Quotulatiousness

January 12, 2025

Quebec within the British Empire after 1760

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, France, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Fortissax, in response to a question about the historical situation of Quebec within Canada, outlines the history from before the Seven Years’ War (aka the “French and Indian War” to Americans) through the American Revolution, the 1837-38 rebellions, the Durham Report, and Confederation:

First and foremost, Canada itself, as a state — an administrative body, if you will — was originally founded by France. Jacques Cartier named the region in 1535, and Samuel de Champlain established the first permanent French settlement in North America in Quebec City in 1608. This settlement would become the largest and most populous administrative hub for the entire territory. Canada was a colony within the broader territory of New France, which stretched from as far north as Tadoussac all the way down to Louisiana. It included multiple hereditary land-owning noblemen of Norman extraction.

Much of the original territory of New France

During the Seven Years’ War, on 8 September 1760, General Lévis and Pierre de Vaudreuil surrendered the colony of Canada to the British after the capitulation of Montreal. Though the British had effectively won the war, the Conquest’s details still had to be negotiated between Great Britain and France. In the interim, the region was placed under a military regime. As per the Old World’s “rules of war”, Britain assured the 60,000 to 70,000 French inhabitants freedom from deportation and confiscation of property, freedom of religion, the right to migrate to France, and equal treatment in the fur trade. These assurances were formalized in the 55 Articles of the Capitulation of Montreal, which granted most of the French demands, including the rights to practice Roman Catholicism, protections for Seigneurs and clergymen, and amnesty for soldiers. Indigenous allies of the French were also assured that their rights and privileges would be respected.

The Treaty of Paris in 1763 officially ended the war and renamed the French colony of “Canada” as “the Province of Quebec”. Initially, its borders included parts of present-day Ontario and Michigan. To address growing tensions between Britain and the Thirteen Colonies and to maintain peace in Quebec, the British Parliament passed the Quebec Act in 1774. This act solidified the French-speaking Catholic population’s rights, such as the free practice of Catholicism, restoration of French civil law, and exemption from oaths referencing Protestant Christianity. These provisions satisfied the Québécois Seigneurs (land-owning nobleman), and clergy by preserving their traditional rights and influence. However, some Anglo settlers in America resented the Act, viewing it as favoring the French Catholic majority. Despite this, the Act helped maintain stability in Quebec, ensuring it remained loyal to Britain during the American Revolutionary War and Quebec was fiercely opposed to liberal French revolutionaries.

British concessions, from the terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris to the Quebec Act of 1774, safeguarded the cultural and religious identity of Quebec’s French-speaking Catholic population, fostering their loyalty during a period of significant upheaval in North America. Following this period, merchant families such as the Molsons began establishing themselves in Montreal, alongside early Loyalist settlers who trickled into areas now known as the Eastern Townships. These merchant families quickly ingratiated themselves with the local Norman lords and seigneurs.

The Lower Canada Rebellion arose in 1837-1838 due to the Château Clique oligarchy (an alliance of Anglo-Scottish industrialists and French noble landowners), in Quebec refusing to grant legislative power to the French Canadian majority. The rebellion was not solely a French Canadian effort; to the chagrin of both chauvinistic Anglo-Canadians and French Canadians, who in recent years believed it was either a brutal crackdown on French degeneracy, or a heroic class struggle of French peasants against an oppressive Anglo elite. It included figures like Wolfred Nelson, an Anglo-Quebecer who personally led troops into battle.

In response to the unrest following the rebellions of 1837-1838, Lord Durham, a British noble, was sent to Canada to investigate and propose solutions. His controversial recommendation, outlined in the Durham Report of 1839, was to abolish the separate legislatures of Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) and merge them into a single entity: the Province of Canada. This unification aimed to demographically and culturally assimilate the French Canadian population by creating an English-speaking majority.

However, the strategy failed for multiple reasons, and was given up shortly after. Lord Durham, having neither been born nor raised in the New World, underestimated the complexities of Canadian society, which was a unique fusion of Old World ideas in a New World setting. His assumption that French Canadians could be assimilated ignored their strong cultural identity, rooted in large families, which encouraged high birth rates as a means of survival. While Durham hoped unification would erode divisions, the old grievances between the British and French began to dissipate naturally.

The Province of Canada, whose unofficial capital was Montreal, where the two groups mixed

Despite Lord Durham’s intentions, French Canadians maintained their dominance in Quebec. Families averaged five children per household for over 230 years, a trend actively encouraged by the Catholic Church’s policy of La Revanche des Berceaux (the Revenge of the Cradles). This strategy aimed to preserve French Canadian culture and identity amidst the British short-lived attempts at assimilation. In Montreal, British industrialists expanded their influence by forging alliances with French landowning nobles through business partnerships and intermarriage. This blending of elites produced a bilingual Anglo-French upper class that became historically influential.

Such alliances drew on long-standing connections established as early as 1763 and later exemplified by the North West Company (NWC). The NWC in particular is interesting as a prominent fur trading enterprise of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in that it embodied this fusion of cultures. Led primarily by Anglo-Scots, the company’s leaders frequently formed unions or marriages with French Canadian women, fostering vital ties with the French Canadian communities crucial to their trade. Simon McTavish, known as the “father” of the NWC, maintained alliances with French Canadian families, while his nephew, William McGillivray, and other leaders like Duncan McGillivray followed similar paths. Explorers such as Alexander MacKenzie and David Thompson married French women. These unions strengthened familial and cultural bonds, shaping the broader Anglo-French collaboration that defined this period.

