Quotulatiousness

March 2, 2025

The end of the Ukraine narrative

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, “Captain Benjamin” outlines the last several years of progressive narrative that may have been totally derailed in the Oval Office the other day:

Zelenskyy walked into the Oval Office wearing an outfit that was reminiscent of the uniforms from Star Trek, he was escorted out a few hours later and the entire liberal consensus that has been the guiding narrative of the West for the last three years was a smoking hot mess, as if struck by several Photon Torpedoes from the Starship Enterprise itself.

It’s forgotten now but the Ukraine War was how the Liberal consensus moved on at breakneck pace from the Covid hysteria without ever having to explain why we had hidden from a cold for the previous two years and spent untold billions doing so.

I still remember being in a newsagent and the woman behind the desk told me that Covid was over and Ukraine was the new thing now, that was how quickly it happened, one mass consensus narrative seamlessly replaced another and the show went on.

Until today when show came off the tracks crashed into the buffers and a million Liberal talking heads exploded in unison as the entire narrative which had served as this strange outlet for their repressed jingoistic and nationalist desires was destroyed.

To me there was always something about the Ukraine War that didn’t pass the sniff test, whether it was Hunter Biden’s links to energy companies there, the way in which valid criticisms of the NATO expansion were shouted down, the mysterious blowing up of the Nordstream pipeline that was never explained.

Or the feverish want to protect Ukraine’s borders while European elites operated an unpopular open borders policy themselves, the billions being funnelled in, the tales of Ukrainians buying up yachts and sports cars.

But most clearly fact that the entire Uniparty Party and the chattering classes were in absolute lockstep about what needed to be down and any disagreement or attempt to question the narrative had you dismissed as a traitor or Putinist.

It was all very reminiscent of the groupthink that had swept the world two years previous during Covid, another unquestionable narrative, with the Uniparty in lockstep and anyone who dared to question it smeared as an anti-vaxxer.

I didn’t support Covid as the narrative had more holes than Swiss cheese and the Ukraine narrative has similarly porous texture, but to see the narrative explode so spectacularly was as much as a shock to me as it was to Zelenskyy who found himself in a hole and just kept digging.

At one-point he shocking seeming to delivered a veiled threat to Trump himself: “During war, everybody has problems, even you, but you have a nice ocean and don’t feel now, but you will feel it in the future.”

A comment that really sent the meeting side-ways, as Trump swiftly told Zelenskyy not to tell him what he should feel, leading to the arguments that scuppered the signing of a deal.

And the essence is that Trump wanted to make a deal, he’d been bragging about it to Starmer the day before, he was going to get a great deal, recoup American loses with rare-earth minerals and the EU could save-face by guarding the American mines as a peace keeping force.

It also meant that America wasn’t getting sucked into a Vietnam in the snow.

Trump doesn’t want to be a war-time President, especially a war he doesn’t think is necessary or good for business, Trump wants to usher in an AI Golden Age, send rockets to Mars, and American living standards to the moon; a 21st Century tycoon economy.

He wants peace for Ukraine and Russia as he knows that thousands are senselessly dying every week, and knows his presidency and the country cannot cope with hundreds of Americans coming home in body bags every month.

And so he wanted to make a deal with Zelenskyy, make a deal with Russia, and America gets paid, it’s a crude outcome but its aligned with reality.

But Zelenskyy doesn’t want that, he wants America men and weapons to win the war and make Russia to pay, while the EU have gassed him up to believe this possible because the EU are clinging to this war as a chance to project the veneer of power that they cannot possibly muster domestically due [to] Populist parties eroding their authority at home.

However, as Trump asked Keir to much nervous laughter, can you take on Russia alone?

America knows without them the EU cannot continue this charade, but more than that the Americans are disgusted with the EU, they view them as a drunk Uncle that has run out of goodwill.

How they are suppressing the free-speech of their citizens, failing to protect their own borders, yet grandstanding off the back of the US defence budget?

These are the questions being asked Stateside about the since Trump took office.

While the America people are questioning why are billions of tax dollars being poured into Ukraine as America goes deeper into debt.

