Once upon a time, patriotism was a fairly simple thing. It was tribal identification writ large, an emotional attachment to a people and their land. In most of the world, where patriotism exists at all it’s still like this — tribal patriotism, blood-and-soil emotionalism.
A different kind of patriotism emerged from the American and French revolutions. While American patriotism sometimes taps into tribal emotion, it is not fundamentally of that kind. Far more American is the sentiment Benjamin Franklin expressed: “Where liberty dwells, there is my country”
Thus, most Americans love their country in a more conditional way — not as a thing in itself, but insofar as it embodies core ideas about liberty. It is in the same spirit that our Presidents and miltary officers and naturalizing citizens swear to defend, not the land or people of the United States but its Constitution — a political compact. This is adaptive in many ways; one of them is that tribal patriotism is difficult to nourish in a nation of immigrants.
In France, the ideology of the Revolution displaced tribal patriotism, just as it did in the U.S. But the French, roiled by political instability and war, have never settled on a political unifying idea or constitutional touchstone. Instead, French patriotism expresses a loyalty to French language and culture and history. It replaces tribalism not with idealism but with culturism.
America and France are a marked contrast with, say, Denmark. I chose Denmark at random from the class of civilized countries in which patriotism is still fundamentally tribal. You don’t become a Danish patriot by revering the constitution or culture of Denmark; you become one by being a Dane. Which partly means being a tribesman, connected to the Danish gene pool, and partly means identifying with stories of past Danish heroism.
It hasn’t been easy to find a fire-breathing Danish patriot for at least fifty years, though. One of the effects of the terrible convulsions of the 20th century has been to discredit tribal patriotism. Many people in Europe, not unreasonably, associate it with racism and Naziism and are suspicious of anything that smacks of immoderate patriotism.
Eric S. Raymond, “Patriotism And Its Pathologies”, Armed and Dangerous, 2008-07-09.
December 5, 2018
QotD: Patriotism
December 4, 2018
Sex, Drugs, and the Right to Vote I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1920 Part 4 of 4
TimeGhost History
Published on 2 Dec 2018When many of the fighting men of The Great War return home addicted to drugs and infected with venereal disease, their sweethearts have decided that it’s time for some serious changes! It’s time for women’s liberation!
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written and directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Edited by Wieke Kapteijns and Spartacus OlssonColorized picture of Greta Garbo in the thumbnail courtesy of Olga Shirnina aka Klimbim
Images of Canadian WWI troops courtesy of the Canadian War Museum.
Video Archive by Screenocean/Reuters http://www.screenocean.com
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
December 3, 2018
Eric Swalwell’s Kinsley gaffe
If you haven’t encountered it, a “Kinsley gaffe” is where a politician accidentally tells the truth (Wikipedia). Newly elected US member of the House of Representatives Eric Swalwell committed a classic Kinsley gaffe in an online discussion on social media, as Jeff Fullerton explains:
Democratic representative Eric Swalwell made a really provocative statement this week according to an article from Hot Air. Pretty much serving notice that: If we confiscate your guns and you fight back, we will nuke you.
Representative Swalwell sort of gives a disclaimer that he he was not actually advocating nuking Texas or some other disobedient red state or region — but merely trying to make a point in the fashion of the Borg from Star Trek; that resistance is futile and it is the lot of us all to be assimilated — against our will if necessary. The author of the article from Hot Air points out something that my friend and mentor Bruce the Historian pointed out long ago; that there are an awful lot weapons in the hands of private citizens capable of making it hell on earth for any federal troops deployed to disarm the population or engage in the collectivization of property and resources in a martial law scenario. Or forced relocation of people. That’s the real reason they want everyone disarmed. They know from experiences in Vietnam and the “Forever War” in the Middle East; that cracking down with overwhelming force has its limits and once they put off a nuke to burn a town in Texas they might have to burn every square mile of the nation to put an end to the uprising.
Talk about excessive force!
