The first thing you learn on even the most cursory look at any secret police is: they aren’t. Secret, that is. Otherwise they wouldn’t be effective. Oh, they’d probably be a lot better at gathering certain kinds of intel, but intelligence gathering is really only their secondary function. Their primary function, of course, is intimidation. That’s why every Hans and Franz on the street in Nazi Germany could tell you exactly where the nearest Gestapo office was.
(The Romanian Securitate had public intimidation down to an art form. They’d follow random guys around using big, obvious details, the better to prove to the proletariat that everyone was suspect. It is to them, not Mafia dons or aspiring rappers, that we owe the now-standard Eurotrash track suit look).
Secret police goons suffer from two serious structural problems, though, that not even the guys in Stove’s book [The Unsleeping Eye] really ever solved. The first is the obvious one, that guys who know where the bodies are buried are always at risk of using that knowledge. Napoleon’s guy Joseph Fourche, and FDR’s main man J. Edgar, lived out their natural lives (as did Elizabeth’s spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham), but of them, only Fourche lived in anything approaching what we would call an ideologized society, and that was small beer.
The rest of those guys died in harness, because of course they did. Adolf Hitler was an especially stupid dictator, and Heinrich Himmler an especially servile little freak, but I have no doubt that if the Reich had gone on much longer [Himmler] would’ve shanked [Hitler]. If Heydrich hadn’t gotten perforated in Prague, he no doubt would’ve gone after [Himmler] even sooner. Lenin and especially Stalin burned through secret police chiefs on the regular, because they pretty much had to.
I don’t know about the goons in the Chinese etc. secret police, but I’d be shocked to find anyone with more than a few years’ tenure, because purges are simply a way of life in totally ideologized societies. For every Khrushchev who manages to hang on – n.b. he was a Red Army commissar during the war, i.e. a not-so-secret police goon — there are fifty guys who live fast and die hard, because that’s just how totalitarians rule.
The stoyaknik, of course, is well served to consider the current scene as if he were watching the Politburo of an exceptionally deluded Commie regime, one made up almost entirely of ruthless yet clueless retards … who still believe, for the most part, in Communism.
That was always the problem for Kremlinologists in evaluating the USSR — whatever the Boss of the moment decided would, of course, immediately be retconned into the Scriptures by the Academicians, but what did the Big Guy himself think about it? That constrained his choices. Stalin and Khrushchev were true Communists, there’s no question about that, but they came up in the school of the hardest possible knocks — if they needed to do something directly contrary to Leninism in order to hang on to power, then Comrade Ilych can suck it.
For anything short of mortal, though, they’d more often than not behave as stereotypical Commies, so the first thing any Kremlinologist had to do was determine the seriousness of the situation from the Politburo’s perspective. Not an easy task, as you might imagine, and what made it worse was: as the USSR gained stability and Communism matured, the old school hardasses all died off and were replaced by True Believers. Mikhail Gorbachev, for instance, didn’t start making his mark until after Stalin’s death, and he wasn’t a real up-and-comer until after Khrushchev — that is, he started rising through the ranks only after the hard boys were gone.
Thus, while Khrushchev was a true Commie, he still had some hard reality to constrain him. Gorby didn’t. He really believed all that Marxist-Leninist horseshit about democracy and etc.; he was far more doctrinaire than the earlier generation could possibly be. Thus Kremlinologists were forever baffled when he did stupid things that made no sense from the Realpolitik perspective, but were perfectly in keeping with the Scriptures. They thought Perestroika was some big 4D chess feint, for instance, instead of just a soft boy doing something noodle-headed.
Severian, “Book Review: The Unsleeping Eye by R.J. Stove”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-09.
November 12, 2022
QotD: The short careers of secret police chiefs
November 11, 2022
QotD: WW1 was the first war where the artillery was destructive enough to change the landscape
This kind of terrain – with so much of the ground-cover blasted away – would turn into mud-soaked pits the moment it rained – particularly where water collected in the shell-holes.
That also explains why these post-battle scenes often lack any kind of local terrain features. Powerful explosive shells could annihilate terrain features like forests, roads, hedgerows, fences, fields – even hills and entire villages – with extended bombardments. And without any ground-cover left, almost any rain at all will then reduce the local terrain into a mud-soaked bog, especially if the local soil drains poorly (as it did so famously in Flanders).
