During the Cold War, it was accepted that we would recruit spies and so would they.
Oxford and Cambridge became notorious hunting grounds for the Soviet Union, as they sought out clever young lefties who they might convince to go full retard into communism and then spy for the Motherland.
They had some success with some dapper young gentlemen called Philby, Maclean, Burgess, Blunt and Cairncross – that’s a story for another day.
It was notable that during the whole affair, British intelligence simply refused to believe that one of their own had been corrupted. They could not entertain such a notion, and so the Cambridge Five remained able to betray their country over and over again.
Alex Noble, “Hero Of The European Union”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-04-15.
June 3, 2022
QotD: Snobbery and spying
June 2, 2022
QotD: The rat race of modern academia
This means there’s a lot of competition for those tenure-trace position, so these PhDs have to outdo each other in their brave and transgressive publications. That their insights make little sense outside of their narrow fields, much less have any relation to reality, is of no import. Academic and career success is the ultimate goal here, nothing else.
Killer Marmot, commenting on “Have you tried less tiresome music?”, DavidThompson.com, 2022-03-01.
June 1, 2022
QotD: Spartiate Women
Sparta has obtained a reputation in the popular culture – derived from the sources – for affording a greater degree of freedom and importance to its women than any other Greek polis (I should stress this is a very low bar) and, so long as we are talking about spartiate women there is some truth to this.
Spartiate girls went through a similar “rearing” to spartiate boys, although they were not removed from the home as their brothers were. Spartiate girls ran races and were encouraged to be physically active (Plut. Lyk. 14.3; Mor. 227; Xen. Lac. 1.4). The evidence is thin, but points fairly strongly to the suggestion that spartiate women were generally literate, in quite the contrast (again, as the evidence permits) to the rest of Greece. Now our sources make clear that this is in part a product of the leisure that spartiate women had, since the primary domestic tasks of Greek women – textile manufacture and food preparation – were done entirely by slave labor forced upon helot women (Xen. Lac. 1.3; Plato, Laws. VII; Plut. Mor. 241d).
Whereas the sources paint a portrait of elite citizen Athenian women as practically cloistered, spartiate women had significantly more freedom of movement, in part because they appear to have been the primary managers of their households. Male spartiates didn’t live at home until thirty and were likely frequently away even after that (Plut. Lyc. 14.1; Mor. 228b). Spartiate women could also inherit and hold property in their own name to a greater degree than in Athens or elsewhere in Greece (note for instance Plut. Agis 7.3-4). The strong impression one gets from the sources is that this gave spartiate women quite a bit more sway; our largely male sources, especially Aristotle, disapprove, but we don’t need to (and shouldn’t!) share their misogyny. The sources are also very clear that spartiate women and girls felt much freer to speak their minds in public than Greek women in most poleis, although they were still completely and universally excluded from formal politics.
But – and you knew there would be a but (surprise! there are two) – but the role of women in Spartan society as we can observe it remains fundamentally instrumental: in the Spartan social order, spartiate women existed to produce spartiate boys. The exercise that spartiate girls undertook was justified under the assumption that it produced fitter (male) children (Plut. Lyc. 14.2; Xen. Lac. 1.4). Plutarch implies that the age of marriage for spartiate women was set in law, though generally older than in the rest of Greece (Plut. Lyc. 15.3; Mor. 228a).
Spartiate women appear to have had no more say in who they married than other Greek women, which is to say effectively none. Marriages seem to have been arranged and the marriage ceremony itself as it it related to us was a ritualized abduction (Plut. Lyc. 15.3-5; Hdt. 6.65) without even a fig-leaf of (largely illusory) consent present in some other ancient marriage rituals. Husbands apparently also “lent out” their wives to other spartiate men (Plut. Lyc 15.7; Xen. Lac. 1.7-8); descriptions of this passage stress the consent of the men involved, but completely omit the woman’s consent, although Xenophon implies that the woman involved will “want to take charge of two households” and thus presumably be in favor; I have my doubts.
Everything we have about the Spartans (honestly, just read Plutarch’s Sayings of Spartan Women, but also Xen. Lac. 1.4, 7-8, Plut. Lyc. 15, etc.) reinforces the impression that spartiate women were viewed primarily as a means towards producing spartiate boys. Gorgo’s retort that spartiate women “are the only women that are mothers of men” (Plut. Mor. 240e), her husband’s command that she in turn (when he died), “Marry a good man and bear good children” (Plut. Mor. 240e), the anonymous spartiate woman who shames an Ionian woman for being good at weaving because raising children “should be the employments of the good and honorable woman” (Plut Mor. 241d) and on and on. Most of the sayings that don’t involve the bearing of children, either involve spartiate women being happy that their sons died bravely, or disowning them for not doing so.