This relative harmony between Anglo and French Canadians continued with the formation of the modern Canadian state in 1867 during Confederation. Sir John A. Macdonald deliberately chose George-Étienne Cartier as his second-in-command. This collaboration contributed to the emergence of Canada’s ethnically Anglo-French elite, who have historically been bilingual. This legacy is evident in the backgrounds of many Canadian politicians, such as the Trudeaus, Mulroneys, Martins, Cartiers, and countless others who have both Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian roots.

In more recent history, this dynamic has been further solidified by the federal government, where higher-paid positions often require bilingual proficiency. Interestingly, about 20% of Canada’s population is bilingual, reflecting the ongoing influence of this historical coexistence.

    The last cannon which is shot on this continent in defence of Great Britain will be fired by the hand of a French Canadian.
    ~ George Etienne Cartier

January 10, 2025

QotD: The “bottle service” model as a “douchebag Potlatch”

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

Gabriel: So far we’ve been discussing bottle service from the consumer’s point of view as a potlatch, but the core of the book is that it requires an enormous amount of extremely convoluted work to mobilize models as a sort of rent-an-entourage to be guests at the potlatch. Veblen observed that one of the functions of dependents, and indeed the primary function of dependents with little or no functional purpose, is to consume beyond what a rich man could consume himself and thereby demonstrate the rich man’s wealth and power. A Wall Street bro can probably consume a lot more alcohol than a woman with a body mass index of 18, but several underweight women at the bro’s table can considerably expand the amount of alcohol that the table can collectively consume. The distinctive feature of bottle service is that rather than the guests being either the host’s long-standing dependents or the host’s frenemy and the frenemy’s long-standing dependents as in a classic potlatch, the models are strangers to the host and their presence is arranged by the club, which subcontracts this to party promoters. I suppose this isn’t totally unprecedented since the synoptic gospels’ parable of the feast (Matthew 22 and Luke 14) also involves mobilizing a bunch of randos to benefit from the host’s largesse; but (a) the host in the parable relied on randos as a substitute when his regular dependents blew off his invitation, and (b) the parables aren’t intended to be realistic stories so aren’t good evidence than an actual 1st century AD host would behave this way.

As to whether I’ve gotten a grant to pay for bottle service, mercifully no. I have had dinner with a (former) model, but it was Ashley herself at the kind of restaurant that occasionally has a hedge fund Powerpoint deck critiquing its management go viral. It was a decent hour, both of us were completely sober, there was no party promoter arranging the meeting, and there was no EDM played at OSHA-violation decibel levels. My idea of a good time is a lucid conversation with a smart friend, such as both that occasion and this email exchange, whereas I’d pay a good amount of money to avoid getting extremely drunk and staying out until dawn in an environment too loud for conversation.1 However I salute Ashley for doing so and thereby providing us with this book. The most I’ve had to suffer for my scholarship is writing response memos to annoying reviewer questions, or struggling with merge errors whilst munging data files.

And yet, contrary to my own taste, the people at the night clubs are paying a lot of money and/or waiting in line to get in, so obviously they seem to think it is appealing. I don’t think we can call this false consciousness either. Ashley is very clear that part of the reasons the models go to the clubs is as a favor to the promoters (much more on that later), but part of it is that a lot of models think going to a famous night club is really glamorous and cool. I’m tempted to say this is just de gustibus non disputandum, but just shrugging at taste is kind of a cop out for a sociologist since one of our mandates is to explain socially patterned taste.

I think a key explanation for what’s going on is Girard’s mimetic desire. The club is glamorous because there’s a long line of people outside waiting to get past the velvet rope. The women are beautiful because everyone agrees that tall skinny women are beautiful, even though in other contexts a lot of men (including the promoters) are more attracted to the kind of shorter curvier women who are barred entry to the club as “midgets”. Everyone and everything in the world of models and bottles that is desirable is desirable primarily because they or it are desired by others.

John: I’ve never read a fashion magazine or watched a runway show, so I just naively assumed that models were stunningly attractive and feminine. But as Mears points out, the models are not actually to most men’s tastes. They tend to have boyish figures and to be unusually tall.2 Is this because the fashion industry is dominated by gay men, who gravitate towards women who look like teen boys? Whatever the origins of it, there is a model “look”, and the industry has slowly optimized for a more and more extreme version of it, like a runaway neural network, or like those tribes with the rings that stretch their necks or the boards that flatten their skulls. There’s actually a somewhat uncanny or even posthuman look to many of the models. The club promoters denigrate women who lack the model look as “civilians”, but freely admit that they’d rather sleep with a “good civilian” than with a model. The model’s function, as you say, is as a locus of mimetic desire. They’re wanted because they’re wanted, in a perfectly tautological self-bootstrapping cycle; and because, in the words of one promoter: “They really pop in da club because they seven feet tall”.

The men don’t want to sleep with the models, and by and large they don’t. This leads directly to one of the most jaw-dropping insights in the entire book: the models are a potlatch of sorts too. The men are buying thousand dollar bottles of champagne and dumping them out on the floor, destroying economic value just to show that they can. And likewise, they’re surrounding themselves with dozens of beautiful women and then not sleeping with them. A potlatch of female beauty, sexuality, and reproductive potential — flaunting their wealth by hoarding women and conspicuously declining to enjoy their company, but at the same time denying them to every other man. An anti-harem.