The problem with depicting medieval, or even early modern battlefields this way is, of course, that these armies do not possess any weapons which can deliver this kind of destruction. Even as late as the American Civil War, field artillery – even massed field artillery – was simply not that powerful (although some heavy naval and siege guns were beginning to come close). Post-battle photography of Gettysburg – even in the approaches to Cemetery Ridge and around the Wheat Field – areas of fierce fighting – shows not only trees and ground-cover, but even fences and buildings largely intact.
Field artillery firing solid shot from 6 to 20lbs to is simply not strong enough to tear apart the terrain in the way that we often see in popular depictions of historical or fantasy battlefields; as pictured above, the guns doing that in WWI were often firing 1,000+ pound shells, 100 times the weight of shot of a normal ACW cannon (lighter artillery, like the famed French 75 (Matériel de 75mm Mle 1897) still fired lighter shells – the French 75 fired a c. 12lbs shell – but still had far more explosive power due to improvements in explosives; that said, the French 75, a capable field gun, was famously too light for ideal use in the trenches). Massed musketry won’t do it either and so massed arrow or crossbow fire, catapults or whatever else certainly won’t.
(This, as a side note, may go some distance to explaining why First World War commanders were so unprepared for the challenges the new terrain they were creating in turn inflicted on them. Doctrine said that the solution to well-entrenched infantry was to mass artillery against them – blast them out of position. It had never been the case before that such massed artillery would render the ground itself impassible, because the artillery had never before been powerful enough to do so.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collection: The Battlefield After the Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-18.
November 10, 2022
QotD: Sarah’s rules of art
And why was this a bad idea, Sarah?
Mostly because I’m married to a mathematician. There is a certain … ah … compulsiveness that comes with it. If there’s something that’s numbered and has a route, we OF COURSE have to follow the route and see every single statue, even if that’s not what we set out to do.
This made things very interesting, since the wedding parties were blocking some of the statues, and others we could see from a distance were the sort of modern art that your kids could do with a backyard forge, meaning the actual level of artistry was about the level of a kindergartner, only they used metal instead of playdough.
This leads us to Sarah’s first rule of art: if people viewing it have trouble telling it from accidental formations, it’s probably not art.
The second corollary of this is: if you need an elaborate card pointing out to you that it’s art, it’s probably not art.
The third would be that if you need a placard explaining to you how daring and courageous this art is, and how it defied some tyrannical regime at great peril to the artist’s life, it’s not only not art, you’re in the presence of a self-aggrandizing conman.
Sarah Hoyt, “Art and Revolution”, According to Hoyt, 2019-05-31.
November 9, 2022
QotD: Was Temujin (aka Genghis Khan/Chinggis Khan) a “great man”?
What had been missing for all that time was Temujin. To buy into the strongest form of “cliodynamics” is to assume that the Steppe always would have produced a Temujin (in part because his impact is so massive that a “general law” of history which cannot predict an event of such titanic import is not actually a functional “general law”). And to be fair, it had produced nearly Temujins before: Attila, Seljuk, etc. But “nearly” here isn’t good enough because so many of the impacts of Chinggis Khan depend on the completeness of his conquests, on a single state interested in trade controlling the entire Eurasian Steppe without meaningful exception. The difference between Temujin and almost-Temujin (which is just basically “Jamukha”) is history-shatteringly tremendous, given that both gunpowder and the Black Death seem to have moved west on the roads that Chinggis opened and the subsequent closure of those routes after his empire fragmented seem to have been a major impetus towards European seaborne expansion.
Moreover, it is not at all clear that, absent Temujin in that particular moment – keeping in mind that Temujin hadn’t appeared in any other moment – that there would have inevitably risen a different Temujin sometime later. After all, for two millennia the steppe had not produced a Temujin and by 1158, the technological window for it to do so was already beginning to close as humans in the agrarian parts of the world (read: China) had already begun harnessing chemical energy in ways that would eventually come to rob the nomad of much of his strength. If Temujin dies as a boy – as he very well might have! – it is not at all clear he’d be replaced before that window closed; his most obvious near peer was Jamukha, but here personalities matter: Jamukha was committed to the old Mongol social hierarchy (this was part of why he and Temujin fell out) and was so unwilling to do the very things that made Chinggis Khan’s great success possible (obliterating clan distinctions and promoting based on merit rather than family pedigree). Jamukha could have been another Seljuk, but he could not have been another Chinggis Khan and in this case that would make all of the difference.
