The hoplite phalanx was the common fighting style of essentially all Greek poleis. It was not unique to Sparta.
That comes with all sorts of implications. The Spartans used the same military equipment as all of the other Greeks: a thrusting spear (the dory), a backup sword (a xiphos or kopis; pop-culture tends to give Spartans the kopis because it looks cool, but there is no reason to suppose they preferred it), body armor (either textile or a bronze breastplate), one of an array of common Greek helmet styles, and possibly greaves. We might expect the Spartiates – being essentially very wealthy Greeks – to have equipment on the high end of the quality scale, but the Perioikoi, and other underclasses who fought with (and generally outnumbered) the Spartiates will have made up the normal contingent of “poor hoplites” probably common for any polis army.
Xenophon somewhat oddly stops to note that the Spartiates were to carry a bronze shield (kalken aspida; Xen. Lac. 11.3 – this is sometimes translated as “brass” – it is the same word in Greek – but all Greek shield covers I know of are bronze). This is not the entire shield, as in [the movie] 300 – that would be far too heavy – but merely a thin (c. 0.25mm) facing on the shield. It’s odd that Xenophon feels the need to tell us this, because this was standard for Greek shields. Perhaps poorer hoplites couldn’t afford the bronze facing and used a cheaper material (very thin leather, essentially parchment, is common in many other shield traditions) and Xenophon is merely noting that all of the Spartiates were wealthy enough to afford the fancy and expensive sort of shield (it has also been supposed that elements of this passage have dropped out and it would have originally included a complete panoply, in which case Xenophon is just uncharacteristically belaboring the obvious).
The basics of the formation – spacing, depth and so on – also seem to have been essentially the same. The standard depth for a hoplite phalanx seems to have been eight (-ish; there’s a lot of variation). The Spartans seem to have followed similar divisions with a fairly wide range of depths, perhaps trending towards thinner lines in the fourth century than in the fifth, though certainty here is difficult. The drop in depth may be a consequence of manpower depletion, but it may also indicate a greater faith held by Spartan commanders of their line’s ability to hold. Depth in a formation is often about morale – the deeper formation feels safer, which improves cohesion.
It’s hard to say if the Spartan phalanx was more cohesive. It might have been, at least for the Spartiates. The lifestyle of the Spartiates likely created close bonds which might have aided in holding together in the stress of combat – but then, this was true of essentially every Greek polis to one degree or another. The best I can say on this point is that the Spartan battle record – discussed at length below – argues against any large advantage in cohesion.
That said, the Spartan battle order does seem to have been notably different in two respects:
First: it had a much higher ratio of officers to regular soldiers. This was clearly unusual and more than one ancient source remarks on the fact (Thuc. 5.68; Xen. Lac. 11.4-5, describing what may be slightly different command systems). Each file was under the command of the man in front of it (Xen. Lac. 11.5). Six files made an enomotia (commanded by an enomotarchos); two of these put together were commanded by a pentekonter (lit: commander of fifty, although he actually had 72 men under his command); two of those form a lochos (commanded by a lochagos) and four lochoi made a mora, commanded by a polemarchos (lit: war-leader) – there were six of these in Xenophon’s time. Compared to most Greek armies of the time, that’s a lot of officers, which leads to:
Second: it seems to have been able to maneuver somewhat more readily than a normal phalanx. This follows from the first. Smaller tactical subdivisions with more command personnel made the formation more agile. Xenophon clearly presents this ability as exceptional, and it does seem to have been (Xen. Lac. 11.4). Hoplite armies victorious on one flank often had real trouble reorganizing those victorious troops and wheeling them to flank and roll up the rest of the line (e.g. the Athenians at Delium, Thuc. 4.96.3-4). The Spartans were rather better at this (e.g. at Mantinea, Thuc. 5.73.1-4). They also seem to have been better at marching and moving in time.
Now, I do not want to over-sell this point. We’re comparing the Spartans to other hoplite forces which – in the fifth century especially – were essentially dumbfire missiles. The general (or generals) point the phalanx at the enemy, hit “go” and then hope for the best. Really effective command – what Everett Wheeler refers to as the general as “battle manager” – really emerges in the fourth century, mostly after Spartan power was already broken (E. Wheeler, “The General as Hoplite” in Armies of Classical Greece, ed. Wheeler (2007)). While “right wing, left wheel” is hardly the most complicated of maneuvers (especially given that the predictable rightward drift of hoplite armies in battle meant that it could be planned for), compared to the limitations of most hoplite forces, it marked the Spartans out as unusually adept.
