In Ages of Discord, Peter Turchin describes the consequences of elite overproduction. Middle-class youths strive for a college degree to ascend the social ladder. But because the true elites are always a small group, an excess of college graduates saturates the job market with mid-level managers. As these managers fight for scarce spots at the top, intra-elite jockeying becomes more fierce. Tests of ideological purity become a way of winnowing the competition. Those most insecure in their elite status do the most virtue signaling, and punch down on the “unenlightened” lower white classes as a way of confirming their rank. Ultimately, these people end up filling the ever-increasing number of mid-level positions in government, media, and universities.
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 27, 2022
QotD: Elite overproduction and Canada’s managerial class
May 26, 2022
Alex Tabarrok reviews The Parent Trap
At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok looks at Nate G. Hilger’s new book, The Parent Trap:
Hilger argues that the problems of poverty, pathology and inequality that bedevil the United States are not primarily due to poor schools, discrimination, or low incomes per se. The primary cause is parents: parents who are unable to teach their children the skills that are necessary to succeed in the modern world. Since parents can’t teach the necessary skills, Hilger calls for the state to take their place with a dramatic expansion of not just child care but collective parenting.
Let’s unpack some details. Begin with schooling. It’s very common to bemoan the state of schools in the “inner city” or to complain about “local financing” which supposedly guarantees that poor counties will have underfunded schools. All of this, however, is decades out-of-date.
A hundred years ago there really were massive public-school resource gaps by class and race. These days, however, state and federal spending play a larger role than local property tax revenue and distribute educational resources more progressively … In fact, when we include federal aid, 42 states spent more on poor school districts than on rich school districts in 2012. The same pattern holds between schools within districts
… The highest spending districts are large urban centers such as New York City, Boston and Baltimore. These cities spend large sums to educate rich and poor children alike. p. 10-11
Hilger is correct. No matter what you saw on The Wire, Baltimore spends more than sixteen thousand dollars per student, among the highest in the nation in large school districts and above average for the nation as a whole. Public schools are quite egalitarian in funding with any bias running towards more funding for poorer districts.
Schools, Hilger writes are “actually the smallest and most equalizing part of a much larger skill-building system.” The real problem, says Hilger, are parents.
But what about discrimination? When it comes to wage discrimination, Hilger is brutally honest:
If we compare individuals with similar cognitive test scores, Black college graduates earn higher wages than white college graduates. Studies that don’t control for test score differences but examine earnings gaps within specific professions — lawyers, physicians, nurses, engineers, scientists — tend to find Black workers earn zero to 10 percent less than white workers. These gaps could reflect discrimination, unmeasured skill differences, or other factors such as geography. In any case, such gaps are small compared to the 50 percent overall Black-white earnings gap and reinforce the idea that closing skills gaps would go a long way toward closing income gaps.
Hilger argues that racism does play an important role in explaining Black-white wage differentials but it’s the historical racism that made black parents less skilled and less able to pass on skills to their children. In the twentieth century, Asians, Hilger argues, were discriminated against in the United States at least much as Black Americans. But the Asians that came to the United States had high skills while the legacy of slavery meant that Black Americans began with low skills. Asians, therefore, were better able to overcome discrimination. The success of Nigerians and Jamaican immigrants in the United States also speaks to this point. (Long time readers may recall that in 2016 I dubbed Hilger’s paper on Asian Americans and Black Americans the Politically Incorrect Paper of the Year.)
The Banshee | Artifacts Interview Series
Legion Magazine
Published 15 Mar 2019Legion Magazine‘s Stephen J. Thorne sat down with Andrew Burtch, the Post-1945 historian at the Canadian War Museum, to discuss what was the crown jewel of the Royal Canadian Navy’s air fleet – the Banshee. Video edited by Adam Tindal.
For more information, visit: www.legionmagazine.com/artifacts
May 25, 2022
The Spy Game That Killed Yamamoto – WW2 – Spies & Ties 17
World War Two
Published 24 May 2022We’ve already seen the power of signals intelligence. Churchill loves being fed information from MI6’s Ultra. Now it brings a vengeance for his American allies. They manage to bag the scourge of Pearl Harbor, C-in-C of the Imperial Japanese Navy, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.
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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 22, 2022
Axis Prisoners Face French Wrath – WW2 – 195 – May 21 1943
World War Two
Published 21 May 2022The Allies have won the battle for Africa, but now they have nearly 250,000 POWs to care for, and do not have the facilities to do so. The Trident Conference continues in Washington to try and decide the direction of the Allied war effort, but they launch the Dambuster Raids this week in Germany to try and cripple German water power — and thus, industry — with a new type of bomb.