Trump wanted to close the chapter with a deal, Zelenskyy wanted to continue a war he cannot win, and as Zelenskyy realised he wasn’t going to drag America deeper into this war he lost control, and in doing so forgot he wasn’t dealing with the Bidens and petulantly disrespected his new would-be patrons, triggering the mother of all blowbacks in the process.

Trump made it clear that what Zelenskyy was asking for was for America to risk World War 3, and Vance made it clear that everyone knew that Zelenskyy was a creature of the old regime, even highlighting how Zelenskyy campaigned against Trump in Ohio, while Trump reiterated that without the America Zelenskyy holds no cards for future negotiations with Russia.

This dose of reality was too much for Zelenskyy and also for the EU who tweeted up a storm in the aftermath pledging to ‘stand’ with Ukraine, only Starmer staying conspicuously silent.

This wasn’t simply a change of policy direction this was the public evisceration of the sacred cow of the waning Liberal Order by the ascendant Populist Insurgency.

Ukraine has functioned as the binding narrative, and in the Oval Office it faced Total Liberal Death, the fragile myth of the rules based international order being violated by Russia Man Bad and being saved by the Liberal Democratic Alliance Good, no further thinking necessary, had functioned as a very effective distraction from the utter failure that Liberalism had turned into domestically while allowing our elites to cos-play as war heroes on the world stage.

This narrative has now been utterly destroyed.

What comes next is still unknown but what we can clearly see is that the Populist Pax Americana will be a very different beast from the Liberal Pax Americana.

As always my friends, thank you for reading I know this is a very polarising issue, so if resonates please like, share and follow, if not please feel free to point out the flaws in my thinking in the comments.

The Mexican Revolution – Bandits Turned Heroes

Filed under: Americas, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Great War
Published 11 Oct 2024

The Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920 was a conflict of shifting alliances and assassinations, peasant revolutionaries, an attack on US soil, and US intervention in Mexico. The decade of struggle cost hundreds of thousands of lives, resulted in new constitutions and governments, and — for some at least — turned bandits into heroes.
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March 1, 2025

Canada’s “supply management” system – our literal “sacred cow”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Food, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In negotiations with the Trump administration to avert the threat of massive tariffs, our political leaders say that “everything” is on the table … except for one teeny-tiny little massive crony capitalist protection racket that we are apparently willing to destroy the entire national economy to preserve:

Unfortunately, Canada’s stubborn intransigence on a significant trade-related issue once again threatens to undermine our position and, with it, the possibility of a deal. I probably don’t have to tell you, but in case you couldn’t guess … yup. It’s the dairy sector.

At this point it should be noted that there are basically two agricultural industries in Canada. One of those industries relies heavily on exports, has thrived under the various free-trade deals Canada has been party to, and is filled with dread at the prospect of U.S. tariffs. Given the obvious significance of the U.S. as an export market for Canadian goods, one doesn’t have to look too far to find all kinds of nervous folks in these industries. For example, nearly $9 billion in agricultural products were exported to the U.S. in 2023 from just Alberta alone. Beef exports represent about a third of that total, and in fact the U.S. and Canada comprise the world’s largest two-way trade in beef and live cattle. There is much at stake here (pardon the terrible pun).

The other agricultural industry in this country, is, of course, the supply managed sector. That’s dairy, as noted above, but also eggs and poultry. The supply managed sectors of the agricultural industry are governed by a system of quotas, price controls, and sky-high tariffs. It’s essentially a legalized cartel system. This sector not only wants nothing to do with free trade, but actually sees free trade as a threat. To them, “tariff” is not a dirty word because they hide behind a shield of tariffs that are far higher than anything Trump has ever threatened or conceived.

Now, it should also be noted that these two sides of the agricultural sector are vastly different in size and importance. Yet, the vocal and irrational demands of the small, sheltered component seem to be the demands that our politicians remain most beholden to. Consider comments made recently by the contenders for the Liberal leadership: during this week’s debate, nearly all of them bent over backwards to declare fealty to supply management, even while expounding upon the existential threat posed by Trump’s tariffs. Even now, it’s clear that our politicians are afraid to pick this fight.

[…]

While that could have been a wake-up call for Canada, we instead went in the other direction. In the aftermath of the U.K. situation, Parliament went ahead and passed Bill C-282, which would enshrine into law the principle that supply management should never be on the table in any trade talks (the bill ended up being bogged down in the Senate and its future is unclear).

