Charlie Dean Archives
Published Aug 27, 2013Cartoonist Rube Goldberg creates a little animation to explain how fuel is converted to power in the modern automobile engine.
CharlieDeanArchives – Archive footage from the 20th century making history come alive!
December 12, 2024
CHEVROLET with Cartoonist Rube Goldberg: Something for Nothing (1940)
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December 11, 2024
The Korean War 025 – UN Forces Abandon Pyongyang – December 10, 1950
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 10 Dec 2024This week, UN forces in the west pull out of the North Korean capital Pyongyang. In the east, the marines continue to fight their way towards safety. Over in Washington, the aftershocks of the Chinese intervention have shaken high command as much as they have the troops on the ground, and America’s allies, especially Britain, grow alarmed over the US response.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:26 Recap
01:20 The Blame Game
03:58 Retreat in the West
07:43 The Chinese Situation
10:59 Escaping Chosin
13:57 Atoms and Attlees
18:07 Summary
18:20 Conclusion
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December 10, 2024
M47 – The Most Boring Tank Ever? | Tank Chat #178
The Tank Museum
Published Aug 9, 2024The US built M47 probably isn’t the most interesting tank in history – but it was a vital part of NATO’s Cold War tank force.
Rushed into production at the outbreak of the Korean War, it never saw active service with the US military and was quickly superseded by the M48.
But large numbers were supplied to US Allies around the world – with Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Jordan, Pakistan and Austria being among the most significant users.
Probably the most famous M47 crewman of all, Arnold Schwarzenegger, served on the tank during his National Service.
00:00 | Intro
01:05 | M46 Sees Service in Korea
02:56 | Development Problems – And a Stop Gap
10:57 | Short Lived US service
12:47 | But An Export Success
15:24 | M47 plugs the gap for the US Army – goes on to serve abroad
15:46 | The Tank Museum’s M47 Restoration Project
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QotD: Nuclear deterrence and the start of the Cold War
Understanding the development of US nuclear doctrine and NATO requires understanding the western allies’ position after the end of WWII. In Britain, France and the United States, there was no political constituency, after the war was over, to remain at anything like full mobilization and so consequently the allies substantially demobilized following the war. By contrast, the USSR did not demobilize to anything like the same degree, leaving the USSR with substantial conventional military superiority in Eastern Europe (in part because, of course, Stalin and later Soviet leaders did not have to cater to public sentiment about defense spending). The USSR also ended the war having annexed several countries in whole or in part (including eastern Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, parts of Finland and bits of Romania) and creating non-democratic puppet governments over much of the rest of Eastern Europe. American fears that the USSR planned to attempt to further extend its control were effectively confirmed in 1948 by the Russian-backed coup in Czechoslovakia creating communist one-party rule there and by the June 1948 decision by Stalin to begin the Berlin Blockade in an effort to force the allies from Berlin as a prelude to bringing all of Germany, including the allied sectors which would become West Germany (that is, the Federal Republic of Germany).
It’s important, I think, for us to be clear-eyed here about what the USSR was during the Cold War – while the USSR made opportunistic use of anti-imperialist rhetoric against western powers (which were, it must be noted, also imperial powers), the Soviet Union was also very clearly an empire. Indeed, it was an empire of a very traditional kind, in which a core demographic (ethnic Russians were substantially over-represented in central leadership) led by an imperial elite (Communist party members) extracted resources, labor and manpower from a politically subordinated periphery (both the other Soviet Socialist Republics that composed the USSR and the Warsaw Pact countries) for the benefit of the imperial elite and the core. While the USSR presented itself as notionally federal in nature, it was in fact extremely centralized and dominated by a relatively small elite.
So when Western planners planned based on fears that the highly militarized expansionist territorial empire openly committed to an expansionist ideology and actively trying to lever out opposing governments from central (not eastern) Europe might try to expand further, they weren’t simply imagining things. This is not to say everything they did in response was wise, moral or legal; much of it wasn’t. There is a certain sort of childish error which assumes that because the “West” did some unsavory things during the Cold War, that means that the threat of the Soviet Union wasn’t real; we must put away such childish things. The fear had a very real basis.