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May 21, 2022
Ed Browning’s Winchester G30 Prototypes
Forgotten Weapons
Published 25 Jul 2016http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons/
After Jonathan Edward “Ed” Browning had his 1929 rifle dropped from US military testing, he took the design back to his shop in Utah and kept working on it. By 1938 he had made enough improvements that he was ready to present the gun to Winchester, hoping they would be interested in purchasing the design. Specifically, he redesigned the receiver to move much of the bolt travel into the wrist of the stock, shortening the action. He also replaced the short recoil action with an annular gas piston. He made two sample rifles, one in military configuration and one in sporting configuration.
Winchester was looking for a self-loading rifle to market at the time, because they could see that war in Europe appeared to be imminent. They had been caught without a military rifle of their own during World War One, and did not want to be in that situation again. They thought that Ed Browning’s design showed merit, so they agreed to purchase it, and brought Browning onboard to help continue development.
With Winchester’s resources, it was possible to make the guns more professionally. Winchester designated the rifle the G30, and we have one of the examples made by Winchester in the video as well.
The tilting bolt mechanism took inspiration from John Moses Browning’s 1911 pistol, and the trigger housing bears an interesting resemblance to that of the French Berthier rifles (which may or may not be coincidental). The rifles appear to have worked reasonably well, although the annular gas piston was a hindrance which Browning apparently was unwilling to abandon. With his death in 1939, the project moved on to a new phase with David Marshall Williams taking on the job of improving it.
May 20, 2022
High and low “state capacity” illustrated
In Law & Liberty, Helen Dale recounts a miserable experience getting out of a major US airport and says this is an example of America’s low state capacity:
“TSA Checkpoint” by phidauex is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
At the other end, I found a stretch limo waiting for me. Getting ferried about in a limo after The Trip from Hell is something I’ve experienced before, in Damascus, before the Syrian civil war. Classic third world. Like Syrians, American hosts send limousines to the airport to pick you up because they know you flew in from JFK and will need to be appeased.
My experience is illustrative of something not confined to airports, however. Indeed, if it were only confined to airports, then the phrase I’m about to use (about the US) would be unfair (to the US). America’s dysfunctional airports are instances of widespread low state capacity. And this is bigger than airports. Low state capacity can only be used to describe a country when it is true of multiple big-ticket items, not just one.
State capacity is a term drawn from economic history and development economics. It refers to a government’s ability to achieve policy goals in reference to specific aims, collect taxes, uphold law and order, and provide public goods. Its absence at the extremes is terrifying, and often used to illustrate things like “fragile states” or “failed states”. However, denoting calamitous governance in the developing world is not its only value. State capacity allows one to draw distinctions at varying levels of granularity between developed countries, and is especially salient when it comes to healthcare, policing, and immigration. It has a knock-on effect in the private sector, too, as business responds to government in administrative kind.
Think, for example, of Covid-19. The most reliable metric — if you wish to compare different countries’ responses to the pandemic — is excess deaths per 100,000 people over the relevant period. That is, count how many extra people died beyond the pre-pandemic mortality rate on a country-by-country basis. For the sake of argument, drop the five countries leading this grim pack. Four of them are developing countries, and the fifth is Russia, which while developed, is both an autocracy and suffers from chronic low state capacity.
At the other end of the scale, ignore China, too. It may be lying about its success or, more plausibly, may have achieved it by dint of being an authoritarian state with high state capacity (notably, the latest round of draconian lockdowns in Shanghai commenced after the WHO collated that data).
The US has the worst excess death rate in the developed world (140 per 100,000). Australia has the best: –28 per 100,000. Yes, you read that right. Australia increased its life expectancy and general population health during the pandemic. So did Japan, albeit less dramatically. The rest of the developed world falls in between those two extremes: Italy and Germany are on 133 and 116 per 100,000 respectively, with the UK (109 per 100,000) doing a bit better. France and Sweden knocked it out of the park (63 and 56 per 100,000 excess deaths).
Recall, too, that not only did different countries adopt different approaches to pandemic management; sometimes there were large differences within countries. Like the US, Australia is a federal system, and as in the US, different states did things differently. Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, had the longest lockdown of any major city in the developed world. Other Australian states, meanwhile, locked down sparingly or not at all. In a European context, Sweden rejected most over-the-top Covid responses, the UK was somewhere in the middle, and Italy was thoroughly draconian, even barring unvaccinated people from supermarkets and groceries.
May 19, 2022
Alas, poor MiniTru … sent off to the knacker’s yard so soon
Apparently the Biden administration is reconsidering the decision to set up a “Ministry of Truth” — at least for the time being — and as Chris Bray shows, the media wants to talk about the evil, Nazi trolls who brought it down:
Labeling instead of describing; a narrative frame instead of factual discussion. Be grateful for Taylor Lorenz, because her cartoon journalism makes the game so gloriously obvious.