Now, there is a necessary and very important caveat here: this is the role of spartiate women as viewed by men. It is striking that the one of the largest things we can be reasonable sure that spartiate women did do – they seem to have had the full management of the household most of the time – doesn’t figure into these sayings or our sources hardly at all (save, to a degree, to Aristotle’s polemic in Book 2 of the Politics). We should not be surprised that our – elite, aristocratic and exclusively male sources pick out the roles that seem most important to them. The average spartiate woman may well have felt differently – for my part, I can hardly imagine many spartiate mothers were overjoyed to hear their sons had fallen in battle, whatever brave face they put on in polite society. And I have to imagine that many spartiate women were likely shrewd managers of their households, and probably took some pride in that skill.
All of that said, I think it is fair to say that, on the whole, spartiate women seem to have had a relatively better condition than free citizen women in other poleis in Greece. Where they were sharply constrained – and to be clear, by modern standards, spartiate women were still very sharply constrained – they were constrained in ways that were mostly typical in Greek society. Quite frankly, ancient Greek poleis did quite poorly by their women, even by the low, low standards of other pre-modern societies. But given that low bar, the life of spartiate women does seem quite a bit better and our sources reflect this fairly openly.
But – and this is the other “but” I alluded to above – a huge part of this is that spartiate women were freed from the demand to do hours and hours of difficult labor preparing and serving food and producing textiles. And here we circle back to last week’s problem: spartiate women probably represented around 6% of Spartan (including the helots) women. If we want to talk about the condition of women in Sparta, we need to talk about helot women.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
May 31, 2022
QotD: Chaos, the ancient enemy
I was probably one of the few people not at all surprised that Jordan Peterson’s seminal work was subtitled “An antidote to chaos”. Because of course that is our ancient enemy, the enemy of everything that lives down to the smallest organized cell.
Perhaps it is my Greek ancestry (in culture, via the Romans, if nothing else. I mean 23 and me has opinions, but they revise my genetic makeup so often I’m not betting on anything. Also, frankly, they base it on today’s populations, so that if say every person in an extended family left Greece to colonize Iberia, today I’d show only Iberian genetics. [Spoiler: I don’t. Europeans are far more mixed up than they dream of in their philosophies.]) that makes me see Chaos as a vast force waiting in the darkness before and around this brief bit of light that is Earth and humanity, ready to devour us all.
I can’t be the only one impressed by this image, as I’ve run across echoes of it in countless stories both science fiction and fantasy. If you’re reading the kind of story that tries to scrute the ultimate inscrutable and unscrew the parts of the mental universe of humanity to take a metaphorical look under the hood, sooner or later you come across a scene where the main characters get to the end of it all and face howling chaos and darkness. Only it usually doesn’t even howl, nor is it dark. It’s just nothing. Which is the ultimate face and vision of chaos. And most of us know it. Perhaps writers, most of all.
I have a complex relation with chaos, in that part of me seems to be permanently submerged in it. Some of this is the culture in which I was brought up. You know, the Portuguese might have crime, but no one can accuse them of having organized crime. Or indeed organized much of anything.
It’s not just the disease of “late industrializing culture”. There’s something more at work. For one, the Portuguese pride themselves on it. They routinely contrast the British habit of queuing for everything to the Portuguese habit of queuing for nothing (And you haven’t lived till you see a communion scrum with the little old ladies having their elbows at the level of young men’s crotches) by describing the way Portuguese do not queue as “All in a pile and may G-d help us”.
Sarah Hoyt, “The Ancient Enemy”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-05.
May 30, 2022
QotD: The end of Nicolae Ceaușescu
“You should have fired on them, and had they fallen, you should have taken them and shoved them into a cellar,” she said. “Weren’t you told that?”
Long one of the world’s most vicious dictators, Ceaușescu’s most recent plan for winning over the heartland was forcing half the country’s villagers to destroy their own homes — with pick-axes and hammers, if they couldn’t afford a bulldozer — and packing them into project apartments in new “agro-industrial towns”, for a “better future”. Despite this, and his long history of murder, terror, and spying, Ceaușescu to the end did not grasp that his unpopularity had an organic character. He was convinced ethnically Hungarian “terrorists” were behind the latest trouble.
After reaching the balcony of Bucharest’s Central Committee building to give a speech that December day, he’s genuinely surprised when the crowd turns on him. When he tells them to be quiet, he’s befuddled by their refusal, saying, “What, you can’t hear?” Elena jumps in and yells, “Silence!”, to which Ceaușescu, hilariously, replies, “Shut up!” The crowd listens to neither of them.
