spiked
Published 5 Aug 2022The spiked team discusses the rise of Britain’s thoughtpolice, Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip and Beyoncé’s act of self-censorship.
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August 6, 2022
Britain’s woke Stasi | The spiked podcast
QotD: Locke’s Treatise
Locke’s Treatise, then, is in many ways a retcon — a retrospective justification for the observed fact that late 17th century Englishmen were quite prepared to risk their lives for liberty and property. They’d done it once in Locke’s youth (the Civil War, 1642-51, in which Locke’s father fought briefly for Parliament), and were gearing up to do it again (the Treatise was published in 1689, one year after the Glorious Revolution, but was written 10 years earlier, during the Exclusion Crisis). He wasn’t trying to establish some theoretical “right to revolution”. The revolution had already happened, and was about to happen again. Locke was justifying it.
This is important, because Our Thing is almost exclusively backward-looking. We’re looking for a (hypothetical, FBI goons, hypothetical) right to revolution, and Locke’s social contract seems to be the answer, just as it (seemed to be) for the Founders. All the stuff George III did to the colonists, FedGov does to us, in spades.* Our problem, though, is that to us, “liberty” and “property” are what “life” was to John Locke — a necessary precondition, sure, but nothing to get too worked up over. They’d just stopped burning heretics in England twenty years before Locke’s birth, after all, and every day, in every port of the realm, sailors signed on for very likely death sentences on international voyages. In a world where starving to death was still a very real possibility, in other words, convincing people to roll the dice with their lives was pretty easy. It was the other two that were the toughies.
We Postmoderns, though, carry on like we’re in Auschwitz if Twitter goes down for a few hours. We have no idea what “sacred honor” could possibly mean, but we’ll riot in the streets if our sportsball team wins a championship. The Revolution (again, FBI goons, hypothetically) won’t come when they take away one more liberty. It’ll come when the Obamaphone doesn’t have the latest version of Angry Birds.
We need to think long and hard about why that is, and what to do about it, because our John Locke is going to be a hard man indeed.
* Well, except that whole “refusing to encourage migrations hither” bit — FedGov is fucking aces at that. But no historical analogy is perfect, alas.
Severian, “Overturning Locke: Life”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-09-11.
August 5, 2022
ARNHEM – A Bridge Too Far – THE TRUE STORY (2001)
British Army Documentaries
Published 25 Jun 2022Please help us to keep bringing you great content! We are able to bring you these interesting documentaries, which would otherwise be held in a vault, or away from public view because we purchase commercial licenses often at considerable expense. Unfortunately, YouTube’s re-use policy now means we can’t monetise it. This means we can’t invest in new licenses for new documentaries. Please help us by subscribing to our Patreon page from just £2/month so we can keep bringing you great content, otherwise, this channel may need to close forever. Thank You
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At 3:00 a.m., the commanders of the 2nd South Staffordshire battalion and the 1st and 11th Parachute battalions met to plan their attack. At 4:30 a.m., before dawn, the 1st Parachute Brigade began its attack towards Arnhem bridge, with the 1st Battalion leading supported by remnants of the 3rd Battalion, with the 2nd South Staffordshires on the 1st Battalion’s left flank and the 11th Battalion following. As soon as it became light the 1st Battalion was spotted and halted by fire from the main German defensive line. Trapped in open ground and under heavy fire from three sides, the 1st Battalion disintegrated and what remained of the 3rd Battalion fell back. The 2nd South Staffordshires were similarly cut off and, save for about 150 men, overcome by midday. The 11th Battalion, (which had stayed out of much of the fighting) was then overwhelmed in exposed positions while attempting to capture high ground to the north. With no hope of breaking through, the 500 remaining men of these four battalions withdrew westwards in the direction of the main force, 5 km (3.1 mi) away in Oosterbeek.