Direct military action against the USSR with conventional forces was both politically unacceptable even before the USSR tested its first nuclear weapons – voters in Britain, France or the United States did not want another world war; two was quite enough – and also militarily impossible as Soviet forces in Europe substantially outnumbered their Western opponents. Soviet leaders, by contrast, were not nearly so constrained by public opinion (as shown by their strategic decision to limit demobilization, something the democracies simply couldn’t do).
This context – a west (soon to be NATO) that is working from the assumption that the USSR is expansionist (which it was) and that western forces would be weaker than Soviet forces in conventional warfare (which they were) – provides the foundation for how deterrence theory would develop.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Nuclear Deterrence 101”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-11.
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December 9, 2024
“Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time”
Chris Bray checks in on the vocational mental health clinic known as the New York Times:
Non-binary New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen
A cruel government official absolutely brutalized and devastated some journalists this week, in a horrifying showdown that the New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen bravely describes this morning:
Shortly before allowing reporters into the main chamber of the Supreme Court for oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a court employee asked us all if we needed to use a bathroom. The men’s room was right next door, the staff member said, and the women’s room down the hall.
“Where should nonbinary people go?” one of the reporters asked.
An uncomfortable back-and-forth followed. The staff person seemed not to understand the question. In the end, there was no answer. It just didn’t seem to compute.
The men’s room is over there, the Nazi said, not even seeing what a vicious act this was.
This is the lede; given the richest real estate in journalism, Gessen opens a discussion of a Supreme Court case with the story of victims denied the right to drop a deuce in a manner that fully provides them with the rich tapestry of social equity. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it apparently bends toward just using a gendered toilet stall to wipe your ass. The piece goes on the warn about the American descent into Trumpian autocracy, in case you hadn’t guessed.
After an election season in which Tim Walz, of all people, was sent out to sell the narrative that JD Vance, of all people, was deeply weird and socially marginal, I constantly find myself seeing representations of strangeness and darkness and cruelty and horror that make me … shrug? “Which part is the bad part?”
I mentioned this yesterday, but I’m fixating this morning on the journalist who just crushed Pete Hegseth, just absolutely caught his ass, dead to rights, and bragged that she had the receipts. Mic drop, bitch — she got you! Your deviant behavior is on video. And then you watch the video, and it’s some way-obvious dads drinking a glass of whiskey together, obviously sober and acting with restraint, in a dead-center normal piece of social behavior.
This happens daily. HERE IS A SCARY WEIRD THING, a headline says, and I click on the link and see an unremarkable thing. The nonbinary journalist M Gessen is deeply concerned that the Supreme Court building is operated in such a bizarre way, consistent with a brutal descent into autocracy, not the socially reasonable way in which a diverse regime of toilet facilities are aligned with the infinite number of possible ways to represent your relationship to your crotch. M Gessen.
Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time.
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“… liberalism has become a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses”
Freddie deBoer patiently explains why outrageous over-the-top emoting isn’t a useful or productive way to argue for your political views:
I’ve written several times about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention. I’ve focused on it not because I necessarily think the issue itself is particularly important, but rather because it’s so emblematic of what liberalism has become: a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses, a collection of well-intentioned people who mistake the responsibility to fight discrimination for a broad, vague duty to shield certain groups of people from any criticism.
For the book I’m currently writing, I’m talking to a ton of people in the broad world of mental health — psychiatrists, therapists, researchers, policymakers, journalists, fellow patients — and I’ve brought up the TikTok DID community over and over again. Remarkably, not one person defends the phenomenon as a true expression of genuine illness, not even a few disability rights activists I’ve talked to, who usually have an ethic of never questioning a disability claim. Countless normie liberals I’ve chatter with, over the past several years, have also accepted my basic position that these young women don’t actually have dissociative identity disorder. But, also, almost no one is willing to affirmatively say anything about this dynamic themselves. Indeed, The Verge reported that many experts have decided that the costs of speaking out about that whole culture just aren’t worth it. And so you have a set of behaviors that no one defends but that no one feels comfortable criticizing, thanks to the pathologies of 21st century liberalism and online rage. That’s what I’m really here to talk to you about today.
