’m talking — you almost always see that they’re tenured at some second rate academy. They’re topped out, and they know it. Hang around the faculty lounge long enough, and you learn to spot it in their eyes — that precise moment when they realize that Harvard won’t be calling, so they’re stuck here at Flyover State. They can’t move up, and thanks to tenure there’s no realistic (in their minds) possibility of falling down. The only drama left, then, is interpersonal drama, which is why they’re such vicious, obnoxious bitches to everyone, everywhere, always.
It works outside the academy too, of course. The two main CRT loons, Robin De Angelo and that Ibram X. Kendi guy, are maxed out and they know it. They weep, because they’ve seen they have no more worlds to conquer. Ever-escalating lunacy is the only emotional escape hatch they have left. You saw the same deal with “the workers” under Communism. They’re stuck there, forever, and they know it. They can’t move up — wrong class background, comrade, plus you lack Party connections — but they can’t really move down, either, if for no other reason than the KGB, vast as it is, can’t bother with every moribund tractor factory in Krasnoyarsk. Can’t move up, can’t move down, so you drink yourself into oblivion and spend your still-conscious hours in petty backbiting.
Severian, “Mailbag Etc.”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-06.
November 5, 2024
QotD: “If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others”
I’m a biological essentialist about sex — your sex is a given of your chromosomes and organs, and I will never actually believe that you can invert it by choice.
I am, however, conditionally willing not to challenge your weird Gnostic beliefs on this point, and to treat you as the sex you “identify” as anyway. Here are the conditions:
1. You must be good at passing. If you can’t present a convincing pretense, it’s neither in my interest nor anyone else’s to help you prop up an unconvincing one.
2. You must be harmless. Most obviously, you must not use your “identification” to prey on others, whether directly by violence or by using the physical advantage of your sex to overwhelm them in sports, or in any other way. And if you’re told you’re unwelcome in a bathroom or changing room, it’s on you to not impose.
3. You must be modest. Your desire to role-play as M or F does not entitle you to violate prevailing norms about where, and to whom, you expose your genitals. If you aren’t polite enough to refrain from this, I won’t be even a bit polite to you.
4. Children are off-limits. The moment you engage in behavior that seems intended to confuse or indoctrinate them, you enter the category of “predator” and stay there. My response to sexual predation on children only begins with rejection and rudeness.
5. If you try to use the force of law to gain what equal and voluntary negotiation with individuals won’t give you, you also enter the category of “predator” and stay there.
The meta-rule is: the more your behavior imposes costs on others, the less polite and accepting I will be. If you want me to treat you nicely, play nice with others.
Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-07-28.
November 4, 2024
QotD: Early raids on, and sieges of, fortified cities
In contrast, the emergence of states focused on territorial control create a different set of strategic objectives which lead towards the siege as the offensive method of choice over the raid. States, with their need to control and administer territory (and the desire to get control of that territory with its farming population intact so that they can be forced to farm that land and then have their agricultural surplus extracted as taxes), aim to gain control of areas of agricultural production, in order to extract resources from them (both to enrich the elite and core of the state, but also to fund further military activity).
Thus, the goal in besieging a fortified settlement (be that, as would be likely in this early period, a fortified town or as later a castle) is generally to get control of the administrative center. Most of the economic activity prior to the industrial revolution is not in the city; rather the city’s value is that it is an economic and administrative hub. Controlling the city allows a state to control and extract from the countryside around the city, which is the real prize. Control here thus means setting up a stable civilian administration within the city which can in turn extract resources from the countryside; this may or may not require a permanent garrison of some sort, but it almost always requires the complete collapse of organized resistance in the city. Needless to say, setting up a stable civilian administration is not something one generally does by surprise, and so the siege has to aim for more durable control over the settlement. It also requires fairly complete control; if you control most of the town but, say, a group of defenders are still holding out in a citadel somewhere, that is going to make it very difficult to set up a stable administration which can extract resources.
Fortunately for potential defenders, a fortification system which can withstand a siege is almost always going to be sufficient to prevent a raid as well (because if you can’t beat it with months of preparatory work, you are certainly unlikely to be able to quickly and silently overcome it in just a few night hours except under extremely favorable conditions), though detection and observation are also very important in sieges. Nevertheless, we will actually see at various points fortification systems emerge from systems designed more to prevent the raid (or similar “surprise” assaults) rather than the siege (which is almost never delivered by surprise), so keeping both potential attacking methods in mind – the pounce-and-flee raid and the assault-and-stay siege – is going to be important.