The 2nd Battalion and attached units (approximately 600 men) were still in control of the northern approach ramp to the Arnhem bridge. They had been ceaselessly bombarded by enemy tanks and artillery from two battle groups led by SS-Sturmbannführer [Major] Brinkmann and one commanded by Major Hans-Peter Knaust. The Germans recognized that they would not be moved by infantry attacks such as those that had been bloodily repulsed on the previous day so instead, they heavily shelled the short British perimeter with mortars, artillery, and tanks; systematically demolishing each house to enable their infantry to exploit gaps and dislodge the defenders. Although in the battle against enormous odds, the British clung to their positions, and much of the perimeter was held.
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FN MAG: Best of the Western GPMGs
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Apr 2022
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August 2, 2022
August 1, 2022
Hamburg’s Citizens Burnt Alive – WAH 071 – July 31, 1943
World War Two
Published 31 Jul 2022In Italy the Fascists fall from power in a peaceful coup, while in Germany the RAF and USAAF bring down a rain of fire of biblical proportions in Operation Gomorrah, launching the Firestorm of Hamburg.
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July 31, 2022
Mussolini Falls from Power – WW2 – 205 – July 30, 1943
World War Two
Published 30 Jul 2022The Allied advance on Sicily continues, though they’re really gearing up for operations next week. The Soviet advances in the USSR and in New Georgia also continue, with the enemy deciding to withdraw in both; Allied firebombing kills tens of thousands of German civilians, but the big news is still the fall of Benito Mussolini from power in Italy.
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American publishing has a race problem, but it has an even bigger gender problem
In the latest edition of the SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte considers a recent online brouhaha featuring novelist Joyce Carol Oates and notes that while she was being dragged by the usual online mob for her perceived defence of “white” authors, an even bigger problem for the ever-diminishing number of “big” publishing houses is their gender balance:
Publishing also has a gender problem. Only 34 per cent of the Penguin Random House workforce is male.
When you eliminate the warehouse staff, that figure drops to 26 per cent.
A Lee & Low survey from 2019 put the male component of the US publishing workforce at 24 per cent and a Canadian survey (referenced in SHuSH 90) found our publishing sector is 74 per cent women and 18 per cent men. Oates’ critics, many of them women, skated over this part of the equation.
That’s not unusual. Most people in publishing skate over this part of the equation. A few years back, when it was revealed that men are just 20 per cent of the fiction reading public, the question arose, might that have something to do with the lack of men acquiring and marketing books. Hardly anyone in publishing thought so. As I noted at the time, a Random House spokesperson said the gender composition of the firm was “not an issue of concern or even much contemplation for us”. And the head of Columbia U’s publishing program asserted that “great literature transcends gender in terms of editors”. A UK literary agent attributed the gender disparity in fiction to merit: some men, she said, “just aren’t very good”.
I spoke to several agents this week to see if the agent mentioned by Oates was an anomaly. What I heard suggests not. My agents were not surprised by the assessment of the anonymous agent. One just shrugged, as in, “what’s new?”
Whether the comments following the Oates’ tweet are valid — “it’s about time”, or “welcome to the oppressed, now you know what it feels like” — I’m probably not qualified to say. The real issue, which seems to be missed in this conversation, is that work is very often not judged by its quality but by who the author is and what the author represents. (Not a wholly new phenomenon in the world.) It is heartbreaking to see work of real talent, maybe even genius, being rejected by publishers (and I do see this in action) in favour of an author who has the right name and biometrics.
Not all of my agents agreed with Oates’ anonymous agent. One said, “It’s equally hard to sell everybody in this market. I’ve got white authors, black authors, brown authors. It’s hard to get a good deal anywhere. The consolidation in the industry is real: there are fewer editors to pitch books to than there used to be.”
This agent admits that the trend is now toward loading up on BIPOC authors but believes that will blow itself out, as all trends do, and the publishing houses will all chase after the next shiney thing. As for the situation inside publishing houses, “it’s been tough for guys as long as I’ve been in the business. Talk to the white male editors who sit on editorial boards at publishing house and they’ll tell you, it’s tough, there’s a lot of pushback from the other voices around the table.”