It’s naïve in the extreme to think that any trading partner, including and especially the Americans, would simply shrug and say “Well, shoot, that’s too bad. Let’s move onto other issues.” We’re needlessly harming our position even before talks begin.

February 28, 2025

Trump’s done something most of us thought impossible – giving the Canadian Liberals hope for re-election

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Canadians were sick to the teeth with Liberal PM Justin Trudeau and itching to throw him out of office … until newly inaugurated US President Donald Trump tossed Trudeau a lifeline:

The BOM and the Little Potato on his way to another Taylor Swift concert.

For President Trump, making America great again in his second term includes tariff threats against Canada, along with talk of turning America’s northern neighbor into the 51st state. What that’s mainly achieved so far is to make Canada woke again.

Prior to January 20, Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre had been cruising in the polls, and with elections coming this year in Canada, North America seemed headed for a right-leaning political bromance between a President Trump in Washington and a Trump-lite Prime Minister Poilievre in Ottawa.

That was before Trump got elected and began talking about 25 percent tariffs on Canadian goods (10 percent for energy), which would likely wreck Canada’s economy.

One poll showed that four in ten Canadians see Poilievre and Trump as alike and that is hurting him as “Canadians increasingly associate Poilievre to Trump’s negative rhetoric aimed at Canada,” said Mark Marissen, a Liberal party strategist.

For the first time since 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party is ahead of the Conservatives in the polls. If an election were held tomorrow, 38 percent of decided voters would choose the Liberals, while 36 percent would back the Conservatives. This is a massive shift — just six weeks ago, the Conservatives were leading by 26 points.

[…]

“Poilievre’s rhetoric is nothing like Trump’s. He only takes conservative positions when he’s pushed in that direction,” says Nichols. “A Poilievre government is going to be exhausting. He seems behind the curve on a lot of social issues, such as DEI and gender ideology.”

The reality is that the Canadian right generally doesn’t resemble the unruly U.S. version. This, in turn, reflects a more moderate political culture whose roots go back to Canada’s early years as a refuge for loyalists to the British crown fleeing the American revolution.

Eric Kaufman, a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham, argues that Poilievre’s reluctance to mimic Trump reflects the fact that Canadian conservatism has always been “very wet”, with Conservative politicians reluctant to challenge the progressive consensus on culture and identity.

“Poilievre only takes a stand on social issues like DEI and immigration when there’s already overwhelming momentum in the press. He still plays within the safe sandbox of talking about economic issues which is permitted for Conservative politicians in Canada,” says Kaufman.

QotD: A jaundiced view of the feminist movement

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The idea of the suffragettes was that women should share in the political business of the menfolk voting on leaders whose main task was deciding matters of crime, taxation, and war, on the grounds that they share in the outcomes and burdens of any bad decisions in that area.

Note that governments, back in the day, did not attempt to act as a nanny, warding off daily harms from unsafe commercial products, or was government in the business of educating the young, nursing the sick, or managing the personal lives of all the children of all ages inhabiting the nation.

The idea of the men who invented feminism was that propelling women into the workforce would increase the tax base, break apart the nuclear family, and increase sales of expensive drugs to promote temporary sterility.

Breaking the family in turn would make women more dependent on the government than on their menfolk, and draw the unreasoning admiration women typically bestow upon their protectors and breadwinners onto the Powers That Be. The fanatical devotion that mothers of convicts show, when they insist forever that their child is innocent, would then be channeled into the ballot box toward whatever demagogue with a vacant smile promised to remove dangerous liberty from the hands of the children, regardless of age, inhabiting the nation.

Pornographers like Hugh Hefner encouraged feminism on the grounds that it would increase vice, and hence the monetary gain from the public sale of vice.

Then, once women were in the workforce, excluding them from the military and other areas where men are better qualified was said to be a sign of hidden bigotry against them. The idea of this bigotry was so stupid that a new word had to be coined to hide its meaning, and that word is “sexism”.

The word “racism” — which at the time had a meaning — was decapitated and the word “sex” — and at the time this word also had a meaning — was sutured onto the neckstump, to produce a new word intended to denounce a nonexistent hatred and contempt felt by men against women.