More complicated Spartan maneuvers often went badly. Spartan forces at Plataea (479 – Hdt. 9.53) failed to effectively redeploy under orders, precipitating an unintended engagement. Plugging a gap in the line once the advance was already underway, but before battle was joined (something Roman armies did routinely) was also apparently beyond the capabilities of a Spartan army (Thuc. 5.72). While the Spartans are often shown in popular culture with innovative tactical formations – like the anti-cavalry wedge or anti-missile shield-ball (both of which, to be clear, are nonsense) formations in 300 – in practice the Spartan army was tactically uncreative. Like every other hoplite army, the Spartans formed a big rectangle of men and smashed it into the front of the enemy’s big rectangle of men. Notably, as we’ll see, the Spartans made limited and quite poor use of other arms, like light infantry or cavalry, even compared to other Greek poleis (and the bar here is very low, Greek combined arms, compared to say, Roman or Macedonian or Persian combined arms, was dismal). If anything, the Spartans were less adaptable than other hoplites.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VI: Spartan Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-20.
July 8, 2022
QotD: Sparta’s vaunted hoplite phalanx differed little from hoplite armies from other Greek cities
July 7, 2022
QotD: Predestination
Modern people see that as carte blanche to do whatever we want, because hey, if we do it, God made us do it … which, if you think about it for half a second, means God Himself is responsible for “sin” (quotation marks necessary, because it can’t be evil if I have no possible choice in the matter). Calvin, Knox, et al thought of that too, of course — they were crazy, not stupid — and they even had an answer: Shut up, that’s why. Not the most theologically sophisticated reasoning, but when you’re being burned at the stake for Arminianism it’s remarkably persuasive. Meanwhile, you’d best live like the holiest Puritan that ever lived … even though it’s exquisitely pointless, because you’re almost surely damned.
Severian, “Public Piety”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-01-29.
July 6, 2022
QotD: Like Communism, “true” Social Credit has never been attempted
The bits of Social Credit that people in Alberta liked, amid the misery of the 1930s, were the hatred of high finance and the promise of an unearned monetary dividend. Alberta Social Credit tried to govern on this general basis, even after Douglas came to Edmonton personally and informed the cabinet that it had failed to comprehend his genius. Despite this, “Douglasite” true believers remained prominent in the party until shortly after the war, when premier E.C. Manning purged them from the Social Credit electoral apparatus. (Many were vague but obvious anti-Semites, like Douglas himself.)
Colby Cosh, “Social Credit may be dead. Long live Social Credit!”, National Post, 2019-04-22.
July 5, 2022
QotD: The Great Enrichment
In particular, it is ideas that people have for commercially tested betterment that matter. Consider alternating-current electricity, cardboard boxes, the little black dress, The Pill, cheap food, literacy, antibiotics, airplanes, steam engines, screw-making machines, railways, universities, cheap steel, sewers, plate glass, forward markets, universal literacy, running water, science, reinforced concrete, secret voting, bicycles, automobiles, limited access highways, free speech, washing machines, detergents, air conditioning, containerization, free trade, computers, the cloud, smart phones, and Bob Gordon’s favorite, window screens. …
And the Great Enrichment depended on the less famous [but] crucial multitudes of free lunches prepared by the alert worker and the liberated shopkeeper rushing about, each with her own little project for profit and pleasure. Sometimes, unexpectedly, the little projects became big projects, such as John Mackey’s one Whole Foods store in Austin, Texas resulting in 479 stores in the U.S. and the U.K., or Jim Walton’s one Walmart in Bentonville, Arkansas resulting in 11,718 stores worldwide.
Letting people “have a go” to implement such ideas for commercially tested betterment is the crux. It comes, in turn, from liberalism, Adam Smith’s “obvious and simple system of natural liberty”, “the liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice”. Liberalism permitted, encouraged, honored an ideology of “innovism” — a word preferable to the highly misleading word “capitalism,” with its erroneous suggestion that the modern world was and is initiated by piling up bricks and bachelors’ degrees.