Paul Kenyon’s Children of the Night describes the morbid black comedy that ensued. The Ceaușescus and a motley gang of undead apparatchiks that included the “morbidly obese Prime Minister, Emil Bobu” later tried to load into a single helicopter — Bobu “waddled, walrus-like, to the rear” Kenyon writes — but there were too many of them, and the copter barely got off the ground. “Where to?” asked the pilot, and nobody knew, because there was no plan, since none of them had ever considered the possibility of this happening.
The sky was full of stuff, including other helicopters, which were dropping leaflets on the crowd giving what Kenyon described as a Marie Antoinette-like order to ignore “imperialist conspiracies” and return home “to a Christmas feast”. Four days later, a firing squad put the Ceaușescus against a wall and gave them their final, solid lead Christmas presents.
Ceaușescu’s balcony will forever be a symbol of elite cluelessness. Even in the face of the gravest danger, a certain kind of ruler will never be able to see the last salvo coming, if doing so requires any self-examination. The neoliberal political establishment in most of the Western world, the subject of repeat populist revolts of rising intensity in recent years, seems to suffer from the same disability.
Matt Taibbi, “Justin Trudeau’s Ceausescu Moment”, TK News by Matt Taibi, 2022-02-10.
May 29, 2022
QotD: Was Biden’s Afghan evacuation driven by Twitter “optics”?
But the Apparat didn’t do that, and the reason was: Twitter.
All the Blue Checkmarks on Twatter agreed that “letting” Bad Orange Man pull out of Afghanistan would be “handing him a win”. After all, he said he was going to do it! And if he somehow got out before the 20th anniversary, that’d be an even bigger win. Obviously, then, they had to “let” Biden do it, because that’s a “win”. And of course he had to do it in August, so that he could “spike the football” on 9/11/2021.
So the withdrawal had to be pushed into 2021, and it had to be slapdash. Indeed, it had to be the exact opposite of whatever Bad Orange Man was planning to do, so that there was no possible way Bad Orange Man could claim a “win”. It had to be all Biden …
… and so it was. With results that anyone smarter than a concussed goldfish — which of course excludes everyone with a Blue Checkmark — could’ve predicted.
If the Blue Checkmark Borg on Twatter, then, decides that Brandon needs to look tough by nuking Moscow, then it’s go time. And since the social dynamic on Twitter is ever-spiraling lunacy — the only way to “win” Twitter is by being more screechingly insane about everything than everyone else — then whoever gets there fustest with the mostest is going to drive the “decision”.
Severian, “Ukraine”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
May 28, 2022
QotD: Breaking the trench stalemate with tactical air power
But how much airpower does it take to really move a division out of position? In 1944, at the start of Operation Cobra as part of the Normandy breakout, it was necessary for US forces to move the powerful armored division Panzer Lehr out of its prepared positions outside of St. Lo. Over the course of an hour and a half, the U.S. Eighth Air Force hit Panzer Lehr with approximately three thousand aircraft, including 1,800 heavy bombers (each of which might have had bomb-loads of c. 2-3,500kg; the attack would have been the equivalent of about 13,000 Farman F.50s (of which only a hundred or so were built!)). By this point, even medium bombers carried bomb loads in the thousands of pounds, like the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, with a bomb load of 3000lbs (1360kg). This was followed by a hurricane artillery barrage! Despite this almost absurdly awesome amount of firepower (which, to be clear, inflicted tremendous damage; by the end of Operation Cobra, Panzer Lehr – the heaviest and most powerful Panzer division in the west – had effectively ceased to exist), Panzer Lehr, badly weakened was still very capable of resisting and had to be pushed out of position by ground attack over the next three days.
Needless to say, nothing on offer in 1918 or for a decade or more after, was prepared to offer that kind of offensive potential from the air. That kind of assault would have required many thousands of aircraft with capabilities far exceeding what even the best late-war WWI bombers could do. Once again, while close air support doctrine was developed with one eye on the trench stalemate and the role airpower could play in facilitating a breakthrough and restoring maneuver (either by blasting the breakthrough or – as in Soviet Deep Battle doctrine – engaging enemy rear echelon units to bog down reinforcements). But the technology wasn’t anywhere near the decisive point by 1918. Instead, the most important thing aircraft could do was spot for the artillery, which is mostly what aircraft continued to do, even in late 1918.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
May 27, 2022
QotD: Elite overproduction and Canada’s managerial class
The managerial class in Canada is much more powerful than that in the U.S., for several reasons. First, the managerial class makes up a much larger share of Canada’s population, because far more Canadians go to college. Whereas 51.9 percent of Americans between the ages of 25–34 have tertiary education, in Canada it is almost 65 percent. While America’s elites are decentralized (Wall Street and Silicon Valley are very different), Canada’s elites are concentrated in the Laurentian corridor of Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal. And there is a revolving door between the managerial institutions. Since Lester Pearson, prime minister from 1963 to 1968, every leader of the Liberal party has begun his career as either a civil servant, academic, professional party hack, Bay Street lawyer, or leader of one of Canada’s Laurentian “continental corporations” — or as the son of one of these. These institutions receive generous federal funding. So does the Canadian media, which is now financially dependent on the federal government. Because these institutions are regionally concentrated and rely on symbiotic relationships with one another, Canada’s managerial classes hold hegemonic political power.