I don’t, of course, want to be too harsh on the individual young women who have turned a debilitating and controversial disorder into an opportunity to put on vertical video fashion shows; they’re just kids and kids do stupid shit, sometimes even genuinely offensive shit. What you usually have, or used to have, is the ability to tell someone doing stupid shit to knock it off. Not oppress anyone, not humiliate anyone, not permanently shun anyone. But just to say, “You don’t have dissociative identity disorder, pretending you do is unhealthy and offensive towards people who actually have serious mental illnesses, knock it off“. I find that very easy to say. But clearly a lot of people don’t, and the reasons are fairly obvious. First, despite whatever vibe shift we may be living through, it remains the case that in progressive discursive spaces, saying the wrong thing is still very fraught and can result in accusations of bigotry that are personally and professionally damaging. Second, liberals have trained themselves to avoid any position at all that might be construed as siding with the enemy, as a matter of in-group identification. Take it from me: “A lot of people in Gen Z appear to be lacking in emotional resilience, in a way that’s unhealthy for them” has become, in the internet-soaked mind, “Gen Z is a bunch of snowflakes”, and so a ton of liberals recoil at that idea. Can’t appear to make a concession to the enemy! I’m afraid we do not have a vocabulary for critical solidarity anymore.
All of this is bad, and you only have to look at how incredibly harsh certain slices of “queer fandom” can be to see what I’m talking about.
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QotD: The downfall of Boeing
There’s a lot to love about an engineer-dominated corporate culture. For starters, it has a tendency to overengineer things, and when those things are metal coffins with hundreds of thousands of interacting components, filled with people and screaming through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, maybe overengineering isn’t so bad. These cultures also tend to be pretty innovative, and sure enough Boeing invented the modern jet airliner and then revolutionized it several times.
But there are also downsides. As any Googler will tell you, these companies usually have a lot of fat to trim. Some of what looks like economic inefficiency is actually vital seed corn for the innovations of the future, but some of it is also just inefficiency, because nobody looks at the books, because it isn’t that kind of company. Likewise, being highly deliberative about everything can lead to some really smart decision making and avoidance of group think, but it can also be a cover for laziness or for an odium theologicum that ensures nothing ever gets done. Smart managers steeped in this sort of culture can usually do a decent job of sorting the good from the bad, but only if they can last, because you see there’s a third problem, which is that almost everybody involved is a quokka.
Engineers, being a subspecies of nerds, are bad at politics. In 1996, Boeing did something very stupid and acquired a company that was good at politics. McDonnell Douglas, another airplane maker, wasn’t the best at making airplanes, but was very good at lobbying congress and at impressing Wall Street analysts. Boeing took over the company, but pretty much everybody agrees that when the dust had settled it was actually McDonnell Douglas that had taken over Boeing. One senior Boeing leader lamented that the McDonnell Douglas executives were like “hunter killer assassins”. No, sorry bro, I don’t think they were actually that scary, you were just a quokka.
Anyway, the hunter killer assassins ran amok: purging rivals, selling off assets, pushing through stock buybacks, and outsourcing or subcontracting everything that wasn’t nailed down. They had a fanaticism for capital efficiency that rose to the level of a monomania,1 which maybe wasn’t the best fit for an airplane manufacturer. And slowly but surely, everything went off the rails. Innovation stopped, the culture withered, and eventually planes started falling out of the sky. And now the big question, the question Robison just can’t figure out. Why?
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Flying Blind by Peter Robison”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-02-06.
1. This is how you know this story took place in an era of high interest rates!
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December 8, 2024
The potential for retribution in a second Trump presidency
Francis Christian meditates on whether or how President-elect Donald Trump will indulge in eye-for-an-eye revenge against the individuals most clearly involved in the lawfare and other attempts to derail his re-election:
It was the English poet Alexander Pope who admonished us in the manner of the New Testament that “to err is human; to forgive, divine” — Errare humanum est, ignoscere divino.