Dierdre McCloskey, “How Growth Happens: Liberalism, Innovism, and the Great Enrichment (Preliminary version)” [PDF], 2018-11-29.
July 4, 2022
QotD: The French solution to trench warfare
On the defensive, the French had adopted many of the same principles of the German defense-in-depth we’ve already discussed. On the offense, they came to favor (particularly under the influence of Philippe Pétain and […] Ferdinand Foch) an offensive doctrine designed to maximize France’s position in an attritional contest: that is to limit losses and maximize enemy casualties while still taking and holding ground. The system favored limited “bite-and-hold” attacks, ideally limited such that the attack stopped before triggering the inevitable German counter-attack. Remember that it was when the attacker ran out of steam and the defender’s counter-attack came that the casualty ratios tended to shift to favor the defender. In French thinking, the solution was just to not reach that point.
Instead, the French came to favor – and the British and Americans picked up the same method by the end – elaborately prepared small offensives. The elaborate preparation meant planning out the attack carefully, using shorter but carefully planned hurricane barrages (all of this planning, of course took time) and then seizing the enemy’s forward positions and just their forward positions. Instead of then trying to push through – the old French notion of assault brutal et continu (“brutal and continuous” – a “keep up the pressure till they break” method) which Robert Nivelle had favored – methodical battle focused on “bite-and-hold”.
Once you hit your limited objectives in that first rush where enemy resistence is disoriented (from the short, hurricane barrage) and weaker – and thus where the casualty ratio favors you – you stop and begin fortifying your position. You dig those communications trenches, move up your artillery and brace for the counter-attack. By the time the enemy realizes you aren’t going to attack his second or third line positions (and trigger his devastating counter-attack), you are dug in and prepared for his attack (the hold part of “bite-and-hold”). To reestablish defense in depth, the defender now has to back up to establish new lines to the rear (or launch his own fresh offensive, but by late 1918, the Germans were too weak for this). A long series of such attacks – with significant intervals for fresh careful planning and stockpiling resources – could slowly but surely lever your opponent off of key positions, one by one. It would also preserve a favorable balance of casualties, ensuring that in the end, the enemy runs out of men and shells before you do (that is the “rupture” that Joffre had always hoped for, but which arrived but two years too late for his career).
Such a slow, expensive, bloody and unglamorous strategy was in some ways only politically possible once, by 1918, it had become apparent that all other options were exhausted. That said, to argue that this bite-and-hold operational doctrine broke the trench stalemate is probably not fair either. The progress of allied offensives in 1918 was extremely slow by even the standards of 1914. The German Spring Offensive was well and truly done in July and the Allied offensive picked up in August and ran through November as fast as it could (with Foch doing everything short of getting out and pushing the offensive to try to speed it up) and yet the final allied positions by November were not even in Germany. Even at its greatest distance in 100 days of unbroken victories by a force with materiel and numerical superiority, the front moved less than 100 miles and the overall casualty ratio was roughly even (around a million on both sides).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
July 3, 2022
QotD: The US media when Donald Trump “happened”
But then Donald Trump happened, as my students would’ve written. Though it’s only a few years in the past, we’ve already forgotten just how much The Media loved Bernie Sanders when the Republican nomination was still in doubt. Trump, of course, made The Media lose their shit so egregiously that what they did to W. looked like the happy ending to an Oriental massage, but virtually nobody was cheerleading for Hillary qua Hillary. It took the specter of The Donald as president to get them all on the same page.
Which brings us to now. The Democratic Party can read a poli-sci textbook. They know how difficult it is to beat an incumbent president in a good economy. Hell, it’s almost impossible to beat an incumbent president in a bad economy — see 2004 and 2012. It takes a major systemic shock to turf out an incumbent in the modern era — a catastrophe on the magnitude of a serious third party challenge (Ross Perot in ’92), or the incumbent being Jimmy Carter. The poli-sci textbooks say that the Dems’ only hope is to run the closest thing to the Antimatter Donald Trump they can find. That is to say: the blandest, SWPL-iest Goodwhite on their roster.