That they’d even talk at all about using a nuclear weapon to put down an internal insurrection proves beyond the shadow of doubt that power hungry politicians are a far deadlier existential threat to us all than any crazed mass shooter or terrorist could ever hope to be!
This congress creature bases his argument on a fallacy which is common assumption among the political class: that because the federal government is capable of mustering overwhelming force — the Second Amendment is obsolete anyway. He already contradicts himself for if we the people are impotent against the overwhelming fire and manpower of the Army and the bombs and missiles of the Air Force — then why are people like him so adamant about disarming the average Joe? I think I already answered that one. […]
There is also the issue of the military itself that the political class ought to take into consideration. It may be less monolithic than assumed. Many of them still believe in the validity of the Constitution and would side with the resistance while others among the loyalist factions would have problems of conscience when it comes to mass slaughter of fellow Americans. Still others might be fearful of the consequences of being held accountable for atrocities or even treason if they end up on the losing side of things. To attack and kill your own people who you swore to serve and protect is a grievous betrayal. It is treason of the highest order and the punishment for that is death. So if you choose such a course of action and loose the fight; you go down in historic infamy to be remembered like the Nazi war criminals who stood before the Nuremberg tribunals. And you will probably [be] shot or hanged in a public execution!
US immigration – two views
In the latest Libertarian Enterprise, John Walker presents two fascinating charts illustrating the levels of immigration to the United States since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Depending on which one you see, your interpretation will likely differ substantially. The first, the way the statistics are usually presented, show the current rate of immigration to be a very significant — even unprecedented — economic and political concern:
Immigration shown in raw numbers.
The less common way of illustrating the immigration numbers is showing it proportional to the whole population, which would not work anywhere near as well to support certain narratives:
Immigration to the US shown in proportion to the population.
This is a very different picture. There are clearly two different epochs. In the first, between 1820 and 1930, the U.S. was “filling up the empty country” by admitting large numbers of immigrants. Then, due to immigration restrictions in the Immigration Act of 1924 and the subsequent economic depression and war, immigration remained at low levels until 1946 when, in the immediate postwar period, it jumped. In this view, the impact of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was not the discontinuous change some present it as (at least in terms of absolute numbers; it may have changed the composition of the immigrant population, which is not captured in these statistics).
Instead, the trend established after 1946 continued to rise continuously until 1989–1991 when it went all whacko. These numbers, as a fraction of the population, haven’t been seen 1923 or since. If you take out those crazy years, the overall trend of immigration as a fraction of the existing population continues to rise almost linearly since 1946.
The Mini-14: A Cost-Effective Scaled-Down M14
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 10 Nov 2018https://www.forgottenweapons.com/the-…
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The Ruger Mini-14 is certainly not a “forgotten” weapon, but I think there are some valuable insights to be taken from it. As a company, Ruger has an outstanding track record of making not flashy and exciting guns, but rather guns that are economical and dependable. The Mini-14 is an excellent example of that, with hundreds of thousands sold since its introduction in 1972. So today we will take a look at how Jim Sullivan simplified the M14 design when he scaled it down to 5.56mm for Ruger, and how the company used its investment casting expertise to further reduce production costs.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
December 1, 2018
CAFE killed the North American passenger car
The move by GM to close many of its remaining car manufacturing facilities in Canada and the US is a belated rational response — not to the market, but to the ways government action has distorted the market. In the Financial Post, Lawrence Solomon explains how, step-by-step, the CAFE rules have shifted drivers out of sedans and wagons and into minivans, pickup trucks, and SUVs:
Before the U.S. government introduced Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards to increase the distance cars could travel per gallon of gas, sedans and full-size station wagons were popular and SUVs were unknown. CAFE, which effectively governed the entire North American market thanks to the Canada-U.S. Auto Pact, incented manufacturers to artificially raise the cost of large passenger cars in order to favour smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. It soon claimed its first victim: the full-size station wagon, whose flexible interior accommodated both passenger and cargo needs, and which, at its peak, came in 62 models to satisfy different tastes.