There have been wars between races and tribes since time immemorial, and hatred between races and tribes. But the war between the sexes is not really a war, because both sides keep flirting with the other, and settling down, and having babies and suchlike.

John C. Wright, “No More Lads”, John C. Wright’s Journal, 2020-01-28.

February 27, 2025

Reining in the ATF

Filed under: Government, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille on the ATF’s immediate future with FBI director Kash Patel as the newly appointed acting head of the bureau:

Kash Patel, 9th Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

… it’s impossible to credibly argue that the ATF doesn’t need a shakeup. After all, this is a federal agency that ran guns to criminal gangs in Mexico as part of a bizarre and failed “investigation”, manipulated mentally disabled people into participating in sting operations — and then arrested them, lost thousands of guns and gun parts, killed people over paperwork violations, and unilaterally reinterpreted laws to create new felonies out of thin air (which means more cause for sketchy investigations and stings). The federal police agency obsessively focused on firearms has long seemed determined to guarantee itself work by finding ever more things to police.

But what about putting the same person in charge of both the ATF and the FBI? How does that make sense?

Well, there’s a lot of overlap in the responsibilities of federal agencies. During the ATF’s “Operation Fast and Furious” gunrunning escapade in Mexico, it coordinated — badly — with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). During its 2012 investigation of that fiasco, the Justice Department Inspector General “conducted interviews with more than 130 persons currently or previously employed by the Department, ATF, the DEA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” on its way to identifying “a series of misguided strategies, tactics, errors in judgment, and management failures that permeated ATF Headquarters and the Phoenix Field Division”.

[…]

Done right, you wouldn’t need as many agents for the combined agency, and you would have lower overhead. But — and this is a big concern — done wrong, you’d end up with a supercharged federal enforcement agency with all the hostility to civil liberties its old components embodied when separate, but now with lots more clout.

When he took charge of the FBI, Patel became the leader of an agency that has long served as a sort of political police. Its abuses date back decades and never seem to go away, just to morph into new ways of targeting anybody who criticizes whoever is currently in power.

“The FBI entraps hapless people all the time, arrests them, charges them with domestic terrorism offenses or other serious felonies, claims victory in the ‘war on domestic terrorism’, and then asks Congress for more money to entrap more people,” John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower, wrote in 2021.

That means there’s already a problem that needs to be addressed, or it could infect a combined agency rather than taking the sharp edges off the ATF.

Also troubling is that before his nomination to head the FBI, Patel made comments suggesting he wants to target his own political enemies. He’s backed off those threats, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee he’s committed to “a de-weaponized, de-politicized system of law enforcement completely devoted to rigorous obedience to the Constitution and a singular standard of justice”. But it’s worth watching what he does with his roles at the separate FBI and ATF before combining the two agencies into something more dangerous.

Or maybe the Trump administration won’t take the next step of formally integrating the ATF and the FBI. Self defense advocates have long called for ATF leadership that isn’t actively hostile to gun owners. If all Patel does is rein in the ATF so that Americans get a few years of relief from that agency’s abuses, that’s a victory itself. But eliminating a much-loathed federal agency would be even better.

February 26, 2025

The more DOGE uncovers, the more we see that western governments are really vast graft machines

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson discusses the ramifications of all the wasted money uncovered by DOGE in the first month of investigations and what it almost certainly confirms about the actual value taxpayers are getting for their money:

So essentially the entire town of Washington, D.C. has been stealing. The anomalies are those who are not stealing. $4.7 trillion, almost impossible to trace, represents two-thirds of the annual U.S. budget. And if it’s happening in the U.S., it is happening everywhere: France, Canada, the U.K., Germany, where budgetary processes are probably even more opaque than those of the U.S.

How does the Department of Defence have a $35 trillion black hole?

I used to think of people who worked for the government with a kind of veiled contempt or, in a more benign mood, compassion. I thought of them as pity jobs for those without initiative, as jobs paying off lefty campaigners, as a warehouse for the barely competent. In my own dealings with them, I found them punitive and extractive, papering me with demands to spend more and more money to hire more and more of their pet contractors, to get approval. In my working life, looking at the results of their involvement in America’s rural areas, I hated them for the hell they visited on people unable to fight back. They forced bad science on good people, and refused to see reason. They ruined forests, water courses, fisheries, and township after township turned to dustbowl status. The misery in rural sitting rooms in every state in the U.S. was palpable, long lasting; the green Blob ruined families for generations.