Actually, you know what else the models remind me of? Medieval jesters. There was a point in the 15th century when every ruler in Europe had to have a dwarf in his entourage — not because there was anything intrinsic or valuable about very short men, but just because it was rare. The first guy did it to show that he was a big enough deal to have something expensive and hard to find, and then everybody else started doing it because it was the thing to do. (When dwarfs became too commonplace, the status symbols got weirder.) I think model phenotype is a little bit like that — desirable because it is rare, and because gathering and showcasing all these rare objects is a way to demonstrate your wealth and power.

John Psmith and Gabriel Rossman, “GUEST JOINT REVIEW: Very Important People, by Ashley Mears”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-03-04.

    1. Another interesting work of scholarship on partying is Minjae Kim’s work on Korean work team binge drinking. Minjae shows that people go binge drinking because most of them hate it and thus it serves as a costly signal of loyalty.

    2. In fact, an unusually high proportion of models are intersex individuals with a Y-chromosome and androgen insensitivity syndrome.

January 9, 2025

Hollywood’s favourite creation … the “hero forgives” scene

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

I’ve never been much of a moviegoer or TV-watcher, so I hadn’t consciously noticed what kulak is discussing here:

“El Cid” (Charlton Heston) releases enemy raiders who’ve just burnt down a village … for no reason.

“All that it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
-Edmund Burke

The reason the boomers are the way they are, and the reason no one in the west fights back against their dispossession and replacement is an 80 year long program to indoctrinate an Ideology I call “Hollywood Anti-justice”.

In almost every piece of media to do with violence, crime, justice, and individual heroism of the past 80 years there is a scene: The “Hero Forgives” scene.

Upon violently defeating, disarming, and capturing the villain, the hero, in spite of his every instinct, in spite of friends screaming at him and reasoning with him with arguments he can’t counter, in spite of the villains mocking unrepentance, dead to rights evidence, gleeful confessions, and even vows to reoffend.

Even if the villain is guilty of hundreds of murders, rapes, and treason, even if the hero himself has killed hundreds of henchmen to capture the villain …

The hero will refuse to kill or punish him.

Sometimes the hero will insist that he must go through the courts … Sometimes the villain will openly mock him that the courts are corrupt and will never convict him, and the hero still will refuse to take matters into his own hands …

Sometimes the hero himself IS the lawful authority. Sometimes the hero is a Military officer, post apocalyptic militia captain, Medieval Knight, Greek Hero, Roman Centurion … etc. And in fact his private judgement IS the official lawful means of passing judgement and executing obviously guilty villains … And he STILL refuses to punish or kill them.

I recently saw El Cid, where the hero, a Knight, refused to hang brigands who had pillaged, raped, burnt a town, confessed and were themselves quite resigned to dying, and even as his fellow knights berated him that the law itself demands he hang them, that it is his sacred duty to hang them, and that it would be treason for him not to…

And the Hero simply cuts their bindings and lets them go … Choosing to be forsworn as a traitor rather than hang the confessed and red-handed guilty. Now this may be a historical, but as far as I’ve been able to find such an event never occurred, it’s been made up for the film, doubly egregious because the historical El Cid almost certainly executed many criminals and brigands, committing and ordering justice … Which is NOT depicted in the film.

Even if the hero has been in this exact position before and spared the villain only for more to die, sometimes even his own family and friends, demonstrating the failure of this unspoken philosophy, the hero will STILL let them go … AGAIN.

Ussually there is some Deus Ex Machina that makes this all workout some ironic or divine punishment will find the Villain through their own folly … but not always. Indeed entire franchises have been perpetuated on THE SAME serial killer villain being forgiven, released, allowed to escape, etc. over and over again.

And audiences consistently hate this, this is always the most cliched, poorly written, out of character, film breaking scene in the entire work … Supposedly great kings, ruthless bounty-hunters, outlaws, veteran knights, military officers, grey and black market criminal anti-heroes, smugglers … All of them transformed into the most inconsistent pacifists for exactly this scene. I’ve seen audiences groan and scream at the TV “Just kill him” and yet the hero, often entirely contrary to their character, will not.

This is not an old literary trope, this is a Hollywood trope.

You can read the original Greek legends, the tales of King Arthur and his Knights, early modern nationalist heroes’ stories, the adventure stories of the Napoleonic officer, the Boys’ Own adventures of empire, and well into contemporary fiction westerns, crime stories, military science fiction, historical fiction, etc.

And in all of them you will see heroes kill their enemies in cold blood, order executions of the guilty, demand deserters, spies, and traitors be shot, seek revenge, order mass hangings … Etc.

Nor is this some uniquely American madness … As late as the 1950s the vigilantes/terrorists of the original reconstruction era (1864-1877) Ku Klux Klan were treated as folk heroes… Birth of a Nation was played at the White House when it was released. The idea of vengeance, wild justice, and vigilante killings being some unconscionable moral horror was simply not the case in the first half of the 20th century … It was celebrated, much as it had been for the previous 3000 years of the west.

In 1915 the legitimacy of Vigilantism, Vengeance, and Private Justice was so accepted that even arch-progressive, Princeton University Professor, and US President Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation, a celebration of the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilante-terror campaign, at the White House.

Why did Hollywood invent this trope?

Where Hollywood producers just so attached to an idea of Christian forgiveness and pacifism that they just HAD to include it over the groans and often shouting of their audiences?