But, although CAFE priced the station wagon out of the market, the market still demanded a vehicle that offered its flexibility. Enter Lee Iacocca, the chairman of Chrysler, who helped develop the minivan and convinced the U.S. government to deem it a truck rather than a passenger vehicle, thus exempting it from the strict CAFE standards that killed the station wagon. The minivan took off — the first 1984 model, built in Windsor, sold 209,000 its first year — followed by the SUV, which also was deemed a truck rather than a passenger vehicle. By 2000, the passenger car had less than half the market. Today it accounts for only about a third.
CAFE standards didn’t only claim certain car models as victims, they also made the whole industry a victim by making it dependent on government whims and then handouts. CAFE also distorted the market by creating credits for ethanol and electric vehicles and by creating a lobbyist’s dream through ever-changing regulations that led car manufacturers to continually game the system to favour their own vehicles over those of competitors.
Perversely, by improving mileage, CAFE also increased distances travelled and emissions of pollutants such as carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides. The 2025 CAFE targets (since cancelled by President Trump) ran to almost 2,000 pages and were estimated to add an average of US$1,946 to the cost of a vehicle. Tax loopholes also helped accelerate SUV sales — like all light trucks, they were exempted from the gas-guzzler’s excise tax and also given preferential tax treatment as business vehicles.
California Arms Co 20ga “Defiance” Pistol-Shotgun
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 9 Nov 2018https://www.forgottenweapons.com/cali…
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Made to compete with guns like the Ithaca Auto & Burglar, the “Defiance” form the California Arms Company is a side-by-side double barreled 20 gauge pistol. Only about 300 were made in the late 1920s – note that this was before the NFA introduced regulation of short barreled shotguns. Unlike the Ithaca and most other guns of this type, the Defiance is not simply a standard side-by-side shotgun cut down in length. Instead, it uses a cast aluminum grip assembly with two manually cocked strikers (and storage for two spare shells in the grip) and a barrel assembly with an integrated aluminum fore-end. The Defiance is nothing if not robust, despite perhaps being a bit slower to use than an Ithaca. Interestingly, the marketing for the Defiance also included a strong focus on the use of tear gas ammunition in addition to standard buckshot – the Lake Erie Chemical Company developed a 20ga tear gas cartridge in partnership with the California Arms Company. It was almost certainly too small to really be effective, though, and was not able to induce enough sales to keep the Defiance on the market long.
Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
PO Box 87647
Tucson, AZ 85754
November 28, 2018
AirBnB virtue signals its … anti-semitic street cred?
In the National Post, Barbara Kay discusses the odd business choices of AirBnB in cutting off rentals to only certain locations that just happen to be in Israel:
Planning a group holiday in Kashmir? Airbnb is there to serve you. Likewise in Tibet, northern Cyprus and Georgia’s separatist republic of Abkhazia, all occupied or disputed territories. Airbnb’s political neutrality in these hot spots therefore quite rightly casts suspicion, to put it mildly, on its recent decision to delist some 200 Jewish homes in West Bank communities.
Airbnb stated, “We know that people will disagree with this decision and appreciate their perspective. This is a controversial issue.” No kidding. An Israeli class-action lawsuit has been filed against Airbnb, seeking US$4,000 in damages for every affected host.
Indignation has been running high outside of Israel as well, in statements both spontaneous — disgusted blog, Twitter and Facebook posts — and considered. The Beverly Hills city council, for example, passed a unanimous condemnatory resolution, calling Airbnb out for anti-Semitism and stating, in part: “The City of Beverly Hills hereby calls upon Airbnb to correct this act of disrespect to the land of Israel and restore its original services immediately.”
Setting aside the anti-Semitic optics, is it legal for Airbnb to do this?