As we are going to see, even fairly basic fortifications are going to mean that a siege attacker must either bring a large army to the target, or plan to stay at the target for a long time, or both. In a real sense, until very recently, this is what “conventional” agrarian armies were: siege delivery mechanisms. Operations in this context were mostly about resolving the difficult questions of how to get the siege (by which I mean the army that can execute the siege) to the fortified settlement (and administrative center) being targeted. Because siege-capable armies are either big or intend to stick around (or both), surprise is out of the window for these kinds of assaults, which in turn raises the possibility of being forced into a battle, either on the approach to the target or once you have laid siege to it.
It is that fact which then leads to all of the many considerations for how to win a battle, some of which we have discussed elsewhere. I do not want to get drawn off into the question of winning battles, but I do want to note here that the battle is, in this equation, a “second order” concern: merely an event which enables (or prohibits) a siege. As we’ll see, sieges are quite unpleasant things, so if a defender can not have a siege by virtue of a battle, it almost always makes sense to try that (there are some exceptions, but as a rule one does not submit to a siege if there are other choices), but the key thing here is that battles are fundamentally secondary in importance to the siege: the goal of the battle is merely to enable or prevent the siege. The siege, and the capture or non-capture of the town (with its role as an administrative center for the agricultural hinterland around it) is what matters.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-29.
November 3, 2024
QotD: Minutemen
Granted, there’s not necessarily much overlap between the two groups. But one has supplanted the other in the mass media, the public imagination, and the affection of the right-wing radio hosts — and so help me, I think I miss the days when I felt a certain kinship with the crazies.
Jesse Walker, “More ’90s Nostalgia”, Hit and Run, 2005-07-28.
November 2, 2024
QotD: UBI discourages low-income workers
Earlier this month, a cross-border team of North American economists published the results of a landmark study, probably the best and most careful yet done, of how low-income workers respond to an unconditional guaranteed income. Not so long ago this would have been a plus-sized news item in narcissistic Canada, for the lead author of the study is a rising economics star at the University of Toronto, Eva Vivalt. The economists, working through non-profit groups, recruited 3,000 people below a certain income cutoff in the suburbs of Dallas and Chicago. A thousand of these, chosen at random, were given a thousand dollars a month for three years. The rest were assigned to a control group that got just $50 a month, plus small extra amounts to encourage them to stay with the study and fill in questionnaires.
That randomization is an important source of credibility, and the study has several other impressive methodological bona fides. If you have an envelope to scribble on the back of, you can see that the payments alone were beyond the wildest dreams of most social science: most of the money was provided by the AI billionaire Sam Altman. But the study also had help from state governments, who agreed to forgo welfare clawbacks from the participants to make sure the observed effects weren’t obscured by local circumstances. Participant households were also screened carefully to make sure nobody in them was already receiving disability insurance. (Free money doesn’t discourage work among people who can’t work — or who absolutely won’t.) And the study combined questionnaire data with both smartphone tracking and state administrative records, yielding an unusually strong ability to answer difficult behavioural questions.
The big picture shows that the free cash — a “universal basic income” (UBI) for a small group of individuals — discouraged paying work, even though everybody in the study was starting out poor. Labour market participation among the recipients fell by two percentage points, even though the study period was limited to three years, and the earned incomes of those getting the cheques declined by $1,500 a year on average. There is no indication that the cash recipients used their augmented bargaining power to find better jobs, and no indication of “significant effects on investments in human capital”, i.e., training and education. The largest change in time use in the experiment group was — wait for it! — “time spent on leisure”.
Colby Cosh, “Universal basic income is a recipe for fiscal suicide (for so many reasons)”, National Post, 2024-07-30.
November 1, 2024
QotD: J.D. Vance, a Führer for the rest of us
Expert: JD Vance’s selection as Trump’s running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism
Quoted for the lulz. Ol’ JD, a Führer for the rest of us.
But since we’re here … a fascinating footnote in Jaynes informs us that schizophrenics, who Jaynes thinks might be throwbacks to the “bicameral mind”, have no problem with “diffused identity” or whatever the term was. Jaynes hypothesizes that ancient, preconscious peoples didn’t see images of their gods in cult objects; they saw the actual, physical gods. We unicameral people can’t wrap our heads around it, since there are lots of statues and they can’t ALL be god — even if we grant that the biggest statue in the best temple can be god, or if we allow that the black meteorite or whatever is really god to them, still, god can’t be diffused like that: Either your statue is god or mine is; or neither of them are, but they can’t both be.
Schizophrenics, at least according to Jaynes, would be down with that. He notes that you can put two guys who think they’re Napoleon in the same padded cell, and you don’t get a schizo bum fight, you get complete agreement: They’re both Napoleon, somehow. The law of the excluded middle, personal identity version, simply doesn’t apply.