Were any of these writers, directors and producers even Christian to begin with!?

Why would the communists, atheists, Jews, and pedophiles that comprise the core of Hollywood writing include such an unusual Christian theme so insistently and often story breakingly?

Well. why do they insist on bullshit girl-bossery, race mixing, and woke theming today over the protests and disinterest of their audience?

Because it benefits them to brainwash the masses that way.

The Hollywood writers never identified with the hero refusing to kill an enemy … they identified with the villain and quite liked for him to get away (indeed many Hollywood writers will openly say as much, that they identify with the villains and much prefer writing them).

Trump plays fast and loose with numbers over US/Canadian trade

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

On her Substack, Tasha Kheiriddin refutes some of the big numbers US President-elect Donald Trump has been using in his “make Canada the 51st state” campaign:

US President-elect Donald Trump successfully trolled Justin Trudeau about Canada becoming the 51st state of the union.

“We don’t need their cars. … We don’t need their lumber”, Trump said. “We have massive fields of lumber … We don’t need their dairy products. We have more than they have.”

This is, of course, a giant lie. Canada has plenty of things America needs, including raw materials like oil and food that it refines and transforms. That transformation generates millions of well-paying US industrial and manufacturing jobs. The US also imports nearly $5 billion in fertilizer to boost agricultural production.

And if we don’t have anything America needs, why would Trump want to annex us? Because, he claims, the US trade deficit with Canada is a “subsidy.” Trump asks, “Why are we losing $200 billion dollars a year and more to protect Canada?”

This is a second lie. First of all, trade deficits are not subsidies. A trade deficit represents the difference in the value of imports and exports. Second, the US trade deficit with Canada isn’t $200 billion, or even the $100 billion figure Trump has previously used. In 2023, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, it was $USD 41 billion. And if you remove energy exports, the US actually runs a surplus with us, not a deficit. Energy exports accounted for over $177 billion of Canada’s exports south of the border. Twenty-eight per cent of what we export is energy, namely, over four million barrels per day of oil, the largest amount from any country in the world.

Trump is correct that Canada has benefitted from the American military’s umbrella. We benefit by proximity, because we happen to be next to the US – just like Americans benefit from buying our discounted crude oil, because they happen to be next to us. The US would maintain their military whether we were neighbours or not. They wouldn’t have a smaller military if they annexed Canada; if anything, they’d spend more, because they would be actively engaged across our entire landmass, directly defending our borders. We have also been a steadfast ally in times of war, a fact Trump handily omits.

So Trump’s argument is a lie, but a clever lie. It’s something that will resonate with his voters, with the average American struggling to pay their bills. It’s purportedly about fairness, doing what’s right. Not taking over a sovereign nation, but returning to Americans what’s rightfully theirs.

It’s like Putin saying that the Donbas is full of Russians, so it really should be part of Russia. Or Xi Jinping saying that Taiwan is really part of China, so the two countries should be “reunified”.

It’s also cover for the real reason Trump would like to take over Canada: because we do have a lot of what the US needs, namely oil, water, and critical minerals. He would love to take control of the Arctic, ostensibly for security reasons, but really for the resources that lie beneath. Drill, baby, drill. But Trump can’t say that part out loud, because then he sounds like a communist dictator, not the leader of the free world.

Trump wants to use tariffs to break Canada. Our GDP could drop by two to four per cent and put us in an official recession. Two and half million jobs would be at risk. People would get poorer at a time when two million of us are already using food banks. Throw in a simultaneous diet of pro-annexation propaganda pumped out by Trump’s friends on social media, and the blathering of front groups funded by vested interests, and the 13% of Canadians who favour joining the US could swell to the point where they put political pressure on Ottawa to cave to Trump’s demands.

And then, all bets are off. Trump figures Canadians will beg to join the US, and he may not be wrong. Manifest destiny, achieved — and a YUGE legacy for him.

In the National Post, Carson Jerema wishes the Canadian media would calm the hell down and recognize that Trump is still trolling the heck out of them:

So it turns out Donald Trump doesn’t really want to annex Canada. Seriously. Anyone who watched his news conference Tuesday, and not just the short clip shared on social media, should come away assured, as much as one can be with Trump anyway, that his comments about this country becoming the 51st state really are little more than trolling. Certainly, the U.S. president-elect repeatedly musing about absorbing Canada has never been funny, and the words themselves undermine Canadian sovereignty, but nothing Trump said Tuesday was much different than what he’s been saying for weeks.

Yes, I’m aware that we are supposed to be in crisis mode at Trump’s latest musings, which the Toronto Star called “explosive”, and the Globe and Mail referred to as an “escalation”. Even the National Post’s Wednesday front page played up the president-elect’s comments. A similar response came from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who posted on social media that “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell” that Canada would merge with the U.S., and Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who posted that “Canada will never be the 51st state. Period”.

As is so often the case, what Trump actually said is less exciting than the reaction it generated.

When asked by a reporter if he was “considering military force to annex and acquire Canada?” Trump responded, “No. Economic force because Canada and the United States, that would really be something. You get rid of that artificially drawn line and you take a look at what that looks like and it would also be much better for national security.”

That response is the sum total of the so-called “escalation”.

It is, at a brief glance, easy to see why so many felt compelled to react the way they did to the president-elect’s comments, but it was the reporter, not Trump, who used the word “force” first, and getting “rid” of the border could mean any number of arrangements, short of a merger. Beyond that, however, there isn’t much in the way of a new development in the supposed annexation crisis of 2025.