The U.S. Constitution, as well as various state laws and acts of Congress, prohibits both American individuals and corporations from participating in boycotts against other nations. A corporate boycott against a foreign government does not fall under the “free speech” rubric,” but is considered a “tool of statecraft” reserved for the federal government in such situations as war. The office of Rob Portman of Ohio (R), an author of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act in the Senate, told The Jerusalem Post last Tuesday that it wants to hear from Airbnb. The Illinois state legislature — which passed the nation’s first local anti-BDS law in 2015 — will reportedly meet in mid-December, when it anticipates debating whether Airbnb violated its statute.
Establishing illegality pivots on whether the move is deemed as “politically” inspired. It certainly seems to be. As noted by Kohelet Forum legal expert Eugene Kontorovich in a recent Wall Street Journal oped, “An American Jew with a rental property in the West Bank is barred from listing it for rent on the website. But an American Arab is welcome to list his home a few hundred metres away, even though the Palestinian law forbidding real-estate deals with Jews carries a maximum penalty of death. That openly racist policy doesn’t trigger Airbnb’s delisting policy.”
The Difficult Road To Peace 1919 I THE GREAT WAR Epilogue 2
The Great War
Published on 26 Nov 2018After 4 1/2 years of war and millions of dead and wounded any kind of peace would be difficult. The peace process in 1919 was even more difficult because it happened in turbulent times with a rapidly changing landscape and new ideas about a future world order that should prevent this level of bloodshed in the future.
The bitter economics of North American passenger railways
Earlier this month, I posted an excerpt from The Romance of the Rails, by Randal O’Toole. It’s a book I haven’t yet read, but based on what I’ve heard, his analysis of the state of US and Canadian passenger rail is both savage and accurate — as in, we’re insane to subsidize long-distance or high-speed rail for the wealthy out of the taxes levied on the poor. Recently, Trains columnist Fred Frailey got a chance to chat with O’Toole about his work:
Amtrak Acela passing through Old Saybrook, CT
Photo by Chasesmith via Wikimedia Commons
That was one of the pleasures of reading your book, to discover you are a lover of trains and railroads, and that you marry this with a contrarian way of thinking. Do you take perverse pleasure in that combination? Oh, not at all. To me, it’s really sad. I wish I could support passenger trains, and I do support them as far as riding them and things like that. But I know enough about government subsidies to know that they reduce overall productivity and usually end up taking from the poor and giving to the rich. The people who are riding the Acela are not people in need of government handouts. The people who are riding light rail and things like that are not the poor, by and large.
What is the future of the long-distance trains? The role they fulfill is giving people access to scenery they can’t see in any other way, and really, it ends up being something for the wealthy. I think the Rocky Mountaineer model is the future of long-distance trains, and if you look at the United States, where can we have a Rocky Mountaineer? Certainly, Oakland to Denver, probably Oakland to Los Angeles, and after that, it gets pretty iffy. They would become cruise trains.
You seem almost as uncharitable towards the short-distance passenger trains. Amtrak does its best to deceive people about how well these trains do, for example, counting state subsidies as “passenger revenues,” in order to make itself eligible for more subsidies. I wouldn’t mind short-distance trains if they worked, but the Cascades, the California service, those trains aren’t really doing anything. A lot of money is spent carrying not that many people.
[…]
Statistics of yours that struck me are that public transit paid 90 percent of operating costs in 1964 from fares and just 32 percent today. Why not try to make the rail part of public transit more viable? You don’t address that in your book. You can’t make it more economically viable, simply because buses are so much better in every respect than rails. If you take the rail lines, and pave them over, and turn them into busways, you’ll be able to move more people, faster and cheaper and with far lower maintenance costs. Even if you could make the rails pay for themselves, since the buses are so much cheaper, why would we bother?