This agent also noted that the agency world is starting to break down along gender lines. Not surprisingly, literary agents are overwhelmingly white women. Increasingly, they are representing only women.
July 30, 2022
Alexis de Tocqueville
In The Critic, Paul Sagar reviews a new biography of Alexis de Tocqueville by Olivier Zunz:
Alexis de Tocqueville came perilously close to never existing at all. His parents, married in 1793, spent 10 of their first 18 months of matrimony in jail — arrested for the crime of being aristocrats during the height of the French revolutionary Terror. Tocqueville’s great-grandfather was guillotined in April 1794, after being forced to watch the beheadings of his daughter and grandchildren. His newlywed parents were in the queue, awaiting the same fate, but the fall of Robespierre in July meant they were spared.
Alexis, the third son of the family, would be born in 1805, and go on to write not one, but two, of the most influential works in the history of ideas. His two-volume Democracy in America (published in 1835 and 1840) has been hailed as, variously, the first work of political science, a founding text of sociological analysis, and a landmark in the history of political philosophy.
It remains a touchstone for those attempting to understand both democracy and the United States, as well as post-Revolutionary France (Tocqueville’s animating point of comparison). His later The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856) attempted to locate the long-term causes of the events of 1789, and inaugurated a school of French Revolution historiography that remains alive and influential to this day.
He also enjoyed a moderately successful career as a practising politician, directly involved in France’s tumultuous political upheavals from the 1830s to the early 1850s. Constitutionally frail, and wracked by tuberculosis for the final nine years of his life before dying at just 54, he nonetheless packed a lot in.
As a narrative biography, Olivier Zunz’s The Man Who Understood Democracy succeeds tremendously. The details of Tocqueville’s life — and the events he lived through — are rendered with engaging clarity. The detailed reconstruction of Tocqueville’s nine-month trip to America in 1831–32 is especially valuable, shedding a great deal of light on what Tocqueville saw and, crucially, who he spoke to and took his lead from. Zunz does not shy away from dissolving the myth to reveal the man. Sometimes treated as though he were a gimlet-eyed sage who saw through to the very soul of the fledgling United States, Zunz shows instead the extent to which Tocqueville tended to take too much at face value, especially regarding what he was told by less than impartial interlocutors, frequently failing to scratch below the surface on his whirlwind tour.
Thus, for example, he went on to write in Democracy in America that the liberty of the United States meant that secret societies were unknown there, entirely failing to recognise not only the extent of Masonic influence in local politics, but also how objections to Masonic influence were a core feature of contestation. A young man, dazzled by the hustle and bustle of the New World, he tended to see what he wanted to see — or what others hoped he would.
July 29, 2022
Joe “Leonid Brezhnev” Biden
Chris Bray says if you saw anyone else speaking the way Joe Biden did the other day, you’d be concerned about medical or psychological crises:
This is an increasingly strange moment, and the President of the United States is an increasingly strange and incoherent man. This is not something that has to be a partisan point, and I propose no next step that serves anyone’s politics — just notice, for now, and figure out the rest on your own terms. I’ve compared Joe Biden to Leonid Brezhnev, and Biden’s place in our political trajectory to Brezhnev’s position as an indicator of societal decline, and here we are again. I’ll get to the insane substance in a moment, but let’s start with the obviousness of the man’s bizarre affect. Turn off your politics for a moment and pretend you’re just watching the old guy who lives down the street. Watch this closely, ideally on full screen — and notice that he blinks once, around the 1:22 mark (and maybe a little one at 0:07):
If you saw a pastor or a small-town mayor or a school principal speaking like this, you would think it was unsettling. If you saw an elderly man in your family speaking this way, you’d call the doctor. This is video posted on the blue-checked POTUS account, official footage that someone at the White House decided to move to the foreground, and it’s disturbing. They didn’t notice the dead-eyed, overdosed stare?