Alas for them, The Media will be having none of that. Trump somehow triggers them even more than he did in 2016 — don’t ask me how; it violates several important laws of thermodynamics — so they’re going all-in on goofballs like AOC and her “Squad.” The Media loves “the Squad,” and since The Media have convinced themselves that theirs is the whip hand, they’re ordering us to love “the Squad” too. To which Trump replies with a version of “lol get fucked,” and since “you’re free to leave this country if you hate it so much” seems forehead-slappingly obvious to anyone without a journalism degree, Trump’s poll numbers rise. Which prompts another stern lecture from The Media, which receives another “lol get fucked,” and around and around and around we go …
But here’s the thing: The battle for the whip is a battle royale. There are more than just two combatants. The Party still thinks it’s in charge. The Media, with 2008, 2012, and 2016 in its pocket, think they’re in charge. Nobody bothered to ask “the Squad,” though, and that’s the truly terrifying thing: “The Squad” thinks they’re in charge, and they might actually be right.
We’ve already got Congress voting to condemn Trump’s tweets. Set aside how brain-bogglingly infantile that is — and how petty and retarded it appears to the American public. Consider just how badly Nancy Pelosi et al, aka The Party, had to screw up to find themselves in this situation.
Severian, “Which Hand Holds the Whip?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-07-17.
July 2, 2022
QotD: How To Read Lacan
I could answer this question on many levels. For example, the theological level: maybe I committed some sin in a past life. Maybe I was predestined to unhappiness. Maybe, having given me free will, God is no longer able to save me from my own bad choices.
On a more practical level: I’m trying to learn more about leftism, I’m trying to learn more about continental philosophy, and I’m trying to learn more about psychoanalysis. I figured I might as well get it all out of the way at once.
I was expecting this to be incomprehensible, but I was pleasantly surprised how good a writer Zizek was. He explains everything clearly, in down-to-earth prose interspersed with mildly funny Slovenian jokes that illustrate his points.
(Lacan himself is completely incomprehensible, to the point where he might as well be speaking Martian, but this book wisely avoided quoting Lacan except where absolutely necessary).
Despite being very readable, this book never really came together. Each chapter consisted of a Lacan quote, followed by Zizek’s interpretations and thoughts. The thoughts were always things like “Sometimes the act of communication itself can communicate something” or “We are never truly engaged with another person, even during sex”. These are always kind of reasonable, Zizek always does a good job proving them and relating them to mildly funny Slovenian jokes, and I came away agreeing with all of them. But I don’t feel like I understand how any of them cohere together into an object called “Lacanianism”, and none of them really seemed like a very surprising revelation, which is one reason this doesn’t get a full book review.
Scott Alexander, “Short Book Reviews April 2019”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-04-09.
July 1, 2022
QotD: The CBC doesn’t want to do economic journalism
Stephen F. Gordon, Twitter, 2019-05-06.
June 30, 2022
QotD: Sparta had Lycurgus, while Athens had Solon … who at least actually existed
Once upon a time … there was a Spartan named Lycurgus, and he was the very best Spartan …
Lycurgus had been the younger brother of one of Sparta’s two kings, but had left Sparta to travel when his brother died, so that he would be no threat to his young nephew.
After a time, the Spartans begged Lycurgus to come back and reorganize society, and Lycurgus – with the blessing of the Oracle at Delphi – radically remade Spartan society into the form it would have for the next 400 years. He did not merely change the government, but legislated every facet of life, from child-rearing to marriage, to the structure of households, the economic structure, everything. Once he had accomplished that, Lycurgus went back to Delphi, but before he left he made all the Spartans promise not to change his laws until he returned. Once the Oracle told him his laws were good, he committed suicide, so that he would never return to Sparta, thus preventing his laws from ever being overturned. So the Spartans never changed Lycurgus’ laws, which had been declared perfect by Apollo himself. Subsequently, the Spartans accorded Lycurgus divine honors, and within Sparta he was worshiped as a god.
And that’s how Lycurgus remade Sparta. The End.
The role Lycurgus serves in the sources is as the perfect, infallible founder figure. No less than the Oracle at Delphi – the divine word of Apollo – declared Lycurgus a god (Hdt. 1.65.3). For later sources who, we must stress – believe their own religion (as people everywhere are wont to do) – that means, essentially a priori that Lycurgus’ “constitution” must be practically flawless and all flaws must stem from its imperfect implementation.
But – wait a second – what is our evidence for the actual person of Lycurgus or the character of the state he set up?