But I did not think of them as being embroiled in a theft so large as to be unparalleled in world history.

The level of the theft has now to be dawning on everyone not living off the public purse which is, what, 60%, 70% of us? The anger setting in is soul-deep, and very very powerful. People who live straightened lives, the poorly pensioned, those living off the laughable social security stipend, those waiting for health care, those whose children can’t even dream of an education, of college, of a six-figure salary which is now subsistence in the ruined cities. Those facing cancer treatment because of the vaccine, and don’t have excess funds. Their families, despairing, hurting, broke.

This isn’t going to go away. It affects everyone. Not addressed down to its deepest level, you are looking at a tax revolt, a national strike. A revolution. A real one, not a papered paid-for color revolution, which is what they have been doing to us.

Those living on social security should have five times the pension they do.

Can you count how many of those there are? Can you?

And meanwhile this:

Is this true? To this date, unknown; the digging continues. Look at this ghastly creature. She apparently has an account in the Cayman Islands. Look at her all compassionate and condescending. She started a war that killed 1.5 million people so far. And apparently got rich from it. A mass murderer celebrated at Upper East Side dinner parties.

Memes like this rocket around, and every one is now suspect. At this point who cares if it’s true, it’s truthy, it makes sense that she made out like a bandit, that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar have millions hidden somewhere. Ocasio can say “I only have $500,000!” all she wants, but we don’t believe her. If the Wall St Journal says it is false, we don’t believe them. Do you actually think they’d have the money sitting in their savings account? No, it would be buried off-shore. The media is not only complicit, it is the principal actor in this scam. It built the fantasy world we live in, where people read The Guardian, the Times and the Globe and Mail and think they’re informed.

No, they are being propagandized. And as a result, no one sane believes anything any legacy newspaper or television or media says anymore. They hid the theft. They did not report on it. No one trusts a thing they say.

Update: Fixed broken link.

The Korean War 036 – MacArthur Gets Dumber Every Week – February 25, 1951

Filed under: Britain, China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 25 Feb 2025

Operation Killer begins this week, and its objective is what the name implies, to destroy as much of the enemy as possible rather than just trying to merely take territory. But once again, UN Commander Douglas MacArthur threatens to telegraph it before it starts. The offensive itself, though, is stymied its first few days by the weather. Meanwhile in China, Peng Dehuai meets with Mao Zedong to clear the air.
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QotD: The banality of crime

Filed under: Law, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I was still in grad school, there was a big pot bust in College Town. Big enough to merit statewide notice, anyway — a couple hundred pounds, something like that, obviously not El Chapo level but enough to where some kind of actual, organized smuggling was involved.

Cynical bastard that I am, I immediately wondered just how they’d managed this feat of law enforcement. College Town being, well, a college town, it had a surprisingly large police force, but the cops dealt overwhelmingly with quality-of-life stuff. I doubt they had more than one or two full time detectives (if that) chasing burglars; I don’t recall College Town ever having a homicide. They certainly didn’t have narcs on the force, is what I’m getting at, so how on earth did they disrupt this small-time, amateurish, yet still legit (on volume alone) drug smuggling operation?

I forget the details, but as you’d surmise from this story taking place in Clown World, they were fake and gay. I’m slightly fictionalizing, and slightly exaggerating, but it really was on the level of “A prowl car saw a guy driving erratically and pulled him over, at which point smoke started billowing out of the windows. The cop looked in and found a felony amount of pot sitting in a garbage bag on the front seat, and the driver copped a plea — he ratted out his supplier, and when the cops showed up with a warrant, that knucklehead, too, had his bales of marijuana sitting out in plain view on the living room couch.”