Cartoon Lady sort of “reports”, this morning, on the apparent demise of another cultural cartoon: Nina Jankowicz is on her way out at DHS, which is probably disbanding the Disinformation Governance Board. Here, via Revolver, is a non-paywalled copy of the story:
The story is an assemblage of right-out-of-the-gate assumptions, all relentlessly untested. Jankowicz is a “victim”, all disagreement with the decision to start the Disinformation Governance Board was part of a campaign of “coordinated online attacks”, the work of the board was good, disagreement with its creation was bad. None of that is established or explained — it merely is. Here’s the Big Frame, the here’s-what-it-all-means:
Jankowicz’s experience is a prime example of how the right-wing Internet apparatus operates, where far-right influencers attempt to identify a target, present a narrative and then repeat mischaracterizations across social media and websites with the aim of discrediting and attacking anyone who seeks to challenge them. It also shows what happens when institutions, when confronted with these attacks, don’t respond effectively.
The federal government created a new organization, and people discussed its existence. Criticism and questions necessarily centered on, wait for it, the person identified as the executive director of the new board, the only person publicly identified as a staff member at the organization. The far-right monsters used the tactic of attempting to “identify a target” by … talking about the person chosen, and publicly identified by government, as the leader and public face of a government operation. See how cleverly the extremists choose their targets!?!?!? I mean, who else would you talk about if you wanted to discuss the Disinformation Governance Board? She ran it.
Then, known demon Jack Posobiec tweeted stuff, the monster, and his “early tweets shaped the narrative and Jankowicz was positioned as the primary target.” Again, the person positioned as the primary target of criticism of a government board was the director of the board — after the building burned down, cruel extremists maliciously singled out the fire chief as their target — but Cartoon Lady presents it as a dark and ominous maneuver:
Just hours after Jankowicz tweeted about her new job, far-right influencer Jack Posobiec posted a tweets accusing the Biden administration of creating a “Ministry of Truth”. Posobiec’s 1.7 million followers quickly sprung into action. By the end of the day, there were at least 53,235 posts on Twitter mentioning “Disinformation Governance Board”, many referencing Jankowicz by name, according to a report by Advance Democracy, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that conducts public-interest research. In the days following, that number skyrocketed.
My goodness, people referenced her by name! They referenced the executive director of the board while discussing the creation of the board! nOw dO YoU SeE HOw thE DaRK ArTs oF thE NaZI tRolLs WoRk!?!?!?
QotD: “Rules of engagement” for home intruder drills
Lying silently in wait in the dark for someone to shoot is practically a recipe for starring in a Claude Werner blog post. Your house is not a free-fire zone, and you are not laying ambushes for Charlie on the Ho Chi Minh trail.
Even if it is a bad guy and not a family member, pet, or drunk neighbor, ensconcing oneself in a safe position, dialing 911, and loudly announcing that you have a gun and have called the cops is likely to save money for carpet cleaning bills and legal fees.
A friend quipped “What, and no advice to drag the body inside?”, which was funny, but … y’know what? I got to thinking about that, and this is even worse advice than that.
“Jes’ drag ’em inna house” is something that most non-dumb people who have watched some TV police procedurals can suss out for themselves as bad advice. It trips the BS detectors of all but the most inept.
But this? This sounds like plausible advice because it sounds like how “bad guy in the house” scenarios play out in Hollywood. The bad guy is never a tweaker who’s after a watch and some jewelry and who bolts when they realize the homeowner is there and armed. (It’s also never the homeowner’s husband home a day early from a business trip.) It’s always some elite killer team or serial murderer who’s there specifically to get the homeowner. And why wouldn’t you want to hide and ambush those guys?
Tamara Keel, “Rules of Engagement”, View From The Porch, 2019-03-27.
May 18, 2022
Trident: The Allied Plan to Win the War – Time Ghost News Flash
World War Two
Published 17 May 2022Washington, May 1943. It was the largest Anglo-American conference of the war so far. With the Axis being defeated in North Africa, the Mediterranean, and New Guinea, the need to agree on new strategic goals arose inside the Combined Chiefs of Staff. A new course of action was to be set against Italy, Japan, and Germany to capitalize on the recent successes. But debates and old dilemmas heated up when it came to resources, manpower, and the question “where to attack next”.
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May 17, 2022
QotD: Slavery
But part of that is that we’re imposing our values on the past. Look, history is looked at backwards, while we live forward. Take slavery (I don’t want it.) Yes, it was a horrible institution. It was also pervasive in human history, and as far as we can tell pre-history, world without end. Hell, still is as well, considerably less of the world than it was, but in Africa it’s pretty much still a thing, and not just in Arab countries.