To get briefly into a bit of historical theory, Chinggis is an individual whose actions in life fundamentally altered many of what the “Annales School” of history would call the structures and mentalités of his (and subsequent) times. The Annales school likes to view history through a long duration lens (longue durée) and focus on big shaping structures like climate, geography, culture and so on. The difference between this and cliodynamics is that Annales thinkers propose to describe rather than predict, so it is not fatal to their method if there are occasional, sudden, unpredictable alterations to those underlying structures – indeed those are the moments which are most interesting. But it is fatal to a cliodynamics perspective, which does aim for prediction since “our prediction is absolutely right unless it is completely wrong” hardly inspires confidence and a “general law” of anything is only a “general law” in that it is generally applicable not merely to the past but also to the future.
In short, Chinggis Khan wasn’t a commodity; he couldn’t be replaced by any other Mongol warrior. And figures like that abound through history (for Roman history, it matters greatly for instance that Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar and Octavian had very different personalities when they found themselves in a position to dominate the Republic with military force). Moreover, the figures like that who we think of, generally capital-g “Great Men”, are hardly the only such individuals like that. They’re only the ones we can see. What of, for instance, the old Argive mother – her name lost to history – who killed Pyrrhus of Epirus, considered the greatest general of his generation, with a lucky throw of a roofing tile, both ending his career but also setting in motion a chain of events where the power vacuum left by Epirus would be filled by Carthage and Rome in a way that would bring those former allies (allied against Pyrrhus, in fact) into a shattering conflict which would then pave the way for Roman dominance in the Mediterranean? History must be full of innumerable such figures whose actions created and closed off courses of events in ways we can never know; how do we know that there wasn’t some would-have-been Temujin on the steppe in 100AD but who was killed in some minor dispute so very minor it leaves literally no evidence behind?
(The fancy way of putting the influence of all of those factors, both the big structural ones and the little, subject-to-chance ones, is to say “history is contingent” – that is, the outcomes are not inevitable but are subject to many forces large and small, many of which the lack of evidence render historically invisible.)
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: October 15, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-15.
November 8, 2022
QotD: Marx was right about “commodification”
Marx was right about three critical things: Commodification, alienation, and class consciousness (again, bearing in mind that “right” in this context means “correct diagnosis”, not “correct in every particular”).
If it helps, you can swap in financialization for commodification. Briefly, it’s the ever-accelerating phenomenon we’ve all observed: burning through social capital in order to make a buck. Things that should not be subject to market forces are not only turned into commodities, but soon become the only commodities, or the only ones that matter.
Consider pretty much everything about the “laptop class”. E.g. the laptop itself. It commodifies time. Now you have the “ability” to work even when you shouldn’t. It is now virtually impossible to leave work at the office. For those of us who are independent contractors, this is a nice bonus — we can invoice every minute of our time, which means we can work as much (or as little) as we want to. For everyone else, though …
See what I mean? It’s simply understood that you’re never off the clock. Throw in the rest of the paraphernalia of laptop-class work — smartphone, social media, etc. — and nobody thinks twice about sending you stuff on a Saturday, a holiday, at your kids’ dance recital, at a funeral, whatever. People still have the residual social habit to say “Oh, gosh, I’m sorry for your loss” when you explain that you couldn’t get to that email because you were at your Mom’s funeral … but not for long, because you can already hear it in their voices: “Yeah yeah, sucks to be you, now will you please get me that TPS report!”
Same way with social media. You will be fired for expressing certain kinds of opinions, even on your “private” accounts, because the assumption is that there is no privacy. You don’t own you. You are a wholly-owned subsidiary of GloboPedo, and while we’re tempted to get outraged at the kinds of opinions for which you will get fired, that’s why those old Leftists — the ones we’re increasingly coming to resemble — would say “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The kind of opinion is epiphenomenal; it’s the principle that matters, because you are not a commodity.
Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.