Canada’s vassalage to the U.S. intensifies the harmful effects of this situation. Once Canada surrendered its British character and integrated itself into the American empire, it became part of the continental system of elite overproduction. Ambitious Canadians seeking the top-tier education that will gain them elite status quickly discover that Canada’s universities are, as one professor once told me, “frustratingly above-average”. The most talented young Canadians therefore tend to jump ship and move to the U.S. The sine qua non for their success is mastering the American empire’s language, which is the language of liberalism. Every ambitious Canadian learns that to ascend, you must talk like American liberal elites. The Canadians who become fluent succeed: They get a top-tier U.S. degree and join the prestigious American networks. By and large, these people do not then want to move back to the imperial backwater. The few who do — such as former Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff, who taught at Harvard, and the current Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who studied at Harvard and married a New York Times reporter — return home confident that they will be the big fish in the small pond. Hence Canada suffers a protracted brain drain to the U.S.
Nathan Pinkoski, “What Led To Canada’s Crisis”, First Things, 2022-02-24.
May 26, 2022
QotD: They don’t make good music any more
To state the hypothesis as it applies to music: If a song or an album has been remembered for 20 years, then it’s more likely to be remembered for another 20 years. If it’s been remembered for 50 years, then it’s probably pretty damn good. If it’s been remembered for centuries, then it’s probably better than you can understand.
If this is true, then it might explain why anyone who has been listening to music for more than a decade has the sense that music was simply better back in the day. It’s not that music is necessarily worse now, on average – we’re in the moment, and it’s difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff.
What we hear in the daily soundtrack of life, when you’re getting your hair cut, out shopping, something coming from someone’s phone at the other end of the bus, is noise. The quality of this music is going to vary wildly because what is popular doesn’t necessarily correlate to what is good. The signal is the true state of music, which fluctuates, and can come from anywhere from the top of the pop charts to underground niche movements.
What we think of as “good older music” is not representative of the general state of music back then. It might be the case those songs that are remembered, and still played on the radio, TV and movies, happen to be the exceptional outliers. The Lindy effect is about filtering: Time has sifted out the mediocre songs that were popular for arbitrary or non-universal reasons, or were just faddish. If you’re going to go to the trouble of looking back to the 1980s now, what you bring back for us better be good.
And what is considered as great music from decades ago wasn’t necessarily chart material. But in the long term, they have been rediscovered by subsequent generations.
James Smith, “The myth of ‘bad’ modern music”, Being Libertarian, 2019-02-25.
May 25, 2022
QotD: The “social responsibility” of business
Milton Friedman, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits”, New York Times, 1970-09-13.
May 24, 2022
QotD: Portuguese art and creative genius
Then the economy recovered, they got jobs, a lot of them connected to or linked to government and all of that stopped. And of course with the EU there are no illegal stalls. I mean Papiere, bitte and all that.
And somehow, perhaps because the new generation knows they have all sorts of “benefits” and “support” coming to them and have never felt the bite of chaos, the crafts and arts in the stores are either startlingly mundane or bizarre. I’m still rather puzzled by entire “scenes from life” (including one that was an operating room) sculpted with penises instead of humans. I mean … who even buys that? Okay. We know who buys that. But do the German tourists and their nostalgie de la boue think they’re tapping into something uniquely “uninhibited and free”, some kind of wild Portuguese sexuality? Raises eyebrow. The Portuguese have been civilized land long before the Germans traded their furs for a place as Roman soldiers. And sure, the Romans could be startlingly and inappropriately sexual (I call to mind a mural, not out of place in a Roman middle class home that had monkeys copulating with children) but it didn’t mean that the culture was “free”, rather that they had different rules. Frankly, the sixties attempt to erase history has corrupted real art and … well, everything else.