Most crime works like that, as it turns out. Even in the big cities, where police departments have bigger budgets and more combat power than a lot of European armies. Homicides, for instance, are 99% paperwork, I’m told. Everyone knows that Peanut shot Ray Ray over a pair of sneakers, not least because Peanut is walking around in the damn things, and probably still has the gun shoved in the waistband of his track suit, too. “Solving” the homicide is just a matter of putting the paperwork through. Stone cold whodunits, like big sophisticated undercover narcotics operations, are vanishingly rare, because the cost of enforcement, let’s call it, is extremely high.

I know, I know, The Wire was a tv show, but people I know who really do work in law enforcement say it’s close enough to the real thing for our purposes. Drug dealers down in the ‘hood aren’t nearly as smart and sophisticated and above all self-disciplined as the Barksdale Crew, but the basic principle is the same: Since the low-level people are inevitably going to get busted, make sure that the low-level people don’t have anything on the guys one level higher, and your drug dealing operation is more or less safe. Just as Peanut could probably get away with blasting Ray Ray in broad daylight if he were smart enough not to wear the shoes around, so the pot dealers in College Town could’ve gotten away with their operation more or less forever, provided they weren’t stupid enough to be driving around high on their own supply, with said supply in plain view in the passenger seat.

Severian, “The Cost of Enforcement”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-29.

February 25, 2025

Argentina’s experience of life with high tariffs

Filed under: Americas, Business, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Marcos Falcone explains how Argentina’s unusually high tariff barriers distort ordinary economic activity for Argentines every day:

When Argentines go abroad, they usually go shopping. Many of the products they want cannot be bought at home, ranging from clothes to smartphones and all kinds of home appliances. Because of this, it has become a tradition to return from a trip with one or two extra suitcases filled with smuggled goods. Did you know that it is more expensive to buy an outdated iPhone in Argentina than it is to fly from Buenos Aires to Miami, stay for three days, and get the newest one?

[…]

Tariffs do not just make it difficult to get phones at home — they can make life dangerous as well. Argentina’s most sold car, which is artificially expensive because of protectionist measures, got 0 (zero) stars on one of Latin America’s most renowned safety tests. Cars in Argentina are not only more expensive than elsewhere in the region, but also markedly less safe.

To achieve these terrible results, the only thing Argentina had to do was enact tariffs, and now the US seems to be heading in the same direction. But in the past, protectionism has caused the same damage in the north as it caused in the south. Back in the first Trump administration, protecting the steel-production industry saved some jobs, but eliminated many more. Tariffs have also hurt businesses that rely on imports within the US and can continue to do so in a world of globally integrated supply chains. More generally, the 1933 Buy American Act, which forces the government to pay more for US-made goods, has been proven to be both ineffective and costly.

There is no escaping the negative effects of blocking outside competition. The more barriers a country enacts, the more damage it causes to itself. If we, as individuals, acted in a protectionist way, we should aim to grow our own food, build our own house, or make our own cars. But how does that make any sense? Economist Robert Solow once said, “I have a chronic deficit with my barber, who doesn’t buy a darned thing from me”. He meant it as a joke, but he had a point: What matters is to create wealth, which can be done both by selling and buying from others.

The revival of protectionism in the US is worrisome. To avoid it, Americans should take a look at the enormous destruction of wealth that tariffs have caused in other countries. Despite President Milei’s recent efforts to lift tariffs and take Argentina out of the “prison” in which it exists, the fact that the country shot itself in the foot decades ago has put it in a very delicate economic position. The US should not follow its path.

Likely trajectories of the victims of DOGE

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Bruce Ivar Godmundsson identifies the most probably career dislocations of civil servants winkled out of their expected life sinecures by the minions of Elon:

To put things another way, the status deprivation experienced by erstwhile feeders at the Federal trough will eventually lead to a great deal of radicalization. After all, if history is any guide, it is not the victims of sustained oppression who raise the banner of revolt, but those who lost advantages that they had earlier expected to enjoy for the rest of their days. (It was not, after all, agricultural laborers, let alone vagabonds, who enlisted in the machine-smashing armies of General Ludd, but practitioners of “decent trades” who had previously occupied lucrative bottlenecks in supply chains.)

As they LARP as extras in the street fighting scene of Les Misérables, the outcasts will find, standing beside them on the barricades, youngsters who, as recently as the autumn of 2024, had expected to parley their ability to paraphrase (or, at the very least, parrot) the Party Line into an internship with an agency, a poorly paid (but prestigious) place in an NGO, or, for those especially adept at symbolic manipulation, a job with a name-brand consulting firm.