The Old Testament in contrast, has the equally familiar and perhaps far more popular, “eye for an eye“, and in one of the most revolutionary statements ever uttered, Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount talked about us “having heard that it was said, ‘an eye for an eye’ — but I say unto you, love your enemies“.
To wish to take revenge upon one’s enemies is therefore human, but Jesus is asking mankind to rise above this basic instinct and instead, to forgive and love one’s enemies. This was all of course part of His Mission on earth — to change by His Life, His Cross and the Resurrection, the destiny of human beings from being bound to basic instincts and death — to being bound for eternal life, a different destiny and a new creation.
The mavens of Hollywood of course march to a different and more ancient tune (which has been handed down unchanged to them) and generations of movie goers and consumers of media have been brought up on the idea that revenge of the most explosively visceral kind is a good thing, even a noble thing.
My readers will undoubtedly have their own sincerely held beliefs about Jesus’ command to love our enemies and to do good to those who hate us and once again, I do not wish this essay to turn out to be a sermon! What I wish to address instead, is to ask the question: what is the place for retribution, vengeance and revenge in the conduct of statecraft?
In other words, when President elect Trump said in a recently widely publicized interview that he was, “not looking for retribution, grandstanding or to destroy people who treated me very unfairly“, was he declaring a principle of statecraft that makes for a fulfilling and productive Presidency? And is this also a principle of statecraft that will “make American great again?”
In typical, inimitable and endearing Trumpian fashion, the President-elect also added the tongue in cheek comment: “I am always looking to give a second and even third chance, but never willing to give a fourth chance — that is where I hold the line!”
It could be argued from the life of no less a colossal figure than Julius Caesar that decisive and devastating revenge upon one’s enemies makes for a strong and respected ruler and nation. Whilst still a private citizen, Julius Caesar was captured by pirates on the way to the Greek island of Rhodes (to which he was travelling in order to learn oratory from the famous professor Molon). Caesar raised his own ransom — then raised a naval force, captured his pirate captors and had them all crucified.
The later assassination of Caesar and the subsequent civil wars that rocked and roiled Rome is the subject of Shakespeare’s magnificent, Tragedy of Julius Caesar. The subsequent rule of Augustus Caesar was marked by stability, expansion of the empire, the building of roads and bridges (via which the Gospel was to travel), the making of sea and land routes safe for travellers (again, to the advantage of the early Christians taking the Gospel to Asia and Europe) the consolidation of Roman power — and the rule of (Roman) law. It was also during the reign of this austere, learned emperor that Jesus was born in a manger, in the Roman province of Palestine.
H/T to Brian Peckford for the link.
How it started – Blame Canada. How it’s going – Annex Canada?
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper has some fun imagining what the Dominion of Canada would have written in its diary over the last week after President-elect Donald Trump joked about making it the 51st state:
TUESDAY
Don’t get me wrong; annexation would be thrilling. What could be naughtier than abolishing the world’s longest undefended border? Or getting a Chik-Fil-A in all 10 provinces? Or watching CNN as a swing voter, instead of just as a voyeur. Or screaming “I know my rights!” at a cop and having it mean something.Who among us doesn’t want to lock up serial child molesters in a Supermax instead of sending them to a healing lodge? Or strap a revolver to one’s belt just to see what it would feel like to be an armed citizen at the mall. Or go to a store that sells booze, cigarettes, firecrackers and shotguns all in the same place.
I’m not ashamed to say it all gives me goosebumps. I’ve resented you, looked down on you, claimed to hate you, but I’ve never said I wasn’t attracted to you.
WEDNESDAY
And the lifestyle benefits; my god. A four-lane interstate to Alaska. Flyovers at CFL games that consist of an entire formation of fifth-generation fighters, instead of just a search and rescue helicopter. Hell, maybe they wouldn’t even *be* CFL games?A dollar that’s worth … a dollar, rather than 60 cents. Books that can be purchased at the actual price, instead of the “in Canada” price. Productivity and per-capita GDP to burn, and all with lower taxes.