Forgotten Armies of the Vietnam War: Australia, Korea, China, USSR

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

NR: Sorry about this … RTH must have taken this video down at some point between me scheduling it to appear and today.

Real Time History
Published 16 Aug 2024

The Vietnam War is mainly remembered as a conflict between the Vietnamese and the United States. But both sides received direct and indirect support from other countries.
(more…)

January 8, 2025

The Korean War 029 – The Third Battle of Seoul – January 7, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 7 Jan 2025

The Chinese People’s Volunteer Army crosses the Imjin River in force and attacks the South Korean capital. The best units available to Eighth Army commander Matt Ridgway defend it, but with more Chinese armies and reformed North Korean units pushing in the east, is there any hope of holding onto it?

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:09 Seoul Good
03:13 Seoul Gone
07:39 To Line D
10:20 The Ceasefire Committee
14:02 Summary
14:20 Conclusion
(more…)

QotD: “Striver” lifestyles for each generation

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

Our forefathers, the Boomers, competed for social status the old fashioned way — bigger houses, fancier cars, trendier job titles, younger / hotter / tighter trophy wives, that kind of thing. When Gen X entered the workforce, we couldn’t compete with that, and not (just) because of Boomer narcissism; there were just too few of us. So we invented the “lifestyle striver” method of social competition. We made fun of the corporate ladder-climbers (anyone else remember “die yuppie scum” from the late 80s?) and embraced “authentic” experience.

That’s why everything was suddenly so Xxxtreeeeem!!! in the early 90s through the Naughts. We can’t afford to fly to Gstaad for a ski weekend, but we can buy a snowboard. Dad might be on Wife 3.0 at that point, and she’s younger than us, but our girlfriends — marriage is for squares — are so much more environmentally friendly. We can’t compete with their high-end clothes, so we’ll push for “business casual” in the office, homeless-casual in our personal lives (everyone can afford thrift store flannel). And so on.

The Millennials and Gen Z, lacking the wherewithal to do even that (what with the six figure college debt and all), invented the “persona striver” as their means of intra-group social competition. For the low low price of a smartphone and a data plan, you too can pretend to be The Most Interesting Persyn in the World online. I’m told there are entire subcultures online, “cottagecore” and the like, revolving around aping the style and mannerisms of prior eras. “Anonymous” seems to think that these kids are actually, physically doing this stuff — that the “cottagecore” lesbians really are moving into little houses on the prairie to bake bread by hand — but it’s obvious that’s not necessary, as this is an entirely online thing and Photoshop exists.

Either way, it’s sufficient for our purposes to note that the cost of entry keeps dropping, while the “totalization” (for lack of a better word) of the lifestyle keeps growing. An old-fashioned, conspicuous-consumption style striver was free to be an individual. Yeah, sure, they were all “yuppies”, but there were Protestant yuppies and Catholic yuppies (and atheist yuppies and everything in between). There were Liberal yuppies and Conservative yuppies (and Libertarian yuppies and everything in between). You might find the same few standard books on all their shelves — management meatball crap; the novels of Danielle Steele and Sydney Sheldon — the same way you’d find the same basic kinds of clothes in their closets, but there was still a lot of individual variety within those broad constraints. You could predict a few broad, superficial things about a yuppie from his business card, but there were no safe bets on anything else.

The lifestyle and persona strivers, on the other hand, are much more narrow. While the yuppie might go to Molokai this summer on vacation, next summer to Italy, because why not?, the lifestyle striver was pretty much trapped in his niche — it’s trail hiking or bust. And the persona striver can’t afford to go anywhere, so xzhey have to make up elaborate justifications for it (“by staying home and baking these muffins from an original 18th century recipe, I’m being completely carbon neutral”). It’s no accident, in the Marxist sense, that marathons and Crossfit and all that shit really took off after the turn of the century, as well as the whole “animal rescue” deal — it’s both a lifestyle and a persona, and it costs next to nothing, and you can, indeed must, do it all day every day.

Severian, “Striving for Revolution”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-11.

January 6, 2025

QotD: The right to bear arms

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

Thomas Jefferson’s question, posed in his inaugural address of 1801, still stings. If a man cannot be trusted with the government of himself, how can he be trusted with the government of others? And this is where history and politics circle back to ethics and psychology: because “the dignity of a free (wo)man” consists in being competent to govern one’s self, and in knowing, down to the core of one’s self, that one is so competent.

And that is where ethics and psychology bring us back to the bearing of arms. For causality runs both ways here; the dignity of a free man is what makes one ethically competent to bear arms, and the act of bearing arms promotes (by teaching its hard and subtle lessons) the inner qualities that compose the dignity of a free man.

It is not always so, of course. There is a 3% or so of psychotics, drug addicts, and criminal deviants who are incapable of the dignity of free men. Arms in the hands of such as these do not promote virtue, but are merely instruments of tragedy and destruction. But so, too, are cars. And kitchen knives. And bricks. The ethically incompetent readily (and effectively) find other means to destroy and terrorize when denied arms. And when civilian arms are banned, they more readily find helpless victims.

But for the other 97%, the bearing of arms functions not merely as an assertion of power but as a fierce and redemptive discipline. When sudden death hangs inches from your right hand, you become much more careful, more mindful, and much more peaceful in your heart — because you know that if you are thoughtless or sloppy in your actions or succumb to bad temper, people will die.