Leaving aside the cinematic metaphors, some of the dispossessed will, no doubt, resort to rioting. More will ride the protest circuit, which will do for them what comic-book conventions do for fancy-dressed fans of manga and anime. Most, however, will do little more than haunt the margins of the middle class, muttering about their masters degrees in public policy as they wait for the next command to appear on the screens above their grills.

Repeated encounters with the fallen may drive the final nail into the coffin of the assumption, once central to the world view of so many Americans, that possession of a sheepskin entitled its holder to a desk job. No longer will parents dining at McDonalds whisper to their children “if you don’t go to college, you’ll end up like that”. Rather, they will point to the technician repairing a self-service kiosk and say “that’s the sort of thing that you want to do”.

February 24, 2025

Rule by bureaucrat, believe it or not, was once considered a better form of government

Filed under: Bureaucracy, China, Government, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the 19th century, the Americans switched from a system where one of the major outcomes of a presidential election was the wholesale replacement of government employees to one where the civil service was “professionalized” to the point that only the very top levels were subject to presidential replacement (Trump 2.0 may mark a significant change in this). Fans of the professional bureaucracy would sometimes gesture toward the venerable Chinese model, which had been run in this way for a very long time until the 20th century. Lorenzo Warby considers the actual performance of these kinds of systems:

Excerpt from the handscroll Viewing the Pass List. Imperial examination candidates gather around the wall where results had been posted. Traditionally attributed to Qiu Ying, but now suspected to be the work of a late-Ming painter with Qiu Ling’s name added.
National Palace Museum via Wikimedia Commons.

Over the course of the C19th, Western states adopted the Chinese notion of appointment by examination for their government bureaucracies. Such appointment-by-merit did have the effect — for about a century and a half — of creating effective and responsive bureaucracies. So much so, that Western democracies gave more and more tasks to such bureaucracies.

This replicates the early stage of the Chinese dynastic cycle — the actual one (see below), rather than the traditional version — where, early in a Dynasty, rule through the bureaucracy is quite effective, even efficient. In modern Western democracies, the legitimacy of democratic action — the demon-in-democracy problem, where the all-trumping legitimacy of the democratic principle tends to overwhelm other ways of doing things — aided the massive expansion in government action, and so in the ambit of government bureaucracy.

The trouble with adopting the Chinese model of appointment-by-merit bureaucracy — including selection-by-examinations — is that folk failed to take a good hard look at the patterns of Chinese government. This despite the fact that the keju, the imperial examination, was introduced under Emperor Wen of Sui (r.581-604) and was not abolished until 1905, so there was quite a lot of history to consider.

The patterns of Chinese government are much less encouraging, because the quite effective, quite efficient, stage of bureaucratic administration does not last. The problem with appointment-by-merit is that it selects for capacity, but not character. Confucianism tries to encourage good character, but it repeatedly turned out to be a weak reed compared to incentive structures. (Almost everything is a weak reed, compared to incentive structures.)

The actual dynastic cycle was:

  1. Population expands due to peace and prosperity in a unified China. This pushes against resources — mainly arable land — creating mass immiseration, an expanding underclass with no marriage prospects, peasant revolts and falling state revenues.
  2. The number of elite aspirants expand — a process aggravated by elite polygyny — but elite positions do not, leading to disgruntled would-be elites who provide organising capacity for peasant revolts (including through sects and cults).1
  3. Bureaucratic pathologies multiply, leading to a more corrupt, less responsive, less functional state apparatus, eroding state capacity and increasing pathocracy (rule by the morally disordered). Late-dynasty imperial bureaucracies could be astonishingly corrupt and dysfunctional.

In contemporary Western societies, mass migration interacting with restrictive land use, and other regulation (e.g. “net zero”), so that:

  1. housing supply is blocked from fully responding to demand for housing—thereby driving up rents and house prices; while also
  2. inhibiting infrastructure supply from responding to demand—increasing congestion and other (notably energy) costs

is creating immiseration pressures. Figures about the “macro” health of the US economy, for instance, are misleading as much of the growth is either not reaching people further down the income scale or is failing to compensate for rising rents.