The thought is always there. Every time I’m clipping coupons or subsidizing some foreign automaker just so they’ll build me a battery plant, there’s always that weak moment where I think, “You wouldn’t need to be doing any of this if you’d just let America take care of you.”
THURSDAY
And yet, even when I lay out all the material benefits of statehood, I know it’s not for me.Snoop Dogg has a net worth of $150 million. You know what his favourite snack is? Hard-boiled eggs like his mom used to make. You can offer me the world, but it’s not what I know.
I like giant monopolistic, uncompetitive corporations. Sure, my cell phone bills are high and my butter doesn’t spread at room temperature, but at least the logo on the package never changes. I like government programs that offer me benefits in theory, even if not in practice: I can’t find a family doctor or a daycare spot, but I can dream. I like making unrealistic international pronouncements, because no one would ever expect me to back it up with aid or military force.
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December 7, 2024
Rediscovering the legacy of “Silent Cal”
Jacob M. Farley recently discovered the history of Calvin Coolidge’s presidency and the economic policies he pursued to such good effect in the 1920s (although Herbert Hoover’s energetic turn as Commerce Secretary for Harding and Coolidge strongly indicated that the benign laissez faire approach would be changed once Coolidge left the Oval Office):
Calvin Coolidge, Governor of Massachusetts, 1919.
Photo by Notman Studio, Boston, restored by Adam Cuerden via Wikimedia Commons.
In the pantheon of American presidents, Calvin Coolidge, or “Silent Cal”, often plays the role of the overlooked extra in the corner of history’s grand narrative. I can attest to this, as my first real exposure to him occurred recently during a visit to a museum whilst travelling in the US. Having spent some time since then reading up on everything Cal-related, I’ve become increasingly convinced that there’s a compelling case to be made that Coolidge’s approach to governance, particularly his economic policies, should be dusted off and revisited, not just for historical curiosity but as a lodestar for free marketeers far and wide.
Before I go any further, let’s set the scene of Coolidge’s era. The 1920s is often remembered for jazz, flappers, and the stock market’s dizzying heights. But beneath the cultural tumult, Coolidge was busy orchestrating what can quite fairly be called a symphony of minimalistic governance. His philosophy was profoundly simple: government should do less, not more.
Whilst this may seem extraordinarily mundane to you, consider that this wasn’t simply cheap talk on the campaign trail designed to get a nod of approval from over-50s. His ideas weren’t born out of laziness or disinterest but from a profound belief in the efficacy of the market’s invisible hand over the visible, often clumsy, hand of government intervention.
Coolidge’s administration slashed taxes like a bootlegger cuts whiskey – to make the good times flow more freely, notably through the Revenue Acts of 1924 and 1926. This wasn’t just about giving the rich a break; it was about stimulating economic activity by leaving more money in the pockets of Americans. By leaving more money in the pockets of Americans, he was essentially saying, “Here’s your allowance, now go make some noise at the stock market”.
The result? A crescendo of consumer spending, industrial growth, and a stock market that seemed to reach for the stars.
Coolidge believed in setting the rules of the game and then letting the players play. This isn’t to say there was no regulation, but rather, it was about not over-regulating, about allowing businesses to innovate, expand, and yes, even fail, without the government always having its finger on the scale. Imagine if the conductor only pointed out the tempo and let the musicians interpret it – that was Coolidge’s regulatory approach.
Under Coolidge, the U.S. economy boomed. Unemployment dipped to levels we can only dream of today, and real GDP growth was robust. If the economy were a piece of music, it was hitting all the right notes. But here’s where the narrative often shifts to a sombre tone – the Great Depression. While Coolidge left office before the market crashed, the seeds of economic disaster were arguably sown in the very success of the 1920s, exacerbated by policies that followed his term, particularly those of the Federal Reserve.