Which is kind of the college student thing. Chaos and free time allows you to be very creative, but then you’re not organized enough to parlay that into a career. (I mean, if they’re destined to be the touristic “warm port” of Europe, perhaps they should consider letting real art flourish. Or even encouraging it. Grants for small businesses and young people. It beats the jobs that don’t exist. Just demand they be actually creative and accomplished, instead of giving grants for art that my kids could do at age two and about as interesting.
Sarah Hoyt, “The Ancient Enemy”, According to Hoyt, 2019-04-05.
May 23, 2022
QotD: The adoption of Astrology by the Greeks and Romans
This portability is not restricted merely to divination. Herodotus’ suspicion that quite a bit of Greek religion might have come from somewhere else has merit, though Anatolia, not Egypt, appears to be the main source (see: M.L. West, The East Face of Helicon (1999); and for the person already writing this comment, yes I am aware of Bernal’s Black Athena and no I am not convinced, nor are many specialists in the field). The Romans were open about importing gods from Greece and make a clear distinction between gods worshiped in traditional Roman manner and those imported from Greece (a quite small number) and thus whose rituals followed ritus graecus – rituals in Greek fashion.
In other cases, the foreign practice was modified to fit the culture it arrived in. The Romans adopted the cult of Cybele, an Anatolian goddess, during the dark days of the Second Punic War (the Senate made that decision based on a consultation with the Sibylline books, a written source of oracular prophecy we can talk about another day). Cybele was called Magna Mater (“Great Mother”) in Rome, and it seems made some modifications to her rituals, in particular possibly limiting the role of the Galli (eunuch priests) whose rituals and style seemed decidedly “unRoman” (though I should note that the scholarship here is contested and the issue and evidence complex).
The normal technical term for this kind of religious borrowing is syncretism, and it is a sort of interweaving of religious traditions that polytheisms both ancient and modern are exceptionally capable of. It is simply not hard to add one more god or one more ritual into a religious system that already assumes the existence of innumerable gods.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part III: Polling the Gods”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-11-08.
May 22, 2022
QotD: Surveying Upper Canada
You have just drawn an Ontario Township.
Now, make your grid. The line roads, north and south, should be 100 chains apart (one-and-a-quarter miles), and the east-west sideroads either the same, or different. They needn’t come out evenly; you may leave a fraction on whichever side you didn’t start from. The whole board may have to be tilted at the “front” (baseline) to parallel a lakeshore, or accommodate the “back” of the next Township down. If you’re in the mood, you might want to draw a diagonal road, right through everything.
Congratulations. You may now have a job as one of His Majesty’s surveyors in pioneer Ontario. It’s a much better job than down south of British North America, where the land is somewhat populated already, and everyone seems to have an opinion. Up here, not yet any people in the way. But there is still the difficulty of slashing through the bush. You only draw “concessions” — future roads defining blocks, to be further subdivided into future farmlots. When the people granted land move in, they will be compelled by the guvmint to actually dig those endless, straight, access roads.
This will make the roads more interesting. Where the lines meet an obstacle, you get a little run around it. Or a big one, if the obstacle continues. Intersections don’t quite meet, so you get a jog. Or, you decide to put the jog in the middle of nowhere, instead. There were at least five major surveying systems in Upper Canada (later “Ontario”), and dozens of variations on each one. The line and side roads might be 66 chains apart, or more than twice that, depending on some local magnate’s whim. Or the surveyor may have been drunk that day.
David Warren, “Esquesan”, Essays in Idleness, 2019-04-10.
May 21, 2022
QotD: People on social media
Amanda (Pandamoanimum) on Twitter, 2015-09-13.
May 20, 2022
QotD: Credentialism
The reason for this — if you want to slap an academic-sounding label on it — is “the reification of the bureaucracy”. Even if 99 out of 100 doctors, say, just want to practice medicine, there’s that last guy who makes “being a doctor” his life’s work. He joins all the associations, and because that kind of guy is basically just Trigglypuff with better hygiene and lower BMI, he quickly rises to a position of influence in every organization. He lives for the bureaucracy. Which means he’s a politician, and there it is.
If you want more examples, look no further than the original guilds, the craft associations of the Middle Ages. Any settlement big enough for actual cash money to change hands in it soon had an exquisitely class-conscious group with lots of actual, but no formal, power. Your smart tyrant co-opted the politicians from the merchant guilds, made them de facto nobility and bade them act like it — that gave you the Renaissance. Your dumb (or merely nonexistent) tyrant let the merchants’ resentments fester — that gave you the Reformation, and the whole catalog of ideological murder that followed.
Severian, “Credentialism Ruins Everything”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-03-22.