The effect of the whole speech this footage is taken from is even more disturbing, if you can stomach it all. At least watch from 8:20 to 8:30, if you’re inclined to take notice of the thing, and watch the weird shift.
QotD: The US Civil War as a “revolt of the elites”
They don’t teach it this way in college (for obvious reasons), but the Civil War was a revolt of the Elites. Put polemically, but not unfairly, The American People were offered four choices for President in 1860:
- tacitly pro-slavery;
- pro-slavery;
- fanatically pro-slavery; or
- fuck you.
These were embodied by John Bell, Stephen A. Douglas, John C. Breckinridge, and Abraham Lincoln, respectively, but the names on the tickets really didn’t matter, because it all boiled down to two options: Some flavor of politics as usual, or fuck you. And here’s the important part: The vast, vast majority of the country voted for politics as usual. “Fuck you” got 39.82% of the vote, which by my math means that 60% of a country that would soon be conducting the largest military mobilization yet seen in the history of warfare wanted things to keep going as they were.
In fact, it’s worse than that. As much as I hate to credit him with anything, Barack Obama was right — He truly was a Lincolnesque figure, in that Lincoln was vague to the point of incoherence about his origins, aims, and platform, too. A vote for Lincoln wasn’t a vote for disunion; it was a thumb in Dixie’s eye, no more. In other words, it was a vote to put the ball in the South’s court — an electoral-college version of the double dog dare. We voted for “none of the above,” pro-slavery people, now whatcha gonna do about it?
We know the answer — they haven’t yet forbidden us from teaching the fact that secession happened sorta-kinda-quasi democratically — but for obvious reasons they don’t teach that the secession conventions were all rigged in favor of the fire-eaters, and even then the motions barely passed. Which, again, means that “politics as usual” was nearly the default position of guys specifically summoned to discuss ending politics as usual. If you want to say that the Civil War was started by about twenty guys nobody’s ever heard of, with names like “Louis T. Wigfall” and “Laurence M. Keitt,” you won’t hear much argument from me.
Severian, “Misunderstanding the Civil War”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-05-29.
July 28, 2022
Is the US Navy in crisis?
CDR Salamander outlines why he is very concerned about the current state of the United States Navy:

US Navy ships from the John C. Stennis and Nimitz Carrier Strike Groups with ships from the Bonhomme Richard Expeditionary Strike Group in the Gulf of Oman, 22 May 2007.
US Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Denny Cantrell via Wikimedia Commons.
If you believe the threat from China is overblown, our Navy is well led, and that our fleet is big enough, then this is not the post for you. If you are concerned for all of it, grab a fresh drink and dive right in.
We are facing of something our nation has not had to seriously consider in well over three decades; we do not have free and unfettered access to the sea.
Even when Soviet submarines roamed the world’s oceans at will – though closely watched – and the Red Banner Fleet could send battle groups on cruises through the Gulf of Mexico, we had fair confidence in one thing – the Pacific was an American lake.
No more.
The leaders of the USN seem to have very different notions about what the Navy needs:
f you feel the Navy needs a larger share of the budget to meet the challenge of China, then you need to advocate for it. You need to fight for it … and when I say “you” I mean “we” and the most important and powerful parts of that “we” are our institutions; our maritime power institutions dedicated to seeing the USA remain the premier seapower.
Let’s start with the most obvious. Our uniformed Navy is itself an institution. It reports to its civilian leadership in the Executive Branch with oversight from the Legislative Branch. There are your big pixel maritime governmental institutions; the uniformed and civilian leaders in the Department of the Navy.
As reviewed yesterday, the CNO is engaged in a rather low-energy talking point about 500-ships, but in 2022 that is not even remotely achievable. He knows it, you know it, Congress knows it as well. A number is not an argument, and yet he is investing personal and institutional capital on this line that is almost immediately ignored if it is heard at all. Why?