This is where the story of Coolidge’s economic policy gets nuanced. The Federal Reserve, relatively new on the scene, played its own tune by the late 1920s. Its policies, intended to stabilise the economy, are often critiqued for contributing to the eventual bust. Coolidge’s hands-off approach might have been a wise nod to market self-correction, but the Fed’s actions, flooding the number of dollars in circulation to stimulate the market’s trajectory in a way they deemed desirable, led to an artificially manufactured drunkenness, leading to a nasty hangover – The Great Depression.
After Coolidge, the economy didn’t just crash; it was like the Charleston dancer tripped over its own feet.
There had been a brief, nasty recession following the end of the First World War, but Harding and Coolidge responded not by muscular government action but by letting the market sort things out. Hoover, as Coolidge’s successor, was not cut from that cloth. Hoover was a believer in the progressive big-government approach to just about everything and his attempts to respond after the 1929 crash absolutely made things much, much worse. Later historians have chosen to forget Hoover’s actual policies and pretend that he followed Coolidge’s lead (most historians over the next couple of generations were pro-Roosevelt, so portraying Hoover as a conservative non-interventionist allowed them to contrast that with Roosevelt’s even more centralizing, interventionist policies).
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The FBI’s future – fix it or abolish it? Decisions, decisions …
At Racket News, Matt Taibbi provides some background information on FBI failures leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks:
On August 13, 2001, 33-year-old French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui paid $6,800 in $100 bills to train on a 747 simulator at the Pan-Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota. A retired Northwest Airlines pilot named Clarence “Clancy” Prevost thought Moussaoui’s behavior was odd for someone with no pilot’s license and told his bosses as much. When they said Moussaoui had paid and they didn’t care, Prevost said, “We’ll care when there’s a hijacking and the lawsuits come in”.
The company went to the FBI and on August 16, in what should have been one of the biggest arrests in the history of federal law enforcement, Moussaoui was picked up on an immigration violation. Agents on the case wanted permission to search Moussaoui’s belongings, with one asking superiors as many as 70 times for help in obtaining a warrant. The situation grew more urgent when the French Intelligence Service sent information that Moussaoui was connected to Islamic radicals with ties both to Osama bin Laden and the Chechen warlord Khattab, and that even within this crowd, Moussaoui was nicknamed “the dangerous one”.
Coleen Rowley, the Chief Division Counsel for the Minneapolis Field Office, absorbed agents’ concerns quickly and was aggressive in asking superiors to seek a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to investigate further. One of the goals was a look at Moussaoui’s computer, as agents believed he’d signaled he had “something to hide” in there. But unlike the former Northwest pilot Prevost, whose superiors trusted his judgment and escalated his concerns, Rowley and the Minneapolis field office were denied by senior lawyers at FBI Headquarters. The Bureau was sitting on the means to stop 9/11 when the planes hit the towers.
This story is actually worse than described, as Rowley made clear in what became a famous letter she wrote to then-Director Robert Mueller the following May. “Even after the attacks had begun,” she wrote, “the [Supervisory Special Agent] in question was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui’s computer, characterizing the World Trade Center attacks as a mere coincidence with Misseapolis’ prior suspicions about Moussaoui.”
While the Bureau blamed 9/11 on a lack of investigatory authority, the actions of the Minnesota office showed otherwise. Rowley’s decision to confront Mueller with a laundry list of unnecessary bureaucratic failures made her perhaps the FBI’s most famous whistleblower. Her letter excoriated the Bureau’s Washington officeholders for failing to appreciate agents in the field, and for implicitly immunizing themselves against culpability.
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Aftermath: December 8
The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 8 Dec 2021December 7, 1941 is remembered as the date that will live in infamy, but that term was spoken by President Franklin Roosevelt on December 8th. Nowhere was the weight of history more obvious than in the territory of Hawaii.
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December 6, 2024
Hegseth is clearly unfit to be Secretary of Defense because LOOK! A SQUIRREL!
I don’t recall having heard Pete Hegseth’s name before Trump nominated him to be the next Secretary of Defense, but Chris Bray clearly thinks the accusations are purely partisan:
Pete Hegseth is being Kavanaughed. And the only people dumb enough to fall for it are Republican senators.