Remember how I said Lycurgus is dated to the late 9th century – specifically the 820s B.C. or so. That’s a huge problem. The earliest Greek literature comes from around (very roughly – there is deep scholarly debate here that I’m glossing over) the mid-8th century (c. 750 or so) and is entirely mythological in nature. The first actual history is Herodotus, writing in the mid-400s. The earliest historical event we have evidence for is the Lelantine War (c. 700ish), at least a century after the life of Lycurgus. None of our sources have anything to go on about Lycurgus – save for what the Spartans – who already worship this figure as a god – tell them. Crucially, Tyrtaeus, writing in the 650s B.C., while he does mention the rhetra (an oracle the Spartans received concerning the arrangement of their government) does not mention Lycurgus (although Plutarch is quick to connect the two, Plut. Lyc. 6.5), meaning that the earliest source for Lycurgus’ existence is Herodotus.
Wait, it gets even better – the one thing we do know about Lycurgus’ laws is that they were not written down (Plut. Lyc. 13.1). Also, Lycurgus supposedly took steps to prevent his remains from returning to Sparta (Plut. Lyc. 29.5-6, but cf. 31.4) and no continued family line, which seems like exactly the sort of explanation you put at the end of a good campfire story for why there was absolutely no trace of such an important man save his legend. So not only the details of Lycrugus’ life, but also the society he created will have lived as oral tradition – potentially changing from one telling to the next, being embellished or expanded – for generations before being committed to the permanent, unchanging memory of written history.
In short, our only evidence for Lycurgus are the campfire stories told about him by people who worshiped him as a god, as related to individuals centuries later. Which is to say that, by historical standards, there is no reliable evidence at all that Lycurgus existed.
[…]
Lycurgus is often set against Solon – the early 6th century Athenian reformer. It is true that Athenians also tend to attribute things to Solon that were later developments, but we need to note the key differences: Solon comes two centuries after Lycurgus (thus, unlike Lycurgus, in the historical period), didn’t receive divine honors and most importantly writes to us (he wrote poetry, some of which survives), so that we can know he was an actual real person. Asking students – as I have seen done – to compare a real, flawed reformer with an idealized, semi-mythical demi-god without any kind of guidance as to the nature of these two figures is, quite frankly, educational malpractice.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
June 29, 2022
QotD: How Cadet Che shows that West Point isn’t West Point anymore
Bad as that is, there’s much worse. Notice the passivity of it all. What were any of the parties involved trying to accomplish? If Cadet Che had wanted to get kicked out of the service (as it seems finally happened, according to the linked article), there are a million easier ways. In fact, cadets at West Point are volunteers. The Army makes a big production out of this: If you can’t hack it at the Point, you’re simply not officer material. All it takes is a letter to the commandant, and you’re out — Cadet Che could’ve been drinking beer with his fraternal socialist comrades at Big State 24 hours after turning in his resignation.
Even the kid’s form of “protest” was passive. There’d be a certain utility, I suppose, for the Revolution if the kid had written “I’m a Communist sleeper agent” on the inside of his hat — evidently our standards are so lax that we don’t do basic background checks on our potential military officers. But he didn’t write that. Instead, he wrote “Communism will win,” a passive, bloodless statement … and that’s it.
The passivity is the truly terrifying part. A West Point graduate is among the elite if anyone is — he has command of at least a platoon of heavily armed trained killers, and the radio one of them carries has the power to call in armor, air strikes, cruise missiles … and yet, not “I’m a communist,” not “¡Viva la Revolución!,” not even “Lenin lives!” Just … “communism will win.” How, comrade?
Severian, “The Man of the Hour”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-22.
June 28, 2022
QotD: The economic pie fallacy
When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. “You can’t make the pie larger,” say politicians. When you’re talking about the amount of money in one family’s bank account, or the amount available to a government from one year’s tax revenue, this is true. If one person gets more, someone else has to get less.
I can remember believing, as a child, that if a few rich people had all the money, it left less for everyone else. Many people seem to continue to believe something like this well into adulthood. This fallacy is usually there in the background when you hear someone talking about how x percent of the population have y percent of the wealth. If you plan to start a startup, then whether you realize it or not, you’re planning to disprove the Pie Fallacy.
What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It’s just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.
Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is — and you specifically are — one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you’ll get more for it.