Too many of us have come to believe ourselves incapable of this discipline. We fall prey to the sick belief that we are all psychopaths or incompetents under the skin. We have been taught to imagine ourselves armed only as villains, doomed to succumb to our own worst nature and kill a loved one in a moment of carelessness or rage. Or to end our days holed up in a mall listening to police bullhorns as some SWAT sniper draws a bead …

But it’s not so. To believe this is to ignore the actual statistics and generative patterns of weapons crimes. “Virtually never”, writes criminologist Don B. Kates, “are murderers the ordinary, law-abiding people against whom gun bans are aimed. Almost without exception, murderers are extreme aberrants with lifelong histories of crime, substance abuse, psychopathology, mental retardation and/or irrational violence against those around them, as well as other hazardous behavior, e.g., automobile and gun accidents.”

To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is, therefore, to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from “the dignity of a free man” would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.

This is the final ethical lesson of bearing arms: that right choices are possible, and the ordinary judgement of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient to make them.

We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both. We can accept our ultimate responsibility for our own actions. We can know (not just intellectually, but in the sinew of experience) that we are fit to choose.

Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.

January 4, 2025

More on the “Boomers and Year Zero” thing

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

I sent the link I posted yesterday to Severian and asked for his reaction, saying that “Eric is three years older than me, so I’m on a cultural time-delay both for that and for not being American, but I still felt he was much more right than wrong here”. Sev’s thoughts as posted at FQ in the weekly mailbag post:

The upshot is that it isn’t the Boomers’ fault — they got tricked into it by Marxists, for whatever value of “it” is foremost in your mind, every time you’re tempted to say “OK, Boomer.”

I largely agree, with the caveat that “tricked” is a bit strong. There were conscious, indeed State-directed, attempts at outright cultural subversion — Raymond cites Yuri Bezmenov, and we’re all familiar with that. But there’s a limit to how much damage that kind of thing can do. What mostly happened, I think, circles back to that “excess calories” bit, above. That’s overly reductive — it’s a springboard for discussion, not a categorical statement — but the fact is, you need a certain baseline of physical security before Chesterton’s Fence becomes a thing. Or, as Confucius (or whoever) said, “The man with an empty belly has one problem, but the man with a full belly has a thousand”.

By 1960, at least in AINO, you had a critical mass of people who had never gone to bed hungry. Ever. And so it never crossed their minds that “going to bed hungry” is a thing people have to worry about. That had profound effects, that we’re still working through. It was never the case, ever, in the entire history of mankind, that the average person didn’t have to put some thought into where his next meal was coming from.

The entire human organism — physically, mentally, culturally — is oriented around the problem of caloric supply. Again, I acknowledge that’s overly reductive, but roll with me here: Our biochemistry has been profoundly fucked up by high fructose corn syrup, for the simple reason that a teaspoon of that shit has more, and more highly bioavailable, energy than an entire feast for our Paleolithic ancestors. At the risk of looking like a fool for using an engineering, especially an automotive, metaphor with this crowd, it’s like trying to run rocket fuel through a Model T.

You cannot blame the Boomers for fumbling a situation that has never before been seen, in the history of mankind.

And it’s even hard to blame them for not getting it, even now. One’s mental habits ossify, like one’s tastes, sometime in one’s twenties. It is very, very hard to break the conditioning of a lifetime, and it gets exponentially harder the older you get. I myself thought Ace of Normies was just crazy edgy — how can that maniac say these things?!? — when I first started reading him …

… back around 2004. That’s because I was in my 30s, which means my worldview was stuck a decade earlier. Even now, all my go-to cultural touchpoints are in the 1990s — Alanis, obviously, but pretty much all of them; the 21st century might as well not exist for me, culturally, if you go just by what I’ve written here. Which means that my own worldview tends to be kinda Boomerish, thanks to that weird telescoping effect TV had on the culture. The Boomers grew up watching TV, and then they made TV, such that you can ask anyone who was there — your typical college campus in 1994 was all but indistinguishable from a “liberal” campus in 1968 (your typical college campus in 1968 would’ve had sex-segregated dorms, a whole bunch of “married student housing”, and so on).

I got over it, obviously — and just as obviously tend to go a little overboard with my getting over it — but it takes tremendous effort. As I like to say, the Red Pill is really a suppository, usually administered by jackhammer. To expect a Donald Trump (born 1946), to say nothing of a million lesser lights, to fundamentally grok that it’s not 1968 anymore, is asking an awful lot. It is what it is.

Winning WW2’s Most Important Battle – Battle of the Atlantic

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historigraph
Published 15 Aug 2024

The Second World War featured many important land battles on a colossal scale. They involved hundreds of thousands of participants, ranged across hundreds of miles and inflicted the most terrible destruction. But none of them were as long-running, as vast or as crucial to allied victory as that fought at sea in the Atlantic, where for four years Allied navies and civilian sailors fought a life or death struggle against Germany’s U-boats. This is the story of how it was fought, and how it was won.

00:00 – WW2’s most important battle
00:45 – The U-boat menace in the early years
08:53 – The massacre off the eastern seaboard
13:12 – American ship printer go brrrrrrrrr
19:31 – The Allies gain the upper hand
21:49 – Black May: the convoy battles of 1943
24:41 – The most important victory of WW2
(more…)

January 3, 2025

The Boomers and “reset to Year Zero”

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

On Twit-, er, I mean “X”, ESR responds to a post from Devon Eriksen decrying the Baby Boomers for effectively destroying the culture of the postwar “American Dream”:

… I’m a late Boomer, born in ’57. I can dimly remember the day JFK was shot. I watched the moon landing. My teens and early twenties coincided with the 1970s. I was there for it all.