I was willing to hear arguments that Hegseth wasn’t the best choice for Secretary of Defense. In his 40s, he’s on his third marriage, and while the rape allegation from his visit to a conservative conference in Monterey is clearly false, I was wide open to the argument that his actions demonstrated poor judgment. I was prepared to hear an argument. Like many combat veterans, Hegseth had some post-war chaos in his life. Discussion was merited.
But the more these arguments have been made, the dumber they’ve become. We’ve seen this play, and we know the third act: more heat, less light, the descent into completely irrational ranting.
Let’s pretend to take this number at face value, for the sake of argument, though Warren is egregiously misrepresenting the estimate about unreported assaults. Let’s just look at the structure of the claim: In 2023, while Lloyd Austin was the Secretary of Defense, 29,000 troops were sexually assaulted. Therefore, Pete Hegseth must never become the Secretary of Defense.
This is the kind of argument people make when they’re piling on, in an atmosphere of hysteria. It has no logic or order to it, and it does the opposite of the thing it’s intended to do: It depicts current leadership as failures, while arguing against a course correction. Bob punched me in the face, which proves that John is very bad. This is currently the logical structure of half the “news”.
In another Martha-do-you-hear-yourself moment, Lloyd Austin himself recently attacked Hegseth for arguing that women shouldn’t serve in the combat arms:
But read this carefully, and look for the own-goal:
Women serving in combat are facing more danger than men, Austin said.
Therefore, women should serve in combat. Explain the logic, Lloyd. Amazingly, the journalist who reported Austin’s comments missed the implications, mindlessly typing up the claim that women in combat are in more danger than men, then — next paragraph! — framing that statement as a rebuke to someone who warned that the service of women in combat “made fighting more complicated.” We’re not discussing; we’re ritually lining up behind our teams.
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QotD: Herbert Hoover in the Harding and Coolidge years
Hoover bungles it. He plays hard-to-get by pretending he doesn’t want the Presidency, but potential supporters interpret this as him just literally not wanting the Presidency. He refuses to identify as either a Democrat or Republican, intending to make a gesture of above-the-fray non-partisanship, but this prevents either party from rallying around him. Also, he might be the worst public speaker in the history of politics.
Warren D. Harding, a nondescript Senator from Ohio, wins the Republican nomination and the Presidency. Hoover follows his usual strategy of playing hard-to-get by proclaiming he doesn’t want any Cabinet positions. This time it works, but not well: Harding offers him Secretary of Commerce, widely considered a powerless “dud” position. Hoover accepts.
Harding is famous for promising “return to normalcy”, in particular a winding down of the massive expansion of government that marked WWI and the Wilson Administration. Hoover had a better idea – use the newly-muscular government to centralize and rationalize American In his first few years in Commerce – hitherto a meaningless portfolio for people who wanted to say vaguely pro-prosperity things and then go off and play golf – Hoover instituted/invented housing standards, traffic safety standards, industrial standards, zoning standards, standardized electrical sockets, standardized screws, standardized bricks, standardized boards, and standardized hundreds of other things. He founded the FAA to standardize air traffic, and the FCC to standardize communications. In order to learn how his standards were affecting the economy, he founded the NBER to standardize government statistics.
But that isn’t enough! He mediates a conflict between states over water rights to the Colorado River, even though that would normally be a Department of the Interior job. He solves railroad strikes, over the protests of the Department of Labor. “Much to the annoyance of the State Department, Hoover fielded his own foreign service.” He proposes to transfer 16 agencies from other Cabinet departments to the Department of Commerce, and when other Secretaries shot him down, he does all their jobs anyway. The press dub him “Secretary of Commerce and Undersecretary Of Everything Else”.