You seem most upset at places like Orlando and Dallas and Nashville, where commuter rail or light rail began but so few seem to ride. It this money thrown to the wind? I think so. Why is it that we allowed steam to change to diesel, sailing ships to steam ships — all these different technological evolutions to take place — but when it came to passenger rail, we said, “Halt, we don’t want more technological change.” The answer is threefold. It’s nostalgia. It’s people who are making money from wasting money, such as contactors — crony capitalism. And it’s accidents of history. The accident of history affecting urban rail transit was in 1973. Governor Francis Sargent of Massachusetts asked Congress to let cities substitute capital investments in transit for interstate highway grants. Congress said yes, but you can’t spend that amount of money on new busses. Instead, cities such as Buffalo, Portland, and San Jose built new rail lines with money from cancelled freeways because they are expensive and could use up those federal dollars. That’s what started the light-rail revolution, not because it was cheap, but because it was expensive.
November 27, 2018
Cutting back on ethanol makes financial and environmental sense
Craig Eyermann explains why President Trump’s push to expand the use of ethanol in cars is a bad call for many reasons:
For example, because ethanol packs less energy per gallon than gasoline does, vehicle owners can expect to get even lower fuel mileage from the expansion of E15 fuel (a blend of 15% ethanol with 85% gasoline) under the new mandate to include more ethanol in automotive fuels, which would be 4% to 5% less than they would achieve if they only filled their vehicles with 100% gasoline. Today’s vehicle owners already pay a fuel efficiency penalty of 3% to 4% lower gas mileage from the E10 ethanol-gasoline fuel blend mandated under the older ethanol content rules, where the new rules will require even more fill-ups.
Beyond that, to the extent that it diverts corn from food markets to fuel production, corn-based ethanol production also jacks up the price of food—the corn itself, plus everything that eats corn, like beef cattle. One review of multiple studies found that the U.S. government’s corn-based ethanol mandates added 14% to the cost of agricultural commodity prices from 2005 through 2015.
Last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency also found that burning increasing amounts of ethanol has made America’s air dirtier because it generates more ozone pollution, which contributes to smog formation. Worse, growing the additional corn to make more ethanol has also increased agricultural fertilizer runoff pollution in the nation’s rivers and waterways.
That runoff has been linked to the increased incidence of harmful algal blooms, which have been responsible for contaminating drinking water and contributing to red tide events in coastal regions, where fish and other aquatic organisms have been killed off.
There is a solution to these federal government-generated pollution problems: stop forcing corn-based ethanol to be used in the nation’s fuel supplies. There’s even a case study from Brazil, where the city of Sao Paulo found that its air became cleaner after it switched from ethanol-based fuels to gasoline in the years from 2009 to 2011.
November 26, 2018
You can make a strong case that “nutrition science is not just misguided but actually harmful”
Alex Berezow outlines the ferment and upheaval in modern nutrition science reporting:
One day, coffee causes cancer; the next, it cures cancer. One day, wine is good for you; the next it kills you. Given its self-contradictory wishy-washiness, can nutrition science be trusted?
Not at all, say Edward Archer and his co-authors, in a new paper published in Frontiers in Nutrition. They believe nutrition research is so bad that they call our current scientific discourse on the relationship between diet and disease to be “fictional.”
This isn’t the first time that Dr. Archer lobbed a grenade into the field of nutrition. In an article for RealClearScience, he (in)famously called the U.S. dietary guidelines a “scientific fraud” based on “implausible” data that “create[s] fear and uncertainty in American citizens.”
Clearly, Dr. Archer believes that nutrition science is not just misguided but actually harmful. That’s an extraordinary statement that requires extraordinary evidence.
Any nutrition study that’s based on self-reporting depends on the participants to be honest and fully revealing of their food and drink intake. At a time when we’re food-shamed on a daily basis by the government and the media for our “failings”. Even mostly honest reporters are likely to ever-so-slightly under-report their intake of whatever foods are the subject of this week’s “two-minute hate”. One of my favourite examples of blatant under-reporting is that — if you believe the reports — approximately half of all the booze sold in Britain is just poured down the drain:
The only real pitfall in this kind of research is the problem of people under-reporting how much they drink. The amount of alcohol sold in the UK is about twice the amount that people claim to drink, so unless we throw away a huge amount of booze, it is certain that people either forget about how much they drink or they deliberately lie to researchers. In either case, we can assume that the people who say they consume two drinks a day are probably consuming three or four drinks, in which case the amount that you have to drink to assume the same level of risk as a non-drinker is even more than this graph suggests.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
November 25, 2018
QotD: Calvin Coolidge, master of inactivity
When asked to summarize the record of his administration, Coolidge replied, “Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my administration has been minding my own business.” The point wasn’t that he was lazy, the point was that it takes work to stop government from doing stupid things. “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones,” he once remarked.