Romans had complex rules to deal with it, and lived in fear of slave revolts.
It required mental gymnastics, because it was obvious to anyone that slaves were as human as their masters, and so a complex set of rules and philosophical separations were instituted and once any idea of the equality of man (or that man ought to be equal before the law (and G-d) the whole thing was doomed, sooner or later.
Americans tend to have a bizarre idea that slavery was always by race. I blame public school. I don’t know if it’s deliberately obscured, to emphasize the specialness of racial victimhood, or just because race and slavery are so associated in American history that it overshadows everything else. (Yes, again, is it malice or stupidity? Perhaps we should formulate an axiom that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.)
Men and women of all colors were enslaved throughout history. Heck, in the peninsula, in the long centuries in which it was a frontier between Christian and Moor, the slaving went on both ways. […]
Roman slaves were often blond, and the citizens often of African origin. But even there, it wasn’t tied to race. (Though celts were apparently in general fairly cheap, from what I can figure.)
So. All of us have slave ancestors. ALL OF US. All of us have slave owners in our ancestry.
Even in the US — though rare — there were black slave owners. And if you’re going to parse quadroons and octaroons who might very well be slaves, you’re going to assume race is one-drop but only for non-white races.
Sarah Hoyt, “I Am Myself Alone”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-25.
May 16, 2022
QotD: The difference between surface meaning and actual intent
Tim Worstall, “That Chinese ‘BreedReady’ Database – Check The Translation”, Continental Telegraph, 2019-03-11.
May 15, 2022
Bill Kristol’s as-yet-unexplained defection from conservatism
In the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from the latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan charts the political pilgrimage of a former right-wing stalwart to being “hugely popular among MSNBC Democrats”:
Bill Kristol at a political conference in Orlando, Florida, 23 September, 2011.
Photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons.
If you live long enough, and haven’t been lobotomized, you’ll change a lot of your views and opinions. Life does that. The world changes; you change; and for most people, who don’t air their views publicly for a living, the process is murky.
For the rest of us, the hacks/public intellectuals, I think there’s another standard: if you change your mind on an issue, at some point, explain why. What principles or ideas have you now abandoned? Which have you now embraced? What new facts have you learned? It’s a basic form of intellectual hygiene.
Which brings me to Bill Kristol. You may recall him as the former gatekeeper of Republican orthodoxy and much of its intelligentsia; architect of neoconservative foreign policy; adviser to US presidents; pundit; smooth-talker; operator. Now hugely popular among MSNBC Democrats, alert to racism and sexism and homophobia, Kristol has, these last few years, performed a spectacular ideological self-reinvention that makes J.D. Vance look like a man of unflinching consistency. And he has never even attempted to explain why.
Take for a moment the issue du jour: abortion. Very few people have spent years and years, as Kristol has, campaigning with a singular determination to overturn Roe v Wade. Here he is in 1998:
Republicans talk a lot about being a majority party, about becoming a governing party, about shaping a conservative future. Roe and abortion are the test. For if Republicans are incapable of grappling with this moral and political challenge; if they cannot earn a mandate to overturn Roe and move toward a post-abortion America, then in truth, there will be no conservative future.
A year earlier, Kristol had been even more emphatic:
The truth is that abortion is today the bloody crossroads of American politics. It is where judicial liberation (from the Constitution), sexual liberation (from traditional mores) and women’s liberation (from natural distinctions) come together. It is the focal point for liberalism’s simultaneous assault on self-government, morals and nature. So, challenging the judicially imposed regime of abortion-on-demand is key to a conservative reformation in politics, in morals, and in beliefs.
This is more than a pro-life position. It is the articulation of a thoroughgoing pro-life conservatism designed to end judicial intervention in politics, reverse the sexual revolution, and restore distinctions between men and women rooted in biology and nature. It couldn’t be more GOP 2022! The man was a visionary. And so you might imagine that when Kristol’s vision came to final fruit in 2022, he’d be over the moon.
But no. After Trump became GOP leader and put three pro-life justices on the Supreme Court, Kristol barely mentioned abortion on his Twitter thread — except to take a swipe at “the Republican political class — at once cavalierly uncaring about the women they seek to represent and manifestly insincere about the pro-life beliefs they claim to hold.”
The End of the War in Africa – WW2 – 194 – May 14, 1943
World War Two
Published 14 May 2022With the end of the Tunisian Campaign, the Allies have won the war for the African Continent. What next? They meet at the Trident Conference in Washington DC to try and figure that out. Meanwhile, the fight in the field continues — in Burma, the Aleutians, China, and the Kuban.
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