Hoover’s greatest political test comes when the market crashes in the Panic of 1921. The federal government has previously ignored these financial panics. Pre-Wilson, it was small and limited to its constitutional duties – plus nobody knows how to solve a financial panic anyway. Hoover jumps into action, calling a conference of top economists and moving forward large spending projects. More important, he is one of the first government officials to realize that financial panics have a psychological aspect, so he immediately puts out lots of press releases saying that economists agree everything is fine and the panic is definitely over. He takes the opportunity to write letters saying that Herbert Hoover has solved the financial panic and is a great guy, then sign President Harding’s name to them. Whether or not Hoover deserves credit, the panic is short and mild, and his reputation grows.
While everyone else obsesses over his recession-busting, Hoover’s own pet project is saving the Soviet Union. Several years of civil war, communism, and crop failure have produced mass famine. Most of the world refuses to help, angry that the USSR is refusing to pay Czarist Russia’s debts and also pretty peeved over the whole Communism thing. Hoover finds $20 million to spend on food aid for Russia, over everyone else’s objection […]
So passed the early 1920s. Warren Harding died of a stroke, and was succeeded by Vice-President “Silent Cal” Coolidge, a man famous for having no opinions and never talking. Coolidge won re-election easily in 1924. Hoover continued shepherding the economy (average incomes will rise 30% over his eight years in Commerce), but also works on promoting Hooverism, his political philosophy. It has grown from just “benevolent engineers oversee everything” to something kind of like a precursor modern neoliberalism:
Hoover’s plan amounted to a complete refit of America’s single gigantic plant, and a radical shift in Washington’s economic priorities. Newsmen were fascinated by is talk of a “third alternative” between “the unrestrained capitalism of Adam Smith” and the new strain of socialism rooting in Europe. Laissez-faire was finished, Hoover declared, pointing to antitrust laws and the growth of public utilities as evidence. Socialism, on the other hand, was a dead end, providing no stimulus to individual initiative, the engine of progress. The new Commerce Department was seeking what one reporter summarized as a balance between fairly intelligent business and intelligently fair government. If that were achieved, said Hoover, “we should have given a priceless gift to the twentieth century.”
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: Hoover”, Slate Star Codex, 2020-03-17.
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December 5, 2024
We must always trust the experts, say the experts and their journalistic fart-catchers
Glenn Reynolds (aka the “Instapundit”) welcomes Nate Silver to the expert-doubting party:
Well. I was writing about this stuff long before Nate got hip. Back in 2017, just as Donald Trump began his first term, I wrote “The Suicide of Expertise”, by way of responding to Tom Nichols’ book, The Death of Expertise. Nichols’ thesis was that the experts were expert, but that ignorant, superstitious Americans rejected their advice out of insecurity and an unwillingness to be proven wrong. My response was that the experts’ actual track record wasn’t looking so good:
Well, it’s certainly true that the “experts” don’t have the kind of authority that they possessed in the decade or two following World War II. Back then, the experts had given us vaccines, antibiotics, jet airplanes, nuclear power and space flight. The idea that they might really know best seemed pretty plausible.
But it also seems pretty plausible that Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?” Not only have the experts failed to deliver on the moon bases and flying cars they promised back in the day, but their track record in general is looking a lot spottier than it was in, say, 1965.
It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.
And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty …
On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.
It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.
And this was long before the experts’ ne plus ultra of failure, the bungled, dishonest, and downright self-serving response to the Covid pandemic. The pandemic stemmed from experts’ arrogance, in the form of illegal “gain of function” research funded by the U.S. and laundered through Chinese labs, was met with ass-covering “wet market” lies to try to conceal that origin, and then with public health measures, such as lockdowns and social distancing and masking rules, that were backed by no actual science at all, and that were cheerfully flouted by those propounding them whenever it suited their purposes. The final nail in the experts’ authority-coffin, though, was when, after all the lockdown hysteria, they approved massive public marches by Black Lives Matter because, we were told, racism was a public health problem.
Well, so are STDs, but they weren’t encouraging anyone to march against gonorrhea.
Rather they were (ab)using their position to promote the leftist cause du jour. Everyone saw through it, and their stock collapsed.
So. Welcome to the party, pal. Nate’s noticing just how far things have gone downhill.
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