In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven’t made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was. *
Kids know, without knowing they know, that they can create wealth. If you need to give someone a present and don’t have any money, you make one. But kids are so bad at making things that they consider home-made presents to be a distinct, inferior, sort of thing to store-bought ones — a mere expression of the proverbial thought that counts. And indeed, the lumpy ashtrays we made for our parents did not have much of a resale market.
* In the average car restoration you probably do make everyone else microscopically poorer, by doing a small amount of damage to the environment. While environmental costs should be taken into account, they don’t make wealth a zero-sum game. For example, if you repair a machine that’s broken because a part has come unscrewed, you create wealth with no environmental cost.
Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.
June 27, 2022
QotD: Perfectionism
It has blighted more lives than autism, destroyed more potential work than brain damage, stopped more achievement than mis-education. It can devour entire civilizations, and arguably has. […] If you’re an artist or even just a “creator” or worker: a writer, an artist, a programmer, a cook, holy heck, even a house cleaner, you know exactly what I’m talking about.
There’s this odd tendency to be more dissatisfied with our work the better we do and then to decide not to do things because, what the heck, it will never be good enough.
The way it blights lives is … interesting. As in I’ve seen perfectionists utterly ruin themselves by doing nothing. Oh, you want to write/create/climb your work ladder? But you look at your work and you know you’re not good enough because you can see flaws, so why even try. And then you do nothing. And then … and then you’re 65 and you’ve done nothing and achieved nothing in your life, and it’s a miracle if you came close to supporting yourself. (And the only reason you’ve done so is because you did some job you considered was menial and didn’t matter, so your perfectionism didn’t infect THAT.)
If you’re a true perfectionist, you also never had any relationships. Because even though you’re far from the ideal mate, you judge every potential by tagging up defects. If you can’t have perfection, why bother.
The very smart are extremely susceptible to this, but everyone can fall into the trap. If you care or know enough about any field, the flaws in your own (and others) work will stand out glaringly and in relief and then you can’t do ANYTHING.
Of course, the more you practice and know the more flaws you see. And it eventually shuts you down. I catch myself in this trap frequently to the point of being amazed when semi-pro anthos buy my work, because I’m sure it’s the worst thing ever written. And I can shut myself down for years. (I’m not alone, I know you know other writers with this problem.)
Sarah Hoyt, “The Flaw in Flawless”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-27.
June 25, 2022
QotD: The Left’s long march through the institutions
Once they were in, they of course credentialized everything, such that the cultural-transmission professions — journalism, education, even art and music — suddenly required college training … and all the trainers were Reds. Ever wonder why you seemingly have to have a fucking Master’s Degree to get your lit-wank novel published? Seriously: read the author bio of any of the flavor-of-the-minute wunderkinder that get their painfully quirky dreck blurbed in the New York Times Review of Books — every blessed one of them has some kind of advanced degree in “creative writing”. All those graduate-level “creative writing” programs aren’t just make-work for otherwise unemployable Eng-Lit PhDs, in other words. They’re what the Union of Soviet Writers was in the USSR: The guarantors of politically-reliable content.
That’s the setup. Ready for the twist?
They won, but they don’t know it. Not only was the Revolution televised, it’s still being televised, 24 hours a day, on 587+ satellite cable channels and umpteen digital streaming services. Eugene V. Debs’s wettest wet dream couldn’t compare to Current Year America. The SJWs are like the Seekers, out there desperately trying to prepare the world for the UFOs … but the UFO already landed in their backyard, and they were too busy trying to save the world to see it.
That’s why widespread political violence is inevitable, and damn soon. Nancy Pelosi may be the nastiest evil old bitch to ever slime through the halls of Congress, but she’s not stupid. She’s just in an impossible situation. She’s the leader of an organization that didn’t manage its True Believers, and now she’s fucked either way. […]
That’s what the old-school Commies didn’t see coming. Those poor deluded fools really thought that “intellectual” was an adjective. The Russian word for the noun version is intelligentsia, and they gave the Soviet Union no end of trouble — Stalin had to send boxcars of them to Siberia fairly regularly to keep them in line. In the West, though, they really thought that you can have an “intellectual” steelworker, or dockhand, or farmer, and the like. They were counting on it, in fact — see “community colleges were all Red fronts”, above.