November 7, 2022
QotD: The rise of architectural modernism
Many ingenious lovely things are gone
That seemed sheer miracle to the multitude.Professor Curl’s book is particularly strong on the historiographical lies peddled by the apologists for modernism, and on the intellectual weakness of the arguments for the necessity of modernism. For example, architectural historians and theoreticians such as Sigfried Giedion, Arthur Korn, and Nikolaus Pevsner claimed to see in modernism the logical continuation of the European architectural tradition, and Pevsner even recruited such figures as William Morris and C.F.A. Voysey as progenitors of the movement. Pevsner was so enamored of Gropius and the Modernists that he wanted to claim a noble descent for them, as humble but ambitious people were once inclined to find a distant aristocratic forebear. Yet Voysey could hardly have been more hostile to the movement that co-opted him. The Modern Movement, he said,
was pitifully full of such faults as proportions that were vulgarly aggressive, mountebank eccentricities in detail, and windows built lying down on their sides. … This was false originality, the true originality having been for all time the spiritual something given to the development of traditional forms by the individual artist.
Pevsner (to whom, incidentally, Curl pays tribute for his past generosity to young scholars, including himself), with all the academic and moral prestige and authority that attached to his name, was able to incorporate Voysey — unable to speak for himself or protest after his death — into the direct ancestry of modernism, even though the merest glance at his work, or at that of William Morris, should have been sufficient to warn anyone that Pevsner’s historiography made a bed of Procrustes seem positively made to measure.
Theodore Dalrymple, “Crimes in Concrete”, First Things, 2019-06.
November 6, 2022
QotD: Thatcher and the Falklands
And, even when Mrs Thatcher won her victory, the civilizational cringe of the west was so strong that all the experts immediately urged her to throw it away and reward the Argentine junta for its aggression. “We were prepared to negotiate before” she responded, “but not now. We have lost a lot of blood, and it’s the best blood.” Or as a British sergeant said of the Falklands: “If they’re worth fighting for, then they must be worth keeping.”
Mrs Thatcher thought Britain was worth fighting for, at a time when everyone else assumed decline was inevitable. Some years ago, I found myself standing next to her at dusk in the window of a country house in England’s East Midlands, not far from where she grew up. We stared through the lead diamond mullions at a perfect scene of ancient rural tranquility — lawns, the “ha-ha” (an English horticultural innovation), and the fields and hedgerows beyond, looking much as it would have done half a millennium earlier. Mrs T asked me about my corner of New Hampshire (90 per cent wooded and semi-wilderness) and then said that what she loved about the English countryside was that man had improved on nature: “England’s green and pleasant land” looked better because the English had been there. For anyone with a sense of history’s sweep, the strike-ridden socialist basket case of the British Seventies was not an economic downturn but a stain on national honor.
A generation on, the Thatcher era seems more and more like a magnificent but temporary interlude in a great nation’s bizarre, remorseless self-dissolution. She was right and they were wrong, and because of that they will never forgive her. “I have been waiting for that witch to die for 30 years,” said Julian Styles, 58, who was laid off from his factory job in 1984, when he was 29. “Tonight is party time. I am drinking one drink for every year I’ve been out of work.” And when they call last orders and the final chorus of “Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” dies away, who then will he blame?
During the Falklands War, the Prime Minister quoted Shakespeare, from the closing words of King John:
And we shall shock them: naught shall make us rue,
If England to itself do rest but true.For eleven tumultuous years, Margaret Thatcher did shock them. But the deep corrosion of a nation is hard to reverse: England to itself rests anything but true.
Mark Steyn, “The Uncowardly Lioness”, SteynOnline.com, 2019-05-05.
November 5, 2022
QotD: The use of chemical weapons after WW2
Both Cold War superpowers stockpiled chemical weapons, but seem to have retained considerable ambivalence about their use. In the United States, chemical weapons seem to have been primarily viewed not as part of tactical doctrine, but as a smaller step on a nuclear deterrence ladder (the idea being that the ability to retaliate in smaller but still dramatic steps to deter more dramatic escalations; the idea of an “escalation ladder” belongs to Herman Kahn); chemical weapons weren’t a tactical option but baby-steps on the road to tactical and then strategic nuclear devices (as an aside, I find the idea that “tactical” WMDs – nuclear or chemical – could somehow be used without triggering escalation to strategic use deeply misguided). At the same time, there was quite a bit of active research for a weapon-system that had an uncertain place in the doctrine – an effort to find a use for a weapon-system the United States already had, which never quite seems to have succeeded. The ambivalence seems to have been resolved decisively in 1969 when Nixon simply took chemical weapons off of the table with an open “no first use” policy.