When Coolidge said, “When you see ten problems rolling down the road, if you don’t do anything, nine of them will roll into a ditch before they get to you.” Again, the point wasn’t laziness, it was confidence in the ability of society — a.k.a. the people — to figure things out for themselves. For every ten big problems our society faces, nine of them aren’t the government’s problem. Liberals think not only that all ten are the government’s problem, but that ten is an insanely low tally of the big problems the government is supposed to be dealing with. And fewer and fewer conservatives would endorse the Coolidge Ratio.
I’m increasingly convinced we’ll never have another one like him. My point isn’t that we don’t produce people like Coolidge anymore — though that’s more than a little true, too. It’s not that a Coolidge couldn’t get elected today either, though who could argue with that? It’s that even if we somehow produced a Coolidge and got him or her elected, the nature of the state is such that even Coolidge couldn’t really be Coolidge.
Jonah Goldberg, “The Unwisdom of Crowds”, National Review, 2017-01-21.
November 23, 2018
QotD: Inactivist bumper stickers
I’ve received several hundred suggestions for inactivist bumper-sticker slogans and, as befits the situation, I’ve been slow to read them. Still, I like some of them quite a bit:
Visualize me ignoring you.
How about “let’s not.”
Don’t honk if you can’t be bothered.
Don’t Act, NOW!
If not now, whenever.
Leave well enough alone
Slacking: It’s not just for kids.
YOU Save the Whales!
Practice Random Acts of Self-Restraint.
Ask Not.
Future Site of Political Statement.And so on.
But there’s a problem. Many readers segued too easily from celebrating inactivism to championing outright sloth. For example, “Practice Random Acts of Self-Restraint” is a fine inactive motto. But “They can have my channel changer when they pry it out of my cold, dead hand,” while very funny is off point. “Don’t Mess With Stasis,” doesn’t quite rhyme but it’s got the right idea. “Think globally, act loafally,” meanwhile, has the wrong idea — except insofar as it mocks people with stupid bumper stickers.
The funny thing is that inactivists are actually very active people. I would bet that — this is a broad generalization-the folks who find inactivism politically appealing probably work harder and are more successful then people who find conventional activism attractive. Inactivists didn’t boycott the Million Mom March simply because they had better things to do. They stayed home because they believe the Million Mom March was a vast, peripatetic parade of propaganda. Inactivists don’t fail to mobilize solely because we’d rather watch a rerun of Matlock than chant for vegetable rights and peace at city hall. We actually don’t believe in vegetable rights. We want our carrots to remain as chattel.
I agree that sloth is funny. And I suppose that’s why so many people want Homer Simpson to become the inactivist spokesperson. I laugh whenever I hear Homer Simpson speak admiringly of Teamsters: “Oh, I always wanted to be a Teamster. So lazy and surly… mind if I relax next to you?” And his campaign slogan when he ran for garbage commissioner was pretty good. “Can’t someone else do it?” The best line from that episode was when he told Springfield voters “Animals are crapping in our houses and we’re picking it up! Did we lose a war?” But still, Homer’s wrong when he tells his kids “You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: Never try.”
Jonah Goldberg, “Let History Come To You”, National Review, 2002-07-24.
November 21, 2018
Allied War Economy During World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 19 Nov 2018Check Out Supremacy 1914: https://www.supremacy1914.com/index.p…
Financing and supplying the First World War was a huge economic undertaking that influenced the British, French, American and Italian economies profoundly and shaped the global balance of power.