In the last year one of his highest profile public appearances was when he shoveled heaping piles of personal and institutional capital in a fight defending a red in tooth and claw racial essentialist Ibram X. Kendi against who would normally be the US Navy’s natural allies in Congress. Ultimately he lost that battle and removed Kendi’s racist book and others from his reading list, but in the face of everything else going on in the maritime world, why?
What about the Vice CNO, Admiral William K. Lescher, USN? Maybe he could throw some sharp elbows for the maritime cause? Sadly, not. Just look at his exchange with Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) back in March. He seems to be the “Vice Chief of Joint Force Operations” more than anything else. He is focused on something, but advocating for sea power is not it.
With the night orders from the CNO and VCNO as they are, if you expect any significant advocacy from the uniformed Navy leadership who report to them for — checks notes — the Navy, you are going to have to wait for a long time, time we don’t have. It isn’t going to happen.
[…]
Take a moment and ponder – when was the last time you heard the SECNAV or Under out front on The Hill or to the greater public about our maritime requirements? Yes, I fully understand what goes on behind closed doors, but that slow roll in an ever-slower bureaucracy infested with scoliotic nomenklatura is well past being of use. The American people must be provided the information and motivation to understand how their entire standard of living – and to a great extent their freedoms – is guaranteed by our mastery of the seas. Is even a rudimentary effort being made in this regard?
Just look at the USN’s YouTube feed – a primary communication device for the American people. What has the SECNAV talked about there this year? LGBTQ+ Pride Month, Juneteenth, Army birthday, Asian-Pacific Islander Month, Mental Health Awareness Month, Women’s History Month, carrier air birthday, and Black History Month.
There you go. There’s your communication. Dig harder if you want … but if you read CDRSalamander and you are not readily aware, then imagine the general population’s situational awareness of the dragon just over the horizon.
The History of American Chip Flavors
J.J. McCullough
Published 2 Apr 2022The story of chips is the story of America.
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July 27, 2022
Baghdad Biden speaks
Chris Bray recounts the story of a local government attempting and — for a while — succeeding with the Baghdad Bob blanket denial strategy:
In the Deep Blue suburban town where I live, our city government has been stumbling through a series of crises. For a couple of years, employees fled from City Hall like the building was on fire, and nowhere was the crisis more acute than in the finance department — where we had five directors in a little over two years, and lost most of the other staff, including one who sued the city over her departure. There was a year when we couldn’t pass a budget, because the budget proposal was such a shambles, and a discussion at a meeting of an advisory commission in which a commissioner asked one of the many finance directors if the numbers in the city’s bank accounts matched the numbers in the city ledger. (Try to guess the answer.)
Recently, an ad hoc committee of local citizens — all finance professionals — wrote a report on the period of crisis, and presented our city council with a recommendation that they hire someone to do a forensic audit of the city’s accounting during those years. The council scheduled the report as a “receive and file” item, placing it on a 28-item agenda as, you’ll never guess, item #28. Then, in a brief discussion that began after midnight, they said that the report was nonsense and hearsay. The end.
So, yes, there was no financial crisis in our city during the years when we had five finance directors, when “permanent” finance directors left after a few months, when we lost most of the finance department staff, when we couldn’t pass a budget, and when we had no idea how much money we were actually supposed to have in the bank. Our city council says so. “These are not the ‘droids you are looking for.”
Meanwhile, we’re not in a recession, or even facing the risk of a recession, because that’s not Joe Biden’s view, and because the technical definition of a recession is very complicated.
Also, the inflation of 2021 was transitory. Zipped right by! Also, Joe Biden has a plan to shut down the virus.
The war in Ukraine is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, the economy is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, the continuing Covid-19 “emergency” is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP, and the mRNA injections are REALLY REALLY SHUT UP. Actually, the way experts measure this is really complicated, and technically …