Looking at Soviet doctrine is harder (both because I don’t read Russian and also, quite frankly because the current epidemic makes it hard for me to get German and English language resources on the topic) The USSR was more strongly interested in chemical weapons throughout the Cold War than the United States (note that while the linked article presents US intelligence on Soviet doctrine as uncomplicated, the actual intelligence was ambivalent – with the CIA and Army intelligence generally downgrading expectations of chemical use by the USSR, especially by the 1980s). The USSR does seem to have doctrine imagine their use at the tactical and operational level (specifically as stop-gap measures for when tactical nuclear weapons weren’t available – you’d use chemical weapons on targets when you ran out of tactical nuclear weapons), but then, that had been true in WWII but when push came to shove, the chemical munitions weren’t used. The Soviets appear to have used chemical weapons as a terror weapon in Afghanistan, but that was hardly a use against a peer modern system force. But it seems that, as the Cold War wound down, planners in the USSR came around to the same basic idea as American thinkers, with the role of chemical weapons – even as more and more effective chemicals were developed – being progressively downgraded before the program was abandoned altogether.
This certainly wasn’t because the USSR of the 1980s thought that a confrontation with NATO was less likely – the Able Archer exercise in 1983 could be argued to represent the absolute peak of Cold War tensions, rivaled only by the Cuban Missile Crisis. So this steady move away from chemical warfare wasn’t out of pacifism or utopianism; it stands to reason that it was instead motivated by a calculation as to the (limited) effectiveness of such weapons.
And I think it is worth noting that this sort of cycle – an effort to find a use for an existing weapon – is fairly common in modern military development. You can see similar efforts in the development of tactical nuclear weapons: developmental dead-ends like Davy Crockett or nuclear artillery. But the conclusion that was reached was not “chemical weapons are morally terrible” but rather “chemical weapons offer no real advantage”. In essence, the two big powers of the Cold War (and, as a side note, also the lesser components of the Warsaw Pact and NATO) spent the whole Cold War looking for an effective way to use chemical weapons against each other, and seem to have – by the end – concluded on the balance that there wasn’t one. Either conventional weapons get the job done, or you escalate to nuclear systems.
(Israel, as an aside, seems to have gone through this process in microcosm. Threatened by neighbors with active chemical weapons programs, the Israelis seem to have developed their own, but have never found a battlefield use for them, despite having been in no less than three conventional, existential wars (meaning the very existence of the state was threatened – the sort of war where moral qualms mean relatively little) since 1948.)
And I want to stress this point: it isn’t that chemical munitions do nothing, but rather they are less effective than an equivalent amount of conventional, high explosive munitions (or, at levels of extreme escalation, tactical and strategic nuclear weapons). This isn’t a value question, but a value-against-replacement question – why maintain, issue, store, and shoot expensive chemical munitions if cheap, easier to store, easier to manufacture high explosive munitions are both more obtainable and also better? When you add the geopolitical and morale impact on top of that – you sacrifice diplomatic capital using such weapons and potentially demoralize your own soldiers, who don’t want to see themselves as delivering inhumane weapons – it’s pretty clear why they wouldn’t bother. Nevertheless, the moral calculus isn’t the dominant factor: battlefield efficacy – or the relative lack thereof – is.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-20.
November 4, 2022
QotD: History while it’s happening
Well, future historian, since I know how much that sucks, I’ll spare you. If you’re plowing through my papers (you’re welcome for all the Slave Leia pictures, by the way) and you get to the “Impeachment of Donald Trump” section, you’ll have something. Maybe nothing interesting, or particularly coherent, but at least it’s something. Professional courtesy.