And even then, even in the 1970s, feeling a sense of subtle disintegration all around me, I already dimly grasped that we weren’t just falling. We were being pushed.

But I was very young then; I wouldn’t come to fully understand why, and by whom, for almost another 30 years

We Boomers didn’t burn down our heritage in a fit of thoughtless hedonism. I mean, we did some thoughtless hedonism, yeah, but that’s not where the real damage came from.

If you want to know where the damage came from, look up Yuri Bezmenov. Listen to him explain “demoralization” and the long game of Soviet culture-jamming against the West in general and the U.S. in particular.

Reset to year zero was a Marxist idea. It was part of a suite of memetic weapons, infectious propaganda bombs deployed against the social and cultural cohesion of the “main enemy”.

Often, they were successful in damaging us by leveraging not our vices but our virtues. Valorizing tolerance and liberality until they became helplessness in the face of more and more extreme forms of deviance was one of their attacks.

We didn’t fall on our own. We were pushed. The Boomer fault wasn’t that we were hedonists or nihilists, it’s that we didn’t have sufficient cultural immune defenses against what was being done to us.

Why that is exactly is a long sad story that I’m still not sure I completely understand. But I can hit some highlights.

One is that religion failed us. This is nobody’s fault and I don’t think it could have gone differently; it’s a failure that had been on the cards ever since the mechanistic worldview reached effective completion by Darwin. One of the things the Marxists did was work to accelerate the inevitable decay of religious authority.

Secular conservatives failed us, too. They had one job — just one job — which was to explain why all those Chesterton’s fences shouldn’t be torn down. They utterly flubbed that on all three levels of awareness, analysis, and persuasion. That could have gone differently.

It didn’t help that after the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954 conservatives developed a severe case of cowardice about calling out Communist subversion.

That may have been their single greatest dereliction of duty. The result was that over the next 50 years Communist institutional capture of academia and other institutions went almost unopposed. Which is why today we struggle with “woke”.

Most of us Boomers weren’t wreckers, even by accident. Most of us were duped. It’s easy to say in hindsight we should have done better, but the enemy was very clever and determined.

Try not to judge us too harshly, kids. It’s nice to think that a later generation might have done better, but … I haven’t seen it happen yet.

January 2, 2025

DOGE has a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick

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

Patrick Carroll selects some of the least-defendable ways the US government has been spending taxpayer money from Senator Rand Paul’s 2024 Festivus Report, including pickleball courts, $10B in unused office space, DEI initiatives for birdwatchers, crop fertilizer in foreign countries, and literal circus performances:

Rand Paul by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Why does such government waste persist year after year? A significant part of the explanation traces back to the concept of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. Essentially, the beneficiaries tend to be a small, concentrated group, so they lobby hard for these outlays because they stand to gain a lot from them. Taxpayers, on the other hand, tend to be dispersed and only minimally affected by any single expense, so it’s not usually worth it for them to lobby against the spending, or even learn about it in the first place.

Economist Gordon Tullock famously illustrated this concept with his fictional Tullock Economic Development Plan. The plan “involves placing a dollar of additional tax on each income tax form in the United States and paying the resulting funds to Tullock, whose economy would develop rapidly”.

Think about the incentive Tullock would have to advocate for this plan, compared to the incentive that an ordinary taxpayer would have to look into it and voice their objections. With campaign contributions and votes to be gained from the special interest beneficiaries, is it any wonder politicians often go for these kinds of wealth transfers?

The ubiquity and stubborn persistence — year after year — of all this waste, combined with the economic theory that explains why it happens, suggests that there is a fundamental problem with the process of government as we know it. This is not, as many are itching to believe, a “Democrat” problem or a “Republican” problem. The degree of government waste changes very little with changing administrations. No, this is a problem with the government as such.

To solve this problem, we need to ask not just who should run the government, but what the government should be allowed to spend money on in the first place, given what we know about its entirely predictable and repeatedly demonstrated propensity for waste and dysfunction.

Milei has already started that conversation in Argentina. Let’s hope that with the new Trump administration and DOGE, that’s a conversation we can have here as well.

QotD: Sincerity

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

“… in the ’90s, the human spirit was alive and free. And that’s the vibe that resonates with me.”

This is what the French call le horse pucky. If we may be so bold as to speak of “the human spirit” — which is pretty heavy for a column starting with a professional wrestler — the 90s killed it stone cold dead. The human spirit can flourish in the most awful situations, but one indispensable requirement is: Sincerity. You just can’t be snarky about the “Ode to Joy” or ironic about the Sistine Chapel. If you do, then there really is no difference between Beethoven and MC Funetik Spelyn, nothing to choose between Michelangelo and a dog turd on the sidewalk — someone placed them there intentionally, which is the only distinguishing characteristic of “art” possible in a world overrun by Postmodernists and Deconstructionists.

Severian, “Why the 90s Was the Worst Decade Ever”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-04.