Western commercial societies are sufficiently dynamic that elite over-supply is much less of a problem than in pre-industrial societies. There is, however, very much a problem of toxic parasitism — the entire (Diversity Equity Inclusion) DEI/EDI apparatus to start with. What we might call malign elite employment or bureaucratic parasitism.

    1. NR: I’ve read that the Taiping Rebellion in China was led by a man who’d failed the Imperial Examination and raised the banner against the entire system as a form of revenge. By the time the rebellion was quashed, somewhere up to 30 million people were killed in the fighting or as an indirect result of the conflict. (Traditional note of caution about any statistics from pre-20th century China … well, any Chinese statistics at all, really.)

Update: Fixed broken link.

Dawn of the Atomic Age – W2W 007

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 23 Feb 2025

In 1946, the world’s fate is rewritten in fire. The first peacetime nuclear tests shake the Pacific, while Stalin accelerates the Soviet push for the bomb. With the power to destroy the entire world now a reality, global leaders face a defining choice — will the bomb usher in the peace of our time, or lead to nuclear doom? The arms race has begun, and there’s no turning back.
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The Third Triumvirate?

Filed under: Europe, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, John Carter posted an amusing thread (unrolled here courtesy of the @threadreaderapp):

JD Vance as Julius Caesar
AI image by Grok

Trump, Musk, Vance: the new triumvirate, bringing a window of stability to the troubled Republic.

Trump: the old warhorse, beloved of the people, a part of the establishment but with an uneasy relationship to it. Trump is Pompey.

Musk: the richest man in the world. Musk is Crassus.

Vance: the charismatic young upstart. Vance is Caesar.

So how does this play out?

Musk’s ambition is to go to Mars, just as Crassus wanted to conquer Parthia. Musk harnesses his wealth, launches the expedition to great fanfare. Things go horribly wrong after their arrival. Contact with the colony is lost. Musk’s grave is never found.

At the head of a private military corporation equipped with letters of marque, Vance is sent into the badlands of South America to crush the cartels and secure the Panama Canal. The war takes longer than expected. By the end of it, Vance hasn’t merely crushed the cartels – he’s conquered the entirety of Central America.

At home, Vance is beset by his enemies in the Senate, who mistrust his ambitions and intentions. It is whispered that he wishes to make himself king.

Vance’s enemies whisper in Trump’s ears. Were you not the one who built the wall? If Vance brings the Central American republics into the Union, what then of immigration? Of your life’s work? Vance will destroy it all.

And do the people, after all, not love you first and most? Are you not their hero? Why then should you fear this upstart?

With Trump’s blessing, Vance is recalled by the Senate, to face charges of corruption.

But throughout this time Vance has been building auctoritas with the people, going directly to them with his poasts, showing them his victories and their fruits. The people have come to love him more than they love Trump — for he has sent great wealth back to them, and crushed their enemies abroad.

And so the fateful day comes in which Vance returns, as summoned … but he does not demobilize his mercenary army when it crosses the Rio Grande. His forces — which now include former cartel soldiers, some of whom he has won to his side — drive straight to Washington in a blitzkrieg attack.

Washington empties out in panic.

Trump and the Senate flee to New York City, where they rally their forces. There are still many who are loyal to Trump, particularly within the military … but it turns out that Trump’s base is much older than Vance’s … and there are many, more than expected, who declare for Vance.

And so the Union cracks apart into the Civil War that was deferred when the triumvirate first seized power, so many years ago.

But this is not first and foremost a war of ideology, as it would have been — a showdown between right and left.

It is a war of personalities and personal loyalty, a war to determine a single question: who is to be king?

Obviously none of this is going to happen. History never repeats itself so precisely.

But it’s fun to think about Vance rampaging around Central America at the head of a PMC.

February 23, 2025

How WW2 Changed Espionage Forever

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 22 Feb 2025

In their struggle to defeat German and Japanese espionage efforts, the Allied intelligence agencies of the KGB, CIA, MI6 and DGSE are all transformed into modern, global, espionage forces. But even as East and West work together to defeat the Axis, they are fighting the first underground battles of a new Cold War against one another.
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