If nothing else, this impeachment fiasco confirms that we’re ruled by fools. No earth-shattering insight, that, I realize, but there it is. Really it’s just math — since most people in all times and places have been fools, it stands to reason that nearly every human who has ever lived has had a large part of his fate decided by an idiot. This is true even of those blessed to have seen good leadership in action, as even the best men are fools about lots of things. Up to and including the things that make their reputations. George Washington, for instance, was indisputably a great leader, but a terrible general — with Cornwallis trapped on the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia, he had to be talked out of moving the Continental Army north, to reconquer New York. He was one of history’s great captains, but I bet I could take him in a game of Risk.
Severian, “Impeachment Thoughts”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-12-19.
November 3, 2022
QotD: Why reading the news became less informative and more didactic
Gone is the assumption that readers are intelligent people who can draw their own conclusions from a compelling presentation of the facts. Journalists now seem to live in fear that their readers won’t think correctly. Take this sentence from an interesting article on the evolution of American Sign Language: “For a portion of the 20th century, many schools for the deaf were more inclined to try to teach their students spoken English, rather than ASL, based on harmful beliefs that signing was inferior to spoken language.” (Emphasis added.)
If you read the article, you are highly unlikely to come to the conclusion that signing is anything less than a full-blown language, not inferior to spoken English. But the article never gives evidence that this incorrect 20th-century belief was harmful. It doesn’t discuss the pluses and minuses of signing, or why one belief was succeeded by another. That’s a different story. In the context of this story, the adjective is unnecessary, distracting, and insulting to the reader’s intelligence.
Virginia Postrel, “Shrinkflation, Disqualiflation, and Depression and more”, Virginia’s Newsletter, 2022-07-28.
November 2, 2022
QotD: Being “the world’s policeman”
The United States took on the mantle of world’s policeman in the post-Second World War world. They have spent much of the last 60 years trying to keep the peace, and, interestingly, to maintain the balance of power. (Do not be fooled by the concept of the overwhelming superpower. Britain was a lot closer to being able to take on the rest of the world in the 19th century, when it really could defeat every other navy in the world combined; than the US is now, where it could perhaps face Iran, Russia and India simultaneously, as long as the European Union is friendly. Whoops, forgot China, the Balkans, Palestine, Syria, North Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and other little blips on the US horizon. Well let’s be honest, no one has ever been able to take on more than a few of the other powers simultaneously. NO one.)
For their troubles, they are usually pilloried by those all about them, particularly by up and coming powers who want their “place in the sun” – the Soviet Union and China being the stand-out examples. (Though there is a lot of whinging from old allies like France). For the last forty years (since Vietnam, and certainly since Gulf War One), there have been signs that the US voter is having serious second thoughts about the whole concept.
Britain was quite reluctant to take over later imperial dependencies, particularly leftover states of defeated Empires like Turkey, such as Iraq and Palestine: but also parts of Africa and Asia “of interest to no bugger”. They were never part of the British ideal of commercial empire, and were almost impossible to govern. They were abandoned as soon as possible.
The United States is currently experiencing the joys of taking over, or being responsible for unwanted bits of empire. Strangely the names Iraq and Palestine are occurring on that list, as well as Afghanistan and possibly other commitments to come. (The US has interfered in these areas far longer than Britain had before she was stuck with them). They cannot be considered part of a logical geopolitical empire (not even for oil conspiracy nuts), and will be abandoned as soon as possible.
The British voter responded to the world wars by wanting out of empire. Now. Some of the states thus “released” were well-developed societies with decent infrastructure and good literacy and rule of law concepts. India, Malta, Ceylon, Bermuda and Singapore spring to mind. Others were abandoned prematurely: without literacy, rule of law, good infrastructure, a developed civil service, practice of voting, or any of the other minor necessities for establishing a democratic state. See any list of African dictatorships.
The US voter is responding to current events by wanting out of the Middle East ASAP. They are intent on abandoning states to “democracy”, regardless of a lack of literacy, rule of law, good infrastructure, a developed civil service, practice of voting, or any of the other minor necessities for establishing a democratic state. Whoops.
Britain suffered from an immense artificial economic high after the Napoleonic war. This left the British economy extremely artificially inflated for eighty years, and still well above its realistic weight in the world for another fifty (and only really brought back to the field by the immense economic losses of two world wars). In the last twenty years Britain has held a more realistic place in the world economy for its population and industrial level (though still relatively inflated by an immense backlog of prestige and sometimes reluctant respect.).