January 1, 2025

The Korean War 028 – Happy Nuke Year! – December 31, 1950

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 31 Dec 2024

Matt Ridgway arrives in Korea to find his Eighth Army broken and dysfunctional from top to bottom. He has a mere few days to rectify these issues and get them combat-ready before the Communist Chinese forces approach once more. But the stakes are high; UN forces commander Douglas MacArthur continues to pressure Washington to expand the war, through either conventional or atomic means. As 1950 expires, the doomsday clock is ticking.
(more…)

Mark Steyn – “This is not a healthy development in world affairs”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, India, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Mark comments on the ongoing political punch-up over the US government’s H1B visa program for foreign workers:

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy as the figureheads of D.O.G.E.

As you’ll have noticed, the world’s most uniquely unique peaceful transition of power turned suddenly violent over Christmas with various of America’s super-brainy Indians beating up on each other: Nikki Haley, the Boeing board’s token Sikh, lit up Hindu monotheist Vivek Ramaswamy’s tweet like Air Canada overhead baggage in objection to Vivek’s remarks on US “mediocrity”. The offending Ramaswamy tweet was in response to MAGA objections to Trump’s appointment of Madras techie and open-borders fanatic Sriram Krishnan as his AI advisor. This was a very 2025 brouhaha: while you knuckle-draggers down in flyover country were arguing about sub-minimum-wage Hispanics turning down the sheets at Motel Six, the Hindu billionaires have been busy taking over the country.

Is everyone in this all-American punch-up an Indian? Well, no, eventually a South African weighed in. The Boers don’t like the Hindus, do they? I think I got that from Gandhi. Ah, but in this case Elon agrees with Sriram and Vivek.

A couple of very general observations:

1) The MAGA base intuits that H1B visas are a racket. Why wouldn’t they be? Everything else the federal government touches is — from presidential pardons to West Point to Jan 6 justice. America is the third largest nation on earth — a third-of-a-billion people, officially (rather more in actual reality). Why does it need to hire entry-level workers from the first and second largest nations? Yes, yes, too many Americans graduate in non-binary studies rather than any serious academic discipline but simply because you’ve bollocksed up your entire education system is no reason to (as my former National Review colleague John Derbyshire puts it) “import an overclass“.

The MAGA objections to mass immigration (ie, not just illegal immigration) are primarily cultural. They didn’t like it eight years ago when Trump would add to his wall-building promises the line about “and that wall will have a big beautiful door”, and he should have got that by now. Besides, to address the counter-argument more seriously than it merits, a nation of a third-of-a-billion that “needs” to import entry-level accountants is so structurally dysfunctional that no amount of immigration can save it. How about entry-level lawyers? Do we need more of those?

As an aside to that, for all you Constitution fetishists, I’m increasingly sceptical that a Constitution designed for an homogeneous population of two-and-a-half million people can be applied to a third-of-a-billion with a cratering fertility rate of 1.6. The only two more populous nations — China and India — are both more or less conventional ethnostates. Which is a great advantage. America is the only large-scale polity founded on a proposition — that, simply by setting foot on US soil, one becomes American. Immigration on the present transformative scale will nullify the Constitution. So the Dance of the Constitution Fetishists will get even sadder.

The Constitution is increasingly for judges rather than citizens. May be time to import more Supreme Court justices.

2) Besides, H1B is what the government calls, correctly, a “nonimmigrant” visa. One of Rupert Murdoch’s minions offered me an H1B thirty years ago. I looked up the terms and declined to sign on to indentured servitude. You’re not importing “the best and brightest”. You’re assisting well-connected corporations in advantaging themselves at the cost of the citizenry among whom they nominally live. [NR: Emphasis mine.]

3) Have you noticed that almost everyone involved in this spat is a billionaire? Today’s rich are not just rich in the old Scott Fitzgerald they-are-different sense. They approximate more to the condition articulated by Lord Palmerston in his observation that England had no eternal friends or enemies, only eternal interests. For a billionaire, friends and enemies come and go, but, like any medium-sized nation-state, he has his interests.

To most Americans, Elon was largely unknown until he started weighing in on and then buying social media; Vivek was entirely unknown until he ran for president; Sriram is still unknown. But they are far above not just the schlubs who lost their jobs to cheaper H1B types but also to the more famous political class whose poll numbers in Iowa so obsess the hamster-wheel media but which are increasingly irrelevant to anything that matters. Among Sriram Krishnan’s minor claims to “fame” is that he’s the guy who introduced Boris Johnson (remember him?) to Elon Musk — and you can bet that was after desperate wheedling and pleading from the Shagger, not because Elon had any desire for dating tips.

This is not a healthy development in world affairs.

4) Vivek Ramaswamy’s sweeping paean to American “mediocrity” as manifested by everything from prom queens to sitcoms was probably ill-advised but it was certainly entirely sincere — and would be widely shared by his fellow members of the Hindu overclass. The Indian tycoon (and David Cameron advisor) Ratan Tata, who died in October, is best remembered in the UK for his 2011 Vivek-like attack on the natives’ “work ethic“. As Sir Ratan marvelled after buying Jaguar-Land Rover:

    I feel if you have come from Bombay to have a meeting and the meeting goes till 6pm, I would expect that you won’t, at 5 o’clock, say, ‘Sorry, I have my train to catch. I have to go home.’

    Friday, from 3.30pm, you can’t find anybody in the office.

That may well be true, as Vivek’s musings re Urkel and football jocks may be true. On the other hand, as a rather precocious lad, I observed to my mum that, five years after the Gambia’s independence, nothing seemed to work as well as it did under colonial rule. True, conceded my mother, then added: “But in the end people want to be themselves, as themselves. At least it’s their chaos.”

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