And since my hypothesis is that smartphones are re-decameralizing (it’s a word) us at Ludicrous Speed, well … here you go. Donald Trump is Hitler, but J.D. Vance is somehow also Hitler. It’s not like the real, historical Hitler lacked for shitty, evil underlings — J.D could easily be Heinrich Himmler or somebody. But no, he’s gotta be Hitler, the same way Trump has to be Hitler, and if that means they’re somehow both Hitler, well … there it is. Bicamerality for the win.
Severian, “Catching Up With the Crazies”, Founding Questions, 2024-07-29.
October 31, 2024
QotD: How to increase your Barbarism Quotient (BQ)
The digital barbarians have for now made themselves illegible to the hyper-surveillance, algorithmic discipline, and intrusive analytics that loom like the hundred-eyed Argos over all online interactions. In fact, insofar as a key technique of the cyber-panopticon is the construction of predictive models of user behavior, to be unpredictable is an important component of being ungovernable. The other option is to hide.
Hiding is a strategy that some people attempt offline as well, either by building a compound in the woods or by adopting protective coloration and hiding in plain sight. But as the bots grow ever more omniscient, hiding gets more expensive and less effective. Another classic barbarian-inspired strategy is to maximize mobility, and indeed contemporary economic and technological conditions seem ripe for a renaissance of nomadism. But the trouble with always being ready to pack your bags is it makes it hard for anybody to count on you.1 Is there anything that can be done for those of us who want to live marginally more barbarically, but still sip lattes and put down roots? Yes, because the ultimate lesson of Scott’s book is that barbarism is really more of a state of mind that can be practiced anywhere. Three brief examples of ways to increase your Barbarism Quotient (BQ), suitable for the discerning urban barbarian:
- Keep your identity small. Paul Graham once said this, but we can go much further. An expansive identity implies its contrapositive: a similarly expansive set of ideas, behaviors, and lifestyles which we cannot adopt without incurring psychic damage. This limits our space for action, and makes us easier for the machines to predict and for the man to control. Better far to figure out what you really care about, figure out what the real red lines are, and convert everything else from a non-negotiable into a piece of the optimization frontier. The ethnic and cultural mutability of barbarous peoples is an example of this kind of suppleness, but there are other sorts of mutability that can be useful too.
- The great Boston T. Party once declared: “it’s better to have $1,000 of ammunition in your garage than $1,000 in your bank account; but it’s even better to have only $100 of ammunition in your garage and $900 of practice.” A lot of would-be modern barbarians daydream about burying gold bars in the ground or sewing them into the lining of their clothes (like the barbarians of yore hiding their tubers in the ground), but Mr. Party’s insight generalizes well here. Physical gold is admittedly a less legible form of wealth than T-bills or CBDC; but skills, knowledge, and relationships are even harder to seize than bullion, and even easier to transport across borders. The wise barbarian judiciously transmutes a fixed percentage of his financial capital into human capital. Nothing improves your ultimate BATNA like having friends or being useful.
- Barbarians have a deserved reputation for not taking too kindly to strangers, but this xenophobia and clannishness is tactical. For the hill dweller, most strangers are in one way or another the representatives of hostile alien entities that are out to conscript, tax, and subjugate. The situation for we cosmopolitan, urban, dare I say urbane barbarians is a little bit different. We’ve already reached an accommodation with centralized despotic states, having found the advantages they offer to be worth the tradeoffs. Be that as it may, states have a tendency to try to unilaterally change the terms of the deal. To protect ourselves from this form of encroachment, the correct attitude is not xenophobia, but rather paranoia. The toolkit of modern states is to direct all our enthusiasm towards the Current Thing whilst deadening our senses towards everything else. “We had no idea it could get this bad” is a recurring theme in testimonies given by survivors of oppression and genocide, to which a family culture of “they really are out to get us” is a salutary corrective. Every pinprick ought to raise an alarm, because it could be the prick that precedes the onset of anesthesia. Finally, the cultured barbarian remembers that states are not the only hostile, alien entities waiting for us in the night with drooling jaws.
I could come up with a dozen more such practices, inspired by the hill people Scott documents, and ready for incorporation into the family culture you’re creating. But barbarism is a state of mind, and reflecting on how to keep yourself distinct and aloof from the fat, decadent agriculturalists is part of it. So read this book, and then begin carving out your cultural mountain fastness or your ideological swamp hideout. The barbarians are within the gates, they live among us, and we welcome you to join our ranks.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-16.
1. Unless, that is, you all move together. If somebody wants to pitch me on peripatetic cyber-gypsy life, I am all ears.