The US suffered from an immense artificial economic high after WWII. This left the US economy artificially inflated for the rest of the century, and still well above its realistic weight in the world to the present. … Sometime in the next few decades, the US will probably return to a more realistic place in the world economy for its population and industrial level. (Minor variables like World War III may make this projection uncertain as to actual timing, but it will happen: simply because the US will not be able to largely sit out most of the next world wars and profiteer from everyone else’s ruin the way she could in the last two).
Nigel Davies, “The Empires of Britain and the United States – Toying with Historical Analogy”, rethinking history, 2009-01-10.
November 1, 2022
QotD: Spartan strategy during the Persian wars
The hammer Sparta has, of course, is hoplite battle. Sparta seeks to solve almost all of its issues by applying a hoplite phalanx to the problem, regardless of if the problem can be solved by a hoplite phalanx. Spartan strategic thinking is thus marred by both a failure to consider military solutions that did not consist of traditional hoplite battles, as well as an inability to consider or execute non-military solutions at all.
We can see the former weakness in Spartan planning in the Persian Wars. Spartan planning is both direct and unrealistic: find a choke-point, fortify it and hold it indefinately with a hoplite army. Attempted at Thermopylae this plan fails; the Battle of Thermopylae is often represented in popular culture as an intentional delaying action, but it was nothing of the sort – Herodotus is clear that this was supposed to be the decisive land engagement (Hdt. 7.175; Cf. Diodorus 11.4.1-5). The Spartans then attempt to recreate this plan at the Isthmus of Corinth and have to be rescued from their strategic stupidity by the Athenians, who threaten to leave the alliance if the plan isn’t abandoned (Hdt. 8.49-62). A blockade at the Isthmus would be easy for the Persian army to bypass – assuming it didn’t simply defeat it with generally superior Persian siegecraft – and worse yet was a diplomatic disaster given that it meant essentially writing Athens off as a loss, when the Athenian navy provided the bulk of the ships protecting the Isthmus.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
October 31, 2022
QotD: The True Believer
Why? From the Wiki summary, believers will persist in the face of overwhelming disconfirmation if:
- A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he or she behaves.
- The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
- The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
- Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
- The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.
This is Leftism in a nutshell, and it explains why SJWs are impervious to factual, rational argument. Boiled down as far as it will go: Group identity is so important to the Leftist that, faced with the choice between continued group membership and the evidence of xzhyr own lying eyes, xzhey will pick group membership, every time. This sets up its own feedback mechanism, such that disconfirmations of their dogmas actually increase their commitment — only the truest, holiest believers would keep believing in the face of the facts.
Severian, “What Happens if the UFO Actually Comes?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-25.
October 30, 2022
QotD: Thatcher’s legacy
Nevertheless, she won. In Britain in the Seventies, everything that could be nationalized had been nationalized, into a phalanx of lumpen government monopolies all flying the moth-eaten flag: British Steel, British Coal, British Airways, British Rail … The government owned every industry — or, if you prefer, “the British people” owned every industry. And, as a consequence, the unions owned the British people. The top income-tax rate was 83 per cent, and on investment income 98 per cent. No electorally viable politician now thinks the government should run airlines and car plants, and that workers should live their entire lives in government housing. But what seems obviously ridiculous to all in 2013 was the bipartisan consensus four decades ago, and it required extraordinary political will for one woman to drag her own party, then the nation, and subsequently much of the rest of the world back from the cliff edge.
Thatcherite denationalization was the first thing Eastern Europe did after throwing off its Communist shackles — although the fact that recovering Soviet client states found such a natural twelve-step program at Westminster testifies to how far gone Britain was. She was the most consequential woman on the world stage since Catherine the Great, and the United Kingdom’s most important peacetime prime minister. In 1979, Britain was not at war, but as much as in 1940 faced an existential threat.
Mark Steyn, “The Uncowardly Lioness”, SteynOnline.com, 2019-05-05.
October 29, 2022
QotD: Camille Paglia’s “Amazon” Feminism
In my view, special protections of any kind infantilize women. My code of Amazon feminism is based on the empowerment of the individual: Women must not regress to a pre-feminist past to become passive wards of the state.
Camille Paglia, interviewed in “Feminist critic Camille Paglia: ‘Merkel is an important role model for mature women'”, DW, 2017-06-01.