Instead, “intellectual” is the True Believer’s self-chosen job description. You can meet some fearsomely learned people in your day-to-day, but the only people you’ll ever meet who use the word “intellectual” without sneering are Media types and their panty-sniffers in the ivory tower. They’re extremely useful idiots, which is why none of Palsy Pelosi’s predecessors sent them to Siberia like they should’ve. And now it’s too late.
Severian, “If the UFO Actually Comes, Part II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-26.
June 24, 2022
QotD: “[Woodrow] Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash”
The roll call of the worst presidents in American history includes some consensus top choices. James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce both contributed mightily to the nation’s slide into the Civil War, and Andrew Johnson did enduring harm to Reconstruction in the war’s aftermath. But all three of those men were repudiated by the end of their single term in office. They left no heirs who would acknowledge their influence, no fleet of academic hagiographers who could see themselves reflected in those presidencies.
Wilson, by contrast, served two full and consequential terms. He was the only Democrat re-elected to the job during the century between 1832 and 1936. He was lionized by liberals and progressives in academia and the media for most of the century after he left office in 1921. In my youth, and perhaps yours, Wilson was presented in history books as a tragic hero whom the unthinking American people didn’t deserve. He was often placed highly on academics’ rankings of the presidents. Princeton University named its school of international relations for him. Even in rescinding that honor in June 2020, the university’s press release declared: “Though scholars disagree about how to assess Wilson’s tenure as president of the United States, many rank him among the nation’s greatest leaders and credit him with visionary ideas that shaped the world for the better.”
Nah. Wilson was a human pile of flaming trash. He was a bad man who made the country and the world worse. His name should be an obscenity, his image an effigy. Hating him is a wholesome obligation of citizenship.
Dan McLaughlin, “The Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson”, National Review, 2022-03-16.
June 23, 2022
QotD: Mis-preparing our kids for the future
We’re preparing the new generation rottenly for this, too. Look, every generation is educated according to what their grandparents thought was desirable. Which is why I had the education that would have helped an upper class Portuguese Lady in the mid 19th century to make a good marriage and shine in society. For practical purposes, other than diplomacy […] the only use for my degree was academia by the time I took it. Though business desperately needed translators, we weren’t being taught office skills, or the terminology we needed to translate science or industrial stuff. (I learned those on my own, through running into them head first, as I learn practically anything.)
Kids now are being educated to the dreams of the early twentieth elites: for a communitarian world with a strong central government. They’re being told this is the future and what to expect, because when that idea made it into academia, and slowly worked itself through to curriculum and expectations, that was the future everyone EXPECTED. Even conservatives thought that the future would involve central planning. They just wanted to keep a little more individual freedom with it.
I remember blowing the world of Robert’s third grade teacher apart when we informed her that no, in the future there wouldn’t be a need for MORE group work, and that all creativity wouldn’t be communal (which frankly is funny. Creativity doesn’t work that way) but that it would be more individual, probably with people working on their piece of the project miles and miles away from the rest of the “team” and having to pull their weight alone. Dan and I explained why based on tech and trends, and all the poor woman kept saying is “that’s not what we were taught.”
Our kids were prepared not only for a world that doesn’t exist, but the world that idiot intellectuals (all intellectuals are idiots. They mostly don’t know a thing of the real world or real people) thought would come about, somehow, automagically. Think of Brave New World, but everyone is happy and doesn’t need the soma. (rolls eyes.)
And then we sneer at millenials for not finding their way, when people my age, who are self-directed and battlers, and have vocations, find ourselves caught in the grinding gears of change and get our goals and work broken over and over again, and yeah, also don’t find it easier to find our way.
Talk to the kids. Help them find something they’re “meant” to do (that’s not how it works, so make sure they know there isn’t only one goal and only one vocation, but there’s almost always something that their skills and ability are useful for RIGHT NOW. And the ability to learn more to change.) If needed, hook them on multiple streams of income. Help them see it’s possible. Dispel their illusions that life was ever easy.
Sure, in the past there were people who got “the one job” and stuck to it through thick and thin to the golden watch at the end. But I don’t think they were ever the majority. And by the time I came along, you couldn’t have any loyalty to your company, because it would have none to you.
Sarah Hoyt, “Finding Your Way”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